Language can be used for love or hate. The choice is ours

THERE I was last week in Court 5, the traffic offences boutique, clutching my receipt, ready to prove I’d sent €500 to a charity of the judge’s choice after my last visit to his emporium.

Before you think I mowed down an eighty year old grandmother of ten on a pedestrian crossing, I plead innocence. And absence. I was out of the country when my car did the bad thing it was filmed doing. I ended up in court, not for reckless endangerment of road-users, but for reckless endangerment of the bureaucracy. I forgot to respond to the garda notice, which included a blurry picture like a pre-natal scan of my car doing the bad thing.

Nonetheless, I had ended up – earlier in the year — in front of a judge, who told me to put €500 in the poor box for a nominated charity. I thought I should have been allowed to select my own charity, but I wasn’t going to give His Honour an argument. I just wanted to locate the poor box and see if it took credit cards and how would it handle an offender who didn’t know their own PIN number.

“You don’t pay here,” my solicitor hissed impatiently. “You send a cheque.”

This was a generational Groundhog moment. In her late teens, my mother had to go to court to stand up for one of her many brothers who had done a boy thing like feck a brick through a sitting room window. The arresting Guard was a boxing legend nicknamed “Lugs” Brannigan, presumably because his ears, after years of connecting with inward right hooks, were a major feature of the local landscape. The judge at the time told my mother to pay a fine of one and sixpence (google it, kids). My mother promptly tried to press the money into the oversized mitt of Lugs Brannigan, who got so high-mindedly insulted, she thought he was going to double the fine. He seems to have thought she was trying to bribe him. When it comes to the court poor box, as a family, we’re slow learners.

On the instructions of the solicitor, I sent the cheque and pitched up last week to prove I’d sent it.

The courtroom was awash in three kinds of people. The Accused, like me, looking humble and apologetic in a promiscuous way, because we didn’t know who was a threat and who wasn’t. The Legal Profession, varying between young women wearing black suits and an air of suppressed impatience and men in funny collars with tails attached (to the collars) and wigs. (Two of the latter greeted me with the warmth of old friends. I had no clue who they were, and it didn’t seem polite to ask them to take off the wigs so I could see what they really looked like.) And The Law, represented by crowds of gardaí, half of them sitting, looking into space, the other half standing up against the wall muttering jokes to each other. I’d never seen so many Guardians of the Peace together in one small space. A banked mass of blue short-sleeved shirts, they were.

The first hour was taken up by an officer of the court calling on named Gardaí, then listing off the names of the people they were accusing of traffic offences, then telling garda and accused to buzz off until March because they (or the court) were adjourned.

“Garda Gillespie,” she started.

Garda Gillespie put up her hand.

“Marie Murphy?” the officer went on. From the huddle of us accused, Marie emerged. “Michael Duffy?” A croak from within the crowd. “Mikosi Gillimpush?”

A laugh came from the back of the court. The officer and several of the lawyers looked up sharply: what’s funny about a foreign name? Then it emerged that the laugh had come from the owner of the name. He didn’t explain whether he was amused at its sudden out-of-kilter appearance in the sequence of otherwise Irish monikers, or the officer’s attempt at pronouncing it right, but he had no problem understanding that he’d been adjourned to March.

He was the exception, among the non-Irish Accused. In each case, the court official went to endless trouble to try to get the name right and make sure the Accused knew what was happening, but if you’re a Polish plumber, the word “adjourned” may not be a frequent part of your lexicon, and hearing it said more slowly and clearly doesn’t help that much.

When me and my solicitor fought our way out of the court, we found the corridor filled with private versions of the same incident: guards and lawyers trying to explain aspects of their case to foreign nationals half of whom were doing that bright-eyed terrified nod which essentially means “I don’t know what the hell you’re on about, but don’t hit me, OK?”

Now, no offence to O’Cuiv and the other lads who have ensured that Irish is a European official language and that every fart, right across Europe, must be translated into Irish for the delectation of an eventual possible Irish speaking reader, (never mind the cost, feel the principle) but I’d have thought it might be of more practical value, in an immigrant nation like Ireland, to spend the humongous translation costs on getting a few interpreters into our courts and giving basic training in the languages most frequently used by immigrants to people like Gardaí who deal with them all the time.

WE were all brought up to tut-tut at the linguistic imperialism of Immigration Officers on Ellis Island, who crudely re-named incoming foreigners because it was simpler for their paperwork, but the bureaucracy that is modern Ireland isn’t massively different. It certainly demonstrates damn all inclusivity in its communications reach-out to the immigrant workers without whose labours the country would keel over and clog.

In sharp contrast, regional newspapers are phenomenally inclusive to the new nationals, incorporating several pages of local coverage in Polish, Mandarin, Russian and other languages every week. Of course they’re doing it for commercial reasons, but – in the process – they’re demonstrating a wish to include, rather than exclude, using language as the enabler. Unlike Jephthah, the guy in the Bible who smote the Ephraimites back when smoting was the fun way to spend a weekend.

The Ephraimites who survived the smoting tried to get back home across the River Jordan. When one of them encountered a sentry from the other side and tried to let on that he wasn’t an Ephraimite, the sentry would order him to pronounce the word Shibboleth. And the poor devil would say “Sibboleth” because Ephraimites, even before they got smote, couldn’t pronounce the letter aitch.

“Then they took him,” the Bible says, “and slew him at the Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.”

It’s a long while back, but the lesson stays valid.

Language can be the tool of understanding and love. Or of discrimination and death.