Speaking Gaelic being revived on Long Island

With a group of more than a dozen new students before him, their eyes eager and their pens suspended just above their spiral notebooks, Charles Gee breaks out the index cards.

Initially, there are sparks of recognition and relief as the students see the marker-scribed letters on the cards: A, E, I. But as Gee glides through the pronunciation of the letters and their relatives -- the same letters but with an accent overhead called a "fada" -- the students' faces morph into pictures of confusion and worry.

"A is pronounced 'ah,' " he tells them. "But Á is pronounced 'awe.' " By the time he writes out na ainmneacha -- in English, the names -- on a dry-erase board, there are long breathy exhales and murmurs around the room. Gee senses the concern. "It's like throwing mud against the wall," he tries to reassure them. "Most of it will stick and you'll be surprised at what you'll know."

In this case, the mud is the Irish language, commonly referred to as Gaelic.

Every Thursday, Gee and a half-dozen others volunteer to teach the language in makeshift classrooms inside the hall of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians in Babylon. The Gerry Tobin Irish Language School, the only Irish school in the area, is a free, nondenominational school committed to keeping the Irish language alive.

In Ireland, there has been a resurgence of interest in the language, particularly among the younger generations, said Thomas Ihde, associate professor of Irish at Lehman College in the Bronx. The revival has reached the United States, where the pursuit of the language remains strong, he said, and many families are choosing to raise their children using Irish.

Until the past 20 years, Ihde said, anyone wanting to learn the language would have to make a trip to "a bookshop in New York City and buy a magazine that came with a cassette, and they were hoping to hear the language and piece together materials and wait for months to get things from Ireland."

But now, he said, there is an Irish television station, five Irish-language radio stations and weekly newspapers, all of which can be accessed online, along with classes. You can even set your Facebook page to Irish.

The evening at the Tobin school begins with a Mommy, Daddy & Me class for youngsters 4 to 16 years old and their parents at 7:15 p.m. At 8 p.m. a class for adult beginners starts, with lessons in conversation, grammar and advanced workshops running until after 10. Pat Clifford, 63, of Lindenhurst teaches an advanced class.

"With the European Union, there's very little left of your heritage," said Clifford, who is from Ireland."The currency is gone, the borders are gone. The only thing that's left is your music and your language, and there's very little of that left."

Birth of a school
The school's roots go back to Gerald Tobin, who came to the United States from Limerick in the 1940s, said one of the school's founders, Raymond Clarke, 81, of Northport. Tobin taught Irish classes in private homes. Then he started teaching at the hall and invited Clarke to join him.

When Tobin died in 1988, his friends gathered in his honor. "We looked at each other and said, 'What do we do next?' " Clarke said. They decided to carry on what Tobin had started but to take it further. Instead of Irish classes, they would form a school, he said.

Enrollment fluctuates, but the school has several dozen students, Clifford said.

Native speakers also join in, wanting to brush up on their skills. One student moved to Florida but participates via speakerphone.

"Everyone who comes here has a good time," said instructor Jim Norton, 51, of West Babylon. "It creates this whole community of people who can come together and just enjoy this language."

Learning the Irish language, which does not carry the common familiarities to English that many Romance languages have, can be intimidating. Traditionally, the Irish alphabet consists of 18 letters, and the words can appear unusually long with complex pronunciations, students said.

At the Babylon school, the beginner students are nervous on their first night.

When Gee asks at the end of class if there are any questions, he's met with silence and wide eyes. "What a bright group!" he says smiling.

"We're not smart, we're just numb," cracks one student.

While red hair, freckles and shamrock-adorned sweaters can be found in some of the classes, it's not only those with Irish heritage who have enrolled -- and their reasons are as diverse as the group itself:

Ruth Moorhead Davis, 70, of Babylon thinks learning Irish will help her ancestry search in Ireland. "I want to do some family research, and I've gone as far as I can go on this side of the pond," she said.

"It'll be a fun cocktail thing to whip out at parties," said Marisol Brady, 20, of Lindenhurst, who also speaks Spanish.

Brady's mom, Rocio, 53, who emigrated from Mexico City 20 years ago, is learning alongside her daughter. "This is harder than English," she said with a laugh.

Others want their travels to remote parts of Ireland unfettered by a language barrier. "I want to go really, really badly," said the red-haired Jessie McHugh, 15, of Lindenhurst. "If I know the language, at least I can blend in and look like a local." Her mother, Fran, 48, said the trip may come in the form of a graduation present in a few years. Fran, who is of Italian ancestry, also is enrolled.

Young learners
In the room next door to the beginners, instructor Peigí Breathnach Murano, 45, is running in place and using comical animal voices as she acts out a scene from the children's' book "Frog sa Spéir" or "Frog in the Sky." A half-dozen youngsters call out responses in Irish. Siné! -- "that's it" in English -- they all say in unison as she closes the book.

Lawrence McCourt, 40, of Ronkonkoma, sits at the table with daughter Caitlyn, 6, in his lap and son Lawrence, 8, next to him. "I thought it'd be nice for them to learn more of their heritage," he said.

This is their fifth year in the class, he said, and they know how to count to 10, as well as words for colors and body parts and are now starting to learn verbs. McCourt said he's been learning as well. "As they get older I hope I can take it with them," he said.

"It's not like being back in Ireland, but you do what you can," said Cheryl Holohan, 44, whose son Mairtín, 8, has been taking the class for four years. Holohan, who is from the West Indies, splits her time between West Islip and Ireland, where her husband lives. She takes notes as her son participates in class. "I'm learning," she said with hesitancy. "But it's not easy!"

Breathnach Murano, 45, of Deer Park, has created Irish board games and videos to keep the attention of her students, who can range from preschoolers to teens. She tries to speak Irish as much as she can to them, even though she herself is still learning the language. She became interested in Irish after a trip to Ireland in 1997 with her church.

"I couldn't read any of the signs, so out of curiosity, I started to look into it," she said. "I didn't even think there was such a thing as an Irish language!"

She started attending the classes seven years ago. "I was hooked by curiosity but I love history and the language of a people encapsulates the soul of a people, so anything I can do to help the Renaissance of this language, I'm on board," she said.

Later in the night, some advance students sit with some of the teachers to read from an Irish magazine published by Norton. As they take turns, Ed Seewald, 50, of Ozone Park, stumbles on some of the pronunciations.

Seewald had wanted to take Irish in high school but his guidance counselor laughed, telling him Irish was a dead language.

"If I had only learned this when I was 17, I'd be a native speaker at this point," he said. "It's not easy to pick up some of this stuff now."

Ihde said interest in learning the language remains strong, and each semester about 60 students enroll in Irish classes at Lehman. He said many college programs are funded through the Irish government.

"Irish is actually in a very good situation compared to the vast majority of languages, because right now it has a government behind it," he said. "There's just a lot of funding behind it that, say, the Navajo language does not have."

It's commonly said that a language dies every day, Ihde said.

"The Irish language is obviously a language that is going to be affected by international languages like English, but it's a long way from dying. It's not going to die in my lifetime or yours."