Minority right at home with rugby coverage
Last Saturday, for instance, these pages carried a for-and-against debate in The Podium on the quality of RTÉ’s soccer analysis.
What’s caught our eye recently though, is a steady opposition to TG4’s coverage of rugby as Gaeilge.
You’re probably familiar with the tone and thrust of the argument: it’s not fair to those without Irish, it was a quaint experiment while it lasted, no one knows what’s being said, and why can’t everybody’s human rights stop being abused like this, etc. (Full disclosure: this columnist has appeared on Raidio na Gaeltachta on occasion and has also spoken Irish on television, just in case you think I’m biased in favour of Irish. I am, by the way).
With the above arguments in mind I watched TG4’s coverage of Munster-Edinburgh last Saturday evening, and was struck by the following.
1. If you spent the majority of your Irish lessons in school in a shallow coma you would still have learned enough of the language to understand what was going on in terms of the commentary during the game.
2. At most you probably needed a dozen terms particular to the game to maximise your comprehension. In other words, about the same strenuous and demanding vocabulary load you shoulder before going on a week’s holiday to Portugal, say.
3. Even if you couldn’t remember what buntaiste meant (advantage), TG4 scrolled a helpful ticker of the most essential terms across the bottom of the screen.
4. Being absolutely honest as a consumer of the product, would an English-language commentary make the game easier to follow? Yes, of course it would. Did the Irish-language commentary reduce my enjoyment of the game? No, it didn’t.
As a subject, the Irish language and its teaching and learning seem to accelerate foaming at the mouth in a lot of people, so I generally limit myself to one fairly obvious observation on that score (could those people who pontificate about how they weren’t challenged by how they were taught Irish give an honest account of the glorious hours they spent learning religion and mathematics?) If you’re dealing with people with an ingrained distrust or dislike of Irish then it’s an argument you’re unlikely to win. It’s odd that people who can be relatively sane on most matters get their political freak on when it comes to the amount of money pumped into a dead-language-good-for-nothing-only-Peig-Sayers-what’s-the-point?
Well, I think there is a point. I think it’s great that we have our own language and that it somehow survived, in however reduced form, hundreds of years of forced extinction. If you disagree, that’s fine. But if you think that rugby commentaries shouldn’t be in Irish, that’s not fine.
Because you’re wrong. Much is made, and rightly so, of the international reach of rugby. In that context Irish-language coverage of the game always strikes me as curiously appropriate, because just as Irish is a minority language, no matter where you go in the world the game of rugby often represents minority cultures.
Within the larger New Zealand context the Maori mastery of rugby is a valid expression of a group within the society.
In the south-west corner of France the Basque-driven sides of Biarritz and Bayonne — not to mention their near neighbours, the Catalans of Perpignan — embody regional values and hopes in the larger nation. The same parallel could be drawn between Wales and Scotland, while the Springboks were for many years the living, scrummaging incarnation of a minority, though the Afrikaaners were obviously a minority with a good deal more political and economic power than the majority of people in the country until the fall of apartheid. It’s odd, then, to hear people complain about an Irish language commentary making them feel excluded from the great rugby family, because the great rugby family’s assimilation of varied cultures is presumably one of the things those people admire about the sport in the first place.
Christopher Hitchens, a hero of long standing to this column, wrote an article recently stating that women couldn’t be funny, which was not one of his better efforts.
His odd opinion was skewered almost immediately by Tina Fey, creator of 30 Rock and undeniably funny and certifiably female: “I don’t like Chinese food,” said Fey, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe it exists.”
The people complaining about Irish language coverage of rugby could do worse than join the rest of us in Tina Fey’s camp. You guys mightn’t think people who like that Irish commentary exist, but we do. Just like Tina’s chicken in black bean sauce.
Note: Condolences today to a good friend of this column, Eddie O’Donnell of Tipperary and Mallow, whose wife Jennie died over the weekend. Go ndeana Dia trocaire uirthi.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
