The children are gathered in thrilled anticipation in the front room of this Brussels terraced house as they wait for the main appearance. The word goes around: tá Daidí na Nollag ag teacht!
There are shrieks of excitement as a bell rings outside, and then the main man enters: a white-bearded Father Christmas who strides in with a sack of presents, speaking Irish to the children with a Northern lilt.
This is a gathering of some of the Gaeilgeoir families of Brussels, who are raising their children entirely or partly through the Irish language.
The evening brings together about seven children aged between one and four and roughly 10 parents, part of a larger crowd of seven Irish-speaking families with 20 children between them who regularly meet up.
A linchpin of the community is host Aíslinn McCrory, a translator at the European Commission who set up an Irish-language playgroup to bring together other Gaeilgeoir families and create an environment where her little son could socialise in the language he uses at home.
“There were a few people working with me who also needed it,” McCrory explains in Irish as she offers a platter of cheese and hams to the guests. “Then we heard of others, and it grew.”
If there is a Brussels Gaeltacht, it exists in this room, where toddlers can be heard uttering their early speech as Gaeilge, surrounded by Irish-language children’s books such as An Garbhán (The Gruffalo) and Christmas stockings that read ‘Nollaig Shona’.
“Agus cén tusa?” Daidí na Nollag asks each child as they settle on his lap, and they shyly reply with their names. He presents a little girl with some chocolate. “Tá Daidí na Nollag ramhar, itheann sé a lán seacláide,” he tells her. “Hó hó hó.”
Aíslinn’s husband, Páidí, strikes up some carols on the piano, and together the children, parents and Daidí na Nollag sing the classics: Bualadh Bos (Jingle Bells), An Drumadóirín (The Little Drummer Boy) and Oíche Chiúin (Silent Night).
The Brussels European School is an anchor for this community, offering as it does Irish classes to its students, along with other official European Union languages from Swedish to Greek to Lithuanian.
This multilingual environment, in which no language is strange to hear, means there is none of the self-consciousness around speaking Irish that many feel in anglophone-dominant environments.
“In the European School they have so many languages. When they heard us speaking Irish it’s just one more language on top of Estonian and everything else,” says Emma McMullin, a science teacher who taught in a Gaelscoil before she moved to Brussels. “It’s so nice to be able to speak Irish here.”
For Nicola Crean, a newer arrival with her husband and two small children, the extent of Irish spoken in Brussels was a surprise.
“When I first came I had no idea,” she says. “Suddenly I’m here with my whole family, everyone speaking Irish, it’s wonderful.” She and her husband resolved to speak more Irish together at home, to make sure they can keep up when socialising.
The prevalence of Irish in Brussels has been boosted by the hiring efforts of the European institutions to build up their Irish-language staff to 200 after Gaeilge gained full official working language status on January 1st last year.
The full official language status, which means Irish is on an equal footing to all other official languages in the EU, means there is no shortage of work for translators and simultaneous interpreters.
It’s a status that is coveted by speakers of some other European minority languages, such as Catalan, Basque and Galician. As it sought the support of regional parties to form a government this year, the administration of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez made a push for the three to become official EU languages as well.
[ EU pulls brakes on adding Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languagesOpens in new window ]
However, the group of people who use Irish in Brussels is far broader than just those who are employed to work in the language. The city draws in people with linguistic interests, bringing together a rotating army of interns, NGO workers and budding diplomats who bring Irish – and a willingness to use it – along with their French or German.
“A lot of Irish people come here to work for the institutions. They might have French or another language as well as English,” says Mark Hartery (23), who works at the embassy of Japan in Brussels. He attends Irish-speaking events that he describes as knitting together the Irish community in the city, organised over newsletters, Instagram and LinkedIn.
“Here you have people from Italy, Spain or Albania all working together. There’s nothing strange about speaking Irish.”
Gaeilge is heard casually around the city. On an ordinary day this month, I heard several guests automatically greet each other and converse in Irish at an event at the residence of the Irish ambassador to Belgium, before later noticing a conversation as Gaeilge in full flow between two friends at a quiet table at the Irish community’s local in the European district, Kitty O’Shea’s.
At the Christmas meet-up of Conradh na Gaeilge, the organisation that promotes the Irish language and officially launched in Brussels last month, several attendees described finding the prevalence of Irish in the city as a pleasant surprise when they moved here.
Gathering together a buzzing crowd about 20 people almost all in their early to mid-20s, the Conradh na Gaeilge meet-up has taken over a large part of a chic bar in central Brussels, and the smell of mulled wine is heavy in the air.
Roisín de Bhaldraithe (25), an organiser with Conradh na Gaeilge who works in Ibec, says she is now using the most Irish day-to-day since she attended an Irish-language bunscoil in her native Mayo.
“It’s the most I’ve spoken outside of education,” she raises her voice to tell me amid the hubbub of people having craic as Gaeilge.
I can relate: doing this reporting assignment is the most Irish I have spoken since attending Gaeltacht summer courses as a teenager, and I’m amazed at how the language has come flooding back to me with the help of such patient and supportive interviewees. After an hour of immersion, I have to stop myself from almost ordering at the bar in Irish instead of French.
Roisín explains that she had little opportunity to speak Irish when she lived in Amsterdam previously, whereas here in Brussels she has multiple friendships through Irish.
“There’s a strong Irish community here with lots of different events. That makes a difference.”
Being able to speak Irish means a lot to her because of a family link to the language. “It’s dear to my heart to speak Irish because my grandad wrote the English-Irish dictionary,” she says, referring to Tomás de Bhaldraithe, the famous scholar.
Belgium has three official languages: German as well as French and Dutch (Flemish). On top of that, Brussels has one of the highest proportions of foreign-born residents of any city in the world. They bring their languages with them. There are Arabic-speaking pockets alongside the districts of French and Flemish. It’s common for customers of Italian restaurants to slip into the language of the staff when they visit, and the many Spanish-speakers tend to bring the hispanophone world with them wherever they go.
[ Paul Gillespie: Plurilingualism – why we’re so bad at picking up more languagesOpens in new window ]
Many Irish people who move to Brussels find the language is an opportunity to socialise and get to know the diaspora community, along with a range of common activities from Gaelic games to music.
“It’s a living language here,” says Ríoghnach Hyland (26) from Waterford, who works in an NGO. Her shared language with her mother is German, making her just one of several multilingual people attending the Conradh na Gaeilge event.
“Brussels has every language. Every street sign is in Flemish and French. But the difference to Irish and English in Ireland is that they have equal status,” she observes.
“It’s not strange to speak any language here,” Ríoghnach says. “I’m so happy I found my people.”
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