New Ways to Kill Your Mother

kindness.

Despite Fianna Fail’s interest in restoring Gaelic as the national language, neither Rory nor Ita took the matter too seriously. When Rory bought a new suit of Donegal tweed he wondered if he might be mistaken ‘for one of those Gaelic League people who went around talking Irish out loud. I wasn’t talking Irish out loud but I was going around in this lovely suit, and enjoying myself.’ So too Ita and her friends, when they were ignored at an Irish traditional dance, ‘ended up dancing with each other and more or less jeering and sneering at the Irish zealots around us’.

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The father of the writer Hugo Hamilton also went around in the same streets and attended the same dances during the same years as Rory and Ita. But he did so, his son tells us in The Speckled People, ‘talking Irish out loud’ and becoming one of the ‘Irish zealots’ sneered at by Ita. Unlike the Doyles, who brought merely their deep affections and modest ambitions into the domestic sphere, Hamilton’s father in The Speckled People carried his politics into the house, burdened his family with his fierce views on Ireland, and made the home into a state under siege.

Hugo Hamilton, who was born in 1953, published his first three novels in the early 1990s. They were set in Germany, where his mother came from, and dealt with the large subjects of history and treachery and memory. The tone was stylish and restrained and ironic, the drama subtle. It was as though his own upbringing in the Dublin middle-class suburbs in the years when nothing happened did not seem in itself worthy of his attention, being too quiet and settled, too contented perhaps to be useful to a novelist interested in large historical and political subjects. His two subsequent novels, set in the Dublin underworld, served to confirm that his own comfortable background did not offer him material for fiction.

A happy childhood may make good citizens, but it is not a help for those of us facing a blank page. In 1996 Hamilton published a story, seven pages long, called ‘Nazi Christmas’ in a collection called Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow. It told a story that was so unbelievable that it could not have been made up. The three Dublin children in the story with a German mother are harassed by their neighbours. ‘It began with the man in the fish shop saying “Achtung!” and all the customers turning around to look at us.’ As the family in the story appear in public: ‘There was something about us that made people laugh, or whisper, or stop along the street quite openly to ask the most bizarre questions; something that stuck to us like an electronic tag.’ Soon the children are attacked and beaten up.

The story was written in that distant style that Hamilton used in his first three novels, where all judgement is withheld and the emotion, coiled and ready to spring, is buried in the coolness of the tone. His memoir The Speckled People, a best-seller in Ireland, has that same masterfully suppressed rage. It is as artful and deliberate in its textured use of voice as Roddy Doyle’s book is intentionally artless. The world here is viewed through the eyes of a child who does not judge, merely details and describes. But each detail and each description convey enormous and carefully measured levels of concealed emotion and blocked-out pain.

Language itself has been the ground of the child’s suffering, not only the language of his mother, which causes the events of ‘Nazi Christmas’ to be retold here as memoir, but the English language itself, which the father has decided his children should not speak or listen to, even though it is the only language spoken in their Dublin suburb. The father wishes his children to speak and hear Irish, and in order to fulfil these wishes he will need to keep them away from the outside world, from radio and television and popular music and playmates. He will also need to mould them according to the ideology that he has decided to bring home, unsoftened by the atmosphere all around him, by the city of Dublin in all its diversity, but also by the spirit of compromise that took over from the revolutionary spirit in Ireland as soon as the British departed.

The debate between Hamilton and his father is the same debate as occurs between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’. When Miss Ivors encourages Gabriel to go to the west of Ireland on his holidays, Gabriel tells her that he wishes to go to the European continent instead, ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change’. When she challenges him with ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with — Irish?’ he replies, ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ Finally, she accuses him of being a ‘West Briton’.

In his memoir, Hamilton adopts the style of Stephen Dedalus in the early pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the world is described through the eyes of a child: ‘When you’re small you’re like a piece of white paper with nothing written on it,’ he writes. ‘My father writes down his name in Irish and my mother writes down her name in German and there’s a blank space left over for all the people outside who speak English… My father says your language is your home and your country is your language and your language is your flag.’

The Hamiltons, an island of non-English speakers in a West British city, imported Aine, a servant from the west of Ireland, whose tasks included the speaking of Irish, which is her first language, to the children. ‘What good is that to them?’ Aine asked when Hamilton’s mother insisted that she speak only Irish to them. That is the question that haunts any account of the slow decline in the use of the Irish language over the past two centuries. ‘Irish doesn’t sell the cow,’ is the reason advanced why the language was abandoned in favour of English by family after family until it was spoken as a first language only by a small number of people along the west coast of Ireland.

‘By the late 1970s,’ the historian J. J. Lee writes in Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society, ‘the population of the real Gaeltacht… was calculated to be only 32,000, compared with more than ten times that number at the foundation of the state.’ The official Gaeltacht was, during all these years, much larger than the real one. In the late 1980s, when a friend of mine made a journey through the parts of Ireland officially designated Irish-speaking, he found that the most mountainous regions of County Kerry, completely uninhabited, were marked as Irish-speaking by the government. He supposed that the rain came down in Irish and the wind blew in that language, and when snow began to descend it changed its name to sneachta as it hit the ground. But there was no one listening.

No historian of the language’s decline has managed to explain why those who wished to sell cows did not become bilingual, why so many abandoned the language completely. The economic argument, Joe Lee has written, would

strictly speaking… explain the acquisition of English, but not the loss of Irish, unless it be assumed that Irish brains were too small to accommodate two languages, or that the Irish were simply too lazy, or too utilitarian, to be bothered with the less materially useful one… The burden of the small language did not suffice to prevent Sweden, or Norway, or the Netherlands, or Flanders, from exporting successfully to Britain, from growing more rapidly than Britain since the late nineteenth century, and from overtaking British living standards in the course of the twentieth century.

Lee suggests that one reason why Ireland adopted English with such zeal had to do with the sheer intensity of emigration to both Britain and the United States from the time of the Great Famine. Parents needed to do something radical to prepare their children for separation. It is also possible that the levels and grades of poverty were so enormously varied and so minutely structured — and knowledge of Irish was associated with poverty — that abandoning the language was a way of moving upwards, however strangely and imperceptibly.

In the years after independence, while Irish remained associated with poverty in the west, in the rest of the country it became associated with school, with long hours of a grammar badly taught and only half-understood by some of the teachers, with politicians beginning and ending their dull speeches with a few words of the language. ‘The children,’ Joe Lee writes, ‘were given no incentive to master Irish as a living language, only as a dead one. The charade of Irish language tests for public employment, when everyone knew the language would hardly ever be used again… inevitably left its mark.’ Irish, for those who knew it and loved it, was, in the words of Arland Ussher, ‘the great language of conversation, of quips, hyperboles, cajoleries, lamentations, blessings, cursings, endearments, tirades. Its unsuspected rhythm had even given an intimate and personal quality to the great Irish writers of English. It was the winged word in its flight that was beautiful. Stuffed and mounted on the page of a