Darach Ó Séaghdha Author and linguist

In Calling 353, bestselling Motherfoclóir author and podcaster Darach Ó Séaghdha casts a linguistic eye on how we talk about what it means to be Irish, the signs we post to each other about Irishness – and what really lies beneath it all. 

SPOOKY SEASON IS in full swing at the moment, despite certain shops and taverns already putting Christmas decorations up.

Around the estate where I live, all sorts of plastic ghouls decorate the doors of houses who intend to participate in the scary festivities of late October.

The neighbourhood WhatsApp group has already flipped from passive-aggressive seething to aggressive-aggressive mayhem as representatives of different parenting styles accuse each other of being The Worst. Maybe they should dress up as each other on the 31st?

One enduringly popular costume for adults, especially the Mams doling out sweets at the door, is that of the witch.

Like a Christmas tree, it can be as simple or as elaborate as you like. If Halloween is as Irish as they say, and if the witch is such a timeless cultural motif, then we can expect a similarly enduring word in Irish for witches, can’t we? Well…

There are actually a few words and terms for witch in Irish, which hint at how the concept wasn’t as rigid here as elsewhere.

Witch hunts in Ireland did not happen at the scale noted in other European countries or the American places those European countries colonised.

If you ever want to fall down an internet wormhole, you could do worse than click on The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft which is a database of over 4,000 people in Scotland accused of witchery, searchable by name, location, witch-hunter, nature of demonic pact (kissing the devil’s bottom appears to have been popular), ritual objects used, and year.

The critical mass for such a database in Ireland just isn’t there, which leads me to the first Irish term for witch we will discuss today: Bean Ultach, literally meaning an Ulsterwoman.

In Dinneen’s dictionary, the meanings listed for Ultach are “Ulster, Ultonian, uncouth, cruel, “wise” (his air quotes, not mine), magical”… and the Jesuit lexicographer adds that this magical meaning is shared by tuaisceartach (northern).

And in case you thought that if a Bean Ultach was a witch then a teenage witch must be the cailín version, you’d be wrong: a Cailín Ultáin is the name for “a girl frequenting St Ultan’s Pattern”, which was a pilgrimage in Cavan where participants would leave an item of clothing behind after visiting a dried out holy well surrounded by whitethorn bushes (which are, of course, not to be trifled with).

If you think there’s something spooky and significant about the holy well in question being empty and surrounded by fairy bushes, well you wouldn’t be alone.

Speakers of Ulster Irish don’t call witches that, and it speaks to a universal truth – the bad people are from somewhere else, and if they’re actually not from somewhere else then we will call the part of here they are from “somewhere else”.

The Derry Girls, having the craic at Halloween. Channel 4 Comedy Channel 4 Comedy

Consider how Americans resile against using the metric system unless they’re talking about imported drugs – the foreignness of cocaine and heroin are underlined by their existence in grams and kilos.

We translate the titles of The Three Musketeers and The Little Prince but not Das Kapital or Mein Kampf. If it’s foreign it’s bad, and if it’s bad it’s foreign.

So in the southern parts of Ireland the witches are from Ulster and in the work of the most celebrated English writer, the witches are Scottish. Or are they from Ulster too?

Aye of Newt

The English language doesn’t need much protection, but those who take it upon themselves to do so will often call it “the language of Shakespeare”.

Their implication is that when a language is lost, a treasury of poetry and wisdom is lost with it. And I agree wholeheartedly, which is why English should be able to exist without erasing other languages!

Recently, Shakespeare in film has been intimately linked to the Irish cultural moment – Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in Hamnet, Michael Fassbender in Macbeth and Andrew Scott’s forthcoming film Elsinore.

I suppose Kenneth Branagh has done a bit of Shakespeare too. And the line “I have done the State some service” has such a prominent place in recent Irish history that you’d almost forget the Bard said it first.

Of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, only 13 are set in England (the only one of his works to mention America is, prophetically, The Comedy of Errors).

Most of them were set in places that he and his audiences would never see, and have contributed more to the Anglophone perception of these places than any local achievement – if someone says “a forest near Athens”, you will think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream before you think of Mount Parnitha, home to Europe’s only rainforest (even the people who claim it isn’t a “true” rainforest consider it to be an ecological wonder in need of protection).

Shakespeare’s plays are a foundational body of work in the Anglosphere and while they speak to the human condition in a powerful and resonant way, they are exotic by design. So what happens when a character who is themselves foreign to audiences meets someone who is foreign to them – such as three witches?

Macbeth has been translated into Irish, Lowland Scots and Scots Gaelic – the name Mac Beatha, the son of life, uncovers a new meaning in an old and very familiar text.

And having the witches speak Irish rather than Scots Gaelic in the Scots Gaelic version (and Scots Gaelic in the Lowland Scots version) has been an effective way to establish that spooky difference.

Halloween isn’t far away now and if you do meet a Bean Ultach, do say “cad é mar atá tú (k’jay mar a tahtoo) by way of a friendly greeting.

They’re not as scary as the old dictionaries would have you believe – sure I married one of them.