Turscar, Prátaí, Páistí
A Storm at Sea by JMW Turner, 1800s, Minneapolis Institute of Art/Public Domain
In Irish, my last name means dark-haired, black-haired, or dark sword. Ó Duibhgeannáin. That my hair is naturally dark is a testament to this language lost to me – I’m an ocean apart from my ancestors, but my body still knows where I come from.
My nana used to speak nonsense phrases, or so she said. Dúin an doras! Dùin an fhuinneog! Póg mo thóin!
I’d beg her to explain them to me, to lay them out flat, rolling them like dough into my memory. ‘I’m ancient,’ she’d respond. ‘These aren’t important. Just shut the door, shut the window, kiss my ass!’
She would never teach me more than those three phrases before she passed, deeming them worthless in the Canadian context. Yet I cupped them like candies, precious gems, and dried flower petals. This was our language. What we spoke and how we saw the world before famines, wars, and Christianity cracked away at our stories.
My nana would have been a child when the British came into the schools and eradicated the Irish language. Tally sticks and beatings and fear work well, galvanised by language bans and the forced dispossessions of arable lands. In tandem, the introduction of the Penal Laws to Ireland in 1737 and the widespread dislocation of the Gaeltacht people from the east coast to the rocky and challenging lands of the west helped to push the language out of my ancestors’ mouths. One such law, forbidding the use of Irish in courts, was only repealed in February 2025. How much can be lost in nearly 300 years?
The removal of language is a powerful disconnector. Language links to land, place, time, and a sense of self. How a language is structured can tell you how a people place themselves in relation to the natural world – or how they commodify and extract it for wealth and profit.
The former president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, described the recent revitalisation of the Irish language as a full and sensorial experience. It means that young people in Ireland can ‘take the complex new stuff that’s happening around them and see it through the prism of the Irish language’. To make it sensual, to encourage feeling as it unfurls in myriad directions, is decolonial too – the full freedoms of the earlier Irish Gaeltacht voice, before Catholicism bluntly shuttered its more robust expressions.
As I’m only two generations removed from the motherland, I’m eligible for citizenship through my lineage. In many ways, I see this as a reckoning, a deliberation. Despite a large family, our last name could have easily ended with me, for reasons tragic and familiar. I could reconnect through administration, language, and passing of names. Or I could separate entirely, succumb to the tides of settler colonialism, and patriarchy. Adopt names that aren’t my own, that don’t speak to our family tradition of being the keepers of history through the Annals of the Four Masters. The Duignans were a people known for strong ties to the land through farming and storytelling.
The relationship between land, language, and food resonates beyond these written histories. Potatoes, a food not native to Ireland, but intertwined in its history, were introduced through the Irish triad of ‘Turscar, Prátaí, Páistí’. This translates to cast-up seaweed, potatoes, and children. While superficially odd, they braid together weather (storms and wrack), agriculture, and population growth as essential to life in coastal Ireland.
As Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dónall Ó Braonáin detail in Irish Food History: A Companion, the potato’s introduction to the hungry nation directly coincided with a dramatic burst in population growth between 1590 and the 1840s. The potato offered nutrition, and some argue that this bolstered their health and stature against the social and economic challenges throughout the Great Famine. Seaweed was relinquished by the sea in late April to early May, used as both food and fertiliser, useful to enrich the growth of potatoes, which became essential to feed ever-expanding families. A triadic expression of the promise of a season.
While my nana convinced me of Irish being without value in a modern global economy, its revitalisation emphasises the cultural, spiritual, and health-related importance of conjuring a traditional language through which to see the world. Words to fight against the doldrums of modern capitalism, words with which to envision new futures.
I struggle in my Irish lessons, a possibility made reality only thanks to the digital age. Yet learning what was stolen from my grandparents renews my hope that we can persist and fight for cultural continuity. Learning your language helps you place your tongue in time with your ancestors. It connects you to a place you’ve lost, a people you miss. I worry about remembering these new words.
One week, I’m taught about the origins of scéal, meaning story. Scéal comes from proto-Celtic and proto-Indo-European verbs that mean ‘to say’. Long after I’ve forgotten this lesson, I watch Guy Ritchie’s Mobland, absorbed by the drama of Pierce Brosnan’s Kerry accent and the outrage it draws. A character greets Brosnan, saying, ‘Aon scéal, mo chara?’ (‘What’s the story, my friend?’)
Without a single thought, I understood. Like a wave hitting the coast; in and out, in and out. The language came to me, just as I was told it would, like my jaw had been waiting for the opportunity to release what’s been buried. There is a swelling of tears in my chest, a release of salt water as my mouth adjusts to new uses. I worried I’d trip over the letters, the sounds, the structures, but they feel right, as though they’ve been sitting there waiting for me this whole time.