Culture Night, an annual, nationwide event that celebrates creativity and arts in Ireland, will take place this year on September 18th. Though the traditional programme has undergone some changes in adapting to “the new normal”, this year’s team of Culture Night National Trailblazers and County Ambassadors remains just as strong.
Úna-Minh Kavanagh, a Gaeilgeor who is making waves in the fields of journalism and media content, will be hosting DIY Gaeilge as part of the Culture Night festivities. The free webinar will offer something of an online crash course in Irish that is aimed at beginners and relearners of the language.
“I just noticed that the Irish media didn’t look quite as diverse as it should be – it was just a sea of white faces”, Kavanagh tells me, speaking about a campaign called “We Are Irish” that she launched in 2017. The campaign, which aimed to “showcase how colourful Ireland is”, later grew into a website by the same name that launched in February 2020.
Kavanagh was adopted from Vietnam at six weeks old and was raised in an Irish-speaking household in Co. Kerry. “Irish was the only subject I cared about in school”, she says with a laugh, explaining how she went on to study Irish and Journalism in Dublin City University. “I do quite a lot with the Irish language – it’s probably most of my personality at this stage!”
Producing content through the Irish language comes with its challenges, she says – a certain disillusionment with the language’s function in society and accusations that it’s a “dead language”, not least of all. Kavanagh has faced her fair share of criticism, but she remains firm in her belief that the language is important. “You have to get to a point where you stop blaming school”, she explains. While there are issues with the Irish education system, she says, many of the complaints lack any proactivity. “If you’re not actually giving solutions, then you’re just complaining, and I think it’s really rude to come up to anyone speaking any minority language and ask them ‘what the point’ is.” Kavanagh is adamant that the language is alive and well, citing multiple Irish communities online and artists like Kneecap as examples of its solid presence in our culture.
For Kavanagh, her role as a Culture Night Trailblazer is about making different aspects of culture more visible and accessible: “A lot of the time people think culture is just to do with the arts whereas culture itself is so much more than that – it stems from our laws, our customs and our beliefs, everything like that.” She notes that there is a tendency in society to view the arts as a more “middle-class” institution, which creates a barrier. The role of a Trailblazer, in Kavanagh’s eyes, is to “bridge that gap and showcase how to make it more accessible to more people”.
As a creative working through the pandemic, Kavanagh understands the challenges faced by her fellow artists and creators in adapting their work to the changing restrictions and online. “I work from home and online anyway, so for me it wasn’t a massive change”, she explains, “but for a lot of people in a lot of areas, broadband still isn’t that great and being forced to put things online was difficult”. She tells me that she was impressed by how quickly some people were able to “turn things around”, but that a lot of patience is required where people have to “upskill themselves very, very quickly.”
Kavanagh encourages attendees of any Culture Night online events to be similarly patient and open to any changes that this year may bring. Nevertheless, she is confident that this, the fifteenth edition of Culture Night, will be just as vibrant and exciting as the last.
DIY Gaeilge takes place on September 18th at 8pm and tickets can be booked through Eventbrite on the Culture Night 2020 website.
