‘A Forked Tongue’ by Róisín Costello

Patrick Nolan is chasing rabbits.

It is 1932. Three thousand miles away, Wall Street is in the throes of the Great Depression – a term that means little to Patrick Nolan though he could tell you, unhappily, that the price of stock has never been so low nor unemployment so high. Patrick stretches his arm through a tangle of brambles in pursuit of a rabbit and, wedged roughly into one of the fissures that criss-cross the limestone of North Clare, he finds not a soft handful of wriggling fur but something hard, metal-cold. What Patrick had found was the Gleninsheen gorget. From the limestone, he pulled what first appeared to be an uneven half-moon of yellow gold. Unfolded, it revealed itself as a broad oxbow-shaped collar, its metal hammered into a rainbow of gold ridges and ropes three thousand years before – a visible measure of its wearer’s power, tucked back into the rock its owner had once ruled over.

On a Tuesday in December, across the country from Gleninsheen and nearly a century later, the rain drifts in from the Irish Sea and washes Dublin in a briny opaque silence as the country limps towards Christmas. As I cross Kildare Street, a cyclist plummets past me, like a gannet headed towards the Liffey. I am on my way back to the glass case where Patrick’s gorget sits glowing in the dust-heavy air of the National Museum. As I have grown up, the gorget has moved from one spot on the mosaiced floor of the main hall to another, and I have followed it, across a space which once seemed vast and I can now cross in a few steps.

Enthralled isn’t quite the dynamic. My interest in the gorget isn’t as subservient as thrall suggests, which in my mind is bound up in the Irish word it is usually translated as – geis. A taboo or a prohibition, a binding spell when placed on another person, a hold so strong it cannot be broken. I am drawn back to this battered gold collar, but my interest is less settled than thrall suggests. Less certain. In Irish, you would say that I am gafa leis. That I am taken with it, that it has caught, or held me. That something in its form has snagged on my mind so that my feet always lead me in an inevitable waltz through the museum until I find myself back, standing before it again. For a long time I couldn’t have told you what in it caught my mind, except that it was pulled from the rock of the place I think of as home. That it is the oldest bit of the history of a county I don’t know as well as I should.

In Gleninsheen, the field where Patrick found the gorget is largely unchanged. The bare limestone that shows through the spare grass is hard to alter. Formed from leaves and bones compressed on ocean floors over millennia, it is silver in rain, navy under the grey skies of winter, lavender in the light of an August sun setting behind Connemara across the bay. The mountains that slope away towards the coast seem unyielding – armoured in grey stone. I have heard people describe it as an alien view, a moonscape, a hostile landscape. But I have always found it kind. The grikes that crosshatch the rock of the mountains are like laugh lines. They trap the heat of the sun in summer, and release it slowly all winter, mocking the neat changes of season that other landscapes are subject to. Even in December, as frost bites down on the bare hazel woods, the grikes are home to tiny acid-green ferns whose tongues unfurl, poking up towards the sky.

Mary McNamara was born an hour’s walk away from Gleninsheen if you go straight across the fields, and there were few roads when she walked this landscape. She was the daughter of a family whose name was bound up in the story of their arrival. Mac Con an Mara: son of the sea hound, a family who came from Spain and settled in Clare before the old gods disappeared. So the story went. Mary was born in 1801. Not a bad year to be born. History took place far enough away that things were calm. She married when she was old enough. Moved to a cottage a few dozen miles away, on the top of Sliabh Eilbhe overlooking Galway Bay. In 1847 she was 46 when she gave birth to a son, Patrick, in that cottage. Old, even then, to have a baby. And in the worst year of the potato famine. Black ’47. The third winter without food. Mary watched as more than half her neighbours died or left for good. If she had other children none survived – only Patrick.

*

It is a strange legacy of colonialism that Irish skips generations in my family – divides us into those who can, can no longer, and don’t speak Irish. Many of my memories are in a language I do not share with my parents. Or maybe they are not. I have spoken two languages for so long I don’t remember a time when I only had one – though I know that time existed. Like all children of English-speaking parents, I must have spoken that language first. But Irish came so early it has leaked into everything. It’s not that my memories are in Irish or in English. It’s that in my mind they are neither – and both. These historical competitors – the language of country and the language of colonizer – have sat together in my mind so long that it is only when I recount a memory for other people that I realize some experiences need translation.

My parents do not speak Irish. But then they sent me, at four, to a Gaelscoil. Until I was thirteen, between 8.30am and 2.30pm, speaking English was a punishable offence. I lived a deliberate inversion of the historical norm – it was English that was undesirable, forbidden. In retrospect, it was a strange sort of existence, to step from an English world to an Irish one in the instant you entered the schoolyard every morning. I have sometimes wondered if I should resent how it has shaped me: loving a language I can speak fluently but that lives mostly within me, providing the internal narration for a life lived in an English-speaking world. Not that there is nobody to speak to. My sister speaks Irish too, but I suppose she lacks my taste for language, or maybe just this language. She does not care that we are alone in our family, moving uneasily between English and Irish-speaking identities: constructing our relationships with others in English, our relationships to our selves in some indeterminate mix of both languages. She mostly just lets the Irish identity go. But somehow, I can’t. I tried to. Tried to uncomplicate who I was by being just an English edition of myself. Tried to let it be enough to have my other language be a private one. It was not as if I needed it. And we were not an Irish speaking family. There was no great legacy to uphold. Or so I told myself.

But then one weekend I am at home in Clare, pulling up maps on the computer to plan a hiking route, looking for the one that recorded the snaking trail of the old cattle road I wanted to follow. I find the map where it is marked, trace my finger along the track’s length, committing its shape to memory. And then, as my index finger rounds the familiar curve of Cappanwallagh mountain, a single word in neat black letters appears beside the route. Gaeltacht.

My mother’s family has lived in this place for as long as anyone can remember, probably since the time when the Gleninsheen gorget was hidden. And they were there when it was found. So how has nobody ever mentioned this to me?

‘We never really spoke much Irish,’ my mother says when I show her the map. She does not understand her family as Irish-speaking. But the words on the map begin to eat away at my easy acceptance of this truth. My mother’s mother, a post-mistress, could only calculate accounts in Irish. Her father lived his life in both languages and had the heavy-tongued pronunciation of English that gave away which language he had preferred when he was young. I know all these facts but until I see that single word on the map I have believed that these people were aberrations in our family story. Exceptions to the rule. We are an English-speaking family.

I find myself disappearing into archives. Searching for when North Clare became English-speaking. Searching for answers to how a language died. In the landscape. In our family. I find old archival footage from RTÉ, a camera shot of the field beside my grand-aunt’s house in Murrough. The host is interviewing a woman wearing a headscarf and an expression of utter bemusement that anyone would take the time to record what is being said. But the conversation is important. She is one of the last two speakers of the area’s distinctive Irish dialect. A dialect that will die a few years after the programme airs, leaving with its speakers.

I trawl through parliamentary debates and departmental reports. If the last speakers disappeared so recently, when did the Gaeltacht end? I find an official time of death buried in pages of dry prose about population density and language competence by age bracket. September 1956: the date we decided Irish in Clare was no longer worth saving, that the language had declined to the point that the battle was lost. But the last speakers of the dialect are interviewed by RTÉ in 1980. The last speaker dies just after I am born, a little over a decade later. Irish limped on here well past its official extinction. And I find I can’t give up on it. I want to know this language better, this dialect that belonged to us. That died just as I was speaking my first words of Irish.

I hunt down scraps. Sa tóir ar, I would say in Irish – to pursue. Derived of, or maybe simply adjacent to, the middle Irish tóraidhe – a bandit, the pursued. The root from which Tory island off Ireland’s far north-west coast gets its name. The famous home of outlaw pirates pursued across the sea. The name later given to the bands of guerrilla fighters who opposed Cromwell’s armies during the 17th-century invasion of Ireland, who would attack and flee in the same manner, and – by a process of crude association – the political label given to those sympathetic to the Catholic Duke of York at the end of Charles II’s reign: the Tories.

This is what I am pursuing, I think – the shapeshifting insights that come from the deep intimacy of knowing a language beyond its constituent parts. The magic of a familiarity which can, by a process of consubstantiation, turn a word from a label for those outside the law to the name for the beating heart of the very institutions which sought to eradicate the language the outlaws spoke. This is what I tell myself. I am trying to know my language better. But it is also, I think, that I want to feel entitled to call this language mine – because she does not always feel like she belongs to me.

I am sitting in the studio of Raidió na Gaeltachta. I am afraid I will say something wrong, mispronounce something once the red beo button illuminates. Beaming my fumble for the right verb into thousands of homes. Placed in a studio full of native Irish speakers, I know I do not sound like one. My Irish is poor: not in standard but in depth. I know I do not have the elusive saibhreas, the linguistic richness of a native speaker. I cannot explain what this means but I know what it feels like. I feel it sitting in the radio studio with all its soft corners and hushed air. There is more space for silence in my Irish speech than in my English. Space that gives my sentences time to retreat in upon themselves in doubt.

The poet John Montague wrote about having a grafted tongue, about the pain of being an adult attempting to repossess Irish, generations after it had been carefully eradicated from his grandparents’ speech. The pain and hope of stumbling ‘over lost syllables of an old order.’ The frustration of being a man whose identity is founded on his command of language, reduced to the crude building blocks of subject, verb, and object once more.

I don’t lack the language like Montague, but my tongue feels like a mongrel among thoroughbreds. I think sometimes that this is actually more frustrating. My French, such as it is, is a language of competent minimalism. I have accepted that I will never gain the depth of expressive capacity in French that I have in other languages. But in Irish, equality of expression is so near I can taste it. And yet. I cannot quite make Irish as pliant to my purposes as I would like. In some ways, this is fitting. A language that resisted erasure for so long should hardly be amenable to manipulation. But it frustrates me. The shape I want it to make keeps slipping through my teeth. The language inverts itself in complex structures which force me to read rather than move through a text, make me redirect myself halfway through a sentence, squeeze my thoughts through the grammatical opening I can find instead of the one I would prefer.

Worse maybe is that I do not sound like I am from any Irish-speaking place in particular. I am composed of layered scraps of the dialects of my teachers, battered into adherence to the caighdeán – the standardized, sanitized version of what state exams expect Irish to be. As if language could ever be standardized. My accent does not help. Irish is deeply allegiant to place and mine has none of the hallmarks that brand me as connected to a location that is Irish-speaking. So I think, sitting in the silence of my language watching for the on-air button to illuminate, that my desire to trace how Irish died in Clare is perhaps also an attempt to justify my tongue. To show my language comes from some deeper source than a Dublin schoolyard. That it grew somewhere. That my tongue is as good as yours.

But the dialect, the canúint of Clare is gone. I cannot parrot it. Even if I could, there is nobody left to speak it to. A braver, more stubborn part of me thinks – why should I? Why should I have to alter the voice I have to justify my claim to the language? I want to believe that loving it is enough. Because I do love Irish more. Knowing it makes English seem like a naïve, shallow thing. A language in which words can have so many meanings that they have none. English lacks the beauty of specificity that Irish revels in.

I love the language that taught me to name my feelings as a child. Tá imní orm. I am anxious. Except that imní is not anxiety. Imní carries in its narrow, escalating vowels the rocketing pitch of adrenaline. Like the frantic whistle of a kettle left on a stove too long, it is a juddering plea for escape. And it is not a state like anxiety is; it is not a space to inhabit. Tá imní orm. It is on me. Settled on my shoulders, winding its fingers around my ribs so that my breath catches. It makes anxiety seem a hopelessly passive state. I love the language in which sneachta means snow and carries in its opening the sound of ice being scraped off an early morning footpath. I love the language in which the same word can mean indifference. The icy shrug of a landscape in which you are a fleeting actor, which does not recognize your cold.

The Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson refuses to translate her work into English, offering the refusal as a deliberate challenge to those who ‘think everything can be harvested without loss.’ I love this language. I know it is diminished in translation. But I cannot claim allegiance to this level of purism. I hardly feel my Irish is good enough – or independent enough – to justify it. Each language defines the other in my mind. Irish echoes off the corners of English words. Maithiúnas and breithiúnas. Forgiveness and judgment. Words that, as a lawyer, I sometimes have to roll around my mouth and mind. I know they are only made the same by their endings – something carried out or granted. But they taste the same when I say them. A rhyme of power and absolution that sticks to the way I think about them in both languages.

What is lost in the harvesting that Jenkinson fears? A history, a subtext, the personal geography carried in the familiar sounds of imní or sneachta? And what is lost by refusing to harvest? To allow one language to bounce off the other? Jenkinson fears dilution, perhaps. The process of transfer that makes us believe we can keep what is of value and discard the language which brought it to us. That nothing is lost when imní becomes anxiety. But what do we lose by shearing one language of the other? Maybe nothing. Maybe the speakers like me who are neither language and both.

I recover slivers of the dialect. My language grows.

I find linguistic atlases from the 1950s, their huge wafery pages evoking the Irish for page – bileog – with all its wind-filled sounds of billowing sails and its adjacence to duilleog, or leaf, another thing tossed about by gusts. The librarian warns me to be careful of the gently withering pages and I contort myself, holding the volumes at odd angles to fit them on the university scanners. Some of their text is written in a kind of shorthand, all dashes and dots – a sort of linguistic morse code I cannot decipher. But then there are the maps. Huge spidery drawings of the country labelled with the different ways a single word was used in each area. From the maps I learn that the North Clare dialect truncated words – eirball (for tail) becomes rubel, a world away from the distinctly tripping syllables of ‘er-eb-el’ as I say it. Other words have not morphed but have simply left the linguistic path at some point in history, never to return. Eallach replaces the more common beithidhigh (for chattels or goods) in North Clare, an older word hanging on by its fingernails to the west coast. And everywhere within the small pocket of water-laced limestone and scrappy farmland, the linguists find that speakers of the North Clare dialect stress the final syllable of the word.

In the dusty silence of the early printed books archive in Trinity College, I can hear my grandfather saying my name again. Even in English, his accent folds the next syllable onto the word even as the previous one is only just receding, building the sounds like waves until their weight topples onto a last stressed diminuendo of narrowing vowels. A ghost of the dialect he must have grown up alongside, though I never heard him speak Irish. And I think of his father-in-law, my great-grandfather, who lived eight kilometres away, and spoke the dialect from Áran. As a child I would correct him when he placed the emphasis on the first syllable of my name instead of the last. How fussy.

It is hard to say how the language trickled away, or when. Government maps from 1851, which shade areas darker relative to the density of Irish-speaking populations, colour North Clare deepest black. The map of Irish-speaking areas made by the Gaeltacht Commission in 1926 colours most of the county yellow – to indicate a Breac-Gaeltacht where more than 50% of the population speaks Irish. North Clare remains stubbornly pink – a Fíor Gaeltacht where Irish is spoken by more than 80% of the population. The skeptic in me wonders if the numbers were talked up – areas returned as more Irish-speaking than they were, to reassure the population of the health of the language, or to convince the government of a viable language to support. But the following decade the National Folklore Commission recorded widespread use of Irish in North Clare. The reports are gathered by schoolchildren, themselves Irish speakers, recounting the Irish answers of their interview subjects.

It is baffling. In a county with one of the highest death tolls during the famine; that has no large city, little industry, high emigration; the language holds on. And then, only fifty years later, Ó Muirthile finds the last two speakers of the dialect, both in old age. The language dying. Did it collapse suddenly? Or did it seep away so gradually that it went unnoticed? I cannot tell. And there are very few people to ask. But I can retrace its footsteps.

On the road between Ballyvaughan (Baile Uí Beacháin, the home of Uí Beacháin) and Lisdoonvarna (Lios Dúin Bhearna, the fort at the gap) is a field with a large, swollen dip in it. Language and landscape go together here. They hide each other. This field has a name in Irish. Poll a’ ceoil. I crouch in the field. It is late August. I have stolen away, ostensibly to go to the shop for the Sunday papers, but I am now quite far from either of the two places where there are papers to be had. Marsh thistles worry my ankles. A month earlier and I would have been up to my waist in feileastram, the tall yellow iris that grows in wet places. Talamh feagacha, this kind of land. Rushy. Water seeps through my runners as a dun cow with a white calf tucked into her flank watches me shuffling about, bent double and listening. And in the silence between cars passing on the narrow road nearby – I hear it. The rushing softness of water hurrying through some hidden path in a trickle of excited notes. Poll a’ ceoil, the hole or hollow of music.

Irish is not made for outsiders. The names it gives things are designed for those who are part of its landscape: composed of layers of local reference that make them useless for a person who wants a precise co-ordinate, but invaluable for those who seek a place. The language can other you if you let it, but in its strange excesses of self-concern and micro-identification, it gives away the secrets of a place that run beneath the surface. Offers a path to belonging. Deacair é a shéanadh. Hard to deny or refuse it. Difficult not to inhabit.

There are things locked in this language and its landscape that are lost to me. Things which the distancing lens of translation, or maybe just the passage of time, have put beyond my reach. But they are there. I keep digging, hunting down books and maps, reports and articles but there are so few answers about when Irish died. On my last evening in Clare before returning to Dublin in September, I walk the path from my parents’ house up Sliabh Eilbhe and find myself outside the cottage where Mary moved once she was married. Standing outside the front door as the sun fades, I can see the lights of Connemara and the Aran Islands flickering on. The circle of Gaeltachts that ringed this bay once is broken here, at this mountain.

In time Mary’s son, Patrick, married too and brought up his own family in this house. On a stormy evening in 1901 he was still out on the farm when the man came from the census to record who was home. Names and ages and occupations were written one after another in the neat columns of the census return. And then, in the last column, the returning officer asked what language he should record as being spoken in the house. One after the other each name was followed by the same response: ‘English/Irish’. Except for one. Mary was 100 years old that evening. She gave her answers for the census in the only language she spoke. The only language she would ever speak. Gaeilge. Irish. And here, in the census record for Mary’s family is where I begin to get my answer, because on the night of the census in 1901, Mary is not the only monoglot in the house on Sliabh Eilbhe.

Ellen, the baby of the family, is four. On the census return she is labelled as having only ‘Béarla’. This is where it starts, I suppose. The fork in our tongues that leads to me, Mary’s four times great-granddaughter, reading her family’s census return and seeing in four-year-old Ellen the first divisions. The first generation who grew up with English and learned Irish, instead of the other way around. A tide beginning to turn. Ten years later, in 1911, Ellen appears again. She is fifteen now and bilingual. Mary has died, sometime after the end of her century. She is buried near Gleninsheen in a grave cut into the rock. Reading the census return I do not know if I feel the language is more mine now, or less. But I have found something unexpected among the rocks of North Clare. It isn’t much. But I can recover this much. We are an Irish-speaking family.

From issue #13: spring/summer 2022

About the Author
Róisín Costello is a writer and academic working in Irish and English. Her work considers the intersections of language and landscape in Ireland and the power and place of female narratives. Róisín’s writing has previously been shortlisted for the Bodley-Head/Financial Times Essay Prize (in 2017/18). Her essay ‘The Sea Has Many Names’, which examines landscapes of immigration and belonging, is forthcoming in The Hopper.