Reality show aims to make the cúpla focal sexy

A NEW reality show has succeeded where the education system has failed — by getting tens of thousands of people to start using Irish on a daily basis.

An G-Team, a 10-part series which launches on TG4 this weekend, is described as one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken in the station’s history, with one of its makers claiming it will make Irish sexy.

More than 50,000 people have taken part in the filming of the show, which aims to get English-speaking communities to converse as Gaeilge on a daily basis.

An G-Team has been almost a year in the making, from its earliest stages when more than 100 small towns and villages responded to ads to win a €40,000 Foras Na Gaeilge-sponsored prize by becoming the top Irish-speaking community outside the Gaeltacht.

Dublin-based Adare Productions whittled the applicants down to 12 before pre-recording nine of the 10 hour-long shows before the live final, to be screened on March 18.

G-Day, or Gaelige-Day, marked the much anticipated 24 hours when the cameras watched everything — every town or village was rigged with CCTV and everyone was under scrutiny — as two communities went head to head each week to take a place in the semi-finals.

Brian Graham, owner of Adare Productions, said the most satisfying part of the mammoth production has been the lasting legacy on the communities which took part.

He said the series — which is tipped to net record audience for TG4 — has reinvigorated interest in the native tongue among entire parishes and has resulted in hundreds more people continuing to converse as Gaeilge on a daily basis.

He said: “People get spooked and put off when it’s pushed down their throats. We wanted to make it sexy — you could say the opposite of Peig Sayers.

“For G-Day, each community was asked to put on a festival, something which celebrated something distinctive about their community, be it a fishing or music festival or whatever. But even a couple of months before G-Day, we would check up on them and make sure they were using every effort to use Irish in the planning stages.

“The results have been amazing. What we’ve seen is fathers starting to read bedtime stories in Irish, the local butcher dealing with his customer as Gaeilge and even local lads chatting up the girls in Irish. Young people started leaving text and Facebook messages in Irish for the first time.

“And in one memorable case, which will be shown on TV in a few weeks, a man even trained his dog to obey his commands in Irish,” Mr Graham said.

* An G-Team begins at 8pm on Sunday, January 15, on TG4.