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EVERY 14 DAYS, somewhere in the world, a language dies. History, songs, folklore and stories disappear forever with the death of a final speaker. But not Irish.
The Irish language has survived invasions, colonisation, famine and more. Irish is often referred to as the oldest vernacular language in Europe outside of Greece and Rome, with a literary tradition stemming back millennia.
Irish speakers number in the hundreds of thousands, with native speakers, language learners, young and old who use Irish every day.
Ivan Yates on last Thursday’s The Six O’Clock Show, Virgin Media 1, told us that there are just 16,000 ‘natural speakers’ of Irish. The figures show us that there are, in fact, 788,927 people in 26 counties of Ireland who speak Irish well or very well.
Perhaps ‘natural speakers’ refers to those who speak Irish in the Gaeltacht alone? That figure is 65,156 with 34,168 daily speakers. Furthermore, there are 71,968 daily speakers outside the education system alone in the state and 625,933 with those still in education included. Add speakers from northern counties, where there is an undeniable grassroots revival of Irish as a community language, and these figures are higher again.
That is not to say that the Irish language is immune to threat. Language loss, diminishing usage and a decline in first language speakers are issues that all minoritised languages must contend with, Irish included.
Indeed, UNESCO categorises Irish as Definitely Endangered, if there is any doubt as to the fragility of the language or the challenges that Irish as a spoken language may face.
Safeguarding Irish for future generations will require motivation, education and investment – and from time to time, intervention.
On motivation, those who are passionate about Irish may find that this is lacking at times from those who would matter the most. The Government target for 250,000 daily speakers by 2030 is fast approaching with little to show for it. Not only has this not been achieved, but there has been a reduction in daily speakers since the Government set this target in 2010.
The targets, set out in the 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language, were happily ambitious. Yet there has been an abject failure in the mechanisms and means to reach these targets, with an obvious lack of motivation from successive governments to adequately resource or invest in the plan.
On education, feelings are much the same. Our education system has a huge role to play in fostering new generations of Irish speakers and bringing out the best in those who learn Irish at school. Research shows that 50% of people in the south would choose a school that teaches through the medium of Irish for their children if there was such a school in their area, yet the reality is that 8% of primary students and just 4% of post-primary students currently attend Irish-medium schools.
These figures would indicate a desire and a great amount of goodwill on the part of the public, but a failure to meet these wishes on the part of the government – in particular, the Department of Education. There is little acknowledgement from the Department of Education of their role in fostering new Irish speakers.
Nor is there action to double the number of students in Irish-medium education, despite this being a commitment in the Programme for Government. Across the water in Wales, where they have a target to increase students attending Welsh medium education from 23% to 40% by 2050, there are concrete, resourced plans detailing how they will get there, something absent from targets here.
The same is true in the case of Gaeltacht summer colleges. At a time when waiting lists to attend courses are a mile long and getting longer, some colleges have closed and numbers have dwindled. Where is the ambition to expand courses, build new colleges, develop year-round provision and support families who have been opening their homes to our young people for decades? Where is the ambition to double, or even triple the number of students over the next ten years, growing the Gaeltacht economy in the process?
Where is the ambition to provide scholarships, so that every school student can have the opportunity to visit the Gaeltacht at least once, no matter their economic circumstances?
Investment in the Irish language is, and always will be, essential. To disinvest from Irish out of a desire for equality between Irish and English does not level the playing field. We may consider investment in TG4 as an investment in Irish, but do we think of investment in RTÉ as investment in English? When funding for RTÉ is already multitudes greater than that of TG4, is the playing field really level?
Investment in Irish is an investment in all the other things that we do already – housing, planning, employment, education, arts, media and other sectors. Irish speakers have all of the same needs as the rest of the population and only ask that those needs are considered. Irish speakers are reliant on a state that operates through English to provide medical care in Irish when the focus is on providing English-language services by default. The same is true for childcare, or social services, or the legal system. Far too often, Irish speakers must leave their Irish behind for English, or not avail of services at all. At almost every juncture, English comes first, and Irish second.
That is where Irish speakers legitimately expect the state to intervene, to do better, to do more. More than a century on from the foundation of the state in the South, language equality must become a reality, not an aspiration.
In spite of challenges and causes for despair, many Irish speakers are hopeful and have immense pride in the language. Younger generations laugh when outdated arguments about Peig Sayers are made, as her book hasn’t been on the Leaving Cert this century, perhaps even since before they were born. While being sympathetic to those who are older who had a profoundly negative experience with the language, it is a profoundly positive sign that an ever increasing number of young people are learning to love Irish and experiencing the language in a better way than them.
To speak, to read, to hear, to feel and to love through Irish is a valuable experience, one that’s intrinsically connected to the culture and the heritage of this island stretching back thousands of years. It is a privilege that’s worth every effort and every investment twice over. In an increasingly globalised and interconnected world that gets smaller by the day, where languages are being lost and cultures are subsumed, Irish gives us something that makes us unique, something to call our own. For that, Irish is worth it.
Caolán Mac Grianna is a spokesperson for Conradh na Gaeilge.
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We should go back to speaking Irish just to annoy people like Ivan Yates
@Irish Axe: off with ya so.
The west brits ain’t fans of oirish
@macrolly23: it’s a dying,almost extinct, language of no benefit to Ireland as a nation beyond some snobbish notions of the faux intellectual. It’s been clasped on to by petty republicans in a vain effort to stick it to the britts. Backward mentality from hippies too frightened to live in the real world. Its a drain on taxes to. The fact it’s practically forced on kids as a prerequisite to attend certain thrid level institutions is proof enough its dying. If it was thriving surely students with no interest in learning it shouldn’t be penilised for not wanting to learn it? Not to mention the inequality of awarding extra points for doing leaving cert exams in Irish.
@macrolly23: The ‘brits’ came up with the word oirish…So in fact they do like it.Oh the irony in your silly comment.
@Mike Carson: Samuel Beckett said of people like yourself. “They couldn’t give a fart in their corduroys for anything like culture” Caitlín Ní hUallacháin, you’re rearing them still!
If people value Irish, they’ll learn it, speak it and promote it. They don’t require the Government for that. Nobody will stop them. We need more individual initiative in this country. Btw when Yates said speak it “naturally” he obviously meant natively/fluently. Most who claim to speak it in the census could barely hold a simple conversion on the weather on Irish. We all know that. And that despite all the money that we’ve pumped into it
Irish is not just the language, it’s our culture, music, poetry etc. The way I was taught Irish was dreadful and boring, I ended up detesting the language but in later years I saw it’s value, how I wish I could speak it now. TG4 not only produces great programmes but also helps with the learning of our beautiful native tongue.
@Barbara Moynihan: that’s the way it was taught with selective Culture, Music, Poetry and Peig Sayers. Lost in Nationalism & Elitist Grammar Intellectuals.
Funny how other Languages had none of that, you just spoke it, discovered culture if interested and had fun with it. later you brushed up on grammar.
@Barbara Moynihan: They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it must also be in the ear. To me the sound of nails being dragged across a blackboard would be more pleasing than anytime I accidentally come across something in Irish. When the nuacht is on Radio 1 it sounds like the newsreader is about to choke trying to get the words out. Just because it was in our culture in the past doesn’t mean we need to keep it alive or we suddenly stop being Irish. Cockfighting was once central to Irish culture. Should we resurrect that too? If someone wants to learn Irish fine, it can be an option in school. It’s even on Duolingo along with Klingon, Hawaiian and even Navajo. Just stop wasting taxpayers money flogging a horse that died so long ago its now a collection of bones.
I did French for 3 years in secondary.German for 5 years in secondary.Irish for the guts of 12 years between primary and secondary and I STILL remember more German than Irish.I have never had any interest in it whatsoever and the fact that if you failed Irish,English or maths you failed your leaving cert still annoys me to this day.
I might have thought different about learning a language later in life or something but having it shoved down our throats for years has just made me despise it.
@Johnny King: that’s not true I dropped Irish for the leaving cert as did most my class as we were doing 7 subjects
@Martin Mongan: certain 3rd level course requires a pass in Irish yet it not part of the course.
English speak english
French speak French
Germans speak german
Irish speak ?????????
Barometer of self respect of self identity
Swedish Norwegians danish are bilingual.
Why are we trying to be monoglots ?
@Sean Mac Cárthaigh: Austrians speak German
@Sean Mac Cárthaigh: I am Irish. I speak English. That doesn’t mean I am less Irish.
@Sean Mac Cárthaigh: 5,100,000 out of 5,200,000 in this country speak English as their main language.
@Sean Mac Cárthaigh: no its not. It’s ‘taught’ and used as emotional blackmail. If you’re forcing people, you’re losing
@Alan Kennedy: don’t forget Canada. English & French. Not a word of Canadian anywhere….
He says 790,000 people speak Irish well?
That’s nearly one in 5 people in the country.There’s exaggerating and then there is outright lying.
That’s a laughable figure.It’s probably closer to one in 50 people if even that,who could speak the language well.
Just a blatant lie.
@Johnny King: It’s only about 100,000
@Paul Corcoran: probably about 10, in a bar in Spiddal. Make that 12. A few years back I heard a conversation in Irish in Ennis
Years of learning irish in primary and secondary schools and virtually no-one can speak or read it fluently.
That speaks volumes and tells us everything we need to know.
It’s obsolete.
Notice the surname of all the anti Gaeilge people, mostly west brits
@Peter Doyle: Bigoted, irrational comments like that won’t do the language any favours. One of its problems is that it has often been associated with dreary, brainless nationalism.
@Peter Doyle: Second ‘west Brit’ comment….Such an ignorant uneducated remark,well done.
@Peter Doyle: Should it not be O’Dubhghaill instead of Doyle. And why not post that message in Irish. I’d say you’d secretly like to be a West brit
@Peter Doyle: funny there doyley, your name hails from Scandinavia which is further than Britain away. Pdo agree with you though
Ana shimplí, labhair Gaelinn agus bí bródúil as!
@Micheál Ó Muimhneacháin: Maith an fear
Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam
@Eileen Clear: and youbuse you’re name as béarla? Hypocrite.
I’ve no problem with Irish speakers as long as they don’t be doing it in front of my face!
@Alan Kennedy: It’s the best place for it.
Irish is our national language, but the vast majority not only don’t speak it, they have zero motivation or interest in doing so.
The much quoted census figures about the Irish language are also absolutely meaningless, I don’t speak Irish at anything above a primary school level and yet I know a few people that put themselves down on the census form as being fluent Irish speakers and they speak less Irish than I do.
If there is a genuine desire to increase the use of the Irish language, then an entirely new approach is needed to teach it, and using app technology to do so is the obvious way forward.
But the advocates for the Irish language really need to change their attitude too, because the smug superior elitism exhibited by many of them just puts people off.
Ivan yates is a stirrer-
But we’ve spent a fortune on teaching people to not speak irish ..
Uduras na gaeltachta is an industry in itself – overseaing “training grants” for non irish speakers – ( i worked in one – no one spoke irish )
Dead language, time to let go and say goodbye
Our daughter is the only Irish speaking person in our home. I wish there were more books with CDs available at the library. Her teacher says the class is behind in Irish because of the pandemic, so we’re trying to find more books with CDs for her. Books in Irish without audio are useless to families like ours. Has there ever been a series for teenagers on TG4? RTE has plenty of options for young children.
The Journal’s really milking this thing, aren’t they?
What next? A story about a poor wee granny from the Gaeltacht claiming Ivan Yates duct taped her mouth shut?
I learned to speak irish while I was still only learning English as a five year old in the Model school in Limerick . It was all songs and games in Irish at scool . I didnt realise that I was multilingual . It was just new words and sounds . It was fun .
My kids experience was completely different. They had to contend with grammar before thay had learned to speak even simple Irish and they ended up hating Irish .
Teach small kids Irish games and songs . Make it fun .
I’d be somewhat wary of conversing as Gaeilge with one of those unnatural Irish speakers, mind you…
I wouldn’t expect anything less from Dowling or Yates
As someone who grew up hating Irish I have come full circle to being a bit frustrated that I don’t speak it. However I have made sure my kids went to A Irish medium school which is the easiest way to learn. You learn by speaking, not so hung up on Grammar In my time it was beaten into us. It is so different now and better.
If we do not support Irish we are losing who we are, our culture has the language in its foundation, it’s poetry, song and other music enrich it. It’s Particularly important now that our Culture will be diluted by other non compatible cultures. Please think about what would happen if we all became mid Atlantic somewhere between English and American we would lose who we are. Sense of humour, slagging and the like which is particularly Irish. Someone recently called Irish people a ‘Community’ in our own country as if the country is now divided by up into separate races now. Is this Integration ?, should those who intentionally come here to live without or without approval, should it not be They who need to integrate. So, Don’t run down our language even if you were beaten to learn it.
Más álainn an teanga í can fáth gur scríobh tú an t-alt seo as Béarla… ?
Pot kettle black
Pota citeal dubh….
My Irish is terrible but my three kids go to a gaelscoil. It’s Ivan Yates that’s dying off
I see the emphasis on learning gaeilge, but gammon/cant is never brought up in the conversation
Speaking as a Brit who grew up in Wales, you’re still doing it wrong. When Welsh was revived, they modernised and phonetisised large parts of it so that it’s structurally similar to a modern European language (lots of loan words are suspiciously French) which made it much easier to learn, and it worked, to the point where you hear it spoken day to day all the time; whereas in 15 years living in Ireland I’ve known exactly one person (from West Cork) who could claim Irish was genuinely his first language) and I’ve heard conversational Irish in public maybe two or three times tops.
Irish could be a working language again (and frankly the claims about it in this article are laughable) but only by making it properly accessible to the majority of people. One side note, Welsh wasn’t forced on anyone in school, and we were streamed into Welsh or English groups in comprehensive by choice. Holding a gun to people’s heads is counter-productive.
@David Evans: that would be a great way to get it easier. Forever when I see the spellings it is difficult to know how to say words and very limited resources to hear how to pronounce them. A new modern accessible dialect of the language would be superb, I’ve read before how lots of English words don’t exist in Irish, that already sounds frustrating and limiting.
The only way to truly revive it would be to have every school an Irish language school, just like English was imposed all those years ago. It would then take another twenty years for that generation to bring up their children as their primary language. So we’re talking at least 2065 until a generation of adults whose first language would be Irish. English still taught from an early age like everywhere else in the world these days to get on.
Did my leaving cert in 1968.
Spoke fluent Irish.
Never had a conversation in Irish since.
The biggest problem the Irish language has had over all that time is the people promoting it.
54 years later, compulsion and a lot of money has left us with lower levels of spoken Irish than ever. There has always been something alienating about the people who promote the Irish language.
Nothing has changed , the language continues its decline.
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