What your grandma said was ‘deoch an dorais’ which phonetically is ‘juck un durish’ (or sounds slightly similiar to that). ‘Deoch an dorais’ literally means ‘drink of the door’ which means to have one last drink before everyone departs. There is a similar phrase in English: One for the road. I hope that helps. Slán go fóill.

Ive wanted to know the language for twenty years. consider that my granma told me “An dock and doris to ye” was what you said on new years , when every one left…… a Parting Glass?
Still clueless, searching….bw

As for your husband: I think it’s common for some emigrants to want to forget Irish heritage as part of the assimilation process. I certainly did at one point, and I see it strongly in others now. Judging from previous generations, they change their minds in their seventies!

Irish is definitely a chi-chi status thing in the upper middle classes, as I found out when I went to UCD. I spoke fluent Munster Irish back then and the blas-free, trendy Blackrock Irish used to drive me nuts. “Yeah, roiysh, go n-eiri an bothar leat, okay?” :-)

All-Irish schools do fabulously well, which simply demonstrates that the best predictors for academic success are parental attititudes and a motivated peer group. I wish them luck, and wish I knew how to bring that sense of purpose to language teaching in all-English schools. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful Irish teacher, who made sure that Liam O’Flaherty’s Dúil is still my favourite book of short stories in any language.

It’s interesting to compare the situations of Welsh and Irish. Irish is compulsory in schools, badly taught, and spoken by a shrinking minority; Welsh is not compulsory in schools and yet is growing and thriving. Why is that? I don’t know, but it seems to indicate that compulsory learning of the language, while there may be arguments for it, is not necessarily the way to preserve it.

“May I go to the toilet?” — lol! “an bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leithris”. That was drilled into us — I can still remember it, the sing-song style we were taught it with, and its fellow phrases, “dia duit a dhuine uasal” (“God be with you, important person”, for a teacher/headmaster/schools inspector visiting the classroom) and “slan leat a dhuine uasal” (“goodbye to you, important person”, its reciprocal).

The traditional school curriculum for teaching Gaeilge was a disaster. Very few people came out of it with a love of the language, and most of them only kept that with outside help (e.g. from their parents). Frankly, it was a chore.

Mind you, I don’t know anyone who grew up in a Gaeltacht, so I can’t really generalise about your husband’s experience here ;) But the above applies for most everyone who grew up in english-speaking parts of the republic.

On the one hand, I hated learning it there, and it took me 10 years to get over my antipathy to the language as a result. (Mind you, I’m now a keen fan.)

On the other, if it was not taught at school, I’d have no doubt it’d disappear into “dead language” status in no time at all.

I think the Gaelscoile — secondary schools where the entire curriculum is taught, and daily life is lived entirely as gaeilge — are a fantastic idea, though. They really have worked beautifully.

PS: day-to-day, I do use it — it’s great for private conversations with another speaker, and the confusion of an english speaker attempting to deal with the different pronounciation rules is always good for a wee titter — like Aoife pronounced “ay oh iffy” ;)

Mind you, the pronunciation rules for written gaeilge at least aren’t as confusing to english speakers as Cherokee looks: http://www.atypical.net/CherTabl.html