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• Wednesday, January 14, 2009 06:10 AM

  @Che Pasa, we like to keep people guessing but the Israelis had one up on us. The President of Israel,

  Chaim Herzog was born in Dublin, son of the Chief Rabbi. He had to learn the Irish language in school, as it was compulsory for a very nationalistic people. Old Herzog, whose son has recently been rebuking the Irish government for criticising the Israeli assault on Gaza, is reputed to have used some Irish words in conversation with some others who'd been through our system, in order to baffle any decoders listening in to telephone calls ordering the destruction of some place or other.

  You see, Che, we are a useful little country as Ronald Reagan discovered during the Iran/Contra affair when a whole load of CIA operatives were asked "Did your mother come from Ireland, cos there's something in you Irish, it must be the sicerity (?) of your smile". Well, wasn't it the clever question after all as they were able to discover that Great-Granny Nonie (Nora) had come from the valley of Slievenamon (anglicised from Sliabh na mBan, mountain of the women) and hey presto! a darlin' Irish passport for Ziggy Wiesel under the name of Partick McFarlane or something like that.

  The Irish language didn't appeal to me because as I said to someone, if I have to go to the doctor I wouldn't have the names for any female parts of my anatomy or anything that could be construed as blasphemous or rude. The language died after the Famine when it was associated with death and desperation while English was the language of commerce; if you wanted to get ahead or go to America, you had to be able to speak and write English. To make matters worse, a priest called Fr. Dineen compiled an Irish dictionary as the source of all that was good and holy and every crude, vernacular word was eliminated so as not to shock us. A whole chapter of a French book "Pecheurs d'Islande" was excised from a text-book bought by our parents; when cheeky girls asked the nun why she'd done that to the books, she gave the hilarious answer that it depicted a very upsetting scene in which a "Chinaman" was murdered. As became known, after this lying for God, it described the wedding night of a Breton fisherman and his bride.

  Enough of this. I'm extraordinarily sane after coming through the Celtic version of the Taleban and I definitely learned to give plenty of guff, probably because of it. As for language, the Hiberno-English of Sean O'Casey's plays "Juno and the Paycock" and "The Plough and the Stars" is really wonderful, almost gone from us now. As Joxer says in "Juno and the Paycock", in a moment of earnest consideration "The whole world is in a state of chassis" but the chaos of those troubled times is minor in compared with the geopolitical scene today. Hasta la vista (at least it's not French).

  —maureenodonnell Read maureenodonnell's other letters
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