If you fancy brushing up on your Irish ahead of St. Patrick's Day, there's one book that might help.

Darach Ó Séaghdha is the author of Motherfoclóir: Dispatches From A Not So Dead Language, which follows on from the successful podcast of the same name and the Twitter account (@theirishfor) which started it all in 2015.

Darach now has over 30,000 Twitter followers with whom he shares different Irish words, old and new. He gets the older words from old dictionaries and the newer ones from Irish language media.

But he wasn't always an Irish enthusiast. "My parents both had Irish but it passed my brothers and I by. We didn't think it was terribly cool."

It was his father who later inspired his interest in the language.

"My dad spoke many languages but Irish was his favourite one. I wanted to know why this was."

"When he got ill and I realised he wasn't going to get any better, I wanted to understand why this connected with him and be able to talk to him about things that really mattered to him, and when I revisited Irish I found the language was so beautiful. I found it a real key to his own sense of humour and his attitude to life in the way the words were phrased."

When it came to the Motherfoclóir book, Darach says he didn't want to write a dictionary. "I wanted to write a story about my own relationship with Irish."

Irish was his worst subject at school, but he found he had "a lot more motivation" when he later revisited it, and thinks it has made him a better listener.

However, he also believes the approach to teaching the language needs to change in order to get the best out of it: "If I was going to change something about the Leaving Cert, I would make Irish more than one subject."