Glad to be gaeilge

Why the hell would anyone put themselves through the torment of learning Irish?

As a native New Yorker, Des Bishop doesn’t have any of the baggage associated with the Irish language. He moved here as a teenager in the mid-90s and so the lucky so-and-so was exempt from doing Irish at school.
However, for his third TV documentary called In The Name Of The Fada, Des sets himself the task of learning Irish. He even moved to the Connemara Gaeltacht to spend a year living with a local family, while trying to get his head – and his tongue – around the language.
The Irish-American comedian says that he was inspired to undertake the mission while slaving away in a minimum wage gig for his first documentary, The Des Bishop Work Experience.
“The actual idea for the TV show came while I was working in Abrakebra. Myself and the director were discussing Irish and I was saying, ‘I always wanted to do that, you know?’ It would be kind of cool. We started messing around with the idea of learning Irish in the TV series, which hadn’t really been done before. We thought it would be interesting because, obviously, it is a heavily loaded issue! Irish has a lot of fucking baggage. Because the Gaeltacht culture is definitely different to other parts of Ireland, this is a very long and very in-depth engagement with a part of Irish culture that a lot of Irish people don’t know about.”
He might technically be a ‘blow-in’, but Des knows all about students being less than enthusiastic about studying Irish. He has some concrete theories as to why the subject fails to catch the students’ imagination.
“It’s taught badly in school. I have no fear saying that. The curriculum is ridiculous really. It’s too difficult. Over the years there’s been various failed policies. A lot of people have negative association with the language because the teachers were too hard or whatever.
“Then, some people associate the language with Nationalism. Other people – although it’s not so much a problem today – associated the language with poverty. And then a lot of people have issues with the amount of money that’s being spent on the language. There is an infinite number of negative attitudes towards what is essentially a collection of words and phrases. It seems strange actually.”
Was it difficult for Des to get used to life in the Gaeltacht?
“It was kind of fish out of water stuff,” he proffers. “I was playing Gaelic Football. That was pretty cool. I got punched in the stomach one day by a player – and the game hadn’t even started yet – and I fell over onto the ground, winded. I stood up and said to the referee, ‘I just want to let you know that he punched me in the stomach. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to!’ And the referee said,” – Des continues in stereotypical countryside accent – “ ‘Don’t tell me how to do my fucking job!’ And that was the moment I realised that you are probably not in Kansas any more, Tonto! Different rules apply down here. I felt like a civil rights lawyer coming down to Alabama in the 1950s.
“It didn’t change my life completely – I still gigged and travelled. I still had my normal life. I just happened to be living in Connemara,” he says.
“I didn’t find learning the language hard. You live in a place, you speak the language and over time it just becomes a part of your vernacular, you know? It’s not just about being in the Gaeltacht – you have to make that decision to engage because they’ll happily speak English to you. There’s no great like, ‘Speak fucking Irish!’
“There wasn’t any pressure – all the goals that I set were my own goals; so it was never at any stage like, ‘Fuck! I’m not going to be able to do it’. It was a genuine challenge because at the end there was a genuine test – ‘Can you do a gig in Irish? Can you be funny in Irish?’ I have to do a gig in Irish. And that, I have to say, is fucking nerve-wracking.”
Des decided to actually sit the Leaving Cert exam and managed to get an ‘A1’ – it was in the foundation level but still, credit where it’s due…
“I couldn’t really engage with the literature and the poetry. I’d be quite critical of the Leaving Cert curriculum anyway. Foundation Level was a little bit too easy! I got an A1 – after four months! And I did the oral (exam) after two.”
Did he have to read the dreaded Peig novel?
“Nobody has to. A lot of changes have happened. Peig is not on the syllabus any more – but having to do those books is, which I still think is a problem. What the fuck are you doing asking people about plot structure and onomatopoeia and poetry when they can’t even speak it?! To me it is silly; there is some sort of denial – it’s like we are all pretending to speak it but we can’t. So, we are all just going to memorise a bunch of fucking answers and then never speak the language again.”
Let’s just hope the Minister for Education is reading this.

In The Name Of The Fada is on RTÉ One from Thursday, March 13 at 10.15pm