Benny interviewed in Irish

here - interesting for me to try to match up the audio with the English subtitles.

The only Irish textbook I have to hand is Teach Yourself Irish by Myles Dillon and Donncha Ó Cróinín, 1992 reprint of 1961 edition.  The exercises fully support Benny's contention that although Irish is certainly not a dead language, it can often be taught as though it were one.  A pall of hard-working gloom hangs over far too many of the sentences.  "We had six barrels of herring to bring home".  "Four sevens are twenty-eight, two shillings and fourpence".  "We shall all die, but we do not know when or where".  "It is a great pity that she is so tall".  Ireland comes across as a land of turf, death and rain.  Of course, with vocabulary you have to start somewhere, and it's depressing to come across language primers that try too hard to be trendy and yoof-oriented, but it's a good job that it's possible to tune into stations like Raidió na Life and hear something that sounds encouragingly like real life, like fun, but in the target language.

The issue of school language courses that take you, over a period of several years, pretty much nowhere towards fluency or even bare usefulness, is something else that I'll address another day.