On How To Say "In Irish" In Irish

After releasing three albums on their own 3ú Records label, The Coronas' latest set, The Long Way, is the band's first long-player for Island Records. On the transition to a major, The Coronas frontman Danny O'Reilly shares, "Island very much come from an independent background and they're very  good at sorta lettin' the artist do their thing — even right down to the last minute! We sorta came to them and said, 'Listen, we wrote these new songs,' and we sent them a demo. Even though they were happy with the album as it was, they agreed to pay for us to go back in and record a song — right at the 11th hour — that they thought was strong enough to make the album. And it might be our next single actually, as it turns out, so I think they were right to do that, you know, and we were delighted that they were; we were sort of going to them half expecting them to say no."

"We assumed that if we were gonna win an award like that that someone would tell us before — or mention it to our manager, you know, just to make sure that we were there."

Let's rewind to the 2010 Meteor Music Awards, which were held in Dublin. The nominees for Best Irish Album were as follows: Blue Lights On The Runway (Bell X1), Tony Was An Ex-Con (The Coronas), The Duckworth Lewis Method's self-titled album, Up To Now (Snow Patrol) and No Line On The Horizon (U2). And the winner? The Coronas! So did The Coronas see that coming? "Not at all, no. Absolutely not," O'Reilly stresses. "I mean, every 'best album' award from, like, all the years before: whenever U2 had an album out they won it, you know? And it was a public vote as well, so we really just didn't think that we had a chance and we were just happy to be nominated.

"I think we assumed that if we were gonna win an award like that that someone would tell us before — or mention it to our manager, you know, just to make sure that we were there — but they didn't. And we didn't have a clue, it was amazing!" When asked how their acceptance speech went, O'Reilly chuckles, "It was general shock and just four, hairy Irishmen hugging each other on stage and thanking our manager really quickly and, you know, almost in tears."

If you've always thought the Irish language was English with an Irish accent, think again. "It's very much the second language of the country these days," O'Reilly enlightens of Gaeilge (aka Irish Gaelic). "I think there's only, like, ten- or 20,000 [people] in Ireland who actually speak it as a first language, and they would, I'm sure, be able to speak English as well." The language is taught in schools in Ireland and O'Reilly says, "Everybody can speak a tiny bit of it whether it's just a couple of [words]: 'hello', 'goodbye' or curse words or whatever... And we recorded a couple of songs as gaeilge, as we say, which is Irish for 'in Irish' and, yeah! It worked out really well."   

Given that O'Reilly studied Irish at university he's fluent in the language and is therefore confident "the pronunciation and stuff was right". And it's fairly safe to say The Coronas will bust out "at least one verse in Irish" during their upcoming shows in this country.