Word: gaelics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They are, in fact, the adorable inheritors of a threatened Irish subculture, that of the Travellers, or Celtic Gypsies. It is their grandfather, who continues to follow the old, threatened ways, who brings the animal he calls ! Tir na nOg (Land of Eternal Youth in Gaelic) to them in the unhappy Dublin housing project where they live with their father (Gabriel Byrne), who abandoned his free-roving heritage after his wife's death...
...empire. Artists know that ancestral tongues or patois, even when they survive, could not reach a wide audience, while English puts them on a world stage. When John Millington Synge wanted to portray hatred of England's dominance in his native Ireland, he nonetheless wrote in English rather than Gaelic. When Mustapha Matura depicts his native Trinidad, he uses English -- indeed, he has lived in England since 1961 -- although his plays acknowledge that it is the language of past slavery and present subordination to foreign culture...
...Irish quartet CLANNAD (whose lead singer, Maire Brennan, is Enya's sister) and an album, Anam, that has all the right career moves: a duet with U2's Bono, a song from the hit movie Patriot Games. The group merits a listen. Brennan's soprano keenings, in English and Gaelic, are variously backed by cool, Sergio Mendes-style harmonies, a bluesy sax, and a guitar's banshee wailing. But in the tune Harry's Game, Clannad goes spare and liturgical, transmuting New Age tonal banality into ageless, ethereal beauty. If you ever ascend to heaven, this is the music...
ENYA: SHEPHERD MOONS (Reprise). Gaelic music of a different sort. Enya sounds like Sinead O'Connor after an overdose of chill pills; her songs seem, at first hearing, like the ideal background for stores that sell granola and wind chimes. But hang in. Enya mixes New Age with space age and Irish mysticism, and there is supple witchery here...
...youth wing to instruct the sons and daughters of Republican families in Irish history, teach them the shadowy rules of urban guerrilla warfare and screen them for paramilitary service. John, 16, joined the youth wing when he was 13, and his early years mainly consisted of reading books, learning Gaelic and, to his frustration, painting posters and marching. "We've been protesting for 20 years against the Brits, and they've never taken any heed," he says. "They take heed...