Julie Jay: It has never been easier to parent as Gaeilge than it is now

“Stop — I shouldn’t have asked you to help me,” he said ruefully. “I know too much now, and I’m supposed to be a beginner.”

This exchange tells you everything you need to know about my husband’s attitude to learning a language, because it’s all about confidence, which he has in spades, and faking it ’til you make it,.

Upon his return, my husband was almost sheepish when he said: “Do you think we could speak some Irish every day?” He said, almost shyly, “I’d love the kids to have it.”

It warmed my cockles, and, ever since, we have made a conscious effort to speak Irish to the children.

We speak a bit of Irish every day, some days more than others, depending on my confidence levels. I have no idea why, but when I am wearing fake tan, and my hair is looking good, I could spout the modh coinníollach for days, but if I am feeling thrown together and my eyeliner has gone awry, my capacity for parenting in my second language quickly dissipates.

For our eldest, the understanding of what I am saying to him in Irish is definitely there, and yet he rarely, if ever, answers back in full sentences, preferring to punctuate his English syntax with nouns as Gaeilge, like ‘gáirdín,’ ‘mála’ and the most important one of all — ‘seacláid’.

It hasn’t all been the sunshine and bogha báistí. We went through a brief, but terrible, period where my pronunciation was being corrected by our four-year-old, because, apparently, when saying ‘buidéal’, I was emphasising the first syllable, rather than the second. ‘Tomayto, tomahto,’ you might say, but emphasising the first syllable is a Connemara trait, and so my four-year-old correcting my delivery was perhaps less about him being didactic for the sake of it and more about saving me from social-pariah status in West Kerry.

It has never been easier to parent as Gaaeilge than it is now, and not just in the Gaeltacht. I do have friends who speak only Irish with their children, and quite a few of them are living in Dublin or other non-Irish speaking areas, and they are flying it.

For me, as for many parents, children are a bridge to the language, especially if your child is attending a Gaelscoil or, in our case, also attending an Irish-speaking childminder.

Picking my son up from the childminder’s house, I love hearing the little snippets as Number One regales me with tales of going ‘amach’, of eating his ‘dinnéar’, and, of course, the saucy stuff, where we get to have the goss about who was ‘dána’ that day. Bizarrely, it never seems to be him, so either I have raised the world’s first angel or, like all men who came before him, his perspective on personal histories is pretty revisionist.

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I have done numerous interviews as part of the Seachtain na Gaeilge campaign, for which I am an ambassador, and only in one did the interviewer express surprise that I was speaking English as well as Irish at home with my children.

The main reason is that my husband is more comfortable speaking English, and while I am no relationship expert, I do feel that constantly conversing in a language your partner can’t speak will only exacerbate underlying issues, of which our marriage has many (recent grief, conflicting work schedules, his love of rock band Counting Crows).

Talking to friends who’d love to speak more Irish to their children, many mention fears they will encounter militant personalities who will publicly correct their grammar and shame their lack of fluency should they attempt to parent as Gaeilge in public.

For me, these grammar gardaí are few and far between. Like anything, there will always be extremists when it comes to the Irish language, but they are very much the eisceacht, not the rule. That being said, I get their fear, because we have all encountered these types of Gaelgeoirí at some point.

After all, I used to know a guy who spoke of a dream Irish-language hospital where Irish-speaking patients (only) could seek medical care as Gaeilge. I never understood how that would work — would you be tested for your knowledge of irregular verbs before they passed you the defibrillator? Similarly, I wouldn’t want my surgeon dilly-dallying in removing my gallstone as he momentarily forgot the Irish for ‘scalpel’.

Thankfully, a new generation of Gaelscoil parents means it’s never been so easy to try your hand at the cúpla focail free from judgement.

However, there is one drawback to raising a generation of fluent Irish speakers, and it’s a big one.

Yesterday, the husband informed me he had ‘seacláid’ hidden in the ‘cuisneoir’ for us to scoff after the children were in bed.

‘Chocolate!’ Number One squealed in delight before raiding the fridge, because, sadly, it’s only a secret language if your child doesn’t speak it. Morse code, here we come.