#irish-language — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #irish-language, aggregated by home.social.
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David Keohan, ‘Indiana Stones’, Lifts the Lid on His Grá for Gaeilge
“I felt like I wanted to cut my fucking colonised tongue out of my head…’Why can’t I speak my own language?'” – David Keohan
David Keohan, ‘Indiana Stones’, is a Waterford man. He is reviving the old tradition of stone lifting in Ireland and has recently published his book, The Wind Beneath the Stone.
5 minute read
Publication 7 of 2026
David Keohan. Photo by Johnny Savage, The GuardianA chairde, I hope everyone enjoyed the Summer months and the long spells of good weather. Following on from my interview with Aideen McQueen (@ComedyMcQueen), this is a powerful story with David Keohan. Tá súil agam go mbaineann sibh sult as!
The pink granite rock shimmered as flakes of mica glistened in the light. Sitting in a hollow encircled by the blue-grey of the surrounding Inis Mór limestone, it lay just a few dozen metres from the rocky Atlantic shoreline.
David Keohan knew this was the prize he had travelled to see. The stone had an aura of its own – an energy that resonated with its history. David had come face-to-face with the Mullán Port Bhéal an Dúin. This was to be the first milestone on a quest of discovery and a journey of reclamation of culture, of language, and of self.
“The story behind these things is everything”
Unearthing a Lost Tradition
Keohan has become the leading figure in the modern revival of Ireland’s historic stone-lifting tradition.
Over the past four years, public interest in his work has exploded, particularly following an appearance on The Blindboy Podcast. Yet he believes the enthusiasm surrounding stone lifting is part of a broader picture.
He says his work has “landed in the landscape of Irish cultural revival”.
Stone lifting traditionally served a range of purposes:
- Testing physical strength
- Marking life milestones
- Honouring the dead
- Establishing local status and reputation
- Preserving community stories and mythology
Keohan says, “The story behind these things is everything”.
The Search for the Mullán Port Bhéal an Dúin
Among Keohan’s most significant discoveries was the confirmation of the stone featured in Liam O’Flaherty’s 1937 short story The Stone.
O’Flaherty described a round granite rock whose mica particles sparkled in the sunlight. Keohan’s search eventually brought him from Waterford to Ros a’ Mhíl, then on the ferry to Inis Mór and to the village of Gort na gCapall. And there he found it.
The distinctive pink granite boulder immediately caught his eye. “Sin é.” he thought to himself. “That’s it.”
The stone is known as Mullán Port Bhéal an Dúin:
- Mullán: a round granite boulder
- Port Bhéal an Dúin: the mouth of the port of the fort
- The fort itself refers to the iconic Dún Aonghasa, the ancient stone fort on the cliff tops of Inis Mór
For Keohan, the encounter was deeply emotional.
The stone had a “tangible presence”.
“You could feel an energy.”
“It spoke to me.”
He says he could sense the history contained within it, the generations of hands that had lifted it before him.
At the time, very few people remained aware of either the stone itself or the tradition that surrounded it.
David Keohan & Derek Hollingsworth in Waterford, 2026Four Years to Lift the Stone
The achievement took time and hard work. Keohan was unable to lift the stone during his first attempts. In fact, it took four years of training before he finally succeeded.
Relecting on the interest in his quest for locate these stones and their stories, Keohan believes that the public fascination his work has generated might not have been possible just five or ten years ago.
The Irish cultural revival, he argues, has provided fertile ground for renewed interest in traditional practices.
“It has rekindled the dying embers of a culture and the flames are being fanned.”
“It’s incredible. I’ve been to every county in Ireland now…we’re all just a bunch of sound lunatics who love telling stories”.
A Reclamation of Self & Culture
For Keohan, the search for lifting stones evolved into something far greater than a physical challenge. He describes it as a “reclaiming of self and my own culture”.
“It’s been the most incredible reclamation of self and reclamation of my own culture because, I mean, before that, I was never really into speaking Irish. I’d never gone to Conamara. I’d never travelled too far west. I’d gone to Clare a few times. I’d never been North. I’d never been to the islands. In the process of looking for these things, I’ve got back in contact to what it means to be an Irish person.”
The journey also transformed his understanding of the country itself.
“I’ve got to see the nation – the beauty of it. I’ve got to experience the beauty of the country that we’re lucky to live in and it’s amazing. It’s incredible. I’ve been to every county in Ireland now…we’re all just a bunch of sound lunatics who love telling stories.”
Learning Irish and Confronting Shame
Keohan’s travels brought him into regular contact with Irish-speaking communities. Those encounters also exposed a sense of loss he had never previously experienced.
“I’ve been to the islands, I’ve met the islanders. I’ve reclaimed part of my soul with this. Táim ag athfhoghlaim an teanga. Níl mé Gaeilgeoir. Bím ag dul go dtí áiteanna Gaeltachta agus cloisim daoine ag caint as Gaeilge. Tá sé go hálainn ar fad and níl mé ábalta caint as Gaeilge.”
He recalls visiting Gaeltacht areas and feeling disconnected from conversations taking place around him.
“I felt shit. I felt like a tourist in my own country.”
One particularly significant experience came while sitting with poet and seanchaí Seán Ó Coistealbha.
“And I was sitting there with Seán Ó Coistealbha – a wonderful poet and seanchaí – in the west, and he’s there chatting away with people and having to translate to me. I felt terrible. I felt like I wanted to cut my fucking colonised tongue out of my head. I felt awful. I was like, ‘Why can’t I speak my own language?’ And I felt an awful sense of shame.”
The experience gave way to contemplating childhood experiences of Irish as a school subject.
“But then I was like, it’s not my fault is it? It’s something I had to really delve into ’cause like it was taught wrong in schools. The system of teaching was terrible. It was taught as an exam subject as opposed to an actual language. We never spoke it in school. It was just ‘dom, duit, do, di…’ conjugation. It was a load of shite. You hated it because it was just a subject – another subject. You just didn’t understand it because you never spoke it, so I hated it in school and I never wanted to do anything with it ever again until that moment.”
“…to get back in touch with the language through this has been the most eye-opening thing ’cause I’ve seen how the language is connected to the land itself.”
Keohan says reengaging with the Irish language has fundamentally changed the way he sees the landscape around him.
“I was like, to know what this means fully, I’m going to have to start relearning the language, and to get back in touch with the language through this has been the most eye-opening thing ’cause I’ve seen how the language is connected to the land itself.”
He credits writer Manchán Magan as a major influence in helping him understand that connection.
“That was massive, and a lot of that was to do with Manchán Magan as well.”
As it happens, Manchán Magan had referred to the Irish word for stone in a 2015 article in The Irish Times:
“The disconnect between language and life in Ireland runs deep. There is something so evocative about calling a stone a cloch. There’s the knowledge that when our ancestors picked up the same stone thousands of years ago, this was the term they too used. Cloch is the word our people chose, and we’ve been using it ever since. It’s not a stone, not to the people of this island, anyway. Cloch is what it is.”
In his own book, David tried to both remember Manchán and respect the language by including its original pre-manglicised native placenames.
“In the book that I wrote…as a deference to Manchán, everywhere I went I not only wrote the English name in, I wrote the Irish name into the book, and the meaning behind the Irish name.”
“And then that opens up your eyes to so much. I’m training on Benvoy and it’s like An Bhinn Buí, ‘Melodious Yellow’. I used to live on the Copper Coast and you’re looking at the yellowness of the cliffs and the melody of the sea coming in against the cliffs – that’s a fucking amazing name! Benvoy means nothing but An Bhinn Buí means everything.”
He points to other examples:
- Fionnúir (Fennor): “White side of the hill”
- Cluain Meala (Clonmel): “Meadow of Honey”
“My favourite one in Ireland is Clonmel: Cluain Meala, ‘Meadow of Honey’, what a name. That’s incredible. Why weren’t we taught this in school? That’s inherently interesting.”
Making Irish Meaningful Again
Keohan contrasts his own school experience with the way Irish is taught by people like Seán Ó Coistealbha.
“Táim ag caint le Seán Ó Coisdealbha. Tá sé Gaeilgeoir agus tá sé ina chónaí i gContae na Gaillimhe. A Fulbright Scholar, he went to America teaching Irish. He’s teaching Irish mythology and poetry. That’s brilliant. I love mythology and poetry is beautiful and he’s teaching through that. It’s making it interesting for people, you know? No one wants to learn conjugation.”
The conversation has also led him to consider language revitalisation efforts elsewhere.
“I’m talking to people in Wales about this thing. What’s it, 17% of people in Wales speak Welsh? You just start in school. You just have a class and just speak Welsh. All of a sudden, everyone’s speaking it. Can we do that here? Why can’t we do that here too?”
__________________________________________________________
This article is based on excerpts from a much longer interview that will air in full on an upcoming podcast, Irish Language Matters – Decolonising the Focal.
During the conversation, David Keohan talks about the post-colonial shame attached to aspects of native Irish culture during his upbringing and the extent to which attitudes have changed in recent years.
We discuss how his quest to rediscover Ireland’s stone-lifting traditions became intertwined with a larger cultural movement, one that has helped many people reconnect with aspects of Irish identity, language and heritage that had been shunned or neglected.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Follow David on Social Media
Insta @_indiana_stones_
David’s book, The Wind Beneath the Stone, published by Bloomsbury is out now across Europe, and is a very enjoyable read. It will be published by Chelsea Green in the United States in September.
David, a chara, go raibh míle maith agat arís!
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#DavidKeohan #Gaeilge #IndianaStones #IrishLanguage #irishCulture #irishHeritage #learning #personal -
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SCEILG MHICÍL
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Focail Gaelach as Lochlainnis ó dhúcas: ancaire ⚓️
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Gaeilge at The Oscars:
2026
Jessie Buckley 🏆
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Say 'seomra' in a thick French accent!Seomra 🇮🇪
Chambre 🇫🇷
Camera 🇮🇹
They go back to the Latin, 'Cambra', & Ancient Greek 🇬🇷 'καμάρα'. -
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Words in English that are Irish originally: ashtore from 'a stór'.
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