Motherfoclóir

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 lit...

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 motherfocloir@headstuff.org 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 Gear...

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 c...

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 a...

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 w...

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...

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...

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...

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/...

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...

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 A...

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...

"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...

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...

"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 retrofi...

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:...

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 debauc...

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 n...

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 Rud...

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 i...

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, dis...

"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 o...

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 motherfocloir@headstuff.org...

"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, Dara...

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 s...