Echo Opinion: A father’s language revival forges bond with young son

I realize that’s not a very politically correct thing to say, but it’s the truth. Maybe it’s the 14 years’ compulsory learning of it that puts people off. All I know is that it came in handy only once over the next decade of my life.
That was during a summer working as a waiter in an up-market country club in Greenwich, Conn. I and a couple of fellow Corkonians found that conversing in our native tongue was the best way to bitch about the tyrannical chef or any annoying customers who were within earshot. I know from experience that this is still a fond tactic of Irish students abroad.
My relationship with Irish remained the same for years thereafter. I never bothered it and, once finished with school, it never bothered me. The only time I ever really watched Teilifis na Gaeilge (the TV channel established ostensibly to promote it) was to catch re-runs of “Bracken,” the classic 1980s drama featuring a young Gabriel Byrne and a typically mischievous Niall Toibin. Very occasionally I would sample a few minutes of an Irish language soap opera, “Ros na Run,” to marvel at how little of the basic vocabulary I had actually remembered from my studies.
Of course, all that changed the moment I moved to the U.S. I had been warned before I left that emigrating makes you assert your Irishness in strange ways — and so it proved. Over the last 12 months, I’ve found myself teaching my 4-year-old son, Abe, basic Irish phrases. The poor boy has barely mastered English and now he has to contend with a father trying to get him to say “Dia Dhuit” and “Conas ta tu?” Needless to say, his mother isn’t amused when she’s out with him in a store and he tells her he needs to use the bathroom by announcing with extreme loudness, “Leithreas.”
Things have reached such a sorry pass that whenever the poor child hears me using any English word he hasn’t come across before, he now asks, “Is that the Irish word for it?” It’s my own fault. I have, inevitably, created a monster. This much was hammered home a few months back during our excursion to buy the family Christmas tree when Abe was serenading us the whole way home with his favorite festive tune.
As he was belting out “Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree, how lovely are your branches.” He eventually grew bored with his own singing — the poor lad inherited his father’s lack of talent in that department — and made a noble call for me to recite the same song in Irish.
And so it was, driving along Rte. 25A on the North Shore of Long Island, I found myself desperately trying to think of the Irish word for tree. Yes, 14 years studying the language and when my son puts me on the spot, I can’t even remember the word for tree. I could, like thousands before me, blame the way the language is taught for my own deficiency, but that’s hardly fair. I was embarrassed and after the first 15 seconds became the victim of mockery by my American wife. Her most salient and valid point being that I should know the language myself before I start imposing it on my son and heir.
A decade and a half after I brazenly flung that translating dictionary into some bin on the way home from school, I now find myself trawling the Internet, surfing the myriad excellent sites that assist people who want to learn Irish. There are so many of these facilities indeed that by the time Abe graduates from high school, I may well be able to hold a conversation in my native tongue again. That’s if my wife hasn’t thrown me out of the house already for forcing this upon the poor child. I now know why somebody once said education is wasted on the young. I’ve also remembered that crann is the Irish word for tree.