Coming Home: One Man’s Return to the Irish Language

One man’s quest to learn the national language

Everyone learns it but no one can speak it; everyone dislikes it but secretly wants to master it. Just a few generations ago Irish was the language of love-making, of putting your kids to bed, of grief and sorrow, of farming and fighting. Nowadays Irish people spend fourteen years learning the language yet struggle to put two words together. Is it the language or is it us?

Like most people, Michael McCaughan studied Irish at school and spent a summer in the Gaeltacht, but he didn’t progress beyond a cúpla focal. Decades later, about to turn fifty, a sudden and unexpected mid-life crisis drove him back to An Ghaeilge once more, this time with a determination to learn the language on his own terms.

Coming Home captures his highly personal and entertaining journey, McCaughan charts his path back to loving his native language and along the way explores our love-hate relationship with it. He finds himself bewildered by the native speakers of the West coast, sits alongside nationalists and loyalists in a Belfast classroom, and meets the pioneers, novices and eccentrics working to deliver one simple message:

Whether you work at home or are locked inside an office all week, minding kids or hiking in the hills, whether you live in Colombia or Kiltimagh, if you are eighteen or eighty eight, is féidir leat – Yes, you can.

Coming Home will be published by Gill Books on Friday, 17 March 2017.

About the author

Michael McCaughan is an Irish author and journalist best known for his work in Latin America. He has written extensively for the Irish Times, the Guardian, Hot Press, Village Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of three works of non-fiction, True Crimes (2002), The Battle of Venezuela (2005) and The Price of Our Souls (2008). He lives in Tubber, Co. Clare.