A BIRCH TOO FAR

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You could be forgiven for thinking that this is just an ordinary, if ornamental, sign erected by residents at the entrance to two housing estates, Maywood and Bettyglen.

In fact it is a comment on the current state of the Irish language.

I remember in school when you wanted an Irish word for something you went for the one furthest from the English. So we had craolachán (broadcasty thing) instead of raidió (as we now have) and guthán (voicey thing) instead of teileafón (as we have today). Perhaps it is a reflection of our developing self-confidence as a nation and our no longer having to define ourselves with reference to England, that we can now accept words from Latin and Greek roots into the Irish language, and not avoid them just because the English got there first.

That's the good bit.

But, despite the abject failure to revive the Irish language and have it as the vernacular of a significant proportion of the population, the pantomime persists. Everything in English must have an Irish language equivalent, even if it doesn't. And the further from the English version the better, much of the time.

So we have, for example, Sráid Mhóin on the street sign for Anglesey Street while, admittedly the official nomenclature list does not attempt to translate Lord Anglesey's name, just misspell it (Anglesea). These streets named after British Lords should be left alone.

Anyway I've wandered a bit from Maywood and Bettyglen both of which, but particularly the former, should have been left alone.

Maywood is variously translated as Colll Bhealtaine (after the month of May) or Coill Mhuire (after the Blessed Virgin) and there may be cases where one or the other of these is appropriate. But not here, where the name is a contraction of a girl's name - May Catherwood.

Bettyglen also has its Irish language variations, the one above meaning the Glen of the Birch. But it is in fact named after a girl called Betty from among the family who lived in Bettyglen House. So even Gleann Éilíse would have been better in this case.

If this sort of madness amuses you take a look at some more here.

DEATH AND THE IRISH

This book is a heap of fun. Death can be fun, or at least there can be some funny aspects to it, as long as its not your own death you're talking about.

This book has over seventy contributors, each covering a different aspect of death in about three pages. The only significantly longer contribution is the introduction by the editor, Salvador Ryan, and that runs to a whole seven pages. So it's lots of stuff but short and snappy.

Salvador Ryan, editor, Nick Maxweell MD Wordwell,
Peter Harbison, archeologist

I'll just reflect on two points from Salvador's introductory talk at the launch in the Royal Irish Academy on 10/11/2016. The talk was serious, funny and highly entertaining. Make you want to buy the book, which, incidentally I did.

The first concerns children and the presence of death. Today, for many people, death is sanitised. We are often far from the old country wake where the corpse is in a bed or open coffin while neighbours, friends and colleagues "party" around it.

I have been with many corpses, from my granny when I was a teenager, to my cousin very recently, and I have not been in the least scared in the presence of the dead. Upset maybe but not scared. It is much more scary to be in the presence of a person dying a slow death and fighting valliantly for every last breath.

The second is the caoineadh or to give it its weak Englsh translation the Lament. It is really a mourning or a keening usually by the family but also sometimes by a "professional" brought in from the outside. We had a taste of it at the launch when Salvador sang an unaccompanied caoineadh as Gaeilge in the course of his talk.

Some of the items in the book may seem a bit obscure and peripheral but I went straight to Rita Larkin's piece on death notices and Mary Ann Bolger's on Memorial Cards (or Memoriam Cards as we used to call them).

Rita's piece is a hoot where she systematically debunks and interprets the PC language used in your standard death notice. The notice is a "best foot forward" job regardless of the facts - nisi bonum and all that. People don't die any more. They "pass on" and the like, and often as not it's "after an illness bravely borne" even if they died roarin'. Then there's the mammy who used always keep an eye on the death notices in the paper - "do you know who's dead?". It's a sad day, and a wakeup call, when this duty passes down to yourself. Anyway, Rita has the ultimate way around the bullshit in the death notice - write your own, well in advance!

Mary Ann's piece also rang lots of bells. More than you might imagine. Both my Granny's and my Mammy's missals were chock-a-block with memoriam cards. And most of the subjects would be regularly prayed for in the course of the weekly, or daily, mass, as the case may be. Lost friends, colleagues and relations all vied for attention. Some had photos and some didn't.

Mary Ann recounts how holy pictures, of varying degrees of piety and suffering, but blank on the obverse, would be obtained by jobbing printers, and turned into highly personalised memorial cards. I am well aware of the process as I too was a jobbing printer once, albeit on a very small scale, and I specialised, inter alia, in the memorial card. Mary Ann mentions indulgences but I don't think she quite gets it as far as the letterpress printer is concerned. Every letter and space had to be set by hand with a tweezers so the less the work and the greater the reward the better. Taking a leaf out of the book of my betters, the older indulgence hunters, I scoured the table of indulgences to find the shortest ejaculation with the biggest bang (so to speak). Worked like a dream.

The choice and range of pieces in the book reflect the evolution of today's Irish society. We have a piece on the Jewish way of death, which while not particularly modern might not have been included in such a book way back. But we also have a piece on the Muslim way of death which certainly reflects the replacement of the kosher by the hallal in some traditionally Jewish areas in Dublin.

The contrast between the funerals of two Irish Presidents, Douglas Hyde and Erskine Childers, tells us much about the progress of human decency and the decline of the influence of the Catholic church in the intervening period.

Well, if you can't have the State Pathologist to launch your book on death you can have a former State Pathologist's brother. This incidental observation, of course, does a serious injustice to Peter Harbison, who is widely renowned in his own right, and appropriately enough to the subject, the field of archeology. I wouldn't have mentioned the brother but he brought it up himself in the course of his witty romp through the contents of the book.

He commented that he was glad he was launching and not reviewing the book where he'd have to comment on all 75 entries. At the launch he just picked out a few teasers, including two cases which called for some ingenuity in repatriating the corpse where the sailors were reluctant, to say the least, to have a dead person on board ship. One was shipped in a full barrell of gin where the gin "evaporated" during the voyage, and the other in a stand up piano, in which he was eventually buried.

I must say that the more I got to read of this book the more I liked it. It is an Aladdin's Cave, an absolute treasure trove of the most interesting of stuff.

Unlike Peter Harbison I could go on all day and night talking about this book and drawing attention to its tightly phrased informative, interesting, amusing and entertaining contributions. But you'd be better off going out and buying the book yourself and leaving it around to pick up and dip into from time to time. That is, if you can leave it down once you've picked it up.

So I'll just mention two more pieces.

David J Butler writes on the momento mori and the Freemasons. I was in the graveyard at Greyfriars in Edinburgh recently and came to the conclusion that it must be full of deceased pirates, if one is to judge by the proliferation of skull and crossbones on the tombstones. My guide explained that they were all Freemasons, a matter of no surprise to him as in them days you had to be a Freemason to get anywhere. And believe you me, these tombstones were not purchased in the local bargain basement. Massive, some of them were.

Clodagh Tait, in her piece on Graveyard Folklore tells us that the inhabitants of graveyards are usually depicted in being proactive in defending their graves from interference. This brought to mind the curse of the Guinnesses in their vault in All Saints Church just down the road from where I live. You can see it for yourself below. Click the image for a larger readable version.

Happy reading.

The Brendan Voyage

Brendan Cardiff is proud to be a Northside Dubliner. Unlike that other "northsider", Bono, Brendan has not ensconced himself in a southside mansion. In fact he hasn't ensconced himself on the southside at all. He has, however, had an exciting and distinguished career on both the Irish and international stages.

His childhood stories resonated with me. We are, after all, both Dubliners and from the same generation.

Before I mention a few of them, and in order not to detract from the more weighty considerations of Irish economic development in the latter half of the twentieth century and from our tunnel visioned relationship with Europe, I should say that I have commented on these in my review of Roots on Amazon.

In the 1950s British sweets were a luxury, probably as much due to their scarcity value as anything else. A visit to the UK always ended with a ritual purchase of the unavailable at home, such as Spangles. Brendan mentions a visit to Northern Ireland in the 1950s when he couldn't buy the sweets because post-war rationing was still in force there and he didn't have a ration book. Well, maybe nobody told him where to get one. My family visited the North in the 1950s and we were directed to the coupon distribution centre to pick up our ration entitlement. Having used this up during the first week of a fortnight's stay, we went back for the second week's coupons only to find that we had already consumed our two week allocation. An early onset of Lent followed.

Brendan very wisely defines the difference between clothes and presents. As a child I sold raffle tickets for the Franciscans in Cork and, as was usual in these matters, there was always a draw for the promoters. I won six dozen of stout. However, as there was a rail strike on at the time and the stout could not be got to Dublin the Franciscans sent a cheque. That was fine by me. I know where the stout would have gone. I had the cheque spent in my head long before it arrived only to find, when it did, that my mother requisitioned it to buy me clothes. Much needed I'm sure they were. Presents they were not.

He reminds us of the time milk was delivered via the tilley out of the churn, only to be replaced by the new fangled bottled milk. He mentions the extra drop out of the tilley to make sure you weren't being short changed. This was the first time I heard tell of a baker's dozen of milk. I wonder does he remember the cutting-edge-of-technology foil-milk-bottle-top opener distributed for free by Hughes Bros. Round piece of plastic with a bump in the middle. Worked a dream.

While we're still on the milk, he mentions the transition from horse drawn to motorised delivery. He doesn't, however, mention one of the downsides to this bit of technological progress. No more manure. I remember well following the horse drawn carts down our road with a bucket and spade gathering manure for the back garden. Maybe they didn't do that on the Northside!

Joshing aside, this is a fascinating book. Apart from the purely personal stuff, Brendan has recorded his experiences in the early days of Irish economic development through his work in the private and public sectors, both in Ireland and abroad. He was in Uganda, representing the EU Commission during Idi Amin's reign, and this, among other things, has given him a deep and no-nonsense approach to development.

He is an inveterate traveler and the book contains wonderful cameos of his favourite places along with some beautiful, and very professional, photos from his own camera.

Significantly, the book is published by Liffey Press, a Northside publishing house, headquartered in Raheny, Dublin 5.

A backseat on the Brendan voyage is yours for the asking. Try it. It's a worthwhile trip. Available at good booksellers or, in extremis, from Amazon.

Mickey Dazzler

The first time I heard my mother use the term "Mickey Dazzler" I nearly died of shock. She used it completely unselfconsciously. I was at a loss. To me it sounded like a description of a "flasher", but, apparently she was describing a particular kind of corner boy spiv.

On looking further I see the phrase is used by O'Casey in Juno, so it must have been common currency in Dublin at some stage.

Context is everything, however, and the mickey has now come to mean only one thing. Checkout this extract from Joseph O'Connor's "Death of the Irish Male". It certainly had me in stitches when I first read this passage in the book.

Then there is the, still common, phrase "taking the mickey" out of someone. Wikipedia has some wisdom on the origins of this expression.

Anyway, the common or garden mickey now appears to have become a serious embarrassment in some quarters. For example, Clare Byrne, on the early morning Newstalk breakfast show, always says "taking the mike". While this may have a different and particular resonance in a radio show, I don't think that has anything to do with the matter. Granted, "taking the mick" is also used as a variant on the original, but I never heard either of the two aberrant versions in Dublin until the radio went posh, or PC, or whatever.

My own favourite incidence is in the (schoolboy?) translation of the Dublin suburb Stillorgan into Irish.

Mickey Marbh

Porkies

The image above is Irish chicken filets purchased from Tesco. Proud to be Irish. Indeed, 100% Irish. No problem with chickens, then.

The image below is Irish pork purchased from Lidl. Proud to be Irish? Not on your nanny. Enter a little trace of toxin and suddenly the Irish pork has a new passport. The meat is revealed as not Irish at all.



And lest you think I have it in for Lidl, here's an Olhausen's packet of sausages. The primary label proclaims the firm to be "Irish since 1896" so you might expect Irish pork. But the subsequent label makes it quite clear the product is "Non-Irish Origin".



And this despite the folksy reverse label.



I'm thinking of starting a new movement called Toxins for Truth. Any takers?

Gaeilge: Fíor, Breac, agus eile

Ós rud é go bfhuilmíd anois i lár Seachtain (Coicís) na Gaeilge mheas mé sraith nasc a thabhairt le chéile do na leathanaigh nó na míreanna agam féin atá as Gaeilge nó a bhfuil baint acu leis an nGaeilge. Seo thíos iad.

As we're in the middle of Irish Language Week (fortnight) I thought I'd draw together links to some of the material on my site/blog in, or related to, the Irish language. Check out below.

These are actually in Irish
Na Duibhirigh
Na hUaisle
Ainmnmú Shráideanna Bhaile Átha Cliath
or bilingual
Rang 1963

These relate to the use or misuse of the language
Gaeilge ón mBroinn
Doicheall
Drochghaeilge Oifigiúil
Deis ar Fáil
Easpa fada contúirteach

These are by way of comment on, or just related to, the language.
Bóithrín na Smaointe
Mar a scríotar bítear
Easpa Shacs-Béarla
Béal doras
Géibheann
Buailte
Iarsmaoineamh
Frithród