Even Greener Pastures

@Neal, are you asking me or Coligno? Because the answers would be quite different: Coligno is definitely well read and I'm definitely not. Anyway, it's not about literature, it's about history, about some (quite recent) events in Ireland — I think you know a lot about it yourself but maybe you're just more used to looking at it from a different angle? "No Béarla" is just an Irish show about the language, by the way - not even a documentary, but there are a few interesting things about it. I was talking about this conversation:


@Coligno, you're right of course, I actually don't know if there were any Irish-learning groups in prisons in other time periods... Maybe there was something like this but not in the form of Jailtacht?
Ah, the page is from the Moscow State University textbook "Современный ирландский язык. Учебные диалоги с комментарием" (https://ufile.io/uulhj , page 98) — but the author says some stories are from Irish school textbooks so I don't know where exactly this particular story is from, originally.
[I thought you might find this a bit amusing but it almost brought a conflict into my house: I translated it into English when a friend of mine asked what I was reciting. Well it wasn't the best idea ever, I might have as well said something like "up the RA!", the reaction would've been the same I think]

@Coligno, oh, you know him? He's basically the founder of the Russian centre of Celtic culture, and the explanations for Russian speakers are written by his student (she's Head of the Department of Germanic and Celtic Philology at MSU now, as far as I understand — though I never studied at MSU myself so I can be wrong here).

Well, it's not that unusual for people to take negative information about their country's politics to heart (I catch myself feeling the same sometimes), but you're right, when it comes to Irish republicanism, the reaction is particularly bad. *

(...) where have you been learning phrases like "Up the RA!"?

I'm not supposed to tell anyone Seriously, though, maybe I heard it in a documentary or something (I think they mentioned these slogans in the documentary "Irish ways" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=E-lm6bQEp6I ] — a very interesting one, by the way, because they interviewed both republicans and loyalists (and representatives of the British Army, and of course ordinary citizens). But I'm not absolutely sure, and anyway in Russia it's relatively easy to come across this kind of information: for example, one of the most popular Russian folk-rock singers, Хелависа, used to sing Rising of the Moon at her concerts (I remember this performance of her, for instance — https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=2ogjWwnVxgY , from 2:20).

*actually it's a relief that people think this way mostly because they are not well-informed (not that I claim to be well-informed myself but still) — I personally know Stalin's fans and people wholeheartedly supporting Churchill's "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time" position, and it's much, much worse.