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More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
FOR TWO WEEKS prior to St. Patrick’s Day, our language becomes a little more visible.
Thousands of people in hundreds of groups and organisations all around the world join together to participate in the largest, longest running, and most positive celebration of our native culture and language.
Seachtain na Gaeilge
This year’s Seachtain na Gaeilge is the largest ever, running for two weeks and involving over 100,000 people taking part in over 1000 registered events all over the globe along with countless events taking place in schools, and is being represented by Actor and 2FM star Clíona Ní Chíosáin and Tomaí Ó Conghaile, BBC presenter and Editor of Nós, the Irish language lifestyle magazine.
Seachtain na Gaeilge is the first step towards choosing a greater place for the Irish language in your life and in our society. Whether you’re líofa or taking your céad cúpla focail steps, there are plenty of events to choose from.
Now is the time to give it a go
You may not have spoken a word of Irish in years, but now is the time to give it a go. Don’t worry too much about your modh coinníollach, your blas, and your foclóir.
Your first conversation will be the hardest, but after that every conversation gets easier.
Irish belongs to you, and the choices you make, with every word, phrase, and sentence you utter, with every conversation you initiate, with every new friend you make through Irish will decide the future of our language.
When you choose a future for Irish, you join hundreds of thousands around the globe who have already done so.
Irish is being taught and learned at universities from Boston to Beijing, and from Montana to Notre Dame. Interest in Irish is growing rapidly in the US in particular, where every year The Fulbright Scholarship programme sends 9 Irish-speakers to teach at universities there.
Conradh na Gaeilge has branches operating as far away as Hollywood and Melbourne, teaching, promoting and renewing the language for a new, appreciative and creative generation.
Getting involved
It doesn’t have to end when Seachtain na Gaeilge has finished on St. Patrick’s Day.
You can keep it up by:
Celebrate the language
When we choose to celebrate Seachtain na Gaeilge, we choose to celebrate our most underrated, under appreciated and underused natural resource.
We give life to the language that roots our culture in the past, enriches our present with its indisputable authenticity, and which will, if we let it, bring new inspiration to our social and economic lives in the future. Its yours. Its ours. Its us.
Is your Irish a bit rusty? Here are some helpful phrases to get you started:
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