State pays little more than lip service to preservation of the Irish language

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

A  school debate long ago trí Ghaeilge between Coláiste Iognáid (the Jes) and Coláiste Cholmcille from Indreabhán – like many debates in Irish – was on the state of the language itself. On this particular day, the theme went something like this: “An bhfuil teilifís ag marú na teanga?”

We had drawn the short straw. As well as having much poorer Irish than the Gaeilge bhinn bhlasta with the Connemara blas of our rivals, we were also arguing on the wrong side of the argument.

We were trying to prove that TV had had little impact on the language – and this was the early 1980s, a good decade before TG4. It was a no-brainer and we were no hopers.

The killer line was delivered by their captain, one of the Ó hÉanaigh brothers. Talking about one of their young relations at home, he said the first three words out of his mouth had been: “Mamaí, dadaí agus the Incredible Hulk”. In our hearts we knew we had lost once those words had been uttered.

The arrival of TG4 (Teilifís na Gaeilge as it was then) in 1996 was a crucial moment in the struggle for survival of the language. Sadly it is one of the few bright moments in a slow, sad and seemingly irreversible decline.

Michael D Higgins was Minster for Arts and the Gaeltacht back then. Only one Aire Gaeltachta, Éamon Ó Cuív, could be compared in the same breath. As for the arts, the spark brought by Higgins to the role has long been quenched.

Irish is still a living language but it faces challenges on multiple of fronts that could not have been imagined, even by us enthusiasts, three decades ago. Then you could go to the heart of the Gaeltacht in Connemara and meet a lot of people – admittedly older – who spoke no English.

In the fíor-Ghaeltacht – places like Carna and Leitir Mór and the islands – the Irish they spoke was unpolluted by English syntax and words. When you hear the likes of Seosamh Ó Cuaig or Máirtín Jamsie Ó Fatharta speak, you hear rich tapestries of language which has been weaved for generations.

But all that has changed. Of course, there are trade-offs. Isolation and relative poverty have given way to more prosperity and connectedness – from childhood children are exposed to the same cultural experiences as all others in the western world. And that means a bombardment of English.

There is no doubt that it has not only affected the way children growing up in the Gaeltachtaí speak Irish – there is an increasing tendency to form sentences using the English ‘frame’ – but there has also been a marked diminution in the number of children who are willing to speak Irish together.

I was at a seminar last year where a parent living in Carna talked about the losing battle to bring their children up in Irish there – once outside the house and the school, English was predominant.

Bilingualism is a reality in all Gaeltachts now. Every language is a living thing and all living languages are mongrels – Irish has borrowed liberally from English, Norman, Scandanavian and Latin over the centuries.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.