Patrick McGinley’s ‘That Unearthly Valley: A Donegal Childhood’: Book Review

In Bogmail and Foggage, Patrick McGinley sent up the Irish (could he or it be otherwise?) murder mystery genre. He scooped dollops of encyclopaedic wit and mordant satire into these entertainments. A later saga proved more somber and meditative, the Black and Tan War ending as The Lost Soldier’s Song, while The Trick of the Ga Bolga updated a mythic showdown around his native village of Glencolmcille, on the blustery coast of Donegal. This novelist left the Glen for boarding …

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Farewell to Gaelscéal

I am writing this article in English (though I will probably write something similar in Irish for Gaelscéal) because I want slugger fans, the majority of whom are English readers, to read it and engage with the issue, rather than get bogged down in whether or not it should be in Irish or English. As poet Michael Hartnett wrote in his poem, Farewell to English: But I will not see
great men go down who walked in rags
from town to town …

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In praise of ….Gerry Adams and Fainne…

Right, hold on to your Frosties, because I’m going in to bat for a Mr G Adams, and his casual but regular use of the Irish language. Gerry may not have the best Irish ever to have emerged from the ‘Jailtacht’, but he does use as much as he has as well as he can. He also wears a Fainne. A big old fashioned one presumably so that the cameras can pick up. Now, there’s an argument made by some …

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Learning Irish in East Belfast: “I find it gives me a great intellectual stimulus…”

Usually, if I link to a piece in Irish I generally write the introduction in Irish, but in this case the heart of the content is a great video piece shot at one of the most socially active churches in the city. At the East Belfast Mission there’s some great new Irish speakers coming to life… It’s just a sheer joy… H/T Tomaí… Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet …

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Dinny McGinley planning a bottom up overhaul of government Gaeltacht strategy?

My father didn’t speak English until he went to school in Fanad at the age of four or five. I couldn’t speak more than a word or two of Irish until we began to learn it at school in Holywood when I was eight or nine. My cousins, ‘at home’, grew up with it because their mum, my aunt, spoke it with them from birth. Now all that’s keeping Irish alive in that part of Donegal is the Irish medium …

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Snap, Craickle and Pop: The Controversy of Popular Gaelicisation

Ever since Ireland was told that the black stuff might not be Irish, but rather a porter stout from Covent Garden, the country has descended into a frantic state of uncertain soul-searching and impassioned reflection to clarify once and for all what is actually ‘Irish’ (potatoes, Gaelic Storm, and Saint Patrick aside).   But now the most quintessentially ‘Irish’ institution of them all is under intense academic scrutiny, the much celebrated notion of ‘the craic’ (and that’s before considering the …

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Official Languages Act falling into disuse in the Republic?

Just getting a language act into legislation does not necessarily help a struggling language like Irish to survive… The Irish Language Commissioner Seán Ó Cuirreáin has noted that even though the legislation exists in the Republic its effectiveness or otherwise is being ignored by a large number of government bodies in the Republic where such an act does actually exist. Lorna Siggins writes: Even the Government department responsible for the language – the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht – …

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Gerry, we missed you on TG4

Many many years ago, when I was about to moderate a long forgotten election debate on BBCNI, an eminent Irish speaker rang me up and offered to supply me with a tough question for Gerry Adams in Irish. To have accepted would have been entirely wrong from every point of view.  It would have shown up the BBC as biased against the Sinn Fein leader by using an obvious trick to expose what was then believed to be his very …

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DUP website embraces Irish language (ie, hacked)

The DUP website was briefly hacked tonight before being taken offline. Soon after, PeterRobinson.org and JeffreyDonaldson.org were given a similar makeover. For anyone needing translation of the (most likely criminal) defacement of their homepages, the message reads Irish Now. My name is Peter Robinson and I supported the Irish Language Act. A country without a language, is a country without a soul. Going by the name Hector Ó Hackatdawn and describing himself as “a computer science graduate, Irish language activist, …

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