He was always one of the most fluent writers of Irish there is, and if you want to learn good writing style in Irish, you could hardly pick up a better teacher. He was one of the most renowned writers to describe the Irish exodus to England after the Second World War in any language, and although Kilkenny was his home, he learnt his Irish from the people of Connemara and wrote the language as well as the best native speaker ever. His name was Dónall Mac Amhlaigh.
Dialann Deoraí (A Migrant's Diary) was the writer's first book, published in the beginning of the 1960s, and as Alan Titley – who wrote a comprehensive book about novels in the Irish language – put it, it is a ‘lomchuntas’, a bare-boned account, of the life Irish workers had in the 1950s looking for work in England.
If you are learning Irish but stuck for the right words to describe concrete building site kind of work, you will pick up a lot of things you need by studying that particular bare-boned account. Additionally, though, Mac Amhlaigh's book is an interesting description of the social life Irish workers had in their dance-halls and pubs, and of how they got acquainted with people from other countries. Nobody had yet coined that big word ‘multiculturalism’, but the thing itself was richly present in England, and Irish workers were very much part of it.
Although an Irish nationalist and a staunch Catholic, Dónall Mac Amhlaigh was not a narrow-minded man. There is no racism at all in Dialann Deoraí. Quite the opposite: he sees Africans, Jamaicans and black Americans as equal human beings, and the fact that these people generally have a welcoming attitude towards Irish people makes him happy and satisfied, of course.
Here it is actually easy to recognize that there is a certain tradition of Third World solidarity in Irish nationalism, a tradition of solidarity with the peoples of other countries once oppressed by the British Empire. When Dónall was writing his book, this tradition was still alive and kicking in Ireland's foreign policy, with the old Republican Frank Aiken in charge as Foreign Minister.
Regrettably, it seems that Dónall Mac Amhlaigh's adventures aren't read about, not even in schools. The copy of Dialann Deoraí I recently bought, my first one being in tatters after so much rereading, was old warehouse stuff from the 1970s. I know how difficult it is to promote a culture of Irish-language reading, and how often the best books are left mildewing without readers. I find it singularly difficult to put up with such indifference towards a writer such as Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, whose books are both easy to read and quite relevant in today's Ireland as they were in yesterday's.
Panu Petteri Höglund is a translator and linguist who studied German, Polish, and Russian at Åbo Akademi University in Finland.
