Local Faces: Daithí de Buitléir
It is not uncommon when going through the education system to hear your peers question the need to learn Irish.
It is also not uncommon when you’ve left school to hear your peers frustrated with not applying themselves in school to develop that level of fluency.
Formal learning is not for everyone.
Irish is listed as the official language of Ireland. It gives us a sense of place.
We are unique, we have our very own language and the value of that cannot go amiss.
But the reality is that Irish-tongue is in decline and must be considered as an endangered language, at least according to a study using data from UNESCO’s Atlas of World Languages in Danger.
However, there is a pocket where language revival can be witnessed in real time – Lucan.
“I think what we’re doing is, we’re kind of redefining that urban experience slightly,” says Daithí de Buitléir, founding chairperson of Na Gaeil Óga GAA Club.
Lucan has seen rapid population growth over the past 30 years and continues to expand to this day, with residential developments popping up all around the town.
Daithí de Buitléir, founding chairperson of Na Gaeil Óga GAA Club
There are several schools where classes are formally thought through Irish.
In two of those schools, Gaelscoil Naomh Pádraig and Gael Eiscir Riada, Na Gaeil Óga help introduce pupils to gaelic games and then take them out on to the field for extra-curricular activities at St Catherine’s Park.
“What we’re giving the kids is we’re rooting them in a sense of place thats linked to language,” De Buitléir, who now plays, coaches and helps with admin for the GAA club, tells The Echo.
“The difference between the kids playing with us and the kids playing with English-speaking clubs in the other suburbs is that the kids playing with us are building a life-long association with the Irish language.
“That’s inextricably linked to Lucan, living in Lucan, being part of the community that’s based in Lucan.
“For us, what we feel like that’s doing, is making Lucan a much more attractive place to move to and live in.
“I know for my own family, the reason we bought a house in Lucan is that we want our family to grow up in a community where the Irish-language is very visible and where the language we speak at home is the language they can speak in the community.
“From a linguistic perspective, people are always talking about if the Irish language will ever be revived.
“But what we have here is language revival in action. What has happened here in Lucan over the last 10 years is incredible.
Daithí de Buitléir
“We’ve gone from having a community where there was a relatively large pool of people who could speak Irish but very few who were on a daily basis outside of the education system, to a community now where every day of the week there is 600-800 people using Irish as a community language.
“That is something in the history of the state that has never happened and that is what language revival looks like.
“We’re privileged in Lucan at the moment to be living in the epicentre of that and see what a comeback for the Irish-language as a community language looks like.
“That is a really powerful thing, and a really rewarding thing.
“Parents can see that transition but the kids, they’re growing up not knowing any different.
“They’re just growing up in a place in Dublin where it is natural to go and speak Irish on the streets, at home and in a local sports club.
“For me, that is a wonderful thing.”
Daithí bought a house in Lucan with his wife Caitríona 18-months-ago and have since welcomed their first child into the world.
Originally from Kilkenny, Daithí grew up in a family of three children to parents Vincent and Mary Butler. His mother Mary, is originally from Crumlin.
Daithí de Buitléir
Daithí grew up hurling with James Stephens GAA, home club to the likes of Brian Cody, Liam ‘Chunky’ O’Brien and the popular Larkin hurling family.
It was when Daithí came to Dublin to study Business in Dublin City University (DCU) that he felt like something was off with GAA culture in the capital.
“In late 2010, I was 20 and in college, in DCU,” Daithí explains.
“Growing up in Kilkenny, the GAA and in particular hurling is going to play a massive role in your life.
“Another important cog for me in my life was the Irish language.
“I suppose I came to Dublin and I just felt that both were missing in certain ways. From a language perspective, I think that’s something that everybody has.
“For a lot of people, there’s a narrative in school that you’re the future of the language and that’s growing, and strengthening all the time.
“The brass tax is when you finish school, there’s no real need to speak it.
“From a GAA perspective, I think for a lot of people when they come to Dublin, although it is strong in certain areas, the way it manifests itself is very different.
“This notion of walking into a club 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 members where nobody really knows each other, and I know they’re trying their best, but ultimately it is very hard to avoid just being a number on a spreadsheet in a soulless vacuum.
“That just wasn’t the GAA that I had fallen in love with.”
In the GAA constitution, there is a rule which states that a player must play for a GAA club in the parish where they live.
But over the years, as urban sprawl increases, GAA clubs are casting a wider net.
“If you look at clubs in Dublin, there’s a bit of a race to the bottom there as a lot of clubs are looking to gobble up more and more suburbs,” Daithí expands.
“You look at clubs now and it’s ‘serving w, x, y and z’ parishes. Every couple of years it seems to be another area added on to the end of the spiel as they’re looking to bring in more, and more people.
“I don’t understand what that is trying to achieve. I would have grown up in an urban club myself. There’s a massive challenge there when as any sporting club, if your not centred on an identity of place or language or something like that.
“What is it that differentiates you from other clubs? In essence it’s how full your trophy cabinet is from one year to the next, but that’s a lonely journey to go on.
“How is that cultivating in young people the skills they need to achieve if it’s ‘we’re better than the lads down the road’? That’s not what it’s about.
“I felt that there was something missing in the GAA in Dublin and I had a group of friends that I met through college.
“We were fascinated by this idea that we love the language but there was nowhere to speak it.
“We just had this idea of what if our identity was forged along linguistic grounds and what if we created a GAA club for people who wanted to speak and play through Irish.
“We felt that would be something that would be really strong, bind us, give us that ethos and give us that glue that so many of the strong clubs around the country have.”
So they did exactly that, and started Na Gaeil Óga GAA Club in 2010.
It snowballed very quickly, rapidly expanding through laying the foundations of a traditional GAA club, building juvenile structures to go along with the adult section – thus formulating a sustainable model.
What started off as just the one adult football team has grown into a hub of activities through the Irish-language that is bubbling with life and boasting 600 members – 400 of which are juveniles.
Based out of St Catherine’s Park, the juvenile section train on the one pitch while the adult section still play in Phoenix Park.
Some 60-70 percent of the players at adult level had a basic understanding of the Irish language, struggling to string a sentence together, when they first arrived up.
Meanwhile, there is also people playing with the club who come from different countries all over the world that would have had no understanding of Irish, let alone English, when they first arrived up the club.
Na Gaeil Óga allows people to come up and fully immerse themselves in the practical-use of the language on and off the pitch and it works every time, they pick Irish up very quickly.
“We’re so atypical. The GAA is so dependent on parents to drive on teams. But we run a GAA club through a language that 90 percent of the parents aren’t fluent in the first day they rock down.
“For us, a massive thing is that we run loads of different schemes and initiatives for parents who want to immerse themselves in that language too.”
Off the pitch, the club provides Irish-classes, walking groups for Irish language learners, GAA for Ma’s and Da’s that is focused around learning the language on the field, and several other interactive initiatives to help people brush up on their fluency.
Na Gaeil Óga is not simply just a GAA club. It’s a thriving community with an Irish-language culture.
“You’ve all these parents that are going learning the language, and then they’re going and training teams,” Daithí exclaims.
“They’re the real heroes in this story. It is easy for me to go to a field on a Wednesday night and train a team in a language I’m fluent in.
“But this story wouldn’t be going anywhere without the 60-80 parents, many of whom have returned to learning the language only in the last two/three-years.
“They’d literally be sat in the car learning how to explain drills and then going out, delivering them to the kids.
“That’s magic. We’re a group of people who love speaking Irish, but there’s a whole range of levels of people there.
“For anybody who is passionate about driving on their level of Irish, and really looking to build something that’s magical from a language revival perspective but also do something that’s really enjoyable from a sporting perspective – they’re the people we’re finding a home for.
“They’re the sort of people that we are finding more and more, and it is brilliant to see. They’re the heroes.”
