The Ghosts of Gaelic
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) is a 1941 novel in Irish by Brian O'Nolan (better known by his pen name Flann O'Brien), published under the pseudonym "Myles na gCopaleen".
set in Corca Dhorcha, a remote region of Western Ireland where it never stops raining, everyone lives in desperate poverty (and always will), while also talking in "the learned smooth Gaelic".
It is a memoir of one Bónapárt Ó Cúnasa (Bonaparte O'Coonassa), a resident of this region, beginning at his very birth.
At one point the area is visited by hordes of Gaeilgeoirí (Irish language lovers) from Dublin, who explain that not only should one always speak Irish, but also every sentence one utters in Irish should be about the language question.
However, they eventually abandon the area because the poverty is too impoverished, the cultural authenticity is too culturally authentic, and because the dialect of the Irish-language spoken in Corca Dhorcha is far too Irish.
example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNFfDirBE6w with transcript and translation: https://songsinirish.com/?song=i-wanna-fight-your-father-lyr...
I love Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brian - particularly the Third Policeman. I should read The Poor Mouth.
Wonder if there are Scottish Gaelic bands like The Rubberbandits. I like Clannadonia, but they are 'just' a piper/drummer band.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/08/100-best-novel...
In terms of the cultural resurgeance of Irish, whilst the Rubberbandits have done their part, its nothing compared to the full-on assault on cultural consciousness the politically divisive rap-group 'Kneecap' have performed - although they're about to be cancelled by the pro-Zionist lobby in the US.
https://www.screenireland.ie/news/kneecap-becomes-first-iris...
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kneecap
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFYfp-hKxZQ
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/23/sharon-osbourn...
I did find the description kinda funny though "An animated adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s only novel written in Irish under the pseudonym of Myles Na gCopaleen. It is a biting satire of the life story of a young Gael reflecting on his life from Sligo Gaol." - as if Flann wasn't also a pseudonym, but I suppose he never wrote much under the name Brian.
(Entirely unrelated, I saw the German adaptation of ASTB as a teenager and it was fascinating. Not necessarily good, but out there)
FWiW he was a prolific writer all his life, as a pre computer civil servent he would have written at length all through many of his days at work .. the rules of the day demanded he be circumspect in regard to public opinion:
Given the desperate poverty of Ireland in the 1930s to 1960s, a job as a civil servant was considered prestigious, being both secure and pensionable with a reliable cash income in a largely agrarian economy.
The Irish civil service has been, since the Irish Civil War, fairly strictly apolitical.
Civil Service Regulations and the service's internal culture generally prohibit Civil Servants above the level of Clerical Officer from publicly expressing political views.
As a practical matter, this meant that writing in newspapers on current events was, during O'Brien's career, generally prohibited without departmental permission which would be granted on an article-by-article, publication-by-publication basis.
This fact alone contributed to O'Brien's use of pseudonyms, though he had started to create character authors even in his pre-civil service writings.
He had an extended family to support after all.
Whenever I hear about Scottish Gaelic, I remember a moment of my childhood, when I have seen some Scottish singer performing "Màiri Bhàn" in Gaelic, and I have liked that song very much, including its lyrics, despite the fact that the Gaelic lyrics were unintelligible for me.
Searching for "Màiri Bhàn" will find many examples of how Scottish Gaelic sounds, for instance this is a good one:
Whilst this has been true for centuries, you can actually see it happening right now in real time with Kneecap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneecap_(band)) and the incredible impact they are having on popularising the Irish language.
> if the new Scottish Languages Bill is to succeed in securing the Gaelic and Scots languages in the face of immense pressures, then the needs of the communities speaking those languages must be at the heart of it
Gaelic advances in the modern era include:
* the foundation of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, a Gaelic-medium university
* the rise of Gaelic-medium education as an option for primary and secondary school
* Gaelic-language radio and TV stations
* The launch, a few years ago, of SpeakGaelic (https://speakgaelic.scot/) with loads of learning materials (mentioned in the OP).
Problems include the continued dilution of Gaelic-speaking communities (native speakers either die or move somewhere with better job prospects; non-speakers buy up holiday homes or Airbnb investment vehicles in the area) and the perception that career prospects are much better for people educated in English (perhaps with a bit of French or similar on the side) than those educated in Gaelic.
I think that this is the reality, not merely perception. How many college textbooks are even available in Gaelic?
- Israel is composed of people from different parts of the world with different languages so as a matter of practical policy they had to standardize on some uniform language for the country. Scotland doesn't have this problem: English is already the uniform standardized language.
- Israel exists in a more "existential" position than Scotland - there is more of a sense that their country and culture could be lost. Thus there is a bigger motivation to preserve what makes them different. I think you see this play out in Ireland, actually: there seems to be more of an interest in the Irish language in Northern Ireland, where the Irish identify is seen as more under threat, than in the Republic, where it is safe.
You have this backwards. Ireland, both Ireland and Northern Ireland, have pockets of interest in the language and culture, but it really is true that the country, culture, and language that was Ireland pre-famine no longer exists. It was successfully and deliberately eradicated.
I can easily see a gritty noir Gaelic language cop show taking the world by storm.
Fís Eireann (Screen Ireland) is another success story. Although they fund Irish filmmaking in any language, there have been a slew of very well received Irish language films lately. Most notably An Cailín Cúin (The Quiet Girl) which made history this year as the first Gaelic film to be nominated for an academy award for best foreign language film.
This is definitely one of these cases where you feel that things that were around in your childhood have been around forever, but things introduced since then are new.
I'd assumed TG4 also dated from the 60s/70s like RTE and was going to comment that the time frames didn't really line up. Turns out it came about in 1996 - still over a decade before the current revival in interest, but much closer in overlap.
Raidió na Gaeltachta was founded in 1972 (before my time), I think people often confuse or conflate the history of the two.
What's super confusing is the naming.
There were two stations at the time - rte1 and network2 (really just rte2). The Irish language channel launched as "T na G" or "Telifis na Gaeltacht" in 1996. Then TV3, an independent station, launched in 1998. Later TnaG rebranded as TG4, even though it predated Tv3, which itself has since rebranded as Virgin Media One.
So in chronological order our channels go 1,2,4,1
Or Wales? Or other minority languages, such as Basque? Just nothing -- not a mention.
It's missing quite a lot of context.
The real division is between Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) and Brythonic (Welsh, British and Cornish)
Irish and Scottish are very similar, but they are not mutually intelligible. It's very annoying when people use the word "Gaelic" because I never know which language they're referring to. Just say "Scottish"/"Scottish Gaelic", "Irish", or "The Gaelic languages".
Not true.
They are mutually intelligible to a high degree. Native speakers, speaking slowly and clearly can understand most of what each other are saying.
I speak some Irish and have personal experience of this.
Side note: as an Irish speaker, reading Manx Gaelic, with its Welsh/English derived spelling system feels like what I imagine having a stroke feels like.
Ha! That's a great description for how completely unsettling reading Manx is.
In Irish, Irish is Gaeilge.
Are they American? Then they mean Irish.
Are they Scottish? Then they mean Scottish Gaelic.
Are they Irish? Trick question, Irish people don't use the word.
And, the situation and standing of gaelic in Ireland and Scotland are quite different. In Ireland, gaelic is strongly associated with the primary, and successful ethnonationalist movement. In Scotland, at the end of the day gaelic is a remnant of a foreign invasion, and is also historically associated with catholicism, so is often seen as the “other”. This makes it more difficult to whip up enthusiasm to learn it, even among die hard Scottish nationalists. This whole situation is quite unlike Ireland and even Wales, it would be at best a distraction in the article.
There's only 3 regional dialects of Irish - Connacht, Munster and Ulster - and all three dialects are tested at Aural level in the School leavers Exam. There's very little difference between them bar pronunciation and some common phrases.
The vast vast majority of daily Irish speakers would speak Connacht Irish - i.e. Connemara Irish - due to spending time in the Colaiste Gaeilge during the summer holidays; effectively state-subsidised Irish language Summer Camps. It's also the predominant dialect on TG4 - the Irish language TV station.
Wales has a massively larger proportion of native speakers of Welsh daily, but this is due to the lack of colonial history attempting to wipe out the language, and the far more multi-cultural make-up of Ireland.
I'd also disagree with a lot of the sentence structure formation and 'grammar' espoused as fact on that Wiki page. You'd be marked down on any Irish Higher Level Paper 2 marking scheme that I'm aware of - e.g.
https://www.examinations.ie/archive/markingschemes/2019/LC00...
More to the point, I'd emphasise the far larger impact of Gaeilge on the dialect of Hiberno-English spoken down there - e.g. 'What mood are you in', 'I've the hunger of the world on me', 'I'm after having a fierce supper there' etc...