Irish as symptom: the short films of Daniel O'Hara

Abstract

Within popular culture and academic scholarship alike, a standard narrative exists about the rightful (non-)place of the Irish language in post/colonial society. It is a tautological narrative because the apparent unfitness of Irish for the exigencies of postmodern life both explains its disappearance and prevents its full revival (i.e. Irish is outmoded because it is outmoded). That Irish requires costly government expenditures to stabilise it only confirms its inherent infirmity. (I want to be clear from the outset that I do not begrudge the efforts of the state to revitalise the Gaeltachts. Quite the opposite. However, I am interested in the ideological genealogies of such efforts.) Yet the ‘problem’ of indigenous language is not so neatly resolved, especially as it threatens to erupt, symptom-like, in unexpected (i.e. anglophone) contexts. The usual post/colonial paradigms cannot fully account for the disjunctive position of Irish. Critical Lacanian theory, on the other hand, offers a way to think the striking disconnect between the constitutional fact of Irish as the ‘first official language’, and the reality that almost no one speaks it. Lacan called this type of disconnect a symptom. ‘Symptomal torsions’ are everywhere evident in the Republic: from bilingual road signs to the near total displacement of the language onto reluctant schoolchildren. Such measures guarantee that Irish will not be spoken in the more unruly space of the streets. The containment of Irish alongside its official valorisation makes certain that it (and the associated ‘barbarism’ of the pre-colonial past) cannot return in unforeseen ways. Yet return it does; the short films analysed here – Daniel O'Hara's Yu Ming is Ainm Dom [My Name is Yu Ming] and Fluent Dysphasia – satirise this return of the linguistic repressed in contemporary Dublin.

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