ABSTRACT
My wife and I were on vacation in Ireland, and stayed for a night in Carna, a fishing village in Connemara. Noticeably many young people were milling about on the village roads, but mostly, we found out, they were not locals. Carna is in one of those remote areas of western Ireland where Irish children come during the summer to live with Gaelic-speaking families, and thus improve their usually very limited knowledge of Gaelic. But the Gaelic language would probably soon be gone in Carna as well, the hostess of our bed-and-breakfast place told us. Hardly anybody now grew up to speak it fluently. As for herself, that morning she was on her way to Galway town, where her family would hold a reunion. She hoped, but was not sure, that a brother of hers, who had had a career of singing in music pubs in New York, would come flying home for the event. Her own adult life had mostly been in London, it turned out, and there were times when she missed the bright lights. Returning to rural Ireland, she said, “was a real culture shock, you know.”
