According to the front page of today’s La Nua, the series No Béarla is being re-commissioned for a second series: or, at the very least they’re talking about it.
In case you missed it, or you weren’t in Ireland during the month of January, No Béarla was a documentary made by a guy by the name of Manchan Mangan, the premise being that he would travel around Ireland speaking nothing but Gaeilge and see how far he could get.
I’ll admit now that I didn’t see every episode, but now that I’ve found it on youtube I may go back and watch them again. The first two episodes were nothing like as depressing as I thought they would be, if I’m honest. Newspaper reports leading up to the broadcasting of the first episode suggested that Manchan was beaten out of Dublin with sticks, which is not quite the case. I supposed it’s a case of expectations. If you expect to be treated like a sane person while speaking your national language, then the impact would have been greater, but most of us ‘mad’ enough to speak the language have long since grown accustomed to being questioned about it, along the lines of “you speak WHA’??”. Very enlightened…
Much of the controversy over the first series was based around Manchan’s apparent aversion to the language itself, or maybe it was indifference, I’m not sure. I think people assume that if you can speak the language fluently then you’re some sort of loon who wants to ram it down everyone’s throat with a rusty spoon until they choke on it. Manchan’s approach of “I honestly want to know if anyone can speak this, and if they can’t, can we just stop now??” offended plenty of people, but I’d have to say that personally I found this relatively reasonable. I don’t so much agree with Manchan’s approach, as appreciate where he’s coming from - and given that the series was broadcast mere weeks after FF once again tried to lay claim to all of Irish culture (while failing to on any level suggest that perhaps a man who has been Taoiseach for a decade could have fitted a few language lessons in there somewhere??) with some [more] legislation that is about as forward-thinking as a dead hamster.
The article today featured an interview with Manchan about the reaction to the first series - and I wish I hadn’t read it, because it’s so bloody typical. Not what he said, mind you, but what others said to him. He spoke about a debate he went to in my alma mater, where he was essentially abused for his lack of grammatical accuracy. Which really, really gets to me. There’s this really nasty hyper-critical streak amongst Gaeilgeoirí, and speaking to those who don’t speak the language it’s one of the most off-putting things about trying to learn, or speak, Irish.
Almost everyone in this country has been through a decade or more of ‘learning’ Irish (don’t get me started, again, on the quality of Irish language education in this country… not just now!), which means somewhere in their heads they have the capacity to string a few words or sentences together. With genuine encouragement, those cúpla focail could be extended into at least a basic ability to converse - which is a start, isn’t it? But the belief that saying the wrong thing or getting your tuiseal ginideach wrong will have you burning in eternal damnation is desperately off-putting. Not to mention ridiculous.
Think about it. If you’re learning a new language - for instance my continuing plodding away at Spanish - if you find someone who speaks the language a bit better than you, it’s the best way to try out what you’ve learnt, and crucially the best way to improve. If you go to a restaurant in Spain and accidentally say “I wanted the heated hen” instead of “I’d like the chargrilled chicken” [en español], the waiter may smirk but they’ll appreciate the effort. Here? You get a dirty look and get told to go back and study your gramadach.
This antagonises me mostly out of personal experience of people who won’t speak Irish near me in case I correct them, which I wouldn’t do!! I’m not for a second saying that we shouldn’t teach the language to a high standard, or that we should ignore grammar - but it’s a LANGUAGE, it needs to be SPOKEN before we can worry about grammatical accuracy!!!
Anyway, time to get off the soap-box. For now.
Manchan has a full page of information and resources related to the original series on his page. This includes a link to a recent article he wrote for the Guardian which summarised the series.
**Apologies for a few missing a-fada’s, firefox won’t let me use the shortcut, will attempt to fix it later.. Manchan is the primary victim 
**
