On a dreadfully sunny day this summer I felt, out of the blue and all at once, the pangs of nostalgia for Ireland. I was at home in Rome, selling Capri postcards to some tourist who likely did not have Italy’s geography very clear. Under the heat of an Italian July, remembering my life in Ireland felt like a vivid dream.

Last May, on a dreadfully rainy day, I decided that perhaps six months had been a long enough time to be far from home. But then customers at my job in Rome’s city centre started asking for ‘wee bags’, thanking me with ‘cheers’ and showing up in full GAAs attires; one even mentioned she studied in UCD, and so – of course, as one does – I had to dash myself on a paean on the wonders of Trinity College. 

First, I texted my college friends like a clingy ex and went through my winter gallery twice. After that, all I had left to do was type out on Netflix’s (and then Prime Video’s, and then Disney+’s) search bar  ‘I R E L A N D’, and go through the amount of movie lists coming out. And that is how I watched Say Nothing and the Kneecap movie back to back. I even was – and still am – on the lookout for Father Ted. That is how bad nostalgia got.

Then I changed the media. Moving from movies to music, I decided to listen properly to Kneecap, and I showed – spammed – them to my Italian friends. 

The music is cool, they admitted. But do you even know what they are saying? The only barely understandable words are the English ones.

That is where I stopped in my tracks with a screeching halt. I realised that the whole time I had been enjoying Kneecap solely because I understood when they sang in English. That is the most hypocritical I can get – I thought, mentally palmfacing myself. 

No, I then realised the most hypocritical I ever got to be is preaching my affection towards Ireland and the Irish culture while actually only speaking in English on her soil. 

So I kept thinking over the summer, ‘Am I feeding the oppression I stand against by just existing in Ireland?’. Since I got here, I have been informing myself on the Irish cause and its history through readings. I have understood and I now support the importance of speaking Irish. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, I am taking an English Literature course taught in English on Irish soil. I love Ireland exactly because it is Irish. She welcomed me and I recognised a familiar pride and fierceness in her. But all this – moving to Trinity, discovering Ireland from within, feeling a sense of pride for her as a home – would not have happened if I didn’t speak English. I realised that not only am I split between two countries – but I am split between my ideals and the reality of my life as an immigrant in Ireland. Am I siding with a history of oppression? Just by the simple pursuit of making a living? One I wouldn’t have in my own country. But can I be so fond of Ireland and at the same time intoxicate it with my ability to only speak English? Is my fondness for Ireland actually poisoning her? 

I – as many other immigrants in Ireland – came here because this is a rising country. It is working well in regards to the civil rights movements, and it has a good job availability. In general, it feels safer than the countries we are from. We saw Ireland as a good place to start over – or start off. But we can only do this because, ultimately, Ireland is an English speaking country. If all of Ireland spoke Irish, our possibilities of integration would fall dramatically.

It does sound egotistical: I am sorry that the trajectory of my life is coinciding with the rising reinstitution of the Irish language, I will praise it from the sidelines while actually, for my own benefit, I will keep speaking in English, counteracting all of your struggles.

I do try to learn Irish words every chance I get. During first year, for example, I tried to read the counties’ names on car licence plates, being spelt in Irish. It was a little artful way to feel like I was less crashing the place and more trying to meet each other halfway. 

Problem is, I have not got much further than that. I can spell single words I already know the sound of because I have heard or read them repeatedly, like ‘​​fáilte’, or ‘siopa’, or ‘slán’. And do not ask me to say ‘go rabh maith agat’, because I will roll every single ‘r’ and it will sound like I stuffed my mouth with marshmallows. On the other hand, when Cillian Murphy thanked the Oscars Academy declaring ‘go rabh míle maith agat’, I got sent tons of reels of different length from my Italian friends asking me, ‘Is this Irish??’ ‘What does this mean? Translate!!’ or the better educated ones, ‘Is this thanks in Irish? Can you say it?’. And I was proud to reply yes, it is Irish, and I know what that means. 

They don’t have to know that that one is quite literally the only sentence – not even – that I can barely string together.

I save TikToks with Irish sayings, but I can’t spell them in my mouth. I understand if someone says, ‘Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste, na Béarla cliste’, and I will cheer to that. But I have no idea how to repeat what was just said. 

Of course, I am not self-centered enough to think that whether I learn Irish or not will drastically change the fate of the language. Nonetheless, it does change how I myself connect with the country I live in – in this case, Ireland. One thing that I have learnt in the course of my life is that language is political. Whether it is an idiom, a regional dialect, or slang, the language one chooses to express themselves in is an inevitable political stance; and us Italians know this well. 

Allow me a little eulogy to my home place – the original one, Campania, Naples’ region. Southern Italians have been called thieves, liars, lazy, and the dialect has been associated with being ignorant and vulgar. There is a newly rising appreciation of the Neapolitan dialect; this can be found, for example, in movies like Sorrentino’s The Hand of God and Parthenope.

So I know how saying little words in that dialect – the little that I have left from my grandmother or my aunts – are stances of pride against those who want to depict the South as poor and illiterate. 

My mother often told me, whenever I’d speak in Roman or in poor Neapolitan, to ‘speak properly in Italian’. But ‘proper Italian’ does not exist, historically speaking. There is no ‘President’s Italian’ like there is a ‘Queen’s English’; so, except for basic communicational reasons, I do not see the point in forcing myself to speak a language that is not, ultimately, the one that truly resonates with my identity – the place I was born, how my mother tells me to be careful, how my father scolds me. No Milanese person will be on the other side of the door eavesdropping on the conversations I have with my mother and will come out complaining that I said my ‘r’s too lightly or my ‘b’s too strongly. My mother tongue is the one that I speak with my mother, which is the one she spoke with her mother, and so on. The language I speak in is my business card.

This concept can be applied to speaking Irish on a much higher level. Irish, historically, is a language of resistance: it is a good bastion of anticolonialism, as it survived the suppression the British tried to impose on it. The politics of the language are in the very small things: saying ‘dia duit’ instead of ‘hello’ when walking in a shop, saying ‘sláinte’ when cheering, or ‘slan’ when leaving. This vindicates an identity, looks at a thousand years of oppression and sticks out its tongue saying, ‘you thought you got rid of me, didn’t you?’

The problem is, this is as much as I can do. After this, I will have to switch back to English to order my coffee in Caffè Nero – whose barista was actually probably Italian or Spanish anyway, so they didn’t even get what I said the first time. 

So my good thoughts and conscience start and end at the cash desk of a coffee shop. 

I am well aware that there are plenty of ways to learn Irish as an adult. I have often stared at the Student Union’s email on the Irish classes offered that peek in everybody’s Gmail inboxes every beginning of Michaelmas Term. Every time I think yes, this is the year I sign up for one. At the dawn of my third year, those classes still haven’t seen the shadow of me. DU Modern Languages also offers courses, but whoops, I saw the post just after subscriptions closed. But honestly, it only seems to me that I am excusing myself from the responsibility of history looming over me by saying that Irish is a difficult language to learn. 

I have often told myself that it is just because I still have to settle in. It is, after all, a new country, new people, new system, new everything. Well, I got my PPSN, officially changed my residence from Rome to merry old Dublin, ran through all of Parnell Street to reach – and then miss – the last Luas, cried in a bathroom stall of Terminal 1 of Dublin airport multiple times for multiple reasons, in September for leaving Italy and in May for leaving Ireland. What else do I have to tick off the list to actually declare to myself that I have ‘settled in’? Will I feel like an outsider until a county Kerry pub sage blesses me with the laurel of Irishness?

I come to think that I might have grown roots on this island, but I can’t speak her language, nor I could actually exercise it properly, because no one I know is Gaeilgeor. So how can I pretend to make Ireland my home, if I do not even speak her mother tongue? Are mine roots in Ireland’s soil, or infesting branches?

Even just writing this out in English is counterproductive. But if I was to write this in Italian, only a few of you would understand me; and I do not have the means to write this in Irish, nor I will develop them in the (maybe) only two years I have left at Trinity.

As a bilingual Literature student, connecting through language is the one most important thing – a sort of Roman Empire. Therefore, my ignorance of the Irish language creates a veil between me and Ireland. Ireland is there, green and welcoming, like a heartwarming movie. But the sound is mute and I cannot break the screen. No matter how many times I have corrected my father’s ‘Londonderry’ with ‘Derry’ and my mother’s ‘Gaelic’ with ‘Irish’, or that I wear the 1990 Ireland football team jersey. My limited language skills fuel the colonialist use of the English language on Irish soil, dividing me from her and making me question my own priorities and ideals.