Our attention has been drawn (via one of Leah Gunn Barrett's excellent 'Dear Scotland' blogposts) to the work of Tomás Mac Síomóin.
We haven't read the volumes reviewed in The Irish Times below but there are immediate and striking parallels with contemporary debates in Scotland sparked by the work of Alf Baird, SALVO, Liberation Scotland and a a burgeoning number of others.
Author:Tomás Mac Síomóin
ISBN-13:9781502974570
Publisher:Nuascéalta Teoranta
Guideline Price:€10.55
In The Broken Harp, Identity and Language in Modern Ireland, biologist and author Tomás Mac Síomóin presents the decline of the Irish language as one of the most insidious outcomes of the multi-faceted colonisation of the Irish people from the 16th century through to the present day.
Rather than appealing to the Romantic rhetoric of the failed Gaelic revival period, or to the naive optimism of modern-day “official Gaeldom”, Mac Síomóin presents a convincing case relying on consistent reference to the fates of other postcolonial nations, to modern postcolonial theory from intellectuals such as Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, and N’gugi wa Thiongo, as well as to his own background in biology which allows him to describe with some authority the residual effects of post-colonial trauma which are, it seems, perpetuated not only through intergenerational imitation of behavioural patterns, but also in the hereditary transmission of the colonial condition via DNA structures and epigenetic profile.
Irish history is not presently a compulsory secondary school subject, as Mac Síomóin notes, but when it is chosen, its narrative is entirely purged of reference to what constituted a veritable cultural genocide in Ireland. As such, Mac Síomóin’s first chapter sets about establishing the nature of the historical relationship between the Irish people and their ancestral language. He does not, however, pursue the jaded cliche of blaming England outright for Ireland’s cultural ills. Rather, he advocates an understanding of Irish history as involving three distinct agents of colonisation, a distinction reflected in the chronological arrangement of The Broken Harp’s central three chapters whose overall narrative may be summarised in the following manner: a process initiated by the Tudors was perpetuated by the Irish Catholic Church who, moving to occupy a power vaccum created by the end of the Irish War of Independence, served to consolidate the English-imposed status quo.
The particular psychological profile of the Irish as a people who for generations had suffered genocide, famine, and sexual crime as consequences of the first two waves of colonisation is said to have engendered a catastrophic vulnerability to the third and present wave of colonisation; that of Anglocentric neo-liberal globalisation, a pet peeve of Mac Síomóin’s.
But is colonisation problematic at all? Róisín Ní Ghairbhí in her recent review of Nicholas Wolf’s An Irish Speaking Island evoked Monty Python’s parody of the decolonising subject who, in questioning the benefits of a colonial relationship (“What did the Romans ever do for us”?), is immediately confronted with the alleged advantages of submission to a colonial other. Mac Síomóin, however, associates a variety of malign symptoms with the colonial condition afflicting Ireland, sensationally terming it “Super Colonised Irish Syndrome”. Such symptoms include, for example, a tendency towards and toleration of alcoholism, the extent of which Mac Síomóin aptly illustrates with an arsenal of alarming statistics, the significance of which he maybe unwittingly mitigates by mentioning in passing that the British colonial power experiences the same phenomenon to a more or less equivalent degree. In a situation he feels is reminiscent of Stockholm Syndrome, Mac Síomóin diagnoses Ireland with a general infatuation with and assimilation to the cultural norms of other Anglophone cultures to the detriment of its own; such a situation is said to already be negatively affecting the experiences of visitors to Ireland, some of whom remark (but just who exactly, we are not told) that the country too closely resembles its fellow Anglophone nations from whence comes the great bulk of Ireland’s tourism-related revenue.
That Ireland submits all to easily to the cultures of its anglophone counterparts is shown by Mac Síomóin to be in keeping with the Sapir-Whorf hypthosis which maintains that the loss of a language entails the loss of a world-view tailored to the centuries of experience shared by those who spoke the language. Adopting the language of the coloniser exposes the colonised subject to a world-view in which he is a mere subaltern partner. On the willingness of colonised peoples to internalise unflattering colonial conceptions of themselves, Mac Síomóin places Albert Memmi’s remarks in the context of Ireland’s consequent inability to assert itself internationally, a reality most recently demonstrated by Ireland’s disastrously apathetic surrender to EU austerity in clear contrast to the ferocious opposition encountered in Greece, insightfully identified by Mac Síomóin as a nation possessing, not coincidentally, an unbroken intellectual heritage unscathed by cultural colonisation. Mac Síomóin’s international perspective derives no doubt in part from having taken his PhD at Cornell University in New York, residing in Catalonia for the best part of the last 20 years.
Mac Síomóin also draws attention to a peculiarly Irish “disjunctive dialogue” which is often glorified as “the gift of the gab”, but is likened in the present work to the fragmented testimony of the traumatised survivors of an AirTransat flight from Toronto to Lisbon which narrowly avoided a fatal crash in 2001, and whose excessive attention to minute details regarding the incident was deemed to be a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.
One might argue that the traumatic episodes of Ireland’s past occurred many generations ago; biologist Mac Síomóin is at hand to provide relevant evidence suggesting that susceptibility to PTSD is hereditary, reminding us that a majority of Irish people lived in conditions favouring PTSD for many centuries, and still do in Northern Ireland.
Despite a penchant for postcolonial and microbiological theory, Mac Síomóin admits to having taken a more journalistic approach to expressing himself for the sake of “Seán and Mary Citizen”, which may also explain the prevalence of exclamation marks throughout the text. His research on the subject therefore extends on occasion to sources as incidental as an encounter with a taxi driver, for example.
The Broken Harp, which includes an appendix detailing his reflections on the feasibility of reviving the Irish language, and another on the current state of Irish language literature, may have benefited from a third appendix comprised of snippets from such conversations. In response to claims made in his presence that the loss of the Irish language was a necessary consequence of societal modernisation, and that the revival of Irish on economic grounds makes no sense, I feel Mac Síomóin has omitted a very effective rhetorical question; to what extent is post-Gaelic Ireland, having embraced Anglicisation, more societally modern and more economically stable than a similar-sized country such as Denmark whose mere 5.5 million inhabitants have yet to abandon Danish? To no extent at all, I dare to wager.
Mac Síomóin suggests that a resuscitation of the Irish language cannot be achieved without first mentally decolonising the nation, echoing Frantz Fanon’s call to discover that the coloniser’s conception of the colonised was nothing but a “hoax” which nonetheless needs to be demolished after colonisation ever before the considerable psychological effects of colonisation can be reversed. Mac Síomóin thus laments the common conception of Irish speakers in popular speech as “eccentrics” or “fanatics”, whose rights, accorded to them by the EU, if not by common sense itself, are consistently denied to them by Irish governments.
Such rejection of the ancestral language is unsurprising in light of Thiogo’s writings, which present such rejection as a hallmark of the realisation of the imperial goal. Perhaps more surprising then, is the success of Hebrew in Israel, which Mac Síomóin presents as an encouraging precedent for the revival of other ancestral languages, wisely accompanying his espousal of Israeli linguistic policy with a footnote assuring readers of his outright condemnation of Israel’s policies regarding Palestine.
Mac Síomóin is not all doom and gloom, and although he does warn of the imminence of the death of the Irish language, he devotes an entire appendix to suggesting sociolinguistically sound solutions to the problem, the extent of which tends to be unhelpfully understated by “official Gaeldom”. Mac Síomóin is not, therefore, marginalising any single group in his work; the entire populace of Ireland are diagnosed with this notion of Super Colonised Irish Syndrome. The Irish public must together acknowledge the very existence of the problem, before a necessarily huge amount of energy can be expended on attempting to solve it.
Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh is a PhD student at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick
Author:Tomás Mac Síomóin
ISBN-13:9798624192850
Publisher:Nua-Scéalta Teoranta
Guideline Price:$14.99
Tomás Mac Síomóin has written a sequel to his widely read The Broken Harp, Identity and Language in Modern Ireland. The Gael Becomes Irish is the most recent reflection from the Dublin-born poet pathologist on the vagaries of the official national language of Ireland. Its title speaks to the 17th-century invention by historical historian Seathrún Céitinn of an “Irish” rather than a Gaelic identity.
Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (“Compendium of knowledge about Ireland”, c1634) emphasised Catholicism rather than Celtic speech as a means by which both the Gael and the Anglo-Norman could unite against a common Protestant foe. Effectively, in this post-Reformation period, the Gael became Irish. Writing contemporarily amidst political upheaval of arguably similar significance, Mac Síomóin returns the verb “became” to its present tense formulation. This clever innovation suggests that the process is one that is ongoing, but which might yet be reversed – an “unfinished odyssey”, if you will.
Céitinn’s earlier rhetoric was hardly the product of idle intellectualisation. His reconfiguraton of the parameters of Irish identity was articulated as a defensive reaction to expressions of colonial ambition of the kind contained in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596). Its author, an English civil servant on Irish territory by the name of Edmund Spenser, had infamously recommended to his colonial government that Ireland be set on fire so as to cause famines which would exterminate the Gaelic p
The opening pages of The Gael Becomes Irish recall the linguistic dimension of Spenser’s colonial project which required total anglicisation of the country on the grounds that “the speech beinge Irishe, the harte must needs be Irishe, for out of the aboundance of the harte the tongue speaketh”. This is a phrase which today might even be re-appropriated as yet another argument for increasing the use of the Irish language beyond the 2 per cent of the population who currently are said to speak it on a daily basis.
Spenser employed in A View of the Present State of Ireland a dialectical format purporting to report a dialogue between a pair of Englishmen concerned about the Irish situation. Just such a literary genre also exists in Gaelic literary culture where it is known as agallamh, as in “the argument of Oisín and Pádraig” which immortalised St Patrick’s discussion with one of the Fianna over the relative merits of paganism and Christianity.
Mac Síomóin too has opted for the agallamh model in The Gael Becomes Irish. Its content unfolds as a series of reactions to questions from an anonymous interlocutor whose occasionally accusative gripes resemble the Hibernophobic jibes sometimes levelled at the Irish-language Twittosphere. Mac Síomóin offers reasoned responses in each instance.
An inevitable consequence of having adopted an accessible conversational style is that Mac Síomóin must take frequent recourse to anecdotal evidence of the kind demonstrated in the following statement on Irish-medium teaching: “some secondary teachers have told me that most immigrant children experience no such Irish learning difficulty [which] lends credibility to the suspicion that their native fellow-students still live under the malign shadow of the bata scoir”.
Evidence for this latter assertion emerged during a very recent Raidió na Gaeltachta interview during which the son of immigrant parents and student of Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne speaks in fluent Munster Irish of the racism he faced while competing in a Gaelic football contest. Sadly, it would seem that neither proficiency in the national language nor a commitment to Gaelic games can guarantee Irishness.
What, then, are the parameters of Irishness in a largely post-Catholic Ireland? Mac Síomóin’s workaround is to suggest that 21st-century Irishness is neither a linguistic nor a cultural marker of any real distinctiveness, but a geographical label. In light of the Irish wave of the #BLM movement, however, some from among the Afro-Irish have pushed the language question once more to the fore, with @PrinceNoir tweeting his intention to speak in Irish to the next person to ask where he’s “really” from.
Whatever rate of terminal decline might wrongly or rightly be ascribed to the Irish language, its continued importance to the identity of various minority communities inhabiting our geographical space, whether recent immigrants, Gaeltacht residents, or east Belfast Protestants, seems quite clear. But most Irish people, Mac Síomóin observes, have become desensitised to platitudes extolling the virtues of learning Irish. Are there disadvantages to not speaking our unique ancestral language? Mac Síomóin warns that anglophone unilingualism in a global world has contributed to a national character which in the past saw Ireland surrender its sovereignty during the 2011 bailout.
This perspective seems a little Eurosceptical, although some of my discomfort in this regard was appeased by due acknowledgement of the official status enjoyed by the Irish language within the EU. Mac Síomóin achieves further balance by also expressing a post-Brexit mistrust of “the wider Anglosphere and its proxies, led, inevitably, by the USA”.
Take note that is no narrow de Valeran protectionism. To demonstrate the viability of bypassing entirely the discourse of the Anglosphere, Mac Síomóin situates his reflections in the international context of, for example, the Portuguese postcolonial theory of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, or the Francophone work of Albert Memmi – a Jewish Arab intellectual who died within weeks of the appearance of The Gael Becomes Irish, as it happen
Meanwhile, in the context of the author’s oft reiterated concern over dwindling readerships, the Irish psyche stands accused of already having been hopelessly infiltrated by “English-only gizmo screens”. My objection is that the Irish language retains a presence on social media out of all proportion with the overall number of fluent speakers. I would argue, however, that the increasingly vocal ambassadors of anti-5G or of Irexit ideology, for example, have fallen prey to the success of neocolonial disinformation campaigns which now are in full swing across the English-speaking world.
Contrarian adherents to such ideologies might try to harvest a bit of fake news fodder from The Gael Becomes Irish. Mac Síomóin has been writing poetry for decades, but he is a “scientist” by training, and his elucidation of the genetic determinism associated with post traumatic stress disorder is sure to satiate the conspiratorial sections of Irish society which in these Covid-19 times have evolved to become more and more “scientistic”.
Consider that the Great Famine is given in The Gael Becomes Irish as an example of a leading factor in the present day prevalence of PTSD in Irish people. The enduring folkloric narrative by which merely a million starved with another million having emigrated is debunked by Mac Síomóin’s citation of official UK government statistics according to which as many as 5 million Irish really died during the Great Famine.
Neither does Mac Síomóin shy away from the white hot debate around the legitimacy of classing the Great Hunger as a genocide. His controversial contribution to that particular conversation is to call attention to an 1846 description in The Cork Examiner of the Irish famine as a “holocaust”, an entire century before the usage more usually associated with that term. Unlike real far-right Ireland, however, Mac Síomóin does not mean to undermine the suffering of groups worse off than our own.
Mac Síomóin's point, rather, is that various kinds of systematic violence aimed over many centuries to eradicate Irish speakers; this is a process which ever since has damaged attitudes to a Gaelic revival and is a process of which, he fears, we are in the final throes. His belief in linguistic revival extends to all other endangered languages as part of a language biodiversity which might punningly be said to "stem" from his own background in plant pathology. He concludes with some practical recommendations for teaching a form of Neo-Irish based on the expertise of such esteemed Irish language scholars as Nicholas Williams and Maoilsheachlainn Ó Ruairc. Loath as I may be to refer readers of The Irish Times to Amazon, it is from their website that a copy of The Gael Becomes Irish can be procured.
Dr Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh lectures at Uppsala University, Sweden
The Gael Becomes Irish: the prospects for the Irish language in Ireland today – The Irish Times
If you haven't yet read any of Leah Gunn Barrett's work, this is as good a place as any to start - highly recommended.
Scotland's real national shame - being a colony (substack.com)
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