He's the first of his kind so when it comes to finding a training manual, newly-appointed Irish Language Commissioner Pól Deeds is on his own - perhaps, therefore, he might consider binging the Apple TV series 'Severance'.

In 'Severance' the protagonists are underground office workers who have volunteered to have their minds severed while in work - the 'innies' knowing nothing of the lives of their 'outies' (and vice versa) who have decided they should have two existences which never meet

Sounds weird? Not to me. I've seen this show before. In fact, I was an actor in it. 

In the seventies, I joined like-minded young students in a nightly pilgrimage to the Irish classes in Cumann Chluain Árd in Hawthorne Street, a veritable hedge school where volunteer teachers taught us to a level which easily excelled the highest university standard. 

Among the inspired teaching staff were Albert Fry and Máirtín 'ac Grianna, an engineer and a PE teacher respectively, while fellow-students included Gaelic games champion Nóirín Ní Mhurchú and author Réaltán Ní Leannáin, Pól Mac Fheidhlimidh of An Foclóir fame and Seán Mac Corraidh who went on to train Gaeilge teachers. Also there was prisoner of conscience Breandán Ó Fiaich who was jailed for refusing to speak in English to the UDA. Sorry, UDR. Though, in retrospect....

Irish ruled in Cumann Chluain Árd - if you couldn't speak Irish you went thirsty pretty quick because everything from ordering drinks at the bar to chatting to friends had to be done through Erse. 

We were in fact, severed from the big world outside. But that wasn't our choice. Out there, in the streets where we lived and laboured, officialdom demanded that Irish be neither seen nor heard. 

Irish was banned in the courts, street names were in English only even where those names came from Irish roots. (A side note: I recall a young man arrested while erecting an Irish street name in Clondara Street and mocked during the jeep ride to the barracks with unrepeatable jibes about the hunger strikers who had died the previous year. His crime: daring to make Irish visible in a landscape from which it had been severed.)

Not a word of Irish was spoken on Radio Ulster or BBC Northern Ireland. The language was vorboten in civic assemblies such as Belfast City Council. Irish was expunged from the primary school curriculum by the unionist education bosses, as journalist Eoghan Ó Néill recalls in his upcoming history of Irish in the Northern state, as soon as they had their size nines under their desks. 

It was not an exaggeration to say that Irish and its speakers officially ceased to exist with the establishment of the state of Northern Ireland. 

For they were there for sure in the 1911 Census, right across these ill-fated six counties. But when the time came to carry out the first census post-partition, the question on Irish language competency was removed and - Hey Presto - Irish speakers were severed from the official record. 

Irish speakers were not to be seen and most certainly not heard. They were non-people. Irish speakers who looked in the mirror of the new state in all its complexity saw nothing reflected back at them. They were invisible.

In the hit Apple TV show, which has just finished its second series, the term given to reversing the severance procedure is 'reintegration'. 

An apposite term for the brief of Commissioner Deeds for he must reverse the injustice which wrote Irish and its speakers out of the script by reintegrating Irish into every facet of life here. 

He has to ensure Irish is given its rightful position in a land in which it has been spoken for 2,000 years. He has the daunting task of welcoming Irish back into the broader society so that all can share in its bounty. None of us underestimate the challenge ahead as he strives to ensure Irish is spoken at Council meetings, seen on street name and road signs, heard on Radio Ulster news bulletins, made visible in the universities in which we were schooled, welcomes us to the hospitals in which we receive care. 

In 'Severance' reintegration is a perilous procedure - with malign forces setting their face against any attempt to have past practices reversed.

We know that plot twist well too. But take heart, at the end of Series II of Severance, which I finished on Friday past, things — spoiler alert — turn out pretty good for the Irish speakers!