I’m not a fluent Irish speaker. I didn’t learn Irish very well in school either. Any Irish I do have came from the fact that I was friends with Irish speakers, and joined a youth theatre group at An Taibhdhearc, the National Irish Language Theatre of Ireland, based here in Galway. Thus I will apologise if the lyrics of this little song are examples of terrible Irish. :)
It is one of two songs that I have written that have Irish language lyrics – the other one just has one section of the song in Irish, and the rest of it is in English. Interestingly, I never set out to “write a song in Irish”, it just seemed to happen both times.
This one was written when I was working as a barman in Club Áras na nGael (the Irish language bar here in Galway) and obviously being surrounded by Irish on a daily basis had some kind of an impact. It is one of the things I love most about Galway – it’s the only city I’ve been in in Ireland where I’ve heard people casually using Irish in day-to-day situations, e.g. queuing for the banklink, or sitting at a table in a café, or talking to their kids walking down the street. As much as the language can appear to be integrated in a tokenistic manner in some parts of the country, here it doesn’t feel like that at all. It really does feel like it is a part of the city – a small part, sure, but a definite one.
It’s only a wee little song, and I never finished off the lyrics or really figured out in my head where it’s going, but I demo’d it again there in the last few weeks to get it on record so I could sit with it and really hear what I want to do to the song. So, I guess it’s a work in progress at the moment and we’ll see what happens with it.
In terms of writing it – the melody came first, and the words kinda slotted into place at one point when I was playing it at the piano. The song was written at the same time as Maria, and both started life as piano instrumentals. I may yet record instrumental versions of both songs, as I’ve half a notion to release a little record of just piano instrumentals.
