Once a month, a Sunday-afternoon pop-up Gaeltacht in Skerries

It was just after 2.30pm when singer and flautist Dónal Kearney arrived at Joe May’s pub on Harbour Road in Skerries.

He wandered through the bar, fixing posters to walls and doors, advertising the latest Folk Club, a local singing session held on the last Sunday of each month.

The club was celebrating its third anniversary, and he had been reflecting on this by doing some maths, he said.

“We’d thought about each session lasting two hours, and we’ve done 26, and we’ve collaborated with a few festivals, and yeah, we calculated we’d done roughly 1,008 songs,” he says.

Nothing major is planned for the anniversary, he says.  “We’re just keeping it simple.”

But there has been one recent evolution in the session, a change which was printed on a second poster he put up beside the usual one advertising the singing circle.

There would be a pop-up Gaeltacht, a social meet-up to come chat as Gaeilge, in the hour before the singing, it said.

The inaugural Skerries Gaeltacht took place in late February, in the lead-up to Seachtain na Gaeilge, the annual Irish language festival, Kearney says. “We had about 14, 15 people drop by.”

Everyone will be here anyway

In a way, the idea for the pop-up Gaeltacht grew from the Skerries Folk Club.

Eithne O’Connell began to drop into the Folk Club in July 2023.

She had been going to singing sessions and festivals for years, says O’Connell, who is a senior lecturer in Dublin City University’s School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies.

“But I’d go as a listener,” she says.

The first time she actually sang in public was at one of Kearney’s sessions on the first floor in Joe May’s, she said. “I had sweaty palms afterwards. I rattled through it.”

A Gaeilgeoir, she had studied Irish in school and later immersed herself in the language when, in her 30s, she lived for six months on the Aran Islands, she says.

“Then I worked in Connemara for six months, and did an evening degree in Irish,” she says.

She had got into it properly as an adult, she says. “So I had a lot of sympathy for adults who wanted to improve their Irish.”

After she moved to Skerries in 2020, O’Connell and Kearney became friends. His desire to improve his Irish sowed the seeds for the idea, she said. “He had this interest, and he would say it to me whenever he heard me speaking it.”

He wanted to know if there were any groups or circles, she said, and there had been a couple, she said. “But some of them have fallen away, or been in abeyance.”

They were either on a workday morning or a Friday evening in a pub, neither of which was good for practising or bringing in a mix of people, she said.

“So we just thought, why not do one in the hour, or half hour before the circle? We’re all coming here anyway,” O’Connell said.

Lost and Found

It’s hard to know what to expect, Kearney said, as he set up a few chairs around the room before the second pop-up Gaeltacht was due to begin at 3pm.

“We had a 15-year-old there with her dad, some older people, a real mix, and conversations just started to break out,” he said.

Slowly, people climbed the stairs and stepped inside.

A shy young girl in her early teens with her grandmother, who admitted it had been a while since she had spoken Irish, and accidentally dropped a couple of German words, a language she’d been more proficient at in school, she said.

“Neirbhíseach,” she said, with a laugh.

Two young men, Adam and Pacair Hutton, members of the folk group The Gladstone Band, arrived, speaking entirely in Irish.

Then, another young man, from San Diego, and two women from Ukraine.

Five became eleven. Eleven became 18.

Everyone introduced themselves one-by-one, some in broken sentences, others confident, and a few fluent, with the chat moving from music, to school and to the redevelopment of the Irish Language Centre on Harcourt Street.

Over a quarter of an hour, the conversation shifted from one involving the whole room to a few breakaways, and back again, culminating in 15 minutes of everyone chattering carefree in both Irish and English.

“We’re still trying to perfect it, so we’re interested in any event for practising and improving it,” said Anne McGough, who came with her husband Conrad.

The couple had set that as a goal when they retired, she says.

But “there aren’t enough opportunities to practise, so the idea here is good, just to provide a forum”, said McGough.

The range of abilities is nice, she says. “You can come, feel your way through the language, and use it a little or a lot.”

McGough had really enjoyed Irish in school, she says. “But in work, there wasn’t a need for it, and life was busy so I neglected it for a long time.”

One of the joys is remembering and rediscovering words and phrases that she thought she’d forgotten years ago but turned out just to be in storage, she says. “You think it’s lost. But it’s not. It’s there.”

As 4pm came around, Kearney spoke up, saying that the Folk Club’s third-anniversary gathering would start now.

“This is a new one by an up-and-coming songwriter,” he said, and strumming his guitar, he started to sing a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”.

As the chorus came around, the whole room joined in.