ABSTRACT
Since the mobilization of Irish by the Gaelic League at the turn of the twentieth century, the language has functioned as a barometer of constructions of national identity. Since the mid-1980s, economic prosperity and its consequences have transformed the ways in which national identity is conceived of, with bewildering speed. The Irish language has adapted with remarkable facility to the impact of globalization, refashioning itself in terms of youth, dynamism, and cultural inclusiveness, qualities that are much in evidence in the short, Irish-language films produced under the Oscailt and Lasair schemes funded by TG4 and Bórd Scannán na hÉireann. I use the term breac-scannáin (speckled films) to describe the hybrid nature of these films. In The Speckled People, the title of his acclaimed memoir of an Irish-speaking childhood in Dublin, Hugo Hamilton (2004) adapts the term breac-Ghaeltacht (“speckled” Gaeltacht, i.e., an area inhabited by Irish and English speakers) to describe the experience of speaking Irish in an Anglophone environment. Similarly, the Oscailt and Lasair films represent small pockets of Irish within overwhelmingly English-language media. They are also “speckled” in the sense of combining the Irish language (formed by Gaelic culture) with Anglo-American film language. This essay will explore the relationship between the Irish language and film language, focusing on Oscailt and Lasair films, and in particular on the ramifications of combining the Irish language with the forms and audiovisual language of anglophone media.
