Gaeilge

I know now why nobody in this goddamned country can speak our native language.

I enrolled for an Irish class in Conradh na Gaeilge, and I started last night. They told me I could pick my own level: I was fairly good at Irish in school, and I like to jabber away from time to time, so I signed up for intermediate 1. Even so, I was nervous on my way in to town for the class, and more nervous still when I faced a room full of people who had taken courses here before.

I'm comfortable in classroom settings: I'm not a terribly capable or resourceful person, but I was a precocious 8-year-old, so put me in a classroom and I'll revert. Even so, Irish is different. I tried to explain this to an English friend last night - she told me I was over-thinking it, which of course I was. But there's a sense somehow - I have it at least - that Irish should be part of our DNA, and that those of us who don't speak it fluently are somehow responsible for that fact. Slow learners. Or ideological failures. Since this is our native tongue, it should be innate, and if it's not then..... put it this way, it's not like being bad at science.

Ok, so I'm nervous and uncomfortable about learning gaeilge, but also buzzed, because like I said I can jabber away, and I get a kick out of it. And here it is January and I'm doing something wholesome and self-improving, and that can only be a good thing.

I hated my teacher. After 2 hours, in a quiet, unobtrusive way (on a chair in a semi-circle of chairs arrayed with adults with pencils and notebooks), I managed to gather a sense of antipathy and hostility towards the man unmatched since I had my last ever row with Sr Louisa in 6th year. I am astonished how this man replicated so exactly the smug, self-satisfied, supercilious indifference to my ability or my learning experience that I experienced from every Irish teacher I ever had in my life.

He was such an complete, unmistakeable, irredeemable MUINTEOIR.

He plucked students' names off his attendance list - alphabetically, so that Aoife got put on the spot every time (poor Aoife), and thrust questions at them, then sneered at their answers and showed how he would have answered better.
He seized randomly on obscure grammar points and tackled them with lengthy photocopied pages with lists of words and no rationale.
He ignored questions, or dismissed them loftily - a sneery version of "that's just the way it is", only that he was meant to be explaining the rules.
He lectured us on why our Irish was dull, lifeless, limited: "why would you use a boring phrase like that when the language has a wealth of curious, inventive, beautiful phrases" (answer: because we don't speak Irish very well!); then he listed off all the words we could have used instead of the lousy one we'd offered - too fast, too virtuosic for anybody to write them down.

I learned nothing. I enjoyed listening to his fluent North Kerry Irish and his way with an anecdote - but I can hear that sort of thing on the radio and it won't cost me 200 bucks. I really enjoyed chattering away in Irish to other students - and maybe I should just do that with my gaeilgeoir colleagues.

The thing though was the way the man managed to instantly whip me back to 6th year, to the sense that no amount of Irish I speak will ever be right, that this language is an insurmountable challenge and that, given that I can never hope to conquer the tiseal ginideach, the mo coinnailach, the urdu, the seimhiu or any of their like, I should just crawl back under my sasanach rock where I belong.

I love Irish. I'm good at Irish. And at the end of 2 hours I wanted to run a mile from learning Irish. Course I'm not going to do that. But can anybody tell me what I should do?