DES BISHOP is not comfortable with tags of being a ‘saviour’ of the Irish language, but there is no doubt that he is playing a major role in the language’s preservation and he is about to write his autobiography as Gaeilge.
Des is not solely about the Irish language. He has a new show coming to town and he’ll be taking a look into the Irish psyche and why Irish people are still squeamish about sex and intimacy.
Unbéarlable
Des Bishop will perform his new show Unbéarlable in the Town Hall from Monday January 19 to Thursday 22 at 8pm. Given its title, many will expect it to again focus on Des’s experiences with the Irish language as Tongues! partially did, but this is not the case.
“It’s a stand up show which follows on from my life post-Connemara,” the New York born comic tells me. “There’s really no theme to the new show and there’s a nice freedom in that.”
Despite the lack of theme, Unbéarlable will nonetheless find Des making some pithy observations about economic and emotional life in Ireland.
“You can’t but be inspired by the change in Ireland’s economic confidence and the election of Barack Obama,” he says, “but more universal stuff I’ll be dealing with is intimacy and the problems people have in regard to intensity of emotions.”
Despite his Irish roots and the fact that he has lived in this country for close on 20 years, Des’s American birth allows him to have an outsiders perspective on the Irish and the kind of things that make us tick (or not as may be the case ).
“I’ll be having a look at the inherent shame of sex and sexuality,” he says. “We are now in a post-Catholic Ireland, but also we’re not really in post-Catholic Ireland. People are liberated sexually but not liberated emotionally. There is still that sense of Catholic shame.
“Ireland is a very familiar society. We are comformable with each other. You can be just introduced to a person and you feel comfortable with them and you can take the p*** out of each other. It’s intimacy...but at the surface level. There is a difference between the person you trust and the person you pat on the back in the pub. When it comes to the next level people prefer to joke about it rather than deal with it.”
Gaeilgeoir
Des is one of the major names on the Irish comedy circuit having won over audiences and critics through his stand up shows and TV series The Des Bishop Work Experience and Joy In The Hood.
In 2007, the New Yorker undertook his greatest challenge yet - learning to speak Irish. He moved to Tir An Fhia, Leitir Mór, Connemara, and gave himself one year to learn enough Gaeilge to be able to do a stand-up show in the language. His experiences were turned into a TV series In The Name Of The Fada and became the basis of his stageshow Tongues! Tongues!
He could not have foreseen it at the time, but in learning Irish Des gave the language a credibility and cool it has not enjoyed for decades. His efforts and success in learning Irish caught the imagination of a young generation, and has given a major shot in the arm to efforts to preserve Gaeilge.
Des is not comfortable with such accolades.
“A certain amount of responsibility has come my way, but I didn’t expect I would become a symbol,” he says, “and I don’t know if I deserve to get much credit for any revival in the language in the long term. There is a sense of momentum about the Irish language now. The show helped that but the momentum was not created by the show.
“The conditions now are so much more favourable that people are being driven to look at language and culture. Previously there was the post-colonial hangover but that’s gone now and the North has peace. It’s so much easier for me to do this than it would have been 20 years ago but I get more credit than I deserve.”
Nonetheless Des is playing an important role in Gaeilge’s survival and revival. Late last year he met An Taoiseach Brian Cowen and the Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe regarding an Internet based pilot project for a different way of teaching Irish.
“We want the old solutions to disappear as they were useless,” he says. “We have solutions now that are practical and exciting. I go around schools talking about it and doing what I can when I have the time and encouraging people to do things for themselves. We want to build a momentum from that that will be unstoppable.”
Another Irish language project Des is working on is a Gaelic hip hop album.
“I’m trying to get together with Rossa Ó Snodaigh of Kíla for a hip-hop album as Gaeilge so that ‘Jump Around’ is not a one off,” he says. “A lot of schools use that song now and I want to link Irish to more modern things and change the perception of the language a smidgen.”
An scríobhnóir
Possibly Des’s most fascinating Gaeilge related project, and certainly his biggest since taking on the language will be to write his autobiography as Gaeilge.
“After learning Irish for about four or five months I got these ‘easy to read’ books and I got sucked into the story and I said ‘This is so cool! I’m properly reading Irish!’” he says.
Encouraged by this, Des considered writing a book of his own and here he will discuss the problem he once had with alcohol.
“I am writing my life story in Irish and it will only be available in the language,” he says. “I’ve had offers before from publishers for my life story but I wasn’t interested, but I thought if I could sell my life story for the Irish language that would be worth it!
“I hope it will be out in September 2009. Giving up drinking was a big thing for me. I don’t speak frankly about drinking but I will in this book. My book will be written in a very easy to read way and I hope people will get sucked into it and that it will give them confidence in reading Irish.”
For tickets contact the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
