The phrase literally means :- 'a couple of words'.
Strange words - On it's own, "a couple" is understood to refer two two humans who have bonded. "A couple of .." usually means more than two of something. The actual number is variable but is less than that implied by 'a few', which in turn would be less than 'a lot'.
Used in the phrase "cúpla focal", however, it is exactly "a few".
Before I stop digressing:- Ancient Irish annals use the term "three times fifty". This didn't mean 150. It meant "an awful lot".
The link is to the Irish pages, but you can navigate to the equivalent English-language in order to make sense of the news items.
Munster seems under-represented below - I'll soon fix that.
I used to have a clickable link to an Irish course from Germany at http://www.phil.uni-sb.de/~brandy/gaelic/Kurs/index.html
The reason that the hyperlink is gone is that the author of the site is an over-opinionated little shite. (If I must use strong terms, at least I make them rhyme.)
The man is entitled to hold an opinion that Microsoft and Bill Gates are the most evil things in the universe. He's even entitled to refuse to serve up the pages to Internet Explorer.
The problem is that if you (in all innocence)hit the site using IE, the man will whine about his problems and then try to shut your browser down (a lame little scripting trick that any idiot can transcribe - not very clever).
Extremism of any sort is not a good thing (I can't tolerate intolerance?).
I'm leaving the text of the URL above, so that people who would like to learn Irish via German (and have access to a browser other than IE) can find it. Personally, I'd avoid the site - it's spiritually suspect.