We're back! Well, sort of. In March 2024 Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar were reunited for a live Seachtain na Gaeilge event in Clondalkin Library (a home advantage for Peadar!)  On the occasion of the anniversary of Brendan Behan's death, the gang discussed the controversy surrounding the English translation of his Irish language play An Giall: did Behan approve of this version, and the significant differences in the text?  This leads to a discussion of translating Hiberno English and Irish locals contexts in general. Is a Trinity Marxist in a Rooney novel comparable to the understanding of a Marxist that Chinese readers would approach her work with? How about the use of swearing in Roddy Doyle - do Germans swear the same way?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With thanks to the Bram Stoker Festival, the Motherfoclóir Podcast was resurrected for one afternoon in October 2022 to discuss the translation of Dracula into Irish by Seán Ó Cuirreáin. In this recording of last year's live show Darach is joined by Peadar and Siún as they consider the different motives of the politicians who commissioned the translation and the writer asked to carry out the work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Motherfocloir is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network and there are lots of other shows on the network we think you might like. Words To That Effect is a show that tells stories of the fiction behind popular culture and if you're a fan of Motherfocloir we think there's a very good chance you'll like this show too. Here's a full episode, all about the history of dragons in fiction and popular culture. Enjoy! For more, and all the eps of Words To That Effect, go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thank you for your support over the last four years.  Thank you for inviting us into your headphones and into your head. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.  Thank you to Brian and Kirsten for making each episode look and sound amazing. Thank you to Éimear, Clodagh, Caitlín, Siún and Ola, and all the members of the extended Motherfoclóir family.  Thank you to our guests for teaching us so much. Much love to anyone who sent us messages of encouragement.  Go raibh míle maith agaibh.  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: Darach - @theirishfor Gearóidín - @GaRoDean Peadar - @TheKavOfficial Kirsten - @KirstenShielART --- Join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/jZSJZKN2 --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you follow Darach's Word of the Week project with the Irish Arts Center in New York, you'll have seen the artwork of Amy Louise O'Callaghan - @amylouioc on Twitter, Instagram and Etsy - who reimagines Irish mythology in the style of Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. More recently she has reimagined the iconography of tarot cards using well-known tales and characters from Irish mythology. She chats to Darach about her influences, her work process, her interest in Japan and her favourite Irish and Japanese words. https://irishartscenter.org/event/irish-word-of-the-week-chapter-3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for the final episode of Motherfoclóir, live on Zoom tonight: https://www.patreon.com/posts/55377967 --- Every artistic/visual representation of Cúchulainn presents him as a hulking, ultra-masculine figure. But is this interpretation justified by the text? In the Táin, Cúchulainn is frequently described as a small lad, girly in some ways, a person who has to change his appearance to present as a "normal man" but does not wear this disguise when he does not have to.  In today's episode of Motherfoclóir, Darach talks to Masters student Finn Longman about queer readings of the Táin. Once we suspend assumptions about binary genders when considering a work of literature that predates this construction, we are free to engage with the deeper meanings of the Táin. Why is the "pillow talk*chapter only in one version of the Táin? What is the significance of Cúchulainn's relationships with Ferdiad and Laeg? And why does this Irish legend talk about bodies and feelings so much?  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The re-release of Professor Terence Dolan's Dictionary of Hiberno-English didn't happen by accident, but was nudged into existence by a writer who also happens to be one of the most seminal and relevant voices in Irish podcasting. And he's our guest this week!  Before we folded the podcast forever, we are delighted to bring you this conversation between Darach and Blindboy Boatclub, one half of the Rubber bandits and author of two collections of short stories. Blindboy talks to Darach about the Dictionary of Hiberno-English, the idea of resistance in language through dialect and satire, the origin of his love of Flann O'Brien and the future of Irish podcasting.  Check out his books and his podcast! --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In terms of literary prestige, romance novels don't get no respect, ranking lower than sports biographies and screenplay novelisations on the scale of respectability - according to people who don't read them, anyway. But what about people who do?  Since Covid, sales of romance novels have shot through the roof, largely on account of the #BookTok hashtag on Tiktok. And one of #BookTok's stars joins us on today's episode. You might remember Róisín McNally from episode #122 - she's back to tell Darach all about romance novels, how Ireland and Irishness are represented in the genre and even the bits where Gaeilge turns up.  We also have a very special appearance from Peadar and a chat with Gearóidín about Bridgerton. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Four years ago we started this podcast off with a discussion of the letter V. There’s been much water under the bridge since then and while we always meant to give the other seven “forbidden” letters their own episode, there was always something a bit more urgent to attend to. Like translating smutty novels and so forth.  But on today’s episode, Dr McEvoy and Mayor Pete assist Darach in a whistle stop tour of the letters J, K, Q, W, X, Y and Z. Where do they come from and what do they want? Can they ever truly belong? Are they the Casa Amor new arrivals in the Love Island villa that is the Irish language, fighting for inclusion by pushing an incumbent letter out of the way? Does it even matter? What happens if you need to put a séimhiú on karma? Are Darach and Peadar in a musical? All this and more in today’s visit to the wild and wonderful world of Motherfoclóir. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everybody is talking about Twitter sensation Séamas Ó Reilly and his hilarious yet moving memoir "Did You Hear Mammy Died?" And rightly so - it's a sensational telling of a remarkable story of a boy with ten siblings losing his mother far too young and being reared by one of the most memorable Irish Dads in the history of memoir. Can a movie be far behind?  Séamas didn't just appear out of nowhere, of course, and between his Rush Hour Crush skits, his infamous anti-capitalist satirical prank involving a chocolate spread and a professional encounter with a beloved ex-president, he is arguably the Cúchulainn of Irish Twitter.  In this week's episode, Séamas chats to Peadar about his book, his journey to becoming a writer… and his favourite Irish word.  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we say that a child is full of divilment, are we saying that they are possessed by Satan? No, we are not.  In today's episode, Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar consider the concept of the devil in the Irish language. Why does diabhal scéal (devil a story) mean no story? What's the deal with the devil being buried in Killarney? Were politicians aware of the term Taoiseach An Bháis (Lord of Death) when the term Taoiseach was chosen to mean Irish Prime Minister? And with all these terms, how much weight should we give to "fear dubh", which entered The Discourse this July?  We also talk about Protestants and the Zoo, for some reason.  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, it couldn't last forever; Motherfoclóir will be ending forever before this autumn. Before we go on our separate ways, we'd like to bring you some topics and guests that we always meant to, but put on the long finger because we wanted "do more prep" or "wait until X was available" or some other excuse. Anyway, there's no time to procrastinate anymore… First up, our Gearóidín tells Darach all about her PhD thesis in advance of a viva. What's a viva? What's a thesis? We will explain. Gearóidín explains how certain concepts recur in how minority language users and people with disabilities interact with the legal system in general and policing in particular.  Are there digressions? Yes, one or two.  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darach chats to Katy and Dominic, the hosts of popular podcast "The Europeans". To hear the full episode and much more visit  https://www.patreon.com/darach The Europeans podcast can be found at https://europeanspodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darach is joined by Mira Adama (@LostWolfling), along with a cast of other contributors, to discuss a cult classic of Irish cinema. Watch Fatal Deviation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPne3Wh0lqk This is our last episode of the season! You can join us on Patreon for bonus content throughout the break.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recently, Yiddish became the fortieth language to join Duolingo, an achievement that followed hot on the heels of Harry Potter being translated into Yiddish. And would you believe that a brother and sister were responsible for these separate accomplishments? Well, when we found out about it we were struck by how many of the same kinds of conflicts and considerations that faced Irish came up again in thre context of Yiddish. So we had to find out more. On today’s episode, Darach chats with siblings Meena and Arun Vishwaneth about their family’s relationship with Yiddish. They tell him how the phenomenon of Yiddish loanwords in slang has a downside when promoting the language, about the sense of post-assimilation loss that defines the relationship some American Jews have with the language. Meena (who worked on Duolingo) talks about dialects and the struggle to pick a flag to represent Yiddish on the app. Arun (who translated Harry Potter) tells of the process involved in translating house names, Quidditch itself and picking a dialect for Hagrid - as well as the matter of a major plot point hinging on an acronym. You can find the Yiddish duolingo module on the app now. You can follow Arun on Twitter at @a_a_vishwaneth --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Watch this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsORJSesv48 In 2017, Irish Sign Language (ISL) was officially given legal recognition in Ireland. Of course, it has a long history prior to this and in today's episode, Darach and Gearóidín meet Caroline McGrotty (@CarolineMcTweet), an ISL translator and presenter, to find out more.  Where did ISL come from? Is it different in Northern Ireland? What is Caroline's favourite ISL word? Find out all this and more.  ISL interpretation in this episode is provided by Catherine White. This production was made possible by the show's generous supporters on Patreon.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the Wee Donkey. Everyone is hooked on “Line of Duty” at the moment, the latest reinvention of the cop show genre - and, fittingly, a reinvention of the “Irish cop” trope which is even older than television. But why did this format - a legacy from the era of segregation and McCarthyism - survive when westerns, Elvis movies, and musicals either die off or get resurrected beyond recognition? More than any other part of the state, policing is understood in the context of police shows. Its shortcomings are explained in the context of the internal conflicts of relatable protagonists while teachers and politicians continue to be antagonists, doctors and lawyers are allowed save the world from the private sector, and nurse/librarian protagonists in mainstream drama are outnumbered by their porno equivalents. The cop show is not going anywhere, absorbing bits of other formats in its path, and the Irish cop is a part of it. In today’s episode, Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar discuss the evolution of the cop show and the Irish cop trope and consider how Hastings has brought significant chunks of Hiberno-English to a large audience. And as Gearóidín admits to a strange crush, Darach takes a surprising perspective on one of the 20th century’s most notorious criminals.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When he’s not beavering away at this very podcast, Darach does a bit of work with the Irish Arts Center in New York as part of their word of the week project. This allows him to collaborate with some exciting and talented artists, such as today’s guest Louise Ní Chuilinn (as known as Selkies). Louise, an Irish speaker living in Brussels, tells Darach and Peadar about that city’s artistic scene, such as the bandes dessinées which French learners in Ireland love so well. She talks about her collaboration with our own Gearóidín on the Peig masks, the mythological background to her illustrations for Darach’s words of the week, considers the culture of bilingualism in her new home and explains what a gickna is. The Irish Arts Center Word of the Week is here: https://irishartscenter.org/event/irish-word-of-the-week  Gearóidín’s masks are here: https://www.etsy.com/ie/shop/Fualainn  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a song in the Mincéir tradition (made famous among settled audiences by Luke Kelly) called the 40 Foot Trailer which ends with the line “There's a bylaw to say you maun be on your way And another to say ye can't wander” The implication is clear: the Traveller Community are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Despite the visibility of the Travelling Community in Irish life, in political pamphlets and bad-faith documentaries, the fact remains that the wider community in Ireland remains unfamiliar with the detail and context behind many Mincéir traditions and the community’s contribution to preserving folklore. In this week’s episode, Darach and Gearóidín are thrilled to be joined by Oein De Bhairduin, a writer and academic who celebrates and shares his Traveller heritage. His book, “Why The Moon Travels”, is a beautiful collection of Mincéir folklore and deserving of a wider audience. Oein tells Darach and Gearóidín about the right way to tell a story, the significance behind funeral traditions, the importance of female financial independence and invites us to consider that the wandering protagonists of Irish mythology might not be settled folk at all. Do yourself a favour and buy a copy of his book: https://skeinpress.com/product/why-the-moon-travels-by-oein-debhairduin-copy/  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the finest new accounts to join Twitter during the pandemic has been @EnyaComments, a deceptively simple twitter handle that shares comments written under Enya videos on the YouTube.These range from the ridiculous to the sublime. But what is it about Enya that draws such a wide fanbase from around the world? Why do her fans feel such a close connection and associate her music with healing, grieving, solitude or mysticism? Why is she so big in Syria? And as for Enya Economics, what can we learn from the difference between how we see her compared to other Irish superstars, the ones with big opinions on every topic? This week Darach and Peadar are joined by Aileanóra from @EnyaComments who has all the answers. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every few weeks, a story goes viral in Ireland: a letter, addressed to someone like "that lady with the yellow baseball cap who owns a cat the size of a dog and a dog the size of a cat" is posted and finds its intended recipient. It's a tribute to the affection and esteem with which Irish people regard their postal service. It hints at one of a number of reasons why Ireland resisted postcodes for so long - because our postal workers had such deep local knowledge that they didn't need them.  It's a family affair this week on Motherfoclóir as we welcome Gearóidín's Dad, Colm McEvoy, to the show. Colm tells us about how postal workers interpret ambiguous addresses, deal with defensive dogs and all the other little tricks that are known to the people who get your post to you. There's also chat about Irish language envelopes, bilingual addresses, rural Post offices and much more. And this week's favourite Irish word is a cracker!  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are things holy because we need them or do we need them because they're holy? This is something that we consider on this week's episode when holy wells are discussed. Are the legends and myths about holy wells just a roundabout way of explaining what their purpose is? Why are there so many in Limerick? What does Ryan Tubridy's surname mean?  We also discuss the theory that zombie movies are more popular under Republican presidents and vampire movies are more popular under the Democrats.  Check out Siúcra by Roxanna Nic Liam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp8MvBgb10k --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2015, the Paris Review ran an article on Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken” and concluded that it is - by some distance - the best known and most widely referenced poem of the twentieth century. Nothing else comes close. And yet, it is as misunderstood as it is famous. Many poems, or extracts from poems, are misread outside their original context - like Frost’s other line, “good fences make good neighbours” and Beckett’s “Fail Again, Fail Better”.  And what of Irish poetry - are the best known Irish poems well understood? What is the most searched for Irish poem anyway? In this week’s episode, Darach and Peadar consider the pitfalls that face such research but march in regardless. They also reflect on the most popular song lyrics in Irish and what those words say about us. Listener mail this week from Belgium and Tipperary!  For more comments see @EnyaComments on twitter. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whether it's Flann O'Brien, the Book of Kells, Dindsenchas or An tOileánach, the Irish literary and literary historical traditions respect the idea of the digression - the idea that knowledge information, truth itself does not respect the artificial categories that limited human minds try to trap them in.  Just as crabs think that eels are flying because they don't understand the concept of water, humans do not always immediately understand the profound links between topics. But to set information free, such as in the art of conversation (which is the stock cube of Irish literature), you allow it to scurry where it wants to go. Not your academic subject categorises, but everywhere.  Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín started to talk about baile/bally- placenames in this week's episode but that journey took many turns, including trains and eels.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the end of February, the CSO released the 2020 baby name statistics and after a long run, Emily is no longer the top girl name in Ireland. How should we interpret this? What does it mean for existing Emilys, especially the ones who rejoiced in the name before it became so popular in the noughties? Grace is the new top name, but how much of that is a global anglophone phenomenon and how much it is linked to its Irish associations - Grace Gifford and the song that bears her name, for example?  And what about Fiadh, the breakthrough Irish language name of the last decade - what kicked that off?  In this week's episode, Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar discuss the latest baby name stats and try to get to the bottom of it all. We hear from an Emily (@EmilyAM) who describes the process of watching one's name go from unique to ubiquitous. We hear from Sophie and Jen of the Mother of Pod podcast about the considerations when picking names.  And we hear about Peadar's dirty secret.  Check out Sophie White's new book "Corpsed" published by Tramp Press. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greetings agus Salutations, I am Motherfoclóir, prince of words, Irish, Irish words and words from Ireland. I have a very special request to make of you. If you listen to this podchraoladh about spam as Gaeilge, I will send twenty millionty squillion US Dollars in gold bullion into your earphones. Please send me your bank details by WhatsApp voice note to +353 89 478 4713 and tell me I'm pretty. Seriously, though. Don't answer spam emails. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Thin Lizzy's tune Emerald, Phil Lynott tells a tale of marching men who wish to overthrow overlords, fighting a fight they believe to be right. But they bring horrible destruction in their pursuit of this goal - children never playing again, for example - as they seek The Emerald, a talisman not unlike Tolkien's ring.  Lynott never explains what the Emerald is nor does he need to. The Emerald is intimately associated with Ireland, the Emerald Isle. But where did this name come from? Did Ireland have it first?  In this week's episode, Darach and Peadar discuss the history of this term: its appearance in "When Erin First Rose" by physicist-doctor-poet-rebel William Drennan, the context in which this ballad was written and the intentional references in it to the well-known lyrics of "Rule Britannia". They consider other emerald isles, including Lesbos in Greece and Geziret El Zabargad in Egypt. They wonder why the Irish word for an emerald sounds a bit like the ancient Greek one. And other precious commodites of note, such as salt and silver, get a mention.  As for the Vikings, their shameless travel agents get a mention.  FUALAINN, Gearóidín's mask project is on Etsy:  https://www.etsy.com/ie/shop/fualainn  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've spoken about fairy forts before. However, in the context of our recent discussion of placenames and bearing in mind the widespread incidences of Ráth and Lios in towns across Ireland, we decided to bring an expert in.  Sinéad Mercier, co-author of "The Men Who Eat Ringforts", drops in to tell Darach and Peadar all about these structures which link Ireland to its past. Is the word "fort" unnecessarily militaristic? If the deference for "fairies" has contributed positively to the preservation of archaeological and ecological phenomena, then why can't we just say "because fairies" in a planning permission objection?  Sinéad tells the lads about Ireland's record for preserving its built heritage and archaeological inheritance to date… and her favourite Irish words.  Purchase Sinéad's book here: https://askeatonarts.com/publications/men-who-eat-ringforts --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Could the word slíbhín - a sly, sneaky so-and-so - possibly come from the word sliabh, meaning a mountain? Are mountain folk really that cunning, or do the people from counties with many a sliabh (counties where more Irish was historically spoken) just happen to have more fire in the belly when they move to the lowlands in search of work?  In the third of our series on the recurring Irish words in placenames, Darach and Peadar discuss sliabh and cnoc (mountain and hill). What’s the difference between a mountain and a hill? We’ll tell you. Is Sliabh Ailp so named because it looks like it belongs in the Alps? If McGillycuddy reeks, why doesn’t he take a shower? Why does the Irish for Sugarloaf not have the word siúcra in it? And what’s the deal with Ben Bulben? All will be answered! Music in this episode from  Súil Amháin and Bantum, available at: https://suilamhain.bandcamp.com/track/viva-liobarnach --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When is an island an Inis and when is it an Oileán? In the second of our look at recurring words in Irish placenames, Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar consider islands. Why do some inland locations have island-based names? Why are there three places in Ireland called Lady's Island, each with a different name in Irish?  What about the island that Charles J Haughey bought in the Gaeltacht - does anyone know how that got its name?  For some reason, University Challenge enters the discussion.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A lot of placenames in Ireland begin with Kil-. Sometimes this is a reference to a church, sometimes it refers to a woodland. Sometimes both. What's going on? Did the early Christians steal holy sites from the pagan druids or something?  In the first of a set of episodes, Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar look at some of the recurring features in Irish placenames. This week it's Cill and Coill.  There's also some discussion of the Luas Red Line, the airport bus, the Germans and fax machines. It's all quite relevant.  The views expressed by Gearóidín McEvoy on this episode are not the views of Headstuff, its advertisers or clients.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast?  Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Or do it online at https://remotely.fm/?coddle  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021 has gotten off to a fairly spicy start and yet again the spotlight has been shone on online communities in light of events in America But what makes one community a supportive safe space but another a radicalising echo chamber?  Unrelated, perhaps, are a number of recent viral tweets where learners have told of disappointing experiences using Irish on social media. Is it fair to compare Irish speakers on social media to a noxious fanbase? Are Irish speakers on social media even a homogeneous group, coming from the same place and wanting the same things?  In today's episode, Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar try to get to the bottom of this thorny question. They don't, so expect more episodes on aspects of this topic soon. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have see promos for Nicholas Cage's new show on Netflix all about swear words. Well, we had the idea first. While Darach was slaving over Christmas dinner, Peadar and Gearóidín sat down with Dr. Megan Figueroa from the Vocal Fries Podcast to discuss the history, politics and even the gendered nature of dirty words. Be warned this podcast contains wall-to-wall f*ks, b*ds, b**ks and more. Not for the fainthearted. Listen to Gearóidín's appearance on The Vocal Fries here: https://anchor.fm/the-vocal-fries/episodes/Irish-isnt-Just-Decorative-e9t9jk --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we take a break for Christmas and New Year, please enjoy this bonus clip from our recent Patreon discussion on all things Irish whiskey. For the full video and more visit https://www.patreon.com/darach Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Not much if you've been in lockdown, lad! Go easy on yourself and remember that getting this far has been an achievement in itself.  This week Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín reflect on the year that was - highlights and lowlights online and offline. Will Wild Mountain Thyme be mentioned? Will there be speculation about the true identity of the TG4 intern? Will there be wild tangents when Darach tries to talk about Christmas? Only one way to find out, a chara - tune in!  This episode features a musical contribution from Aoife Scott - Oíche Chiúin (Silent Night). Check out Aoife on Bandcamp:  https://aoifescott.bandcamp.com/album/homebird  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As December staggers towards the manhole of time and we all wait for it to fall in, a lot of linguistically minded people around the world consider what the word of the year is. All the big dictionaries do. What word best describes these past twelve months? What words have people been using most frequently? And what new words have been added in this time?  At Motherfoclóir we're not so different and in today's episode Peadar and Darach discuss 2020's foclóir nua and research by Kevin Scannell on word searches in the Irish language online. The lads look at words added to the tearma.ie database and reflect on what workers in that role have to consider when presenting a new word. They have their own suggestions too!  And as pop-culture in other languages grows in influence in the Anglo sphere and beyond we speculate wildly about the future of English.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Multinational companies like to appear somewhat local in each of the countries they are present in. This can take many forms, especially in the advertising that the business uses to communicate with the wider community. What do these ads say about the parties in that relationship?  The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his influential research, wrote about how identity is deliberately performed, especially when it comes to language. What are the implications of this for Irish speakers and companies that want to indicate to the outside world what they are?  In today's episode Darach and Gearóidín talk about how people present themselves - pass, if you will - as Irish and how much performance is involved.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bookshops and their proprietors thrive on browsers, on  customers asking for recommendations,on  book launches and on all the little interactions which the pandemic has robbed us of.  So what's it like to run a bookshop in a pandemic?  As well as being a Galway institution for eighty years, Kenny's Bookshop is a family business for three generations and counting. Tomás Kenny is part of that third generation.  He tells Darach about the book business - battles with censors, noticing when a book has been mentioned on TV and his shop's commit to Irish language publishing.  You can find Kenny's bookshop online at www.kennys.ie --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for chess is ficheall (wood wisdom).  A gambit is fiontar….  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, or so they say. But what do we learn when we learn history? How do we interpret the change in a country like Ireland between two given dates and what to we attribute that change to?  One of the prevailing theories is that the history of the world is ultimately the biographies of great individuals; their remarkable ingredients of character allowed them to become authors of the world's life story. The Reformation hinged on Martin Luther's depth of personality, and the vision unique to Churchill was the decisive factor in an Allied victory in WWII.  This theory - which is robustly contested - informs the historical dramas which critically shape public understandings of historical events. Such dramas have become increasingly popular in the 21st century as more and more TV shows and films have monarchs and presidents as protagonists. Are these contributions welcome? Isn't there a big difference between learning about diplomatic immunity from Lethal Weapon II and learning modern British history from The Crown?  In today's episode, Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín consider these themes with particular reference to Irish history and the speculation on what might have been if certain figures had not been taken from us so young.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She's the woman of the moment: after a sequence of acclaimed and award-winning poetry collections in both Irish and English, Clare poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa has delivered a sensational non-fiction book, "A Ghost In The Throat", nominated in two categories in the Irish Book Awards.  In today's episode, Doireann joins Darach and Peadar to talk about her career. She chats about her first poems and the writers who inspire her, including her collaboration with Choctaw poet LeAnne Howe. She tells of the journey to publication and the delicate business of translation. And she talks about her love of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire which led to the book which has readers enthralled. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The romantic comedy, as we understand it, is a Hollywood form as specifically American as the Western, especially in how it shapes and exports America’s image of itself.  Although romantic comedies were the favoured form of some of Hollywood’s most acclaimed writer-directors (like Frank Capra and Billy Wilder) in the mid 20th century, the genre has often been seen as lower prestige than those genres marketed at men. This was especially true in the first two decades of the 21st century when romantic comedies were at their commercial peak and Ireland had a disproportionately high amount of leading men at Hollywood’s top table. In today’s episode, we consider how Ireland and Irishness feature in this most American of storytelling traditions. How is Ireland treated as a setting in love stories, and how much has that changed since The Quiet Man? What do Irish characters in stories set elsewhere represent? Are they protagonists, or a “manic pixie dream people”? And what of our own romantic comedies - are our film stars too serious to make them? Darach and Peadar are joined in this episode by Caroline Siede (@CarolineSiede), who writes the “When Romance Met Comedy”series for the AV Club and is a world authority on the genre. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Louise O’Neill, Clonakilty’s literary superstar, has never been content to limit her phenomenal writing skills to a single genre. Her latest work, “After The Silence”, sees her apply her gift for world-building, Swiss-watch plot intricacy and clear-eyed empathy to the crime genre. Agatha Christie set her murder mysteries in spaces where a range of characters could neither get in or out, and O’Neill has chosen an especially fascinating stage for her tale: a Gaeltacht island off the coast of West Cork. In today’s episode, Louise tells Darach and Gearóidín about writing this novel - why she chose a Gaeltacht island and the research she did in preparation for this. She talks about public interest in real life murder trials and the effect they can have on an area. And she talks about getting both the Irish language and Hiberno-English included in a book marketed at an international audience and how she fought her corner. She has a favourite Irish word too! --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s that time of the year again when Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar turn out the lights, hold torches under their chins and tell spooky stories from around Ireland.  Horror is, of course, often more about what you don’t see than what you do. What memories or untold dreads stir in your subconscious, woken by our tales of black rabbits, the League of Ireland, bishops in their libraries, supermarkets in Laois and mad monks? Detail on Irish fireworks laws are here: https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/justice/criminal_law/criminal_offences/the_law_on_fireworks.html Haunted in Laois are on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/HauntedLaois/  And Duchas can be found at: https://www.duchas.ie/en or https://www.duchas.ie/ga  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you’re destined for. But don’t hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. Ithaca, C.P. Cavafy In Kerry, the sun sets over the ocean. As the county comes to terms with the possible loss of its most famous aquatic son, Darach and Peadar talk about Kerry and its relationship with Fungie the dolphin. Isn’t it apt that this playful creature, both solitary and outgoing in particular ways, fit right in down in Coirce Duibhne, a place of stunning natural beauty both isolated and blossoming with storytellers and musicians? In this episode Darach recounts his memories of Kerry, especially Dingle and Kenmare. The lads speculate on the origin of Kerryman jokes and, as Halloween is approaching, they take a look at the Kerryman newspaper’s legendary ghost stories for kids by kids seasonal competition, even reading some out. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peig Sayers (1873 - 1958) is one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth century Ireland. Her journey to publication is a story of beating the odds. An outsider from the Dublin literary scene by geography, language, gender, education and even literacy (she could write in English but not Irish), she gives a glimpse at the multitude of stories that never got told in a rapidly changing Ireland. It is a story of hardship and personal tragedy, but tells of an extraordinary community and their stories in elegant, blossoming prose. This isn’t how Peig is typically thought of or referred to in Ireland, however, and for the past thirty or more years she has become a mascot of sorts for critics of the Irish education system, and of policies to protect, support and advance the Irish language or Gaeltacht areas. Why is this so?  In today’s episode, Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín look at Peig’s life and legacy. They listen to a contemporary account of her book being removed as a compulsory text for the Leaving Cert from 1995 onwards - a quarter of a century ago - and wonder why this scar hasn’t healed for certain commentators. They consider the process of the book’s dictation and how this may have influenced the final product. And they ask if criticism of this woman and her book (which passes the Bechdel test) can sometimes have an undercurrent of toxic masculinity. We also hear from Irish women who are touched by Peig’s life and work and who feel it is as relevant as ever.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever notice how Halloween is a month long nowadays? Darach and Peadar discuss the Irish names for months of the year and days of the week, as well as Halloween songs, whether we should rename January, working in a chocolate shop and the ancient Celtic festivals. And the word is poioumenon. Trust us, you'll get it later. If you're still reading this send me a voice memo <3 --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s not often that an eighteenth century poem finds itself in the news, but thanks to the rave reviews and public demand for Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s “A Ghost In The Throat”, this is the situation we are now in. Ní Ghríofa’s work is a memoir in which she considers her relationship with the masterpiece “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” and tries to discover the story of its author, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill. How can the person who wrote the greatest poem of her century disappear from history? Why do we only know about her in relation to the men in her life? In today’s episode, Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín consider this poem, the world of penal laws, power changes and rivalries that it emerged from and its place in Irish literature then and now. They discuss its female gaze, the attitude to physical and equal love it reveals and how male Irish poets have asserted their names into the life stories of remarkable Irish women. Also, Darach has a conspiracy theory about the death of Art O’Laoghaire’s assassin, Gearóidín bemoans PS I Love You and Peadar explains the significance of horses in Europe at the time.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: whatsapp - +353894784713 twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every human society has a tradition of bereavement and a tradition of language which, while technically bespoke to its particular needs, changes at a different speed to that society. So it goes with mourning as an immigrant or minority and so it goes with the condolences we pass on to the bereaved. As America and the world mourns the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a recurring debate returned - is it appropriate to say “rest in peace” to someone from a tradition with a different concept of the afterlife? Or is it a case that there is a line to be drawn, just not there? Is it fair enough to offer words of comfort from your own tradition rather than hastily Google and mispronounce something from the other culture? In this week’s episode, Darach, Clodagh and Peadar consider this topic not just as it relates to “ar deis Dé go raibh a h-anam” but also with the standard Irish greetings “Dia Dhuit/Dia is Mhuire Dhuit”. Are these any more or less prayerful than OMG or Ah, Jaysus? For some reason Leap Year pops up yet again. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode, Peadar and Darach are visited by Manchán Magan, the creator of the Gaeilge Tamagotchi project, Gaeilge Amháin and author of “Thirty Two Words For Field”, his new book about the Irish language and the ecological and social wisdom contained in its precise vocabulary, wisdom that would be lost if the language is lost too.  Manchán tells the lads about his travels, his encounters and even those plays he wrote. It's pure wild stuff so be sure to subscribe!  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time there was a young woman from Derry called Emma who loved dogs, baking and movies. She didn’t think about politics very often. Then she met a Californian called Jake and fell in love. She had no idea that she was about to find herself in the middle of a half-decade-long legal battle which would open a can of worms at a time when Anglo-Irish relations were already being tested. On today’s episode, Emma De Souza joins Darach and Gearóidín to talk about how applying for a residency card for her husband before the Brexit referendum led to a battle for the integrity of the Good Friday Agreement. Emma and Jake’s courtcases for the rights of all Irish citizens in the North have led to a significant legal bill - you can help them at their GoFundMe page here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Defend-right-to-be-Irish-against-Brit-Govt-appeal --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this year when AOC guest starred in a Donkey Kong Twitch stream in which she declared trans rights to be human rights (while batting off criticism from greying 90s pop culture warhorses like Aaron Sorkin and Graham Linehan), it felt for many that a generational Rubicon had been crossed.  Computer games. Físchluichí. They've come a long way since Darach was playing Pole Position on his Atari. In recent years games have reached a new level of technical sophistication such that ideas like storytelling and character development can be taken seriously.  So how has this new medium expressed ideas like Ireland and Irishness? Like language and colonialism? Darach doesn't know, so he asked two experts to explain it to him. Úna-Minh Kavanagh (@unakavanagh) and Sarah Maria Griffin (@griffski) are bestselling authors who happen to also be massive gamers. In today's episode they talk to Darach and Peadar about games and the world that surrounds them - and how Irishness turns up in it. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's summer again. You know what that means.  In this episode, Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín look at this year's hot takes about the Irish language  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darach chats with musician and writer Thom Dunn about how perceptions of Irish America have evolved rapidly in his and his father’s lifetimes, and what he hopes Irish America will be like when his newborn is old enough to understand it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you stood on Henry Street with a big smile and asked a hundred Dubliners who it was named after, it’s unlikely you’d get a single correct answer. If you walked into a history tutorial in one of the city’s finest universities and asked the students who Westmoreland was, you’d definitely get a few blank stares. And what’s the significance of Nassau Street - does Dublin have a Caribbean connection to celebrate? Is it unusual that Dubliners are so ambivalent about the origins of these street names and, in light of the recent passing of John Hume (surely a candidate to have a boulevard or a town square named in his honour) is it time to consider renaming some of them?  In this week’s episode, Darach and Peadar look behind the true meaning of some of Dublin’s well-known streets, the red tape associated with renaming and consider if the positive civic engagement that led to the Rosie Hackett and Mary Elmes bridges can be built upon and turned into a way of engaging citizens with history. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the week that saw the world said goodbye to civil rights hero John Hume, today’s guest and topic feel especially apt. Maev McDaid is a Derry woman in London, completing a PhD on retired Irish people in that city, as well as being very active in Clapton Community FC. On today’s podcast she talks to Darach and Peadar about the problems with “the UK” as a concept, and how the confusing term raises issues for researchers, policy makers and discussion of local and national issues.  When a young woman like Medb leaves Derry to go to London, is that considered migration, immigration or not considered at all? Is it the same as a woman from Nottingham moving to London? If so, how do we measure the size of Irish communities in English cities? In the era of BLM when countries consider the relationship between citizens and the police in their state, referring to Britain or the UK can have significant differences. And yet, Britain and the UK are used interchangeably, to much frustration and distress. The gang also talk about football, much to Darach’s delight. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eid al-Adha shona daoibh! Why are some bilingual teenagers seen as a triumph of aspirational middle-class parenting, but others are treated as a problem to be solved? This is a matter that strikes to the heart of discussions around the Irish language as it forces us to think about what monolingualism and multilingualism really tell us about intelligence, culture and community. In today’s episode, Darach talks to writer and law student Fadilah Salawu. She talks about balancing her Muslim, Nigerian, Dublin and Gaelach identities. She tells Darach about Ireland and Nigeria’s shared colonial heritage and the conflicts with colonised people articulating their experiences with an imposed language. She shares the experience of Yoruba-speaking parents using English in the home with their children in Ireland, and watching Catholic rites of passage from the outside (but also from the inside - inside the classroom). She also tells Darach about her enjoyment of learning Irish and why Islam cautions against translating the Quran.  https://medium.com/@fadilah --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taylor Swift broke the Irish Internet today when she wore a geansaí. It launched a thousand versions of the same joke - she looked a bit like one of the Clancy Brothers.  In today's BONUS episode we look at the history of the Aran sweater, what knitters know that the others don't, diddly-eye erasure and much more.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in episode #74, Darach and Clodagh discussed Scots Gaelic in general and a book of transgressive verse called “An Leabhar Liath” in particular. One poem they shared - Bhruadair mi leat a-raoir - got a particularly huge response from listeners and the wider twitter community. Nearly eighteen months later, Motherfoclóir has finally managed to track down the poet who created it. Niall O’Gallagher/Niall Ó Gallchóir is a journalist for BBC Alba by day and a poet by night, as well as being Glasgow’s poet in residence (Bard Bhaile Ghlaschú) In today’s episode, he talks to Darach about his decision to write in Scots Gaelic and not to translate his own work. He describes the process of having his work translated and translating the work of others. He talks about the different issues faced by artists creating in Irish and those creating in Scots Gaelic, the enduring relevance of folklore, placenames and plant names… and the importance of having a correctly-stocked bookshelf when broadcasting from home during a pandemic. You can find out more about Niall here: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/niall-o-gallagher/  And you can check out his poems and essays here:  https://www.clar.online/artist/niall-o-gallagher  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tea. It’s a national obsession - just ask Irish emigrants to America about the first time they tred to get their hands on a kettle. While the infusion of tea leaves in hot water might unite the city dweller from her country cousin, the tiny differences in the way it’s prepared can speak volumes.  This week Darach chats to Sligo’s Laura Gaynor, formerly the tea critic with Raidió na Life. She tells Darach about how she landed in Dublin’s hippest radio station and the doors it opened for her, how learning Irish prepared her for learning Greek, the power that comes with being a critic and how to find something close to Barry’s tea when you are abroad. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2003, a schoolboy sitting at his home computer was messing around on the internet and, without fully realising it, opened a window for the Irish language. That window was Vicipéid, and seventeen years later it is still letting light and air in. But who was that boy and what did Gaeilge and Ireland mean to him? Well, that boy was Gabriel Beecham and he is the guest on today’s show. He chats to Darach and Ola about taking the first step of creating the Vicipéid frontpage, the long space between taking the first and second steps, and watching the Wikipedia volunteer ethic form at this very time. It was the start of a journey which took him to the most famous green owl in linguistics. He talks about his relationship with languages in general and Irish in particular - a relationship which led him to becoming a Duolingo contributor. A doctor by day, he also gives the gang some insights from the frontlines of Ireland’s fight against Covid-19. Featuring: Gabriel's favourite Vicipéid entries https://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9alteola%C3%ADocht Gaeilge i mo chroí - Is DUOLINGO GOOD for IRISH? https://youtu.be/CVSG4bFdKto Ciaran Duffy’s astronomy prints as gaeilge. https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/hellociaran/ --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been another normal and sane week on the internet. It feels like only yesterday that we were chuckling about the Kardashians asking what the Debs was and Gucci were producing rip-off GAA shorts. Well, last Friday a bit of distinctly Irish culture yet again crossed over into the mainstream when talented midlands hunk Niall Horan was savagely roasted by a puppet of a turkey. For Irish people, no further explanation is needed. And yet… In this week’s episode, Darach and Peadar consider the legacy of Dustin, the Dublin puppet who emerged from children’s television (originally introduced as part of a weirdly dark running gag) to become a very Irish kind of satirist, preparing the stage for Ross O’Carroll Kelly and the Rubberbandits after him. The lads talk about his musical career, his famous interviews, his chronicling and creation of Hiberno-English terms, the artistic possibilities of a mask (or puppet, in this instance) and his influence on spoilt votes.  --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the participants in “Women in Harmony”, a charity single for Safe Ireland (which tackles domestic abuse) is Eve Belle, a singer songwriter from Donegal. While still in college, she signed with the influential Rubyworks label - the very same people who discovered Hozier and Rodrigo Y Gabriela. In today’s episode she tells Darach and Clodagh about the creative process, moving from the songwriting process to live performance. She talks about how quarantine times have made people conscious of the role of the arts while also presenting new challenges and opportunities for musicians. She talks about supporting Hozier after performing one of his songs in the Leaving Cert music exam. And she talks about Irish, and how her experience of moving to the Gaeltacht as a child shaped her feelings for languages. You can find her music here: http://www.rubyworks.com/eve-belle Find out about the Safe Ireland “Women In Harmony” single here: https://www.safeireland.ie/irish-women-in-harmony-release-single-in-aid-of-safe-ireland/ --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of us have a very clear idea of what an Irish American is and have an overview of the community's journey from the Famine to the White House. The Irish community in Britain is a different and far more complicated story, however. And since 2016, it has become even more complex.  In this week's episode, Darach is joined by Niamh Lear, a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle. Niamh tells Darach about her research on hybrid Irish identities since Brexit and how a combination of protest and realpolitik have led to a surge in interest in Irish passports. She also talks about the subtle and not so subtle ways in which Irish identity is policed.  You can find out more about Niamh's research here: https://prezi.com/v/z6ncemdbpk9z/hierarchies-of-irishness-the-passport-paddy/  Follow her on twitter at @niamhlear. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] --- Want to record your own podcast? Check out our studios at https://thepodcaststudios.ie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meet John Hyland, an Irish NGO worker whose career took him to Brussels where he fell in love with a French woman. A perfect European love story which led, as these things do, to a perfect European family. But what happens when this most European child, born in one of the world’s most proudly multilingual cities, has a name with a fada? In today’s episode, John tells Darach about his journey to Belgium and gives a whistle-stop tour of a country of contrasts, where divided communities are held together by a labyrinth of bureaucracy. He tells the story of how important it was that his daughter have an Irish name and the lengths he had to go to just to get that recognised. The book John mentions in this episode is “King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/adam-hochschild/king-leopold-s-ghost/9781509882205 Find John on twitter at @JohnHyphen --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week saw the final episode of Normal People, the hit TV show based on Sally Rooney’s novel set in Trinity College. Rooney’s book is just the latest in Ireland’s long tradition of novels set primarily on university campuses, and in today’s episode, Darach chats with Éimear and Peadar about some of the other ones. Were all the great UCD novels written before the construction of the Belfield campus? Which college novel has a bar named after it? What tale of student life was the first novel in Irish to hit the bestseller lists? This episode also features Clodagh and Kirsten sharing extracts from the works cited. --- Support Motherfocloir on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darach  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friend of the pod Póilín Ní Géidigh (@poilination) is back on the show! Since she last joined us (in one of 2019’s most popular episodes of the show) she has taken up quill with the wonderful Irish language website, nos.ie. In addition to her Tuesday lunchtime painting sessions, Póilín is the site’s social media critic, casting her gimlet eye on the mysterious otherworld of online Ireland.  In today’s episode, she tells Darach and Peadar about Reply Guys, cancel culture, TikToks, the Gaeltokt and the dangers of a mobilised fanbase misunderstanding the thing they’re a fan of. Check out Póilín every week at www.nos.ie ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for bilingual is dátheangach, which literally means two tongued. When Clodagh McGinley isn’t contributing to this podcast, sneaking off to be a guest on other podcasts (hello, “I Love This Band”) or curating her photography on instagram, she’s producing her bilingual zín In the social media age where so much creativity is chopped into chunks of content designed to go viral, zines are prepared in a way that resists this, inviting the reader to look at the entire issue as the “unit” rather than the article or headline. And when seeking comfort in pandemic times, maybe something viral isn’t the right answer? Clodagh tells Darach all about zines, their origin and legacy, finding the bilingual content sweet spot and how Gaeilge loves Twitter but Irish dancing loves TikTok. Have a look here: http://bit.ly/zineagran10  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ireland’s relationship with wine is unusual - we drink a lot of it but we do not produce it ourselves, and historically we fall between the stools of Europe and the post-colonial “New World” which divide the wine business. These factors allow us to be completely neutral in deciding which ones we like. So what do we like? And what do we talk about when we talk about wine? Conversations about wine - like conversations about Irish - often heave under the weight of gender roles, social class, geopolitics and money. But if we let our guard down they can lead to wonderful places. In this week’s episode Darach and Peadar talk to Shamim De Brún from MItchell & Sons WInes in the IFSC. She tells the lads about Irish connections to the vineyards of Bordeaux, licking volcanic rocks to understand wine better and how the history of wine importing goes back to Brian Boru. What wine goes best with a spice bag or a bag of Tayto? Do “Cork Dorks” suffer an unfair negative reputation comparable to gaeilgeoirí? Are men scared of rosé? They all get a look-in too. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the past decade, certain subcultures have been identified in social media. Fiat 500 Twitter, FBPE and Scottish Twitter have all been documented to some degree as having their own implied sets of rules, values and norms which are distinct from whatever mainsteam or “normal” is. And then there’s Irish Twitter.  Whatever about Ireland itself and wherever you consider its borders to be, Irish Twitter is widely taken to be activist, feminist, outgoing, left-leaning, pop culture hyper-literate and saltily hilarious. And few individuals encapsulate these qualities as much as today’s guest.  Ciara McShane (@ciara87c)’s twitter feed is a wild diary of the experiences of an Irish woman in a Brexit era London which cannot figure out its nearest neighbour. Her observations on topics from Tinder to politics to Ulster Irish have won her over 29,000 followers. Recently she has talked movingly about homesickness during Covid19 and has been involved in raising money for community groups. She tells Darach and Éimear all about it in today’s episode, as well as her favourite Irish words and historical figures. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We had some very fine plans for Season 3, but, like the best laid schemes of mice and men, they have “gang aft agley” (been ruined) by external events. We have been fortunate that the team is all doing well and we send our best wishes to our listeners around the world and their loved ones at this time. In this week’s episode, Peadar and Darach consider how rapid change and displacement are represented in Irish mythology. The story of Tír na nÓg is one of the best known in the Irish canon, one which hinges on loneliness, homesickness and how people and places quickly change. What was the deal with Oisín’s mother? What monk snuck the religious conversion in? And how many Niamhs did you know growing up? Welcome to the quarantine sessions. We’ve missed you. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To keep you all going during these strange times, here is Motherfoclóir's own Darach Ó Séaghdha in conversation with Sam Blake on another HeadStuff Podcast, Behind the Bestseller.  Stay safe and well. .. Non-fiction is a different beast to fiction, and in this episode Sam Blake chats to Darach Ó Séaghdha, the Irish writer, podcaster and Irish language activist. The author of Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language (Head of Zeus, 2017), and Craic Baby (Head of Zeus 2018) Darach won Ireland AM Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the 2017 Irish Book Awards with Motherfoclóir. Revealing how his Twitter account @TheIrishFor grew into a book, driven by his personal journey and relationship with his father, a gifted linguist, Darach reveals the key issues with taking an online presence into print. Sam Blake delves into the writing process and deciding what exactly goes into a book. Brought up in an Irish speaking household, Ó Séaghdha’s father and mother used to speak Irish together but spoke English to their children. When Ó Séaghdha’s father became very ill, Ó Séaghdha became interested in learning Irish and used Twitter to share interesting Irish phrases and words he came across. Ó Séaghdha describes Irish as “the amazing buried treasure”. In his writing he wants to show people how they, through Irish, can make sense of the world around them, through words and phrases that do not exist in the English language. He runs the popular Irish-language-trivia Twitter account The Irish For. He is also the main host of the podcast Motherfoclóir, part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network, a fascinating podcast focusing on elements of the language. The follow-up to Motherfoclóir, published in 2018, Craic Baby: Dispatches from a Rising Language, explores the very new and very old parts of the Irish language from a personal perspective, covering the topics multilingualism, Brehon Law, Gaelscoils and especially lexicon. Check out all the Behind the Bestseller episodes here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Basic Structure of an Irish Fairytale:  Don’t do the thing Does the thing Death”     Do you understand what mythology is, and its role in the way all stories are told and heard? Do you understand what TikTok is and why teenagers are spending hours preparing nine-second one-person plays in their bedrooms? How could these two things possibly be linked? Fortunately today we have a guest who can explain both. Donegal’s Róisín McNally is an accomplished TikTok-er with a degree in Celtic Civilisation. She tells Éimear and Darach about how Deirdre of the Sorrows is just your typical goth teenager surrounded by disappointing adults, how Irish mythology is full of women discovering their potential when they are left alone by men, and the influence of Celtic Woman and Enya on Gen Z cosplayers. This is the final episode of Motherfoclóir’s Season 2 - we’ll be back soon! Thank you for all your support. You can find Róisín on TikTok and Insta at @roro_the_terrible --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s a new year and Gráinne Ní Mhuilneoir from An Siopa Leabhar is here to tell us all about the new and upcoming books as Gaeilge in 2020.  ====Translations now available==== Asterix agus na Cluichí Oilimpeacha Asterix i gCoill na Cinsealachta  Tintin: Ciste Castafiore Tintin: Slat Ríoga Ottakar  Asarlaí Oscartha Oz (The Wizard of Oz) Ar Luch agus ar Dhuine (Of Mice and Men) Nioclás Beag (Le Petit Nicolas) ===Original works/Grammar texts=== An Diabhal Déanta, Joe Steve Ó Neachtain Sa Teach seo Anocht, Mícheál Ó Conghaile Cití na gCártaí, Réaltán Ní Leannáin An Litir, Liam Mac Cóil I dTír Strainséartha, Liam Mac Cóil Bealach na Spáinneach, Liam Mac Cóil Modern Irish: A Comprehensive Grammar, Nancy Stenson Understanding Irish Spelling, Nancy Stenson & Tina Hickey Basic Irish, Nancy Stenson Intermediate Irish, Nancy Stenson ====Coming in 2020==== Cuisle an Chósta (adult learner) Mise do Mhamó (adult learner) Ní bheidh fuath agam oraibh go deo (adult learner) An Garbhán Óg (The Gruffalo's Child) --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a way, a band like the Pogues had to form in London rather than on the island of Ireland itself, where they would’ve been primarily associated with their town or county rather than the entire Irish community, as they are. London’s anarchic punk scene in the late 70s and early 80s created an exciting opportunity for the Irish identity to express itself and Shane McGowan’s band ran with it, creating a body of work about exile, colonialism, injustice, war, love, toxic masculinty and loneliness. To this day póg mo thoin remains one of the best known Irish expresssions in the world, a tribute to how many people have connected with the band’s music. In this week’s episode, Darach and Peadar are joined by Jennifer Quigley, the host of the I Love This Band podcast. She brings her rock historian skills to the table as we discuss the world that the Pogues emerged from, McGowan’s gradual and unlikely elevation to national treasure status, London Irish hybrid identities and some brilliant songs. You can check out Jennifer’s own podcast at https://podtail.com/en/podcast/i-love-this-band/  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talent. Does it actually exist, or is it just an invention that takes credit for the cruel mix of hard work and good luck (or good work and hard luck) which decides our fate? Maybe we can find out by watching a talent show. Or maybe we can ask Síomha Ní Ruairc, presenter of TG4’s An Ríl Deal and Réalta agus Gaolta. She tells Peadar and Darach about how Gaeilge opened doors for her on her route to television work, growing up with Irish in the home and the right amount of boldness. Plus, Darach admits to an act of youthful delinquence. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. That’s a quote attributed to the Roman senator Publius Syrus, who also said that a good reputation is more valuable than money.  We hear a lot on the radio and in the news about how much Irish costs. But what do costs mean outside the context of value? We know that a car or house might be insured for one amount, sell for different figure and be taxed based on a third value. If value is so uncertain for something so physical, how do we measure it in something as abstract as a language?  Placing a value on intangible assets - goodwill, a brand name, the difference between a print and an original - is tricky but not necessarily impossible. In today’s episode, Darach, Clodagh and Peadar welcome Osgur Ó Ciardha back to the Motherfoclóir studio. He explains some of the valuation concepts used in business for such intangibles, especially when they are linked to the unique selling point of another entity, such as tourism or the existence of the state. And as the concepts of cost and value are intimately connected to the idea of private ownership, we ask if Irish belonging to all of us actually makes it more precious. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we in Ireland think of Irish-America, our minds tend to rush towards rivers died green, New York cops and maybe even a Massachusetts political dynasty. But there’s a lot more to the story than that. In particular, the Appalachian region, crossing multiple states, has its own culture and identity distinct from its neighbours in the South and Midwest, of which Irish music and language have made a significant contribution. In this week’s episode, Darach and Peadar chat to Rebecca Wells, a singer in Nashville, Tennessee. She tells the lads about her Appalachian roots, the influence of Irish music on bluegrass and other musical traditions, the overlap between accents and dialects and the way what you call a can of carbonated drink is an indicator of where you are from. She also tells the story behind her Twitter handle @faoiltighearna and her favourite Irish word. Rebecca’s band Paper Ravens are on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3IDMk7CcFgOyFIgN69Qkj8?si=lrULNBjWSUGxbHDugXVzVw --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen. Sure lookit. Na Daoine Uaisle. The fairy folk.. We wouldn't want to be bothering them. In this week's episode, Gearóidín, Peadar and Darach tiptoe around the delicate business of addressing the folk of the otherworld. What do those beautiful weirdos want? Síofras? Sex? Gold? We also consider which Irish people might actually be from the faerie/sí community. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What a year. What a week. What a decade! It’s Christmastime again and Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín have met up to reflect on the passing of time. In this week’s episode they look at the 2010s as the decade when the Irish language and social media became acquainted with each other, starting with the #sneachta hashtag and ending with an election in our neighbouring state that has made hitherto hypothetical questions about identity and Irishness more urgent. We consider the memes and Irish words of the decade, the beginnings of @theirishfor and Pop Up Gaeltacht and the traditions of activism, community and dialogue that informed the big changes of the decade in this island, which have been a part of Gaeilge all along. We also remember Iris Robinson and the men who surrounded her, the first viral story of a decade bookended by DUP humiliations. And Niall Horan, who our Laois Legend may have met and completely forgotten. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If this episode of Motherfoclóir is exactly as long as your psychotherapy session, maybe that’s not a coincidence. Poor old Podcast Dad Darach is on the couch this week, whining like a man-baby about his terrible, afflicted adolescence at a Jesuit school. The experience gave him a lifelong suspicion of the order and their academic output, up to and including the jewel in the crown of the Irish Texts Society - Foclóir Gaeilge Béarla by Father Patrick S. Dinneen.  In this week’s episode, Peadar and Darach discuss the Rathmore priest’s game-changing foclóir, a marvel in publishing with two first editions (one on either side of the formation of the Free State). They share some best-loved entries, consider his Brubdignagian feud with Padraig Pearse and reflect on the influence of the Typewriter-Stenography School industrial complex on the content of subsequent dictionaries. Oh, and there’s kissing. A whole lot of kissing. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After five years of preparation and development, the RIA have released “A History of Ireland in 100 Words” in 2019. The book looks at the stories behind words found in the Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language (www.dil.ie) in an accessible way. Naturally, it was ony a matter of time before the Motherfoclóir team hunted them down! In today’s episode, Éimear and Darach chat to Sharon Arbuthnot, one of the three authors of this book. She talks about the collaborative writing process, how people in the middle ages were not so different from ourselves and about putting herbs in your ears when you go for a swim. You can buy “A History of Ireland in 100 Words” at good bookshops and see their word of the week at www.dil.ie  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maynooth holds a special place in the heart of this show. Two of the core crew - Éimear and Peadar - are Maynooth graduates, and our most popular episode to date is a sensational live show at the Maynooth Students’ Union featuring a difficult rooster. Today we’re considering another aspect of that university’s gift to the world - specifically, its gift to Irish hip hop. Tebi Rex, one of Ireland’s most exciting hip hop groups, formed in the hallowed halls of the Big Kildare Priest Factory and on today’s episode, Darach, Gearóidín and Peadar are joined by Dafe Orugbo, one half of the dynamic duo. Dafe tells the gang about how Gaeilge played a role in the band forming. He has plenty to say about the world within the Maynooth campus as well as their influences, his love of Kate Nash, the terror of writing sexy songs that your Mam might hear… and his favourite Irish word. Tebi Rex’s new album “The Young Will Eat The Old” is out now. https://twitter.com/TebiRex/status/1174828612584972288 --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s Dublin Podcast Festival time again! This year the Motherfoclóir gang appeared as part of a double bill with The Irish Passport at The Button Factory on November 17th. This episode is the live recording of that show, edited for brevity and clarity. In a world where so many TV and movie franchises have grinded to a halt or are on hiatus, Darach wanted to alert Hollywood to the fact that Irish history, literature and mythology has a wealth of untapped source material for them to consider for the Next Big Thing. In this episode, he talks to Peadar, Gearóidín and Éimear about the blockbuster potential of An Táin (served two ways), Georgian Dublin and the race against time that was the drafting of the constitution. The common link between all these stories appears to be a bunch of ‘rock lads absolutely sending it on their holiday in Thailand. A new epic poem, perhaps? The Motherfoclóir gang are joined by Tim McInerney and Naomi O’Leary from The Irish Passport for the Q & A at the end of this episode. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 2010s will go down as an extremely significant decade in Irish literature in both of our official languages. The bailout and its aftermath affected the country heterogeneously and the literary scream in response to this uneven scourging was delivered in uneven voices: younger, more rural, less aspirational, more accented. While the Celtic Tiger wrote about the recent past with the smugness of a returned backpacker dropping off a year’s worth of laundry, these new voices had a distinctly different sense of the past, the present and the future… and everything in between. It was in this environment that Lisa Coen and her business partner Sarah Davis-Goff set up Tramp Press, an independent publisher which has released two Books of the Year in the past three years, as well as clocking up a dizzying array of other prizes.  In today’s episode, Lisa talks to Darach about the circumstances that gave birth to this publishing phenomenon and the mission that drives them forward. She explains the significance of the company’s name and of tramps in Irish literature. She schools Darach’s big jackeen head on the secrets of Shoe Corner and the nearest ATM and tells of the urgent relevance of the outsider’s stories. And yes, they talk about Irish too! You can find out more about Tramp Press at https://www.tramppress.com  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Support for this episode comes from Foras na Gaeilge - https://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/ --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most talked about, well loved and critically acclaimed TV shows of the past  year has been the second season of Fleabag, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s titular character finding an unlikely connection with an Irish priest. The pressure put on their mutual attraction by his vow of celibacy is a rich source of comedy and drama. This is not the first time such a topic has been examined by a long shot, however. In today’s show, Darach chats to Peadar and Clodagh about Cúirt an Mheán Oíche by Irish literature’s favourite one-hit wonder, Brian Merriman. The Midnight Court is satirical in both form and content, and Clodagh explains how conventions of Aisling poetry are taken and turned on their head in this masterpiece. Peadar tells how the social issues complained about in the poem such as late marriage and clerical celibacy are still relevant today, and Darach predictably does a bit of name-dropping. This week’s episode is sponsored by Foras na Gaeilge, celebrating 20 years of promoting the Irish language. Is í ar dTeanga Féin í! #Foras20 --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our annual spooky Samhain episode! Darach is joined by Peadar and Gearóidín to share their best Irish haunted house stories. Hear all about Mag from Laois, mischievous Gertrude Curran from Rathfarnham and the terrifying secrets of Lep Castle. Please mind your pets this Hallowe'en. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Order from www.dropchef.com using the code “MOFO” mentioned in this podcast for a €15 discount --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible season. That's the view of Motherfoclóir's Clodagh McGinley, who is unimpressed by the golden leaves, soft sweaters and pumpkin spice lattes that mark the autumn months. In today's bonus episode she joins Darach to discuss some autumnal words, plant names and vegetarian vocabulary…. and that annoying ad with the guitarist at the laundrette. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Order from www.dropchef.com using the code “MOFO” mentioned in this podcast for a €15 discount --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Darach, Ola and Peadar are joined by bilingual broadcasting superstar Hector Ó hEochagáin. Since his breakout success with the Amú series in the early 2000s, Hector has become one-name-famous and one of Ireland’s best loved broadcasters. In this week’s episode he tells the gang how he found his way into the television world, how TG4 is like a family and the importance of making a simple human connection in a world of extremes. He also talks about his travel through America’s Deep South for his new show, “Hector USA - Ó Chósta Go Cósta”. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Order from www.dropchef.com using the code “MOFO” mentioned in this podcast for a €15 discount --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every few months on the Irish side of the internet, a certain debate pops up about the spelling of a word. The word refers to convivial merriment, especially in an Irish context. But should it be spelled crack or craic? The reason this discussion can withstand multiple rounds of debate hinges on the way that the word and the stories of its origins overlap with other recurring debates: on Irish identity and smugness, on Gaeilge and if/when it stopped giving new loanwords to English, and on contrarianism itself. This week, Darach and Gearóidín are joined by Senior Film Critic of the Irish Times, Donald Clarke, who has written about this phenomenon on more than one occasion. He tells the gang about his own lived experience as an Irish migrant in London during Italia 90 when he noticed a change in the spelling and frequency in the term’s use. The gang consider the pivot in Irish identity and perceptions of Ireland around this time and consider if feelings towards the word reflect feelings on this transition. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Order from www.dropchef.com using the code “MOFO” mentioned in this podcast for a €15 discount --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The changes in Irish self-identity in the 2010s hinge on the rise of social media, especially how those networks completely altered the way two perennial features of Irish society - emigration and Gaeilge - fed back into the national conversation. A generation of young people who left Ireland after the bank bailout were able to stay in touch with developments and debates in Ireland, culminating in #hometovote but also feeding into other discussions, such as “the way it's taught”. For many abroad, the Irish language connected deeply into feelings of identity and homesickness, leading to them reconsidering their relationship with it. One such fáinleog was Kirsten Shiel, a Dublin artist who found herself in Bolton and Manchester before her heroic return home. In today’s episode, Motherfoclóir’s artist talks about how she returned to Irish and to Ireland, the business of being an artist and the complicated geopolitics of the animation business and the role of translation. She also tells Darach about her work process for illustrating every episode of the podcast you love so much, and how every Gael online wants a Shiel original portrait. --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Order from www.dropchef.com using the code “MOFO” mentioned in this podcast for a €15 discount --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Switzerland is one of those countries that doesn’t pop up in the news very often but appears to be ticking along nicely. In this regard it is not unlike Norway, another country that has chosen to keep an arm’s length relationship with the European Union. Now, as Brexit approaches, these two countries are among the models of post-divorce custody being considered by Britain and the EU. But what is Switzerland really like? In particular, what can this multilingual, neutral, financial powerhouse teach a country like Ireland? Clare O’Dea should know; she’s an Irish journalist who has been living there for years and is the author of “The Naked Swiss”, a book which dismantled myths and cliches about that country. Her new book “The Naked Irish”, seeks to do the same about Ireland. In this week’s episode, Clare chats to Darach about Switzerland’s love of referenda, the differences between Swiss German and German-German, Johnny Logan, Anglo-Irish relations as seen from a safe distance… and her favourite Irish word, of course. Find out more about Clare and buy her books here: https://clareodea.com --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/ Order from www.dropchef.com using the code mentioned in this podcast  for a €15 discount --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s a tale as old as time - boy meets girl, boy is married, girl wants to break boy’s wife’s legs. Or maybe it’s the simple story of a girl in love with a cobbler, forbidden to go to the fair and waiting for a fairy godmother who will never come. Or maybe it’s the entirely relatable fable of an utterly livid goat? Hibernophile and occasional Mary Black backing musician Steve Martin once said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. But Steve has never seen Darach’s sensual rhumba representing the construction of Georgian Dublin. But as you cannot hear this dance on the podcast you must listen to a discussion of music instead.  This week Darach is joined by executive producer Peadar Ó Caomhánaigh and Donegal diva Póilín Ní Géidigh. The topic for discussion is the treasury of lyrics in traditional Irish music and how their expressiveness is lost in translation to mere English. -- -- -- -- -- -- --  Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Order from www.dropchef.com using the code mentioned in this podcast for a €15 discount Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Only a game designed by nerds would have charisma as a fantasy power” Gravity Falls A few weeks ago, Orla Ní Dhúill wrote a blogpost that got tongues wagging across the internet. The issue she wanted to address was the phenomenon of the Irish language being used as a kind of public-domain Klingon or Dothraki across fantasy novels and roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Naturally, we had to have her on the show! In today’s episode, Orla chats to Peadar (the others are “resting”) about how jarring it is to see Irish text used as narrative Polyfila, as well as how half-understood Irish mythological entities turn up in such storytelling formats. It’s a journey that goes from Tir na nÓg to America and back, involving the elf IRA, the salmon of knowledge and highy practical armour bikinis. You can find out more about Orla here: https://naturallyorla.com  --- Get Kirsten Shiel art prints here: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/kirstenshiel/  Order from www.dropchef.com using the code "MOFO" mentioned in this podcast for a €15 discount  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is our hundredth episode! We are delighted to still be here and even more thrilled that you, are listeners, are still here. To mark this august occasion, Darach, Clodagh and Peadar have dipped into the mailbag to see what’s vexing ye all this week.  Expect unusual chicken salads, terrified Slovenians, language learning tips and maybe even the occasional non-glottal stop. --- Please visit www.dropchef.com and use the promotional code given in today’s episode. Dropchef match your order with meals donated to children in need. --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When German-Morroccan DJ Mousse T recorded the song “Horny” in 1998, he surely had no idea that he was creating a Pompeii-like cultural artefact, one that preserved evidence of what a world was like minutes befoe it changed forever. The local slang of a town or of a neighbourhood is part of its cultural treasury. Are new words - be they loanwords of neologisms - an addition or a subtraction from this treasury? What makes some neologisms catch on (text, the verb) and others flounder (talkie)? What makes some slang words break out of their linguistic communities and go national (like shift) or global (like woke)? If languages are the currencies of the mind, what is the exchange rate of words? In today’s episode, Peadar and Darach consider Ireland’s affectionate loyalty to certain regional slangwords (langer, shift, gowl) and HibEng’s openness to certain global English trends. Does saying “men are trash” mean we’ve accepted trash as a fitting replacement for rubbish? If we ask for “ballpark figures”, have we conceded to refer to Croke Park as a ballpark? Most importantly of all, does the transfer of vocabulary from one community to another represent a submission to the values and objectives of the donor culture? These questions and more are considered in the context of how the internet, mobile phones and pop music have impressed themselves upon English dialects since 1998. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the 2010s draw to a close, we’ll be looking back at one of the most significant decades in the Irish history since the Civil War. It is a decade that began and ended with wēijī (crisis-opportunity) moments for Ireland’s relationship with the European Union, as well as two landmark referenda that sparked a wave of activism. So who better to chat about all this with than Lisa Nic An Bhreithimh? Lisa works at European Movement, an NGO promoting the work of the EU in Ireland. She was also involved in the Irish language flanks of the referenda on Marriage Equality and on the Eighth Amendment. She tells Darach about being a critical friend to the EU, the opportunities Irish has created and its role in campaigning and the importance of language in creating tolerance and understanding. You can find out more about the European Movement at https://www.europeanmovement.ie and about ShoutOut at http://www.shoutout.ie --- DropChef is the number one fresh ingredient & recipe delivery service in Ireland. Check out this week’s menu by going to https://dropchef.com/?utm_source=mofo and use the code ‘mofo’ to get €15 off your first DropChef delivery  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for a Prime Minister is Príomh-Aire; Taoiseach is specifically the title of the Prime Minister of Ireland and it comes from the old word for a tribal chief. This word is still used on the Nuacht on those occasions when an African tribal chief is in the news - older listeners might remember references to “An Taoiseach Bhutelezi”.  This isn’t the only time that Irish and African imaginations have dreamed the same dream. When Chinua Achebe set about to write his great novel, Nigeria was not yet an independent state and gripped by a debate on language not unlike that in Ireland. He chose a line from a poem by W.B. Yeats to name his story about the collapse of a social order. What inspired him to do so? In today’s episode, Ola Majekodunmi chats to Darach about “Titeann Rudaí as a Chéile”, Irene Duffy Lynch’s Irish language translation of “Things Fall Apart”. She tells Darach about the place of the novel in Nigerian culture in contrast to European novels set in Africa, the positive and negative lessons that Achebe took from Ireland and considers other African novels she’d love to see translated as Gaeilge. Today’s episode also includes a contribution from the lads at “Pints of Malt”, Headstuff’s Nigerian-Irish podcast, on Achebe’s masterpiece and their experiences with Irish.  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The concept of the “silly season” is arguably a dated one in the era of 24 hour news and social media; it dates back to a time when daily newspapers had to fill gaps created by the closure of houses of parliament, higher courts and lulls in the sporting calendar. In some ways, the silly season is all year long now. But in another way, Ireland’s national obsessions with Leaving Cert results, social class and our self-image reaches fever pitch in August, culminating in some terrible hot takes about the state’s policy of access to Irish through the education system.  Are Gaelscoileana elitist? Is Irish ableist? Are photos of Peig next to articles about the 2019 curriculum relevant? Are Irish language activists a menacing influence on innocent, harmless, agenda-less policymakers?  In today’s episode, Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín look at the key recurring points and try to address them as succinctly as possible. Do you have strong feelings too? Please email us at [email protected] and keep the conversation going.   --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Swedish language represents a kind of "what might have been" for Irish speakers - although there were less Swedish speakers than Irish in the world at the beginning of the 19th century, Swedish is the language of choice for millions of people who also have perfect English. In today's episode, Gearóidín phones in from Finland to tell Darach and Eimear about how Swedish is a minority language there, how different it is from Finnish, and how the story of the Finns sounds familiar to Irish people. The cultural impact of these countries is considered, including Stieg Larsson and Max Martin. ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ***** * ****** Join Darach at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace Centre in Magherafelt on the 9th of August. He’ll be in conversation with Lynette Fay from BBC Radio Ulster about his journey since starting @theirishfor. Tickets at https://seamusheaneyhome.ticketsolve.com/shows/873602197?_ga=2.124528527.424322507.1564084535-1144120869.1564084535  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of the most powerful books for and about teenagers take the form of a diary: Adrian Mole, I Capture The Castle, Go Ask Alice and even The Color Purple (although that spreads beyond the teenage years). So begins Máire Zepf's extraordinary new book "Nóinín", one of the most exciting books published as Gaeilge in some time (featuring cover art from Motherfoclóir's own Kirsten Shiel). Belfast's Máire Zepf is Northern Ireland's first ever Children's Writing Fellow and the author of nine books so far... and she's only getting started. In today's episode, Darach talks to Máire about her inspiration, the writing process, the sharp difference between this book and her previous works, online and offline woes, balancing writing and parenting and why "the way it's taught" is a +353 phonezone phenomenon. Thanks to Gearóidín for the readings from "Nóinín", published by Cois Life. Extra music on this episode by Dauwd: check out "Theory of Colours" on bandcamp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re nearly at the end of this strange and dark decade and it’s hard to know what to make of it at this stage. So much has happened since New Year’s Eve 2009 that could not have been predicted, much of it bad. However, one of the nice things that was not expected ten years ago has been the rise of Irish language activism through social media, where unconnected individuals with a love of the language found a way to make it relevant to their online friends.  Different social media platforms have different appeals to different people. While Darach does his thing on Twitter, Múinteoir Meg prefers to rock the ‘gram, incorporating Irish language phrases and vocabulary into her posts and stories about food, fashion and travel. She joins Darach, Peadar and Clodagh on today’s show to talk about it, being an Irish teacher in 2019 and the Irish for goji berry. ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ****** * ***** * ****** Join Darach at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace Centre in Magherafelt on the 9th of August. He’ll be in conversation with Lynette Fay from BBC Radio Ulster about his journey since starting @theirishfor. Tickets at https://seamusheaneyhome.ticketsolve.com/shows/873602197?_ga=2.124528527.424322507.1564084535-1144120869.1564084535  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"For me, the Irish language was like a ghost limb". The days leading up to the 12th of July are often tense and dramatic ones in the North of Ireland, but never more so than in 2019. After months and months of stalemate and stagnation in Stormont - frustratingly coinciding with the British-Irish border being in the centre of a geopolitical crisis - the DUP's bluff was called with two amendments to the Northern Ireland Act passing in Westminster.  An Irish Language Act is one of three factors in the mix as the October deadline looms.  In today's episode, Darach talks to Belfast journalist Claire Mitchell about the events of the week. She brings him up to speed and gives him the background for all these developments, while also telling him about how Gaeilge fits in to her life and her Northern Protestant heritage. Claire is a contributing editor with sluggerotoole.com  --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some people out there wouldn’t see a rabbinical calling and a love of Irish dancing and sean-nós singing as a likely pairing. Those people have not met Darach’s guest this week. Saoirse Cecelia Beyer is a New Jersey-based rabbi with a passion for traditional Irish singing and dancing styles which has taken her to fleadhs all over. In this week’s episode, she tells Darach about being a “purveyor of joyful Judaism”, learning conversational Connacht Irish but Donegal Irish songs, PG-13 humour in religious education and the significance of the chosen name Saoirse. She also offers an informed interpretation of controversial passages of Genesis and Leviticus which might surprise you. --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gearóidín is a Gryffindor. Peadar is a Hufflepuff. Darach, however, is a muggle who has not read the books, only seen a few of the films and has not yet tuned into the audiobook (famously read by Ros na Rún guest star Stephen Fry). However, so pervasive is the influence of JK Rowling’s books that even he knows more about them than texts he has had to study for exams. The Harry Potter novels have been translated into over seventy languages… including Irish, and that’s where the Motherfoclóir train stops today. In this week’s episode, we look at Harry Potter agus an Órchloch as translated by Máire Nic Mhaoláin. We consider the many challenges and opportunities that a translator tackling such a well-kown text has to take on board. How do you replicate accents? What about acronyms and anagrams? What about the parallel translation of a screenplay? And how about those words which might scurry in the long shadow of copyright laws? The gang also consider the impact that the series has had on pop culture in general, its role in Blair-era “Cool Britannia” soft power and the dangers of legacy management in the internet age. Special thanks to Laura McGloughlin for advice on this episode. --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to food, television or books, there are no tougher critics than small children. They won’t spare your feelings the way adults have been trained to, but they are loyal to what they love. However, small children’s access to food an entertainment is controlled by busy, tired and all too imperfect parents, who often have a hidden agenda of wanting the child to “learn something”, “just be quiet” or even “speak Irish”. This is the Hobbesian world that Sadhbh Devlin has chosen to tell her stories in, and in today’s episode, she talks to Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín about the child’s imagination, the guilt of being a working parent, the thrill of swearing, the relationship kids’ authors have with their illustrators and publishers… and the multitude of concerns a writer needs to be aware of, from sensitive language to health and safety. The gang also manage to talk about future proofing crime dramas, the mysterious land of Brazil and writing for yourself. You can get Sadhdh’s books “Bí ag Spraoi Liom!” and “Beag Bideach!” from www.siopaleabhar.com or www.futafata.ie.   --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s mailbag time again! Here at Motherfoclóir we love to receive your correspondence, suggestions, corrections and observations. Since we last opened the mailbag we’ve received a wheelbarrow-full of such letters and it’s high time we shared them with you. Clodagh and Éimear join Darach in dipping into the bag and find communications about traditional music, An Triail, the notorious episode 82, possible future topics… and focphocaí.  And we were cited in the bibliography of an essay!  And we have a poem from a listener! The bar has been raised. If you’d like to contact us, we’re at [email protected] .  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's in a name? For most of the world's population, Irish names are the only contact they have with Gaeilge, and this is where its reputation for beauty and difficulty is perpetuated. Prospective parents have a great responsibility in naming a child… as to writers of characters in a novel. In this week's episode, Éimear, Darach and Clodagh are joined by Colm O'Regan, the talent behind the Irish Mammies books and columnist with The Examiner. As a Dad and a novelist, he tells the gang about naming children and characters, the rise and fall of certain names, the storm dividend and the subtle difference between doves and pigeons. Colm's new book "Ann Devine, Ready for Her Close-Up" is available here:  https://www.dubraybooks.ie/Anne-Devine-Ready-for-Her-Close-Up_9781848272460 --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like an old friend you don't really want to see right now, summer has arrived in Ireland, and with it a smartly-turned out stampede of Spanish students. For decades, these stylish loudmouths have been teaching Irish teenagers how to kiss and how to swear like a Spaniard in their version of Irish college. In today's episode, Darach talks to reverse Spanish student Éimear Duffy and Salamanca Erasmus veteran Claire Murray about the differences and similarities between Irish and Spanish, a language which outnumbers English as a first language but lives as a problematic minority tongue in some wealthy countries. Is it all down to the way it's taught? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peadar Ó Caomhánaigh, the Johnny Giles of the Motherfoclóir High Table, put his money where his mouth was this year, deciding to stand for election. After a gruelling PR-STV count, our boy won his seat and will represent his fellow Clondalkinites for the next five years. He is one of the 10% of South Dublin County Council representatives to have graduated from a single Gaelscoil, Colaiste Cillian in Clondalkin. In today's episode, Peadar tells Darach all about the experience- why democracy is our cricket, Irish in local government and community activism, the Dubliners and the joy of placenames. * NOTE - Clondalkin is not "the village/meadow of the larks". Darach's misunderstanding was based on a misunderstanding of a lyric by Clondalkin native Mic Christopher (whose album "Skylarkin" deserves your attention). --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gráinne Ní Mhuilneoir is the new bainisteoir of An Siopa Leabhar on Harcourt Street, taking over from our good friend and occasional contributor Caitlín Nic Íomhar (who has since been published in the excellent poetry collection "Calling Cards"). You might know Gráinne from @BooksAsGaeilge on Twitter. In this week's episode, Gráinne tells Darach and Gearóidín about her time at publishing house Cois Life and her new role in Ireland's premier Irish language bookshop. She tells us about new and upcoming books for readers of all ages and even tells us what her favourite Irish word is. Check out on Siopa Leabhar's cool new website www.siopaleabhar.com --- Contact the show: twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to series 2 of Motherfoclóir! We've missed you something terrible so we have. An awful lot has been happening lately so to kick things off we're having a quick look at a topic that's likely to be looming in the background for the next few months. At the end of 2018, it was widely noted that the movement to repeal the 8th Amendment want from being a political football "too divisive to even talk about" to passing a referendum by a significant majority- all in 12 months. Could the same thing happen with a United Ireland? Could some unionists accept some version of a republic to stay in the EU? In this week's episode, Darach is revisited by Naomi O'Leary from the Irish Passport podcast. They talk about this very issue and what issues a new single state on this island might face and what possibilities might be created. --- Contact the show twitter - @motherfocloir and @theirishfor email - [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SEASON 2 MOTHERFOCLÓIR! SEASON 2 MOTHERFOCLÓIR! SEASON 2 MOTHERFOCLÓIR! THIS MOTHERFOCLÓIRIN' FRIDAY! Like, rate, review and subscribe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're really sorry, but sure look, it was bound to happen at some stage. Darach is still on leave and the gang has finally gone off the rails. They start out innocent enough, sure. Peadar and Gearóidín and Eimear and Osgur talk about the perils of machine translation, bad tattoos and lazy Government departments. We don't know exactly when it goes bananas, but they read a porno. An honest-to-goodness porno as Gaeilge. Live on stage in Maynooth! This is not the Ireland of Peig Sayers and Brian Ború. Needless to say, because of the graphic content of this podcast, it should not be listened to by anyone. We're so sorry. Link to "Coláiste Threesome Gaeilge" by Amy Lee: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Col%C3%A1iste-threesome-Gaeilge-Irish-Amy-ebook/dp/B072JMJ1S1 --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Motherfoclóir Beo was recorded in front of a live audience in the Maynooth Students' Union Venue as part of Seachtain na Gaeilge 2019\. Gearóidín and Eimear explore the 1937 Constitution and in particular the provision that a woman's place is in the home. Was this a betrayal of Brehon Law and Irish history? Or was it a reflection of what we've always done - sidelining women? Can a country fail the Bechdel Test? Peadar asks the questions as our resident legal eagle and medievalist take on over 1500 years of misogyny and patriarchy. * * * Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha is a researcher, educator and activist. It was in this latter capacity that she became the driving force behind An Foclóir Aiteach/The Queer Dictionary, a glossary of LGBTQI+ terminology as Gaeilge. So why did it take so long to codify these words about sexuality, gender identify and more? Was it the Brits? Was it the Church? Were we not bothered? Peadar and Laoighseach explore privilege, language learning, grammar rules and Freudian slips as they try, and fail, to stick to the topic. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire is a lecturer in TU Dublin and a well-travelled chef and TV presenter. He's the world's leading expert in Irish food history, so why he agreed to appear on our podcast, we'll never know. Gearóidín and Peadar chat with Máirtín about the history of Irish ingredients, ancient cooking methods, and an absolute heap of cheese. Why is Irish food not held in the same regard as French, Spanish or even Danish grub? What did we eat before the noble spud arrived on our shores? Why do we eat so little seafood for an island nation? Why does Darach hate coddle? Is it because he's weird? It is, isn't it? Find out all this and more, as Máirtín takes us on a culinary journey a thousand years or more in the making. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gearóidín and Peadar discuss the idea of fluency. Can you really be fluent? Even if you know literally all the words? Gearóidín and Peadar can communicate in Finnish and French respectively by shrugging and being rude, but that doesn't indicate fluency. And as for legal language, that's a whole other ball game. When your life is on the line, are you really fluent enough to understand the language used in court? As usual, practically none of these questions actually get answered as our heroes boldly get distracted by video games, knitting and swear words. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darach is on leave, so Gearóidín takes the hot seat as the gang are joined by a special guest. Brianna Parkins was the Sydney Rose in 2016 and when she took the stage in Tralee she used her platform to call for legal access to abortion. Two years later she returned to Ireland to campaign for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment and is now working in the media in Dublin. She called in to Headstuff Studios to discuss the differences between Ireland and Australia, her favourite Irish words, and her favourite deadly Australian animals. Peadar and Eimear also chatted with Brianna about her Irish roots, Dublin accents and the heart-stopping terror an Irish person suffers when a deadly venomous spider falls from your ceiling. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darach is back in studio this week, as he and Peadar begin the podcast by discussing the rising trend of Alt-Right Twitter trolls attempting to weaponise the Irish language. The irony of two white men discussing racism is not lost on them. They meander through Brexit, national identity, Britpop and the halcyon days of 2015 as they chat about what it means to be "Gaelach". Dáithí De Mórdha's article: https://tuairisc.ie/gael-is-ea-gael-is-cuma-dubh-ban-no-riabhach/ The Scots Gaelic version of Motherfoclóir: https://twitter.com/cananballs The Scots Gaelic version of The Irish For: https://twitter.com/scotsgaelicfor --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where's Darach? He's not in the studio today, so Éimear and Gearóidín are running riot, throwing paper aeroplanes across the Headstuff classroom and talking loudly. During her curation of the @motherfocloir account in January, Éimear asked Twitter followers to tell her what drove their interest in Irish under the hashtag #WhyIrish. It was trending on Irish Twitter within hours. She tells Gearóidín all about it and the Duolingo classes and groups what were created on foot of it. There are also hedgehogs, handsome Norwegian architects and a man on the run from the law. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ireland and Scotland have a lot in common, and this is especially true of Irish and Scots Gaelic. Students of Irish could make a decent stab at the meanings of thousands of Scots Gaelic words and not be far off… left-facing fadas notwithstanding! However, though the two languages contain much of the same stuff, they were forged in different fires over the centuries- in Scotland, the language was not politicised at the same scale and it was not promoted by the State the same way in the 20th century. We will be visiting this neighbour language again soon with native speakers, but we thought having a prologue/overture first would be valuable. In this week's episode, Motherfoclóir regular Clodagh tells Darach about her experiences studying a bit of Scots Gaelic as part of her degree and they discuss "An Leabhar Liath" - the light blue book. This is a collection of love poems and transgressive verse which gives a hint of the language's poetic tradition: bawdy and irreverent, but also elegant and tender. Today's episode contains adult language and themes throughout. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is fitting that a book set in a cemetery has come to be known as the graveyard of translators. Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s masterpiece Cré na Cille was described in the New Yorker as “too good to translate” although different individuals have tried. It is widely regarded as the finest novel in the Irish language. In this week’s episode, Peadar (who has read it) tells Darach (who hasn’t read it) all about the wonders of this novel, where the occupants of the graveyard are doomed to gossip amongst each other about the petty concerns and jealousies that poisoned their lives. Comparisons to Ulysses (and Star Trek) are considered, as well as the validity of different approaches to translation, Ó Cadhain’s relationship with Brendan Behan, and the overlapping Irish obsessions with death and property. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Irish speakers are referred to in Ireland as a community, a lobby group or even a kind of secret society: a bloc of people with specific and predictable values and objectives, distinct from the mórchultúr of mainstream Irish society. This expresses itself in many forms, from characterisations on radio debates to the sexual othering of Irish speakers (the "hot Gaeilgeoir" stereotype). The truth is, of course, that Irish speakers stand in the same queues as anybody else. You might even be going out with one! In fact, most of the Motherfoclóir regulars are currently dating outside the flock. But what are the realities of such mixed relationships like? In today's episode, Darach and Clodagh meet author Valerie Loftus and Derek O'Brien, her fluent fella. They talk about Oireachtas widows, slipping into Irish, defending the language when there's no Irish speaker around and the "ecumenical matter" approach to bluffing a conversation as Gaeilge. Valerie's book "Thanks Penneys" is published by Mercier Press and available in bookshops now. You can check out Gaelchultúr's courses at http://gaelchultur.com/en/home.aspx --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It has been quite a year for the Motherfoclóir project - there's been online and offline mayhem of many categories in multiple languages. In this week's episode, Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín take a look back at the highlights of Bliain na Gaeilge - the debates, key people who made us laugh and cry, the @motherfocloir account, the way the present shapes the past, a very special tuít as Gaeilge… and the Irish word of the year. This episode contains more swearing than the losing side of Croke Park on All-Ireland Sunday. Sorry! --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darach Ó Séaghdha's first book, "Motherfoclóir: Dispatches From A Not So Dead Language" was the winner of the Popular Non-Fiction award at the 2017 Irish Book Awards. Today's bonus episode is an extract from the sequel, "Craic Baby: Dispatches From A Rising Language". Craic Baby is published by Head of Zeus and available in bookshops in Ireland and the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As "Bliain na Gaeilge" draws to a close and we look back, one of the moments of Irish language activism that casts a long shadow is **#NílSéCGL - it's not okay**. The hashtag struck a chord with Irish speakers who were fed up of lazy criticisms and stereotyping in mainstream media, and recognised each other's frustration all too well. #NílSéCGL is the brainchild of Ciara Ní É (@MiseCiara), who joins Darach in the studio this week. She's a poet, teacher and activist who's been very busy lately; as well as hosting her first documentary on TG4, she's the force behind poetry night REIC, Memes na Gaeilge on Facebook and What The Focal on YouTube. She tells Darach about her adventures teaching Irish to Americans in Philadelphia, online shaming, video poetry and the importance of good manners. Ciara's documentary Tabú is available on TG4 Player. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The golden age of Irish censorship ended in 1967 when Brian Lenihan Sr introduced a time limit on certain banning orders, leading to thousands of forbidden texts becoming available. Since 1929, a wealth of modern literature and medical writing had been denied to the public by a censorship board which was not required to explain its decisions - Edna O'Brien, Brendan Behan, Aldous Huxley and many others ran afoul of its high hand. However, during this period a wealth of Irish language literature and drama was being produced which slid under the censors' radar, material which still packs a punch today to audiences who feel misled by the notoriety of Lady Chatterley and Holden Caulfield. One such work is the play "An Triail" by Máiréad Ní Ghráda, first produced in 1964 and dealing with topics like religious hypocrisy, abortion, suicide and Magdalen Laundries - all in an Ireland where Disney's Fantasia was banned. In this week's episode, Darach, Peadar and Gearóidín discuss the impact of Ní Ghráda's great work and its relevance today. Darach remembers a less resonant text he studied for his reading, unlocking a wave of '90s memories and Gearóidín reflects on the similarities between the schoolmaster Pádraig and the f*ckboys of 2018\. This episode deals with mature themes and contains some explicit language --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The partition of Ireland in 1922 only included six of Ulster's nine counties in Northern Ireland. This led to the beautiful county of Donegal being cut off- politically and economically distant from its near neighbours, geographically distant from Leinster House. This remoteness - and the fact that Ulster Irish was under-represented in the formative years of the Republic's Irish language policies - have led to Donegal seeming to be a wee bit different to others in the Republic. But is it just that they're normal and the rest of us are weird? In today's episode, Darach wanders into the world of Donegal Irish with 074 natives @AntoinBeag and @poilination. They talk about Football Special, See You Burn, fadudas, ordering soup and the Leaving Cert aural tape, among other things. Antoin Beag's opinions are not the opinions of Headstuff, its staff, sponsors, business partners, affiliates, hosts or advertisers. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Somewhere in the Gaeltacht, a local man (whose first language is Irish) is accused of assaulting another Irish speaker with a broken bottle. What language should the trial be held in? If it is to be in Irish, is the jury a random sample of the defendant's peers? In today's episode, Gearóidín tells Darach and Clodagh all about the remarkable case of Ó Maicín vs Ireland, where a defendant took his fight to be heard by an Irish-speaking jury all the way to the Supreme Court. It's a case that raises questions about the power of language, the role of judges and of legislation, the paradoxes of multilingual jurors in multilingual trials and the perils of interpretation. The perils of jury duty - and the lengths people go to in its avoidance - also get considered. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As any Caoimhe, Siobhán or Medb living abroad will tell you, Gaeilge uses different spelling conventions to Béarla. Students who struggle with this might be interested to hear more about Manx, the Gaelic language of the Isle of Man, which uses English language phonetics. Manx also has the distinction of being declared dead and interrupting its own funeral. In this week's episode, Darach, Gearóidín and Clodagh chat with Katie Kermode, an Ohio native who started studying Manx and got hooked. She tells the gang about Manx today - its Gaelscoils, radio station and ceilís - and shares some favourite Manx words. * * * Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Darach's new book, "Craic Baby: Dispatches From A Rising Language" is published by Head of Zeus and available in good bookshops now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every summer, the Irish people sacrifice thousands of teenagers to Lú, the sun god, so that he will offer them good weather. This sacrifice is called "The Leaving". There's more to Irish than the Leaving Cert and the points race; this is what we've been trying to show in the topics we cover on this podcast. However, it would be pig-headed of us not to mention the Leaving Cert course at all. In this week's episode, Ola and Darach chat with Noirín Ní Mhurchú, who is currently shepherding students through the Leaving Cert course. They talk about sraith pics, the difference between school Irish and the way Irish is spoken socially, whether single-sex education affects the texts chosen, and how we learn more than Gaeilge when we learn Gaeilge. If you're sitting the Leaving Cert in 2019, be sure to bookmark the following sites to your fón póca: www.teanglann.ie (also available as an offline app) www.focloir.ie (also available as an offline app) www.tearma.ie www.nos.ie www.tuairisc.ie www.raidionalife.ie --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

**Gadhrach (adj): dog-living, full of dogs.** Despite her massive popularity over here, Saoirse Ronan's hosting slot on Saturday Night Live earned her a slew of criticism. The very idea that Irish people were unusually keen on dogs, an assumption which one of the sketches was based on, was nonsense… wasn't it? As the Irish language shows, there's always been an affinity for our canine cairde here- nine native breeds, a plethora of dog-based animal words and a seanfhocal or two to boot. In this week's episode, Peadar and Gearóidín tell Darach all about the dogs in their lives and what motivates them. Is owning a dog harder than raising a child? Are we ready to reintroduce wolves to Ireland? And what are certain breeds called as Gaeilge? Darach's new book "Craic Baby: Dispatches From A Rising Language" is available in bookshops now --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

**"Is doiligh drochrud a mharú" - it's hard to kill a bad thing. (Irish proverb)** It's Hallowe'en again and the time is right for a Motherfoclóir Samhain Special! Is Annual Sweetgiving Day a capitalist ploy or is it I inherently socialist? Is the pagan or Christian, American or Gaelic? The spookiest time of the year is arguably more Irish than Saint Patrick's Day; it's certainly a recent arrival to our British neighbours, who were traditionally more invested in Guy Fawkes Day. Darach and Peadar discuss the enduring popularity of vampire stories and consider the Irish origins- most famously Dracula but also the Derry legend that haunted Bram Stoker's imagination. Please mind your pets on this hard fire-working night. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

**Diaspora: from the Greek word diaspeirein "to scatter about, disperse," from dia "about, across" + speirein "to scatter".** The word "diaspora" was not used in the Irish context until Mary Robinson did so, powerfully sending a message about the global Irish community and the pain felt at both ends of the split of emigration. But 28 years later, is the term still apt? In the final part of our Uachtarán Trilogy, Darach talks to Peadar and Gearóidín about how presidents have presented Ireland to the world. As well as Professor Robinson's iconic light in the window, they look at Douglas Hyde's careful neutrality, Hillery's moment as Germany's Doctor Dishy and McAleese's bridge building. Inevitably this leads to a discussion of Saoirse Ronan's "Brooklyn", sentimental 80s ads and suitable judo wear. The opinions of Peadar Ó Caomhanaigh are not the opinions of Headstuff, its shareholders, sponsors, staff, advertisers, past or future investors or associates. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Few writers ever managed to achieve the triple crown of critical acclaim, popular success and sustained relevance that Brian Friel managed in his five-decade long career. In this week's episode, Darach, Peadar and Siún discuss his masterpiece "Translations", which tells its story of doomed love and dark politics against the backdrop of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in 1830 - a critical moment in the colonial project when Irish placenames were carelessly and significantly rewritten. What was the significance of this? How did it compare to other countries? And did "Love, Actually" borrow one of Friel's greatest scenes? The gang consider the text as well as the good, the bad and the ugly of Irish placenames in general. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Motherfoclóir was invited to the Kildare Readers' Festival in Newbridge in October, and this episode is the recording of that show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Wednesday 10th of October, Darach, Gearóidín, Peadar and Éimear swooped upon the Sugar Club on Lesson Street to discuss the importance of the Irish language to the role of president. Three presidents in particular are directly associated with watershed moments in the history of the language - Douglas Hyde, Éamon De Valera and Michael D. Higgins. The gang discuss the implications of their support for an interest in Gaeilge, which inevitably includes a discussion of the 1996 movie Michael Collins, TG4 dating shows, the Gaelic Leinster monarchy, Roscommon and coddle. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Hamlet has been performed in Klingon" Aisling Carolan. For a poet, the fact that the Irish word tír (country) and the English word tear (a sad drop of water) sound the same is profoundly significant. For a linguist, however, this is a coincidence and a cursed one at that. How much weight should we attribute to similar sounding words with similar meanings in different languages? In this week's episode, we consider the theory, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, that Hebrew and Gaelic languages are linked… and that the source of this link is that the Gaels were a lost tribe of Israel. Some of this is down to soundalikes, but do grammatical parallels prove a deeper link? Darach and Clodagh are assisted in their work by crafty classicist/linguist/artist Aisling Carolan, who is determined to prove a link between Pokemon and Púca. Today's episode is swear-free. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Mailbag time again, when the Motherfoclóir team review correspondence that has been submitted to the show by email to [email protected]. In this week's visit to the postroom, Darach, Ola and Peadar read and discuss exciting epistles which deal with topics ranging from Greek and Latin, less vs fewer, the widow's memory, an aimsir ghnáthchaite agus an aimsir ghnáthláithreach, the differences between ye, yous, youse, yis and yisser… and the great coddle debate continues. Happy birthday (or even breithlá sona) to Raidió Na Life, who are 25 this week! Ola and Peadar both present their own shows as Gaeilge on this fine station - find out more at http://www.raidionalife.ie/ga/ --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Irish presidential elections are rare and brutal, but voters have chosen some truly remarkable and inspiring people for the role. Perhaps more than the role of Taoiseach, the presidency has reflected the hopes and values of Irish people and successive presidencies have marked distinct eras in the evolution of the Republic. The Motherfoclóir Team are going to bring you a short series of episodes about the presidency in advance of this year's election - in today's episode, Gearóidín and Darach discuss what the job entails as per the Bunreacht and give an overview of its soft power. Naturally this leads to a discussion of Mary Poppins. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For nearly two centuries, we have been told that English is the language of commerce and industry and that the Irish language sits outside this world, peeping in. Could a company from Ireland ever use Gaeilge in its product branding the way Ikea uses Swedish? Osgur Ó Ciardha is one half of the team behind Pop Up Gaeltacht (the other half being Motherfoclóir regular Peadar Ó Caomhanaigh). In today's episode, he chats to Darach about whether PUG has identified a market for an Irish language bar, the uses of Irish in advertising, the Euro Gaelach and the gravy train myth. Today's episode is swear-free. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for Stradbally is an tSráidbhaile, which means village (or street-town if you want to be very literal about it). For a weekend at the end of summer every year, Stradbally hosts the Electric Picnic festival and this year the Motherfoclóir Podcast was invited to perform a live show for the revellers. This was a double honour for the show as it allowed local gal Gearóidín McEvoy return from Finland to Strad in triumph, basking in the jealousy of all the townsfolk who ever doubted her superstar status. She is joined on the live show by Éimear Duffy and the pair of them - finally free from the tyrannical hosting of Darach – talk festivals, feminism, skincare, strong Irish women from old and recent history, accents, Laois and even take some questions from the audience. Then the gardaí turn up. Today’s episode contains some cussin’. The views of Dr. McEvoy and Dr. Duffy are not the views of HeadStuff, its staff, contributors, owners, sponsors, affiliates or clients. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The breakthrough star of Irish twitter in 2018 must surely be @ruthiefizz – while other tweeters have hurled poorly-cogitated stock arguments at each other, her “Other Ireland” account has used the possibilities of the format to explore important ideas like consent, misogyny and mental health while also sharing informative and fancy facts about (and pictures of) wildlife. What her thousands of followers may not know, however, is that Ruth Fitzpatrick has a solid academic background in Celtic Civilisation and a special interest in Breton, medieval Welsh and Manx Gaeilge. In this week’s episode, Ruthie and Motherfoclóir regular Peadar terrorise Darach has he tries to do a serious interview about these serious topics in an absurdist subversion of the authorial voice worthy of Flann O’Brien himself. Having said that, there are still some animal names in Irish and insights into being sound and changing minds in an online world full of berks. Find cute animal names in Irish here: https://twitter.com/i/moments/796746870123102208 --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for tax is cáin… not to be confused with caoin, which is crying. In life the two great certainties are death and taxes, which is fitting given that many forms of taxation were first introduced to pay for wars. Today’s Vatican City is a fragment of the Papal States, a temporal political entity that governed a portion of Italy larger than Ireland for a thousand years – from the era of Brehon Law until the age of the Home Rule movement. Records of taxes levied by the Papal States represent a uniquely continuous archive of Ireland during this period of economic, civic, political and linguistic change. This week’s guest is Chris Chevalier, a PhD candidate in Trinity whose research uses these records as a source for measuring the distribution of wealth in Ireland in the medieval period. He chats to fellow medievalist Éimear and fellow tax nerd Darach about who had cash to splash in the 14th century, papal audits (and punishments) and the Spielberg-esque adventures involved in chasing research materials from one European city to the next. You can find out more about Chris’s work here: https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/researchers-use-papal-tax-assessments-to-map-medieval-economy-of-ireland/ --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Flatley has been in the news again with his new film “Blackbird” (possibly named for an Irish set dance) and his questionable choice of followed Twitter accounts. No matter how successful his foray into action movies is, it is certain that he will be mostly remembered for and associated with Irish dancing. Irish dance, with its distinctive costumes, moves and tunes, is this island’s most recognisable unique cultural export and the point of greatest overlap in the experience of people who live in Ireland and the global Irish diaspora. Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the first performance of Uisce Beatha/Riverdance, the show that was critical in stirring interest in set dance across the globe. But why isn’t there a Bolshoi or La Scala academy of Irish dance in Ireland? Why are some dances for watching and others merely for participating? And how much of the emphasis on presentation in this female-dominated field is justified? In this week’s episode, Motherfoclóir regular Clodagh McGinley tells Darach all about a youth spent in wigs and pumps that were two sizes too small. It’s a tale of high kicks, nits, injuries, vomiting, inter-school rivalries, stage mams, baffling VAT rates and moments of sheer artistry. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

**"If I were a boy /Even just for a day /I’d roll outta bed in the morning /And throw on what I wanted and go"** **Beyoncé Knowles, If I Were A Boy, 2007** Welcome to our 50th episode! If you're a regular listener you may have heard us mention the Modh Coinníollach before… but what is it? As with Peig who we chatted about last week, the Modh Coinníollach has become a kind of mascot for those who have bad memories of Irish from school. This has become a tired cliche in need of a good shake. In order to get a good handle on the Irish conditional mood, Darach summons German-speaker Peadar and Spanish-speaker Éimear to compare it to the arrangement in other European languages. Is our conditional really so bad on a global scale? The gang also chat about Muppets, Haribo, Fatal Deviation and Beyonce, and Peadar gives a cheeky tip for spoken Irish. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Peig passes the Bechdel Test". Sparklingly witty, unfailingly honest, sometimes misunderstood and with a grá for the Gaeilge, Tara Flynn and Peig Sayers are two women who have been unfairly criticised a lot in recent years. Although Peig is sadly unavailable, Tara was kind enough to visit Darach this week for a chat. Tara tells Darach about her iconic work on the Morbegs (and the attention to detail put into the Irish language content), reevaluating Peig as an adult and the simple joys of the offline life. Tara's book "Rage In" published by Headstuff is available in bookshops now and her new podcast "Taranoia" is out now, go find it. * * * Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

_The Irish word for a rat, francach, can also mean a French person (when capitalised)._ In their most recent media campaign, Vodafone have paid tribute to a long-standing tradition in Irish advertising; the French crush. Prior to this Ireland has had a history of taking cues from our Gallic pals - most famously the tricolour. French is the most-widely taught foreign language in Ireland and comparisons between it and Irish are inevitable. But how apt and how valuable are such comparisons? French exists as a successful minority language in Canada but France is one of the most most hostile jurisdictions to minority languages in the EU. How will Ireland, as the defender of Gaeilge and the custodian of EU English, get on with France after Brexit with regard to our two languages? In this week's episode, Clodagh McGinley (who recently graduated from Trinity with a degree in Irish and French) chats to Darach about the two languages, loanwords, faux amis and the joys French Twitter. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Famously, much is lost in translation. However, writing is a lonely calling, and the act of literary translation by one's peers presents an opportunity for literary intimacy. Two versions of a poem, presented side by side, can be more than the sum of the parts. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is one of Ireland's most brilliant and resonant poetic voices, and "Pharoah's Daughter" - a collection from almost thirty years ago - is still urgently relevant and accessible. Ní Dhomhnaill's dánta are accompanied by translations from a gathering of Ireland's finest English language poets (including Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon). In today's episode, Darach, Siún and Peadar read and discuss some of the poems in this collection… opening the door to a world full of love, sex, hope, feminism, laughter heartbreak, politics and hard-won intimacy. You can get "Pharoah's Daughter" at www.cnagsiopa.com or www.gallerypress.com Adult themes this week. Seriously: ADULT THEMES.Ceo, Craiceann agus Cumhracht: An Introduction to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2018 has been a landmark year for women’s rights in both Ireland and New Zealand. At home, we have voted to repeal the 8th Amendment. Our Antipodean mates have acknowledged a different aspect of reproductive rights (specifically, working mothers not having their careers scuppered) when their Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, gave birth to a daughter – and the country didn’t grind to a halt. That little girl’s name- Neve* Te Aroha Ardern Gayford – is a nod to two traditions, Irish and Maori, and in today’s episode we take a look at the Maori language Te Reo. Darach and Clodagh are joined this week by Louth linguist Aoife Finn who is studying Te Reo as part of her PhD. She enlightens the gang on how Te Reo works with fifteen(ish) letters, how the battle for language rights has been fought down there compared to up here and the process for creating neologisms. We also uncover a massive conspiracy theory about Pinot Grigio. *Niamh spelled in Te Reo phonetics --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the second Motherfoclóir Mailbag show! Listener feedback allows us to see how we’re doing, bring any clarifications to light and gives us ideas for new shows. You can email us at [email protected] if you want to get in touch, or even leave a review on iTunes. Correspondence has been flooding in from near and far in relation to recent episodes. Regular offenders Darach and Gearóidín are joined by neutral observers Antoin Beag and Aifric who consider topics ranging from pronunciation, taxation, the use of swearwords to the legacy of Daniel Cassidy much more. If your mail isn’t read out today, our next Mailbag will be out soon! --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your ex – the one who doesn’t like you as much as you like them and knows it – sends a “you up?” text at 11.32pm. Should you not pick up the phone… or, instead of replying, why not practice your Irish on Duolingo instead? The popularity of Duolingo’s Irish course flies in the face of critics of the language and has been a huge encouragement to those involved in the promotion of Irish. How can we capitalise on this interest? In this week’s episode, Darach and Peadar are joined by Alan Maguire and Ellen Tannam from Headstuff’s Juvenalia Podcast. Alan and Ellen have agreed to give Duolingo’s Irish course a go and report back on what they’ve learnt. It’s a tale of cats on turtles, inappropriate koalas, owlsplaining, film references and more crabs than you can shake a stick at. There are chats about new words and gender identity in anthromorphic creatures too! You can (and should) check out Juvenalia here: https://www.headstuff.org/juvenalia/ --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's episode is about Bród - no, not Miggledy Higgins's best dog (sorry Shadow!) but LGBTQ+ Pride, which is celebrated in Dublin from the 21st to the 30th of June. Ever since the 2015 marriage equality referendum and the ascension of Leo Varadkar to Taoiseach, LGBTQ+ inclusion has been central to how Ireland has presented itself to the world. However, this is an all-too-recent development and until 2018's publication of An Foclóir Aiteach (the Queer Dictionary) the vocabulary for many terms relating to queer experiences was not formally included in Irish. In today's episode, Darach and Gearóidín are joined by Antoin Beag and Aifric, who talk about their fiche bliain ag fás on an island that was struggling to come to terms with who it really was. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. You can check out the Foclóir Aiteach here: http://usi.ie/focloir-aiteach/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the second episode from our live show at the International Literature Festival Dublin, Darach and Éimear are joined by the King of (Book) Clubs himself, Mr. Rick O'Shea. The Rick O'Shea Book Club (ROSBC) has over 17,000 members and has managed to maintain a cordial atmosphere and a low spoiler rate in an internet otherwise teeming with mean jerks. How does he do it? He tells us the secret, as well as answering questions from the audience (including Darach's Mam). You can find ROSBC on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/therickosheabookclub/). --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week's episode - recorded live at Smock Alley Theatre as part of the International Literature Festival Dublin - Darach and Éimear are joined by Terry O'Hagan, the man behind the Vox Hiberionacum blog. Terry's research combines history, archaeology and linguistics as he tackles misconceptions about early medieval Ireland. Celts, Druids, Ogham and snakes all get a sceptical interrogation and we even hear about fart jokes and hungover doodles from the 7th Century. You can see Terry's blog here: https://goo.gl/aUN1GN --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for Wakanda Forever is "an Uácaind Abú!" The Irish language has enough problems to deal with without being co-opted by bigots. Earlier this year, for example, a protester against the Black Lives Matter movement in America wore a t-shirt bearing the slogan "gorm chonaí ábhar", a translation of Blue Lives Matter so bad it's hard to know where to even begin correcting it. Irish survives and thrives as a confident, modern language that welcomes all the people who want to speak it. In today's episode, the first of a number of live recordings, Motherfoclóir regular Ola Majekodunmi takes the hotseat and speaks to RTÉ presenter Zainab Boladale about being Gaelscoil graduates of Nigerian heritage, online and offline jerks and what Irish means to them. This episode was recorded live as part of Africa Day 2018 at Farmleigh House in Phoenix Park. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Referendum Day, and given the massive task of counting votes that is ahead of us, what better time to chat about the way counting works in Irish? It's all especially intriguing as the way we count people is different than the counting of mere objects and beasts. Peadar tells Darach about Irish dancing, the link in counting between uimhir a sé and the séimhiú and the mysteries of plural nouns in both languages. Also, Darach has an epiphany about 1980s children's telly. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's been a lot of talk about obstreperous women lately, so what better time to consider the fierce female characters of the Táin? In this week's episode, Éimear tells Darach about Cuchulainn's wife Emer (pronounced Ever in the old Irish) and Caitlín discusses how Medb has been represented over time. There's still time to buy tickets for the Motherfoclóir live show! http://ilfdublin.com/events/motherfocloir-live-podcast --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Darach and Motherfoclóir regular Siún share many obsessions, but the one they discuss on today's show is the writer Flann O'Brien… also known as Myles na gCopeleen… also known as Brian O'Nolan. As a displaced Northerner, O'Nolan was an outsider in the Irish language word in the Free State, belonging to neither the official Gaeltachts nor the bourgeois Dublin revivalists. This - as well as the restrictions placed on published writings by civil servants - contributed to a body of writing that is broadly hilarious and subtly subversive, darkly bitter and wildly imaginative. Darach and Siún consider his lasting appeal, how he was the 1930s equivalent of a Twitter superstar and how parts of his journalism predict today's world of social networks. You can check out Siún's fab as Gaeilge podcast Beo Ar Éigean at https://www.rte.ie/gaeilge/beo-ar-eigean/ --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The number 8 is full of mystery in the Irish language. There's the "hateful eight" letters that were added in the 20th century. There's a Eighth Amendment, which you may have heard of. And then there's Article 8 of Bunreacht na hÉireann. In this week's episode of Motherfoclóir, Gearóidín wants to clear up any confusion between Article 8 (the status of the Irish and English languages) and the 8th Amendment. They discuss shade in the constitution, the importance of not taking individual lines out of their broader context and consider the role of Ireland in steering English language use in the EU. Could Hiberno-English be the working language of Europe after Brexit? Ah, STOP. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Darach is in London on Motherfoclóir business and is broadcasting from the British Library at Kings Cross rather than the HeadStuff studios. This setting is appropriate as this week's topic is An Vicipéid, the Irish language portion of Wikipedia. Darach is joined by Dr. Claire Murray, a chemist by day and lover of the world's free online encyclopedia. As well as giving an overview of her own work, Claire tells Darach about the standards Wikipedia expects and enforces and they encourage listeners to try updating Vicipéid topics close to their own hearts. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Are we all just characters in a Roddy Doyle Facebook status?" Dublin City's official motto is Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas - obedient citizens, happy city. But do they obey because they're happy or are they happy because they obey? It's a suitably elliptical sentence for a city defined by its murky relationships with obedience and happiness. In this week's episode, Peadar and Darach consider Dublin's happily disobedient use of language. In particular they consider certain articles of Dublin slang with a view to whether they come from Irish or not. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode is a game of two halves. In part one Darach chats to Jody Coogan about certain articles of Hiberno-English slang (specifically, Munster slang) and they discuss whether they have an Irish origin or not. Such slang words enter the language when spoken English and Irish collide. Speaking of spoken Irish… in part two, Darach is visited by Ola, Clodagh and Gearóidín and they discuss the Irish Leaving Cert Oral exam and go through the irregular verbs (Bí, Feic, Téigh, Déan, Faigh, Abair, Tar, Ith, Tabhair, Beir, Clois). If you have a story about your Irish Oral Exam, email it to [email protected] and we'll share the best ones! --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Languages are like ogres; they have layers". Éimear Duffy knows a thing or two about Ireland and Irish in the rare aul' times (specifically the 7th to 9th century). In this week's episode, she tells Darach and Gearóidín about widespread misconceptions of early Irish society, honour prices of different statuses of people, the random sequence of recorded events in the annals and even how to retrofit modern words into earlier forms of Irish. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teresa Lynn is a computational linguist who specialises in technology and Irish language. She visits Darach, Gearóidín and Ola on today's episode to defend machine translation from all the misguided criticism it's been getting. She also talks about how systems like Bing and Google Translate work, emergency translation and the phenomenon of code switching. You can find out more about her work here: http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~tlynn/ --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It has been said that bookshops are the afterlife for good trees and the sound of turning pages is a kind of prayer to them. Belfast bookworm Caitlín Nic Íomhair is the manager of An Siopa Leabhar on Harcourt Street, Dublin’s finest specialist Irish language bookshop. Just like another famous Harcourt Street institution, the walls of An Siopa Leabhar stand witness to tales of heartbreak and debauchery… but unlike Coppers, they usually have page numbers on them here. She tells Darach and Éimear all about it in this week’s episode, in which she also finds time to give a whistle stop tour of Ulster Irish and rhapsodise over underrated poet Biddy Jenkinson. If you can’t make it to Harcourt Street, you can find An Siopa Leabhar online at [www.cnagsiopa.com](www.cnagsiopa.com) --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's going to be a lot of talk about Bunreacht na hÉireann in the coming weeks, a document where the subtle differences between wording in English and in Irish can make a big difference. In today's episode, Gearóidín and Darach look at the constitution in general but the 8th Amendment in particular, putting its origins in context and outlining the relevant Irish terminology. Although there is no swearing in today's episode, the subject matter necessarily leads the discussion into adult themes which some listeners might find upsetting. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ireland has been producing some remarkable YA fiction in recent years, much of which has addressed received notions of Irishness implicitly and explicitly. This is a valuable exercise in the context of Ireland and the Irish language being used as tropes in YA and fantasy literature abroad. In this week's episode, Irish Book Award winner Darach Ó Séaghdha interviews Irish Book Award winner Dave Rudden (ably assisted by future Irish Book Award winner Ola Majekodunmi). They chat about the writing process, first sentences and translate some of the key terms in Dave's books. You can find out more about Dave at www.daverudden.com - his new book, "The Endless King", is out shortly. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As languages don't match each other exactly, linguists and psychologists have debated if specific grammatical features shape the thought patterns of separate language communities differently. Are Germans better listeners than Greeks because they are politely waiting for the verb at the end of the sentence? Are they more punctual because their half six really means half five? This concept pops up in Irish most frequently when we translate the English words "yes" and "no", words which have a powerful place in Hiberno-English literature and politics. In today's episode, Darach talks to Peadar, Gearóidín and Motherfoclóir newbie Caitlín about this concept and its broader impact. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Buddha teaches that "when words are true and kind, they can change our world". Today's special guest, Sineád Burke, exemplified this spirit when she decided to get an entry included for "little person" in the Irish language to supersede the unsuitable existing terms. She tells Darach, Éimear and Gearóidín all about the process in this episode as they discuss attitudes to language, ability, disability and who gets to decide what "normal" is. You can find out more about the work of Little People of Ireland at [lpi.ie](http://www.lpi.ie) and more about Sineád at [minniemelange.com](http://minniemelange.com) --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"An sgéal fada ní hé is fearr" - the longest tale is not the best. As Valentine's Day approaches, the Motherfoclóir gang turn their thoughts to the wealth of love poetry written in the Irish language. Darach, Éimear and Peadar take turns reading poems (and their English translations) from "Filíocht Ghrá Na Gaeilge", which covers a thousand years of Irish love poetry. It covers the whole spectrum of the human heart. While the gang don't swear, there are adult themes in the episode. You can buy the poetry collection referenced this week at: www.cnagsiopa.com or www.coislife.ie --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The beating heart of this podcast is its wonderful lucht leanúna - the loyal listeners. We're always keen to know how you think we're getting on, and in today's episode Darach, Éimear, Peadar and Gearóidín read out and discuss some of the correspondence we've received. Will your letter be in there? --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Éist means listen, péist is a worm, éistphéist is an earworm". Just like Alan Rickman's character in Die Hard, Darach rhapsodises over the benefits of a classical education in today's episode. The genitive case is the grammatical device in languages that applies to possession… and as possession is nine tenths of the law, it gets our attention today. In the lucid company Gearóidín and Peadar, Darach examines the séimhiú- when it is and isn't used and what to watch out for. Did all the Cockney dropped aitches fall off words and land in Irish? What is the dentals rule? Why do female surnames have a séimhiú but not male surnames? Are their regional issues? All will be revealed. It's just a little h. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for a chat-up line is 'briathra meala'. An innocent bystander might be forgiven for thinking that there are two Carl Kinsellas: one, the articulate and outspoken writer with joe.ie… and the other, the High King of Irish pun gags on Twitter. Carl joins Darach and Éimear in the studio in this week's episode and talks about the cheesy bilingual chat-up lines that have made him an internet star. They also discuss the perils of the tinder age and going viral (and give out about various species of birds). --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“By fifth and sixth year, you’re dreaming in Irish”. It’s a little Coláiste Íosagáin reunion on Motherfoclóir this week as Darach is outnumbered by two past pupils: regular contributor Ola Majekodunmi and special guest Ailbhe Malone, who is Lifestyle Editor at Buzzfeed UK (after stints with NME, Nylon, Heat, the Irish Independent and many others). Ailbhe tells us about moving from an English language primary school to an Irish language secondary school, shares her stories about getting a foot in the door in music journalism and chats about the perils and delights of having an Irish name at home and abroad. She also talks about times when her journalism has led her to write about her own life experiences. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although it is regularly cited as the reason some people dislike Irish, Peig has been off the school curriculum for so long that we have adult Irish speakers wandering the streets and hills who were born after its removal. One such adult is the effortlessly cool catóg Clodagh McGinley, who you’ll remember from recent episodes. She tells Darach about the differences between studying Irish at school and at university, moving from the world of sraith pics to the wonders of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So here we are, at the end of another year, the 2017th year… can you believe there have already be 2017 years on this planet? Amazing really. Anyway, what we have compiled here is the best of The HeadStuff Podcast Network 2017, short clips from a range of our shows. If something piques your fancy, […] La entrada Best of The HeadStuff Podcast Network 2017 se publicó primero en Headstuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nollaig shona to all our listeners! In today’s very special yuletide special, Gearóidín tells the gang about Christmas in Finland, Peadar gets excited about wrens, Darach dwells on the practicalities of decorating with a toddler and Clodagh reminisces over Sylvanian Families. Please consider supporting one of the charities listed in today’s podcast. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Chomh ramhar le rón – as chubby as a seal” In Germany, BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke) is pronounced BMV. In Latin, Vs are pronounced as Ws. Humans have been switching these sounds with each other for some time. While neither V nor W are in the traditional 18 letter alphabet, W is so verboten that it is often replaced with a V in some loanwords – tvúit for tweet being a famous example. In Irish, the letters B and M –when combined with a h – can make a V sound (Siobhán, Niamh) or a W (abhaile, ramhar) sound. What should learners watch out for when pronouncing these letter combinations? Darach talks to Gearóidín and Peadar about it all in today’s episode. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the author of five YA novels and the presenter of HeadStuff’s Sweet Valley High podcast “Double Love”, Anna Carey knows a thing or two about teen drama. In this week’s episode, she joins Darach and Éimear to share her memories of being a cinnire (a camp counsellor at Irish college) during the 1990s. They discuss how mix tapes and graffiti were the ancestors of today’s social networking, the translation of pop song lyrics to Irish, narcs, céilís and slang as Gaeilge. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Language and music are strange bedfellows. A huge factor in our continental cousins’ proficiency in English comes from their consumption of English-language pop culture, especially pop music. However, while English speakers frequently enjoy music in other languages (Sigur Rós, Clannad, that Despacito song), the sung language can be taken merely as another instrument rather than as a piece of meaningful writing. This week Darach is joined by Fergal Moloney and MC Muipéad from critically acclaimed Irish language music collective IMLÉ. They chat about the creative process, lyrics, nicknames, crisps and much more. You can get IMLÉ’s album at https://gaellinn.bandcamp.com --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mayo mirthmaker Clare Cullen, better known as Clisare, is the Queen of Irish YouTube. With a staying power not typical in the viral age, she has been delighting her thousands of loyal followers since 2012 with videos such as Stuff Irish Girls Say, the Irish Bucket List and Irish vs. British makeup. She has also produced some cracking Irish language content and tells Darach and Clodagh all about it in this week’s episode. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most recent Irish words to enter common parlance is Aisling – a sensible girl from outside Dublin with an aversion to notions. While the origin of other words based on names are lost in the mists of time, we can trace this one to a popular Facebook group, Oh My God What A Complete Aisling. The creators of this group, Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen, have written a book of the same name and were kind enough to pop into HeadStuff to chat to Darach and Éimear about it. They also discuss hotel breakfasts, Christmas Mass, the Irish roots of the name Aisling and her hometown, Ballygobbard… and the positives of social media. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a ten episode absence, Louth Legend Siún Ní Dhuinn is back at her Motherfoclóir desk in HeadStuff studios. She tells Darach and Clodagh all about As An Nua (her bilingual feminist fashion blog) and Beo Ar Éigean – BAE for short – her fab RTÉ Irish language podcast. There’s laughs, chats, poetry and the occasional burn. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As former British colonies with lots of green on their flags, where St. Patrick is the patron saint and where Guinness is hugely popular, Nigeria and Ireland are countries with plenty in common. In this week’s episode, Ola Majekodunmi talks to Darach and Gearóidín about being a Gaeilgeoir of Nigerian heritage, her favourite words in Irish and Yoruba and much more. You can catch Ola’s show, Seinnliosta an tSathairn on Raidió Na Life every Saturday from 4-5pm. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s the spookiest night of the year, so what better time to share some eerie Irish words? Darach, Ola, Gearóidín and Peadar discuss the ancient roots of Samhain, the mysteries of brack and monkey nuts… and discuss regional traditions on this, the Motherfoclóir Spooky Halloween Special! If you’re listening with the smallies, be aware that there’s a few cuss words in today’s episode. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

National anthems – and the manner in which people observe them – are controversial (linguistically and politically) most of the time, but especially so in 2017\. Amhrán na bhFiann is the Irish National Anthem and the world’s best-known Irish language text, even though it was originally written in English. In this week’s episode, Darach chats with Peadar, Gearóidín and Ola about the history of this absolute banger and compare it to the anthems of other countries. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regular listeners will be acquainted with team Motherfoclóir member Gearóidín McEvoy by now – ex-translator, constitution buff, Lawyers for Choice volunteer, minority language rights champion, Scandi-phile, Laois woman. What you may not know is that Gearóidín is one of the thousands of Irish people with dyslexia. In this episode, she tells Darach all about dyslexia and Irish, school-life and how Irish was the first language that didn’t try to trick her. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Neal Ó Riain is the boy across the road who your Mam compares you to. He literally has a PhD in Astrophysics, a fine job in London and – of course – fluent Irish. However, Neal is sweeter than his native Carlow’s sugar refineries, and gave the world @antainbot (The best bot on Twitter) and Aireamhan, a coding language based on Irish. He tells Darach and Gearóidín all about it on today’s episode, and they chat about language issues in science too. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pop-Up Gaeltacht is PUG for short. The Irish for a pug is smutmhadra. The Irish for smut is salachar, which is an anagram of “ah rascal”. Darach goes down a wormhole with Peadar Ó Caomhánaigh, one half of the duo behind Pop-Up Gaeltacht. They discuss safe spaces, Gaeltacht bangers, getting the wear, euphonic phonemes and the global pug phenomenon. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The letter A (and her saucy sister, Á) are the subject of today’s episode, a pronunciation masterclass with Darach, Peadar, Éimear and Ola . We’ll be meeting cats, boats, cakes, bad weather, terrible puns and showing you where a fada makes all the difference. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Irish for Passport is pas, which can also mean an episode in time or a fit (of rage or madness, for example). This week Darach is joined by journalist Naomi O’Leary, who has written extensively about EU matters and co-presents “The Irish Passport” podcast. They chat about Ireland and Europe, the politics of language, national identity after Brexit and the joys of multilingualism. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The power of words touches all our lives, never more urgently than when those words form laws. In the first of an ongoing series, Darach talks to Eimear (Brehon Badass) and Gearóidín (Constitution Connoisseur) about how differently an area of law is treated in old and modern Ireland. Is it all progress? * * * Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Surnames, a relatively recent invention, are done differently from language to language. In Irish, conventions exist to include gender and marital status identifiers in female surnames, but choices are still available. Darach talks (but mostly listens) to Siún, Éimear and Gearóidín about how this quirk of the language and how it dovetails with attitudes to Irish names – and women’s names – in general. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The computers are coming after our jobs – are translators next? It’s a piece of technology straight out of science fiction – a website tool that translates text between any two of a range of languages (many of them less widely spoken than Irish). However, Google Translate is the bane of many Irish teachers’ lives. In this episode, Darach chats to Gearóidín, Peadar and Siún about the do’s and don’ts of using this feature. --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The People Vs. The Letter V The traditional Irish alphabet had 18 letters, but in the 20th century, there was a gradual thawing of attitudes to the other eight, such as V. However, a very vocal vanguard view V as a villainous visitor to the vernacular vocabulary. In this episode, Darach is joined by Gearóidín, Peadar and Siún and they discuss the controversial letter. It’s a tale of political intrigue (and quacking ducks). --- Contact the show at https://twitter.com/motherfocloir or email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Behind the wall of grammar homework lies the amazing world of the Irish language, and Darach (that @theirishfor guy) wants to take you there. With a crack team of the internet’s soundest Irish speakers, Darach will explore topics like differences between the Irish and English versions of the Constitution, silent letters, Gaeilge and technology, how new words get added to the dictionary and which old words have fallen out. It’s an all slammer, no grammar half hour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices