I spend way too much of my time on social media, but I have a mindset: To paraphrase a religious sentiment, I try to be on social media, but not of social media. I try to stay out of discourse, I don’t pick fights or respond to fights picked at me, and generally I pay attention to what’s going on but don’t take it too seriously. But over the last week I have become way too invested in some drama playing out in the niche world of Irish language influencers.
There’s a Dublin-based influencer named Jonathan Finlay aka Nasti, with over a million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. He appears to be known for very Irish food content (though also, like far too many influencers these days, he has reportedly promoted gambling apps). For the last 12 days as of this writing, Finlay has embarked on a challenge to call up Dublin restaurants and order food in Irish–one of the official languages of Ireland–until someone takes his order.
It hasn’t been going well. In the best cases, some places recognize it as Irish and apologize for not understanding it, or at least give it a shot; some just hang up; others are hostile, with one replying “blah blah blah” before demanding he speak English. Finlay has called the whole thing a “light-hearted challenge” and, as such, says he doesn’t publicize the locations of the places he’s calling. You can see that he’s disappointed when the challenge fails, but he isn’t aggressively rude to the restaurant workers when they can’t help him.
I was a little bit charmed when this first appeared on my Instagram feed. As someone learning Irish in America I have no occasion to ever order in the language or use it in my daily life at all, but sometimes when I’m waiting in a checkout line I’ll practice to myself how I would conduct my business in Irish, just to force a chance to imagine the language out in the wild. Through Finlay’s videos, it’s been dispiriting to see that “maybe one day I’ll go to Ireland and use my Irish there” might not be as much of a solution as I’ve imagined, but at least the videos have taught me a new sentence construction for ordering in case it does ever come up. According to the Irish Star, the series has gone viral, so I imagine a lot of people are in my same position of clicking each new video hoping today is the day.
@nasti_2k ♬ i was only temporary - my head is empty
But because this is social media, it hasn’t taken long for things to go off the rails. Even if Finlay isn’t actively rude to the people answering the phone, it hasn’t stopped commenters from doing it for him. Things have gotten (sorry) nasty: Many of the comments on his videos are, predictably, racist, with some saying he might have better luck speaking a “3rd world language” or otherwise critiquing immigration, and others taking an uncomfortably nationalist stance by saying people “should be ashamed” not to speak Irish in Ireland. (A large number of the comments have also taken Ireland to task for not making the language mandatory in schools, while Finlay and other commenters have pointed out that in fact it is.)
Clare Cullen, an influencer who has made person-on-the-street videos in Irish, critiqued the series early on by saying that Irish language influencers “have to be really careful not to allow [their content] to be used to push forward xenophobic and racist narratives.” She took Finlay to task for not deleting these kinds of comments; I didn’t see them at the time she posted her video, so I can’t tell if he’s since removed any, but there are definitely more ugly comments than not.
Cullen also notes what some of the people not engaged in gleeful racism have pointed out in the comments: that it sounds like Finlay is at least on occasion calling Chinese takeaways, where it might not be reasonable to expect the staff to know Irish. Finlay has acknowledged the claim that he’s picking places unlikely to have Irish speakers without exactly refuting it, saying “I think it’s clear to see a lot of these people have Dublin accents.”
I’ve definitely soured on the stunt since first seeing it. Finlay’s whole approach has come to feel like a bad internet-age take on Manchán Magan’s No Béarla, an incredibly unlikable 2007 TG4 series where Magan attempted to get around Ireland only in Irish and was openly disdainful to anyone who couldn’t keep up with him. The Irish language band Kneecap has praised the show, but I found it deeply offputting; the reasons Irish is rare, even in Ireland, are massive and well-documented, and it didn’t seem to me like stomping around the country sneering at anyone who hasn’t been able to undo centuries of colonialization was likely to change that. (Magan, who died last year at 55, softened in his approach as his career went on; I’m particularly fond of his formal, poetic cover of one of Kneecap’s popular songs.)
The hook of Finlay’s videos are the same, even if he’s not actively saying as much: He simply launches into Irish and lets the call answerer swing in the wind. Watching the videos, reading through the comments, and observing other influencers’ responses, the whole thing has come to feel mean-spirited and not actually doing much to promote or preserve an endangered language. It feels like a crummy way to eat up some hassled restaurant worker’s evening, and it’s adding to the piles of hate speech the internet already has too many of.
Some Irish language influencers have made their own content in response. Cullen made a Finlay-inspired video called “Day 1 of ordering in Irish until someone says no,” which features footage of Aon Scéal Café in Dublin, an Irish language coffee shop. “Will anyone care, or is the new meta that the Irish language will only get mass attention when being used to undermine multiculturalism?” she wrote in the caption.
Another influencer, Éamon Ó Corcráin, who has a series where he invites people on the streets of different countries to speak Irish with him, made a video of himself ordering a pizza in Irish. He starts the call by expressly asking if it’s possible to order in Irish; the person on the phone happily replies that she has Irish, and they have a pleasant conversation in which Ó Corcráin is able to order his pizza. “I teach Irish and good manners,” he writes in the caption.
Other content creators have made send-ups of the video highlighting how Irish can be gatekept. Someone making an Irish language learning game has used it to promote their game.TG4, the Irish language TV station, made a video from the perspective of an over-prepared food worker waiting on a call from Finlay.
It’s not a giant controversy in the scheme of things, but it’s far removed enough from the things that comprise the bulk of my social media that I have broken many of my personal rules and keep searching for people talking about it. (It probably helps that I refuse to get a TikTok account, so I can’t gorge on whatever horrors are surely going on over there.) My behavior highlights to me one of the insidious things about social media: The discourse around the whole thing is so niche and minor, but at the same time it touches on important bigger picture questions about language and national identity. The real weight underneath it all has, if I’m honest, become the excuse I use to just indulge in the ugly habits social media fosters to keep us hooked. I name-search and scroll and gawk at the arguments, decide people I’ve never met are “good” or “bad,” and tell myself I’m learning something about a culture different from my own when really I’m only seeing a small, curated slice crafted by people who are building their personal brands. The drama has opened my eyes to aspects of the language that are removed from me as an American learning it for fun, but I’m not doing anything with that new knowledge; I'm just scrolling social media instead of doing the myriad better things I could be doing with my time, including actually studying my own Irish.
A few years back I quit watching short-form video, and my personal takeaway from all this is that I should probably do that again. I don’t need to see any more Content, and I don’t need to see a bunch of racist comments on that Content, and I don’t need to give any more seconds of my life to Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram. Hopefully by writing about it I can purge it from my system.
Riley MacLeod
