Alison Curtis: My daughter is teaching me the best life lessons... and a little bit of Gaeilge

I really worried that I wouldn't be able to help Joan at all with Irish at all when she started school

Alison Curtis 

Needless to say, when I moved to Ireland in 1999 as a Canadian citizen I had zero Irish. When I first stumbled across TG4 I was so confused as it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before.

Very quickly I realised Ireland is a bilingual nation and everyone I met had learned it in school. Much in the same way French was part of our school curriculum in Ontario from the age of 4 until the end of secondary school. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean I am fluent by any stretch of the imagination and most of us feel how it was taught didn’t entice us to speak it outside of school.