aoife.trench.warfare

Bilingualism is a wonderful thing. It promotes good listening skills, problem-solving abilities and all those other things that make teachers and parents weak at the knees. I'm pretty sure I can count myself as part of that 50% of the global population that calls themselves bilingual, my two languages being English and Gaelainn , or Irish to you internationals (not called 'Gaelic', NEVER EVER CALLED 'GAELIC' ). However, two experiences of late have brought one major bone of contention to mind concerning my mother tongues, and that is this: I cannot, for the life of me, be funny  through Irish. And this, my friends, is a big deal. I'm funny. I make people laugh, be it at me or with me. It's my get-out-of-jail-free card for new and potentially awkward situations. It's the main reason I have friends; in its absence I have very few positive personality traits to my name. Humour is in my genetic make-up. But there's actually a glitch in the gene, as...

Over the weekend, two things happened that have taken over my mind completely and ravaged it ever since. I am referring to two untimely deaths. The first was of Brian Gubbins, a 19-year-old journalism student from Nenagh with a passion for hurling, who did not return home from a night out with classmates in Galway Thursday night last. The second was of a young man named Maurice O'Donoghue who attended the same national school as I did, and was four years my senior when, on Saturday night, a car accident on a road I travel frequently took his life. The main thing that preoccupies my mind whenever I think of these two incidents (and trust me, they're all I've been thinking about since I heard about them one after the other on Sunday morning) is that two families, two groups of friends and acquaintances, team-mates, colleagues, fellow students, didn't get the chance to properly say goodbye. Parents assumed they'd see their sons later, the next day, the next week, whe...