TV presenter at TG4’s new television station for young people, Cúla4, Niamh Ní Chróinín is a key figure at the forefront in the promotion of our native language and continues to inspire a great grá for Irish in young people around Ireland.
Niamh’s love of the Irish language has been with her throughout her life. Growing up in North County Dublin, her parents nurtured her interest in Irish from a young age. As she progressed through her education, her teachers encouraged her interest and she went on to study Irish and Sociology in Trinity College. Niamh spent four years as part of its An Cumann Gaelach society, meeting and making lifelong friendships with others who shared her love for Irish. Fresh out of college, Niamh landed a job with Irish language organisation Conradh na Gaeilge, and began her career with them with the Seó Bóthair Roadshow. Which gave Niamh a chance to travel Ireland and hold interactive language workshops with secondary school students. A year and a half later, an opportunity presented itself at Raidió Rí-Rá and this introduced her to a whole new side of media. Niamh dappled in a variety of radio shows, and became well known to everyone tuning into the Irish segments on TodayFM, Spin 1038 and Raidió Rí-Rá. From here, once the position at TG4 for Cúla4 presented itself, Niamh made an application and well the rest is history.
above: photo by Evan Doherty
Cúla4 is Ireland’s first Irish language TV station for young people. Answering the demand and need for this type of station in Ireland, it gives viewers the opportunity to use and develop Irish in a fun and entertaining manner. Cúla4 runs for 14 hours a day and covers a range of shows that cater to a large variety of interests and age groups. You can catch Niamh having loads of fun in her studio on Monday to Friday from 3-8pm as well as the weekend morning shows. Before its launch, research was carried out to ensure that the station would revolve around the humour, interests and stories of young people in Ireland. “If young people don’t think it’s a great idea then it's scrapped because they are the target audience, this is for them. They are the future of the language, so yes kids’ opinions, decisions, and ideas are at the centre of Cúla4,” says Niamh. If you are interested in learning more about Cúla4, please see their website at www.cula4.com.
Over the last few decades, the Irish language has seen a huge resurgence and for Niamh this largely is thanks to the work of the Gaelscoileanna, TG4 and social media for helping to normalise it. She tells us; “when I was younger I was always looking for opportunities to speak Irish and use Irish and I think that’s a little bit easier today. It’s more normal now to hear pops of Irish around the place and that is growing all the time, and hopefully it will continue to.
What I would like to see more of is more clubs who are doing different things in Irish. We have so many young people now who have a real grá for the language and who want to use it, so it’s important that there are opportunities all around the country to use Irish during football training, or while doing yoga or pilates, basketball or whatever it might be. Where you can do activities that you want to do anyway but you do them as Gaeilge.”
Niamh adds; “I feel it’s important to promote the language in order to show as many people as possible that it is a living, thriving language and that it is being used as a living language every single day.”
As the famous Irish proverb says Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla clíste - Broken Irish is better than clever English.
above: photo by Martina Regan
Feature photo by Evan Doherty
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