Slugger O'Toole: European status for Irish is besides the point

Crap. Total crap. If Irish were to die, Eilis would be without a name for a start.

EU official and working status for Irish, the Official Languages Act etc is the 26 county state trying to balance the books for Irish so that people who want to avail of services as Gaeilge can do so. Admitted it's belated - but it's not too late as there are increasing numbers of people speaking Irish, learning Irish, using it in their daily lives as a matter of choice, not just because they happen to live in a Gaeltacht or not.

It's amazing that the likes of Eilis get worked up about €3.5m being spent on translating some documents into Irish when the Taoiseach last year admitted that most if not all of the documents produced by the EU in English and the other official languages don't get read by anybody. This is at a cost of a staggering €800m per year. No hulabaloo about that but plenty of ructions when a measly €3.5m (0.375%) is spent on Irish. That's the real indicator as to why the Irish language is under fire from the likes of Eilis O'Hanlon, a writer who decried the translation of Harry Potter into Irish. Perhaps she'd be less vindictive about Irish if her fantasy about a lesbian detective in Dublin was translated into the native tongue?

My own feeling is that this latest attack on Irish from various quarters, all too predictable attack, is a case of the tendency towards "Newspeak" and "Big Brotherism" in Ireland. If Irish no longer exists as a language, then the thought of an independent Ireland becomes unthinkable....

So because nobody bothers with the English versions that's more of a reason to spend money translating them into languages almost nobody is fluent in?

Gotta love the Irish logic.

The point I made is that there's no outcry about the vast mountain of unread documents in English and other languages (except Gaeilge) until there's a proposal to translate a miniscule portion (0.375%) stuff into Irish.

Why isn't there an investigation into the massive waste of money on public documents in English and other languages - it's admitted nobody reads them?

The problem is to do with the way in which the government communicates with the public and nothing to do Irish. In fact it could be argued that the vast bureaurcratic morass has been created by too much English being forced down the throats of people by the state than anything else.

Those like Beano, confirmed anti Irish language bigots, will use any opportunity to attack the language. This time their bigotry is exposed.

This article and the Mal Rogers article in DI on Friday are just sad, vitriolic hate articles. Why on Earth does Irish inspire such diatribes? I'll never understand.

I wonder where Éilis gets the authority to use 'we' all through the article too?

These arguments often remind me of what happened to me once in a black taxi on the Falls. I was speaking Irish to a friend of mine and a grieviously insulteed oul' doll turned round and told us we were extremely rude for speaking Irish, because no-one else in the taxi could understand. As it happened, the driver and the passenger in the front were both Irish-speakers too, but the fact is that she hated it simply because she couldn't understand.

The fool Rogers decided that if we had kept Irish as our national tongue over English we would have no Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey etc etc. What a load of bloody nonsense.

Maybe spendng money on translations into Irish is a waste of money. I happen to think that the vast majority of bureaucracy is a waste of money, but the venomous attacks on the language (people, it's just a language, not a w.m.d.) just sadden me deeply.

While I understand how decades of shoving Irish down people's throats by the Christain Brothers and a stifling Irish Free State has vitiated enthusiasm for Gaelic, it is actually enjoying something of a mini-revival over the past decade.

Language users are growing and, after all, what's wrong with people learning and promoting a language.

If unionists are so concerned at this perceived waste of money, why not look closer to home. The NI economy is subsidised by a populace (that of England, Scotalnd, Wales) who, in poll after poll, have unambiguously expressed their desire to have nothing more to do with Northern Ireland. These people should not have to subsidise hangers-on with whom they have no affinity and unionists should now have to stand on their own feet, follow the example of the Republic and build a dynamic economy of their own. There is too much sympathy afforded to lethargic and inefficient unionists. A bit of southern efficiency might sort you out.

I make no apology for labelling people bigots who, in my opinion, express a point of view which is bigoted or based on bigotry. Every time the Irish language comes up for discussion here, umpteen commenters come on with postings which are laced with vitriol against the language and those who speak it. The article referred to above - Eilis Ó Hanlon['s -was a case in point.
The headline gave the game away: "Let's be honest: if the Irish language died we wouldn't give a damn".

Who the hell is 'we' in this case. The royal we. 1.7m on the island of Ireland say they speak some level of Irish - that's one in three of the population. That's a sizable minority being wished away by O'Hanlon.

The blogs in recent times on Slugger have been deliberately loaded against Irish . O'Hanlon's piece was described as following into the 'harsh but true' catergory by Mick while Pete's "No one cares the EU's paying" was similarly biased.

I appreciate the occasional token blog as Gaeilge here but I find it impossible to have a reasonable discussion about Irish language matters without it being hijacked by posters whose bigotry is plain to be seen.

This latest so-called yellow card is an insult. But being an Irish speaker that's the kind of attitude and treatment I expect from the English 'regime'.

Fair play Oilbhéar! Stick it to the ref!

I think you are absolutely correct to point out the tendentious framing of both pieces on Slugger re Irish this week, and Mick's unfortunate and ill-advised "yellow card".

It is silly to suggest that one cannot use the word bigot in reference to those who are so utterly and bizarrely opposed to an ancient language, who regularly and wishfully trumpet its demise ("harsh but true" - biased and bigoted) and who seem to feel that this language is somehow the quintessence of backwardness, atavism and decline.

How utterly intellectually reduntant, how ridiculously prejudiced and yes, how bigoted.

Maith thú Oilbhéar! Ní thuigeann an bó ach an bata.

Anyway, the article...

There might be one or two truths in the article, but unfortatly she wrapped it up in a load of the usual bull... where to start:

"nobody really cares" quite many of us do actually.

"It would be right up there with better nutritional labelling on supermarket food, more cycle ways, iodine tablets for all in case of nuclear emergency, universal peace and an end to world hunger"

Well I wouldn't say it's as important as universal peace or world hunger, but I do think it's more important than iodine tablets or nutritional labelling.

"But deep down, we don't really give a monkey's about Irish"

What's this "we" business paleface? Don't attempt to speak for anyone but yourself.

"If we really cared about Irish, then we'd do something about it. Like speak it"

A fair point. But aren't more people speaking it now that in quite some time? Has she missed the growth in Gaeilscoileanna over the past few years, for example?

"Most obviously, it's children who pay the price"

And what price are children paying? Has she spoken with any kids in the gaeilscoileanna? Does she know how proud they are to have two languages?

"It just looks like another masterful exercise in prising more jobs for the boys for the small band of Irish language junkies who don't seem to have got over the defeat of Brian Boru yet"

Says it all! I couldn't be arsed with the rest. Junk.

If she had some serious critique and presented then fairly i'd be more than willing to listen.

Bigot: One who is intolerant of views contradictory to their own.

My view is that excessive expenditure on a language spoken by a handful of people on the western fringe of the EU is a waste.

Perhaps rather than branding anyone who disagrees with you a bigot, you could tolerate their view and point out any flaws in the logic of their argument.

JKelly "It is silly to suggest that one cannot use the word bigot in reference to those who are so utterly and bizarrely opposed to an ancient language"

The point is it wasn't used in reference to such people. I have no problem with the Irish language as an element of the culture and heritage of this island. In fact I think most of us would do well to know a bit more about it. What I have a problem with its abuse by politicians and wasteful expenditure on its promotion as a 'working' language, and this is before we get into cynical manipulation of the language by certain sections of the community in Northern Ireland.

Just something that should be noted about kid's "paying the price" of Gaescoileanna and Eilis O'Hanlon's lack of pedagogical sophistication.

Because their brains become attuned at an early stage to the grammatical variations of two different languages, kids in Gaelsoileanna are actually proven to pick up other languages with greater ease in their teenage years. This means that, contrary to the inferences of insularity and parochialism that are regularly heaped upon the Irish language, these kids actually have a greater propensity for becoming more well-rounded and cosmopolitan in their learning.

Most Gaelscoileanna and Meán Scoileanna Lán-Gaeilge have high third-level attainment rates and a strong track record in instilling identity and a sense of cultural awareness that is open and embracing.

This looked like a reasonable debate on the merits or otherwise of a community, (the EU in this case), collectively spending a small amount of money to satisfy the cultural demands of a tiny section of that community, (Irish speakers and those who would like to try to be). There must be hundreds of thousands of similar expenditures in the EU. The Common Agricultural policy is a similar issue on a much grander scale.

Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, the opportunity to have a go at the "old enemy" couldn't be resisted. JKelly started by bringing the Unionists into it.

"If unionists are so concerned at this perceived waste of money, why not look closer to home". "There is too much sympathy afforded to lethargic and inefficient unionists".

Nobody had mentioned unionists, nationalists, republicans, loyalists or any other of our popular lables up to this point.

Oilbhéar Chromaill followed up with a reference to "the English regime". To be fair, he may have been referring to an English Language movement.

It may be that those objecting to the expenditure are Unionists and that is colouring their objections to the expenditure. However they did not suggest that. The viewpoint put forward appears to me to a valid position based on "value for money". Turning this around to have a pop at Unionists devalues the debate and implys ownership of the language by one section of the community alone.

As a Unionist, I fully support promotion of the Irish language for those who wish to learn it. I believe it belongs to anyone who wants to learn it and should not be part of the constitutional debate. It saddens me that my community are too quick to surrender much of what is our culture too, just because Republicanism trumpet it. I do however suspect that Republicanism is quite happy to encourage this and use this and other similar issues as a political weapon.

It's a pity for everybody.

That latter point is a very strong one.

My concern is twofold: a) that such movements towards making a language 'official' (in whatever way) are turned into straight black/white (or orange/green) political debates by all sides; and b) that time and resources might be better spent on promoting the spoken language in social contexts at home, rather than on political contexts abroad in which few people are really interested.

A lot of languages have collapsed because those seeking to preserve them have overplayed the political card and placed the technicality of status ahead of the reality of usage. I regret to say both Irish and Ulster Scots may well already be too far down that track.

JKelly

I suspect this is true, but it could be said about any language. It's a good argument why languages should be taught from an early age. I doubt that kids who learn Irish are more able to pick up other languages than kids who do German, French or Japanese.

Oilbhéar Chromaill

Maybe the numbers of Irish speakers are on the rise, but there are fewer young people taking Irish exams these days, if an article I read the other day was accurate.

But being an Irish speaker that's the kind of attitude and treatment I expect from the English 'regime'.

You do realise that Mick is Irish and a fluent speaker, don't you? Still, you made me laugh, and that's what counts.

Excellent points IJP and that's entirely the issue.

No one has explained to me at all how this euro official status actually produces more speakers in Ireland? Realistically even if Irish was the day to day language of 90% of Ireland, it would still be unimportant to the bulk of Europeans who would be no more likely to learn it than I would be to learn Lithuanian. Thus promotion has to start at home.

Unfortunately arguments like this always seem to come down to emotionalist heart versus head stuff. Yes it would be great if Irish was spoken as a first language by the same number of people as languages like Estonian or Hungarian which are in the same boat with regards to another more dominant neighboring language.

However the "heart" solution of giving it equal status with those languanges and squandering money which could be better spent on promotion at home is not the way.

How about:-
- Making the Gaeltacht areas economically viable for people to remain (perhaps even creating a new town there)

- training teachers to give them the ability to pass on the language in a fun way (rather than the staid parrot fashion that I had to put up with back in the 80s)

- promoting culture+arts + literature

- ensuring that public employees actually speak the language (rather than just have a paper qualification) + encouraging its use at work?

All those are practical solutions rather than the tokenistic nonsense that making it an official language is. Sadly the biggest enemies of Irish are often those who advocate it but can't see that their solutions are actually counter-productive. They are too busy worrying about subtle political status distinctions and using the language to fight age old political battles than actually increasing its usage!

Gonzo
"but it could be said about any language."

Certainly. But Irish is the only language apart from English that you can learn from the age of 6 in Ireland. It's also the only language, apart from English, which you can learn through.

"It's a good argument why languages should be taught from an early age."

And Irish is in a perfect position. The resources are already pretty much there.

"but there are fewer young people taking Irish exams these days, if an article I read the other day was accurate."

No. Fewer kids are taking higher level, more are dropping to lower level.

O'Hanlon's writing is of a very poor standard.

however much noise a small handful of our most vocal citizens may have made in recent months about European Union recognition of Irish, nobody really cares.

Nobody? Or nobody she knows? Clearly somebody cares because this decision was a result of hard work by campaiginers.

Oh, we say we do. If there was a list of issues we considered important, the status of the Irish language in Brussels might be one of the boxes we ticked - assuming, that is, we were allowed to tick as many as we liked.

People say they want it but she looks into her own heart and realises that they don't really.

Mick when you ask people to build a case against her arguments I think it's fair to point out that there isn't actually an argument made. It's more a spluttering of bias in the tabloid style.

It would be right up there with better nutritional labelling on supermarket food, more cycle ways, iodine tablets for all in case of nuclear emergency, universal peace and an end to world hunger, on the infinite wish list of things which it would be quite nice to have.

So people do want it.

But deep down, we don't really give a monkey's about Irish.

She cares enough to attack it. It is a conceit to assume that everybody shares her agenda. But then that is the Sindo style.

We only pretend to because it's one of the things that educated and sophisticated Irish people are now supposed to believe, and because, well, believing in the spiritually-enhancing properties of the Irish language has become a habit we're much too intellectually lazy to breakout of.

So it's not the Irish people she is claiming to speak for at all but the educated and sophisticated who she must believe are suffering from false consciousness!

That is funny.

You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed? Pure West Virginia. What's your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamb? You know how quickly the boys found you... all those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars... while you could only dream of getting out... getting anywhere... getting all the way to the Sunday Independent

Whilst many of us with a passion for the langauge are happy enough to see the language gain EU status, it's the status and confidence of speakers themselves that will decide the fate of the language. To some extent it will be their ability to proselytise and promote the multiple benefits of billigualism, as articulated by J Kelly earlier in this thread that will save it for future generations.

There remains a concern that the meagre resources available for the promotion/continuance of the langauge should be seen to be used in the best way to effect a continued revival (mostly in the Galltacht), arresting its decline (mostly in the Gaeltacht), and above all encouraging its use by people who have up till now remained unengaged.

A nightmare scenario could be that the language dies out in fifty years with little to remember it but shedloads of documents of policies and directives that few will read in any language.

Maca I see exactly where you're coming from but this comes back to the point that respect is something that has to be earned - it can't simply be conferred on someone or something by the whim of a public body.

One reason that Irish has not had the "respect" that you speak of is due to the relatively meagre number of speakers. Numerous Europeans think that the language is a dialect of English for example. (Would be good if that could be changed by the official status!)

So first off you spend the resources promoting the language at home then you can go on later to call for official status with a MUCH stronger case than before. Otherwise it's like trying to teach someone to run before they can walk.

Personally I think the official European status is a side issue anyway. It will not lead to more people learning the language and Europeans aren't going to learn it anyway because of it's geographically peripheral status. (Think Estonian, Latvian, Romanian etc for similar examples...)

Mick, isn't this the point? Irish has not been promoted by its own government and has been allowed to dwindle. Sadly in this globalist era I think it might be beyond salvation. Only drastic measures can save it now and while the politicians have paid lip service to it, few of them seem willing to invest the time and resources to do what's necessary.

Any language which is relying on a Government to keep it going is on very thin ice. All it takes is a change of government to one that couldn't care less, or worse, is actively hostile and a language can become endangered within a generation. Spain's regional languages survived through the most rigorous persecution because enough people cared about them and found them useful as a cultural medium. Not because the government pumped money into them.

Henry94, she isn't the only one who claims the oracle like status of speaking for people. To give you an example which I'm sure you're familiar with, about a decade ago the local shinners decided that there was a huge demand in the New Lodge area to rename the 7 Tower blocks. No public consultation took place at all, but hey who cares, they can pat themselves on the back that they got a few street signs up. No matter that many of the local community still use the original names or that the younger generation use the bastardised "---- House" instead of "Teach ----." Why bother with practical measures when you can dupe yourself with a bit of pointless tokenism eh?

Eilis doesn't back up a single claim made in that article with facts. Who needs facts when supplying copy to the Sunday Independent, I would nearly be tempted to ask.

For example, how does she explain the increase in the number of Gaelscoileanna and the waiting lists for them?

How does she explain that Irish speaker numbers in the Gaeltacht remained stable between 1996 and 2002 for the first time in the history of the Irish state?

"We only pretend to because it's one of the things that educated and sophisticated Irish people are now supposed to believe."

I think this is the crux. Eilis has looked on in horror as in the last ten years Irish actually has become quite trendy - by Irish standards.

Maybe the vitriol comes from the fact that she would hate to think that her lack of grá for Irish means she isn't considered educated or sophisticated in these new circles.

Nothing worse than sitting down to an upper-middle class dinner to find that that some of that peasant vocab you jettisoned within a fortnight of leaving school is required.

Or maybe she's less than gruntled at the thought of her children not being even able to get into a Gaelscoil because mummy wouldn't pass the oral interview.
(Rant beag)

"It's amazing that the likes of Eilis get worked up about €3.5m being spent on translating some documents into Irish when the Taoiseach last year admitted that most if not all of the documents produced by the EU in English and the other official languages don't get read by anybody. This is at a cost of a staggering €800m per year"

Alot of people over the last week are talking about this 3.5 million a year, as far as I was aware this is a fee that every country in the EU will have to pay, a fee we would be paying even if the Irish language wasn't included as an official language.

I got this from the Conradh na Gaeilge website www.cnag.ie and what they are saying is true. "Íocfadh ciste aistriúcháin an AE (a chosnaíonn €3 an duine faoi láthair) as an gcúram agus íocann Éire isteach sa chiste sin pé scéal é."

This translates more or less to "The EU translation budget (which costs €3 per person at the moment) will pay for this responsibility, and Ireland pays for this service anyway".

Here are some other points that Conradh na Gaeilge mention about how this will be beneficial to speakers of the Irish language.

1. Eiseofar dlíthe an Aontais Eorpaigh i nGaeilge. Ní foláir reachtaíocht na hÉireann a chur amach i nGaeilge agus i mBéarla. Tagann 75% den dlí againne ón Eorap; anois tiocfaidh sé chugainn sa dá theanga oifigiúla againn.
2. Bíonn postanna in institiúidí an AE oscailte do shaoránaigh an Aontais a bhfuil 2 cheann (nó níos mó) de theangacha oifigiúla an AE acu. Is acmhainn anois í an Ghaeilge ar mhargadh fostaíochta na hEorpa.
3. Beidh cead Gaeilge a labhairt i bParlaimint na hEorpa.
4. Fostóidh an tAontas aistreoirí breise agus teangairí breise agus beidh deiseanna fostaíochta ann dá réir do Éireannaigh.
5. Íocfadh ciste aistriúcháin an AE (a chosnaíonn €3 an duine faoi láthair) as an gcúram agus íocann Éire isteach sa chiste sin pé scéal é.

Valenciano wrote:

respect is something that has to be earned - it can't simply be conferred on someone or something by the whim of a public body.

Official status is a sign of respect, but does not of itself confer it. The respect has been earned by those who campaigned for it over the last number of years. Not to mention the MEPs over the years who spoke Irish in Parliament.

My favourite story is of Mary Banotti speaking in Irish, being told by the chair (an English Tory) to speak in "a civilised language" and continuing in French.

Official status makes that kind of cheap snub impossible, and therefore adds to respect for the language.

It must be galling for those Irish journalists in the english language who have been trumpteting for years about Irish being a dead language to find the Foreign Ministers of 25 EU states all disagreeing with them.

I have met many people who have a) never realised that a separate Irish language existed or b) thought that it was merely an English dialect (including my current housemates, from NZ, Aus and Italy). I have been delighted to put them straight.

Much of the debate on this thread misses the main point - while welcoming the decision to make Irish "official", nobody seems to be able to say how exactly this will make the language more widely spoken - the reason being, it will not.

The main argument in favour of spending €3.5m for the Irish translations (effectively "but lots of money is already wasted in the EU") is supremely perverse - but it's given me quite a few laughs..

Respect? I think you'll find that for the massive majority of EU citizens (and I mean massive, 99%+) the over-riding sentiment towards Irish is indifference, regardless of whether it is "offical-ised" or no. I would be surprised if this decision warranted more than a sentence in "other news" in only the more Europhile papers around the continent.

To pre-empt the (by now predictable) onslaught - I am not a Unionist, I do not "hate" Irish, and in fact, when I arrive at the stage where I can speak Spanish fluently, I am minded to try to find an Irish language class somewhere in London to study it - NOTE not because it is now an "official" language in the EU..

"The main argument in favour of spending €3.5m for the Irish translations (effectively "but lots of money is already wasted in the EU") is supremely perverse - but it's given me quite a few laughs.."

A Chara, this is money that we would have been spending on official languages anyway. Regardless of whether the Irish language was official or not.

"Much of the debate on this thread misses the main point - while welcoming the decision to make Irish "official", nobody seems to be able to say how exactly this will make the language more widely spoken - the reason being, it will not."

My opinion of an answer to that statement would be that there are plenty of things that this will do for the Irish language. Unfortunately over the years the Irish language has been associated occassionaly with republican and the highly educated, people are saying that only the yuppies speak Irish...which in fairness is all crap. But with Irish now being an official EU language it will mean that it will

firstly get international recognition, so no one will be able to say they thought it was a dialect of English now.

Because Irish will be more recognised it means that more people throughout the world will learn it.

Bilingual dictionaries will be made with other languages other than English, and the Irish language will no longer be confined to the island of Ireland (which is like it or not how the case seems to be at the moment)

I think this recognition will make the language so much stronger than it is now.

I work with the Irish language every day and I use it with my family and many of my friends. Recently I was working on a campaign to promote the Irish language and I was called sectarian and a bigot because I used this brilliant language... I am not political, I don't agree with sectarianism or bigotry, but some people assumed, because I spoke Irish and because I was trying to get it on par with the English language, that I was being anti English....

"nobody seems to be able to say how exactly this will make the language more widely spoken"

Lafcadio,
nobody campaigning for Irish to be afforded this status ever claimed this step alone would make the language more widely spoken.

Recognising somebody's rights is the beginning of the process not the end.

What it will do is afford the deserved respect to Irish speakers when it comes to dealings with the European Union while also giving Irish language qualifications that hundreds of thousands of Irish people have a new found status when it comes to looking for employment within the EU.

This status is another reason (not the overriding reason but another reason) to study Irish to an advanced level.

What amazes me is that so many English speakers get so uppity about the Irish language. Even in its current perilous state it still seems to scare the bejaysus out of a lot of Irish people.

Even though the 3 million + bill is minute and would have to be paid anyway and they won't have to see an extra word of Irish in their lives because of this decision, they still can't help getting in the digs.

The money given to Irish horseracing by the government over the next five years would pay the Irish language status bill for the next 65 years.

Anti-Irish language activists should ask themselves why they can't gain a sense of perspective?

Lafcadio wrote

nobody seems to be able to say how exactly this will make the language more widely spoken - the reason being, it will not.

The main difficulty for Irish speakers is finding employment which allows them to work in Irish. Not being able to speak Irish at work means that an important part of your life is cut off from the language. Offical status means that at the very least the translators will be able to work through Irish - and that effect will spread since the documents will be available as raw material for journalists, educators etc.

It will also make it easier to get EU funds (and therefore other funds) for cultural and educational projects in Irish, which up to now had to fight on a case by case basis for funds. Like it or not, most cultural and educational projects, regardless of language, depend on state funding.

George: "The money given to Irish horseracing by the government over the next five years would pay the Irish language status bill for the next 65 years."

Aonghus: "The main difficulty for Irish speakers is finding employment which allows them to work in Irish."

And whose fault has that been? Surely that points to the direct culpability of the Irish government which has failed to promote the language? They've done nothing to try to attract investment to the Gaeltacht areas or to ensure that public sector employees use the language at work. Why should European people have to cover the Irish governments failings?

Maca, the Europeans that I have met think that Irish Gaelic is similar to English and have been shocked when I've spoken a few words of the language to them to highlight the differences. Again while it would be nice, it's wishful thinking to suppose that official status will change that. Official status has not stopped many Irish people thinking that Latvian or Hungarian are similar to Russian for example! Which again comes back to the point that, due to it's geographic position it will remain an irrelevant peripheral language to continental Europeans. The battle therefore has to take place at home and I remain uncovinced that this will lead to more people studying the language.

Thanks for responses, folks, will come back later for fuller response, a couple of quick points:

I thought the €3.5m was the extra that would be spent on Irish; if not, then what is this €3.5m spent on? In any case, having an extra translation requirement will require some extra spend, regardless of how modest it can be made to seem by means of inappropriate comparisons (eg "..but Europeans spend £10m each month on toothpaste.." etc) and my point would be that what the EU needs, particularly given its travails right now, is less ineffectual bureaucratic spending rather than more.

I fear that the problem with this decision, is that it creates the illusion of "doing something" on the behalf of the Irish govt - so that the next time they're reproached for cutting funding to an Irish college or study programme or whatever they'll go "what do you mean we don't care about Irish, we got it recognised as an official working language in the EU don't you know.."

George - will reply later, gotta run for train..

Why should European people have to cover the Irish governments failings?

An effect of European status is that it increases the pressure on the Irish Governemnt to live up to it's commitments at home. The EU has had a positive effect on getting the Irish Government to live up to prior commitments on environmental and social issues. I'd be sanguine about it having a similar effect for Irish, where the problem has been good policies on paper, but no follow through. (until Éamon Ó Cuiv became minister, with some positive steps before that, notably TG4 set up under Michael D. Higgins).

European status is important for it's effect at home, rather than abroad. The anomaly that it was the 1st offical language on paper at home, but merely a "constitutional" language in Europe, where most of our law now comes from, was damaging at home.

Val
"the Europeans that I have met think that Irish Gaelic is similar to English"

I have to say I have never experienced that. Once I add the word "Gaelic" they always understood what I meant. The problem, I have experienced, was just with the word "Irish"

"Again while it would be nice, it's wishful thinking to suppose that official status will change that."

I don't think it will change that much, I don't think people are much too bothered by it.

"The battle therefore has to take place at home and I remain uncovinced that this will lead to more people studying the language."

There I sort of agree with you. But do we really know what effect this move will have? All we can do is guess. What negative effect will it have do you think?

George - are you referring to me when you're talking about "anti-Irish activists" and the like? If so, I'm genuinely unsure of where you're getting that idea; far from "scaring the bejaysus" out of me, the thought of Irish becoming extinct during my lifetime is depressing - and exercises in pointlessness like this make that prospect no less likely.

Further to what I was saying about the supposed respect that this will confer on the language, I had a look at the short Nouvel Observateur article above, and in the space of three paras, they mention twice that it's not widely spoken, as well as wrly observing that Dermot Ahern made his enthusiastic statement in English...

I reckon that people study languages (very broadly) because they perceive that benefits will accrue to them; these can be roughly classed into two categories, financial (to find employment, pad out cvs, communicate in business, i.e. why most of the world learns English these days) and cultural (i.e. to enrich experience of travelling, cultural appreciation, etc).

Another problem with denoting Irish as a working language of the EU, apart from the money spent, is that it maintains the pretence that learning Irish will invite benefits in the first category - when in fact, if anyone studies Irish as a route to professional gain, I would seriously question their decision-making. Of course, this will provide a handy and probably quite remunerative job for maybe 20 or 30 people, a drop in the ocean even among the slender population of people who still speak Irish.

The posters above seeming to welcome this as the start of some sort of return to widespread employment of Irish in business or politics are kidding themselves; Irish is not now, has not been for several centuries, and will probably never be again, widely spoken or useful in either of these contexts, even in Ireland.

What we should concentrate on are ways to focus attention on the benefits from the second category: a broadening of cultural experience for Irish people and people from abroad alike. It's not an easy sell, particularly for English-speakers who become very lazy with respect to languages; and I must say I can't think of any brilliant ideas for smart funding, aside from the obvious - bilingual education to be encouraged, etc.

Scríobh Lafcadio:

Irish is not now, has not been for several centuries, and will probably never be again, widely spoken or useful in either of these contexts, even in Ireland

It depends on what you mean by "widely". Within the context of the current pool of speakers, opportunities for employment are in fact increasing - mostly in the media and educational sectors. Among other things, EU official status will help consolidate that. Of course this is mostly the "cultural" sector, but that sector is an important one, where the language one speaks actually matters.

A Czech acquaintance of mine, who speaks fluent Irish, has been working with a terminology project in DCU since January, for example.

English speakers are, regretably, notoriously blind to the advantages and the normality of multilingual societies.

Lafcadio

"..exercises in pointlessness.."

The only reason Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots , Welsh, Manx, and Cornish went into decline in the first place was that they became "officially" nonexistant with the creation of the UK.

If you want a language to live you need to give the people who speak it access to all the official information they require in that language.

This should be viewed as a start (maybe not a particularly good place to start).

If there is to be any hope for the language this is exactly the kind of "exercise" that needs to be done.

> English speakers are, regretably, notoriously
> blind to the advantages and the normality of
> multilingual societies.

But Ireland is a multi-lingual society. Its just that none of the lanaguges that you hear on a regular basic on the streets of Ireland are Irish.

I can walk around Dublin and hear its residents speak half a dozen lanaguges. Slavic languages, Baltic languages, Asian languages, African lanaguges. Not a peep of Irish.

But apart from those who are forced to speak Irish, those who are paid to speak Irish, or those who are language cranks, you almost never hear Irish spoken in any normal situation by ordinary folk in Ireland.

In fact the last time I heard someone speak normal conversational Irish in a public place was 1992.

It was a real shock the first time I visited North Wales and discovered that the locals actually spoke Welsh in normal social situations. I had become so used to the profound hypocracy surrounding the Irish language in Ireland. Lots of cooercion, lots of compulsion, lots of lip-service, but not a word spoken outside of school and a general embarassment about the whole subject.

The Irish langauge is dead. And making it an offical EU lanaguge is not going to revive it.

Maca, well your observations are as good as mine however the impression I've had in Spain, Romania, Latvia and Poland is that people either think that Irish is a dialect of English or that it's a related language (eg Spanish vs Italian, German vs Dutch etc) in Spain I've disabused them of the notion by pointing out that the Spanish words Corbata [tie] , mil [thousand] or conejo [rabbit] have more in common with their Irish equivalents than English. I even formulated the controversial theory that it would be easier for an Irish speaker to learn Spanish than Irish, but then that was after listening to a load of cliches and I was a wee bit bolloxed at the time :)

The negative affect that I think that this could have is that it could actually demote Irish in real terms within the EU.

Other languages which are spoken widely within the EU include
Russian (700.000 mother tongue speakers in Latvia alone - not counting those in the rest of East Europe!)
Catalan (8-10 million speakers in Spain, France and Italy)
Turkish (well over a million in Germany alone, not to mention Belgium etc)

add Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Chinese, Welsh, Basque, Galician, etc etc all with much more daily mother tongue speakers in specific EU regions and where do you stop? By accepting one you open the floodgates to all the others and thus Irish becomes a language among many which has to survive on its own merits which frankly it's not doing a very good job of doing at the moment.

The biggest problem is that it's a cop-out from a government that has failed to do anything to preserve the language other than a few tokenistic measures, so that that they can head off any protests by saying, hey look we achieved equal status for the language in Europe.

Lacfadio, you miss a third and arguably more important reason why people learn languages which native English speakers often overlook - compulsion. We are used to at least having some choice of languages that we study whereas many continentals compelled to learn English from early primary school through to A-Level / leaving cert. The more important though (totally alien to English speakers!) is that businesses often force their employees to attend English classes. Believe me, a class of surly adults there at compamny expense is worse than a group of 6 years olds there at parent's expense!

Biffo: "If you want a language to live you need to give the people who speak it access to all the official information they require in that language."

Fine, provided that this leads to more speakers. However I find the idea of people queueing up for Irish courses in order to decipher the latest EU document a little difficult to imagine.

Be realistic, this is a forum for those interested in politics and you could count probably count on the fingers of one hand those of us that read EU publications VOLUNTARILY. If we couldn't give a toss then what hope for the ignorant big brother watching masses?

If you want a language to live then you need to maintain the number of speakers at a high enough level to ensure that it will be passed on to the next generation. If it isn't at a high enough level (which arguably Irish isn't) then you need to increase the number of speakers. Does this do that? NO.

Irish, sadly, is dying and not just because of indifference, but also because the people that should care are doing nothing other than indulging in lip service measures rather than the hard and drastic things that need to be done.

aonghus

But you do sound like a language crank, sorry, enthusiast. You sound like a classic example. "Me and me mates speak Irish on the DART so therefor Irish is alive and well"

Well I've spent several hundred of hours traveling on the DART over the last few years and I have heard more than two dozen languages spoken, not one of which was Irish.

Just one sample point, I know, but as I said before in another thread, if there are are 40,000 Poles in Ireland and I can hear Polish spoken on a regular basis, why is it so difficult to hear Irish spoken by the 100,000+ Dubliners who claimed in the last census that they spoke Irish on a daily basis.

I heard almost no evidence of them while growing up, and one hears little evidence of them now.

And why do you feel to need to speak in Irish in public?

Does it make you feel superior to those clod hoppers around you who after 12 years of compulsory Irish can barely string together a sentence in Irish.

Or does it makes you feel like a true Irishman while all the rest of us are just ersatz west-brits?

Or is it just a attempt at cultural affectation?

Or maybe you do have a true love for the language and culture but have n't noticed yet that the coercive language policies of the last 70 years have failed to either revive the language or halt its decline as a living language.

Just wondering...

Biffo

"Why don't you compare like with like, you're not going to hear Welsh in Cardiff, unless you look hard for it, similarly Irish in Dublin."

True.

But my surprise was based on growing up in Ireland, including lots of time spent visiting many parts of Ireland, including areas nominally Irish speaking in Cork and Kerry, and never hearing Irish spoken.

I had watched lots of Welsh TV (HTV) while growing up because that was the only ITV channel you could pick up in some parts of North Dublin at the time. So not unexpectedly I thought that the situation in Wales was just like Ireland. Lots of programs in the language on TV and radio but little or no evidence of the language in day to day living.

So imagine my surprise while stranded in Hollyhead dues to canceled ferries when I discovered that in shop after shop the locals were actually talking in Welsh to each other. Very different from my personal experience of equivalent towns in Ireland.

JMcConnell wrote:

And why do you feel to need to speak in Irish in public?

and then the usual rhetoric imputing arrogance etc to me

I don't "feel the need". I grew up speaking Irish in Dublin. If I meet an acquaintance who also grew up speaking Irish, or whom I met in an Irish speaking context, then the natural language for me to speak to that person is Irish, so I do.

Case in point: This morning I met an acquaintance whom I know speaks Irish, so we had a conversation in Irish from Blackrock to Pearse (where he left the train). Apart from my jokingly pointing out to him, based on JMcConnells comments above, that the conversation we were having wasn't happening, we didn't discuss Irish or the cause or any of the other thing Irish cranks are supposed to incessantly discuss at all.

What you feel your identity is, is quite frankly, a matter of no concern to me. Several things go into my sense of who I am, and speaking Irish is one of them. So is the ten years I spent in Germany. So is my religion. So what?

Val
"The negative affect that I think that this..."
"By accepting one you open the floodgates..."

I don't necessarily see this as a negative. It may force a whole rethink of the system, perhaps they will work with a small core group of languages and leave the translating up to each individual Government, which I think might be a better system.

"The biggest problem is that it's a cop-out from a government that has failed to do anything to preserve the language other than a few tokenistic measures, so that that they can head off any protests by saying, hey look we achieved equal status for the language in Europe."

I'm not sure i agree.
Certainly there has been a serious lack of focus from the government but if you look at, for example, the Official languages act or the growth of Gaeilscoileanna, I don't see them as token measures. There still remains this lack of focus from the Government but if the growth of gaeilscoileanna can continue for a generation (vital to get kids speaking early) things might look a lot more positive then. Irish may not need token measures at that stage.

JMcC
Why do you only pop in for Irish discussions, you should join us on some other threads.

JMcConnell also wrote

Me and me mates speak Irish on the DART so therefor Irish is alive and well

I'm not saying it's "alive and well", merely that your assertion that no natural conversation in Irish has happened in Dublin since 1992 is untrue.
"alive, but could be better" is what it is, therefore I am in favour of EU Official Status, and the Language Act, since they provide opportunities for Irish speakers to live a little bit more of their lives through Irish. Something which is especially important for Gaeltacht dwellers, who, being farmers and fishermen etc. have much greater interaction with State bureaucracy than urban dwellers like us. The lack of State services in Irish in the Gaeltacht has been in factor in the falling of of Irish as a language of business there.

For the record, the Welsh Office employs 50+ translators, and contracts out translation as well:
http://www.wales.gov.uk/organipo/content/pgfa/proc-c19-e.htm

Hi maca

I was wondering when you were going to join in.

The reason why I only pop up in Irish language threads is because it is the only political question in Ireland that I can getting somewhat excited about - and mainly to see if there has been any advance in the arguments of the Irish language lobby in the last twenty years.

From the evidence so far, the cozy self-referential world of the Irish language lobby is still stuck firmly in the 1930's.

For the last ten days I've got to do some comparative linguistics. So I'm staying in western Brittany, just outside a town not unlike Kinsale. Not hardcore Briezh but not exactly enthusiastic francophonie either. The only French flag is on the marie.

I decided to do some Brezhoneg spotting. I've visited equivalent areas in Ireland over the years without hearing a single word of Irish spoken so I was wondering just how much Breton was spoken here. At the first opportunity to hear the locals in a group social situation, the local school fete, I heard my first Breton. A few old guys, local farmers, speaking at first why sounded like particularly impenetrably accented French. On closer listening it was Breton. Next sighting a few days later, in a hypermarket in a large town not unlike Dungarvin. A family, one small kid, mother and father, chatting away in Breton. Most recent sighting, yesterday, in a coastal town not unlike Youghal, several groups of people I passed on the street were speaking Breton.

The last time I visited a Gaeltacht area, in Kerry, it was only on the fourth day of the visit when my host told me that we were in a Gaeltacht area that I even realized I was in a Gaeltacht area because all the locals were speaking English. I did not hear a single word of Irish the whole ten days I was there.

You still haven't responed to my points JMc.

I'd like to add three points:

1) You will hear recent immigrants speaking their language more in Dublin than you will hear Irish speakers, simply because they have not been assimilated (yet). Therefore most of the contacts will be people they know from home, have travelled here with, or are in the same boat. Irish speakers are mostly Irish - and have the same number of english speaking friends, family colleagues etc as the rest of the population.

2) There is what amounts to a social taboo in Ireland about continuing to speak in Irish when a person who does not speak Irish well joins the company. That goes some way towards explaining why you personally have seldom heard Irish, even in Gaeltacht areas. (Where in Kerry were you, by the way?)

3) There is an additional problem, in that the Gaeltacht boundaries of 1926 and 1956 included areas where the language was not the language of the community for years before. So an official gaeltacht area is not necessarily a Gaeltacht area.

My personal experience in Corca Dhuibhne was that I heard plenty of Irish being spoken, even in an Daingean (dingle). I was able to conduct all my business through Irish except in one shop where the shopkeeper was a foreigner (i.e. not Irish at all).

JMac
"The reason why I only pop up in Irish language threads"

I think it really tells us something that you only pop in for these threads. I don't think "excited" really applies here but you obviously have some deep rooted hatred of the language which drives you. Which is fair enough, each to his own I say, I just don't understand it.

"For the last ten days I've got to do some comparative linguistics."

Good for you.
Have you given them much grief about speaking a "dead language"?

Btw, Aonghus touched on a very good point which I might have mentioned before. Point 1 - immigrants always group together. Always. Being an immigrant of sorts I can testify to that, it's vital for your survival in another country to have people you can talk to normally, in your own language. So Poles will find other Poles. It's not the same for minority language speakers in their own country, Irish speakers in Ireland, Swedish speakers in Finland, Hungarian speakers in Slovakia etc etc
Point 2 is also very relevant.

Aonghus

I was guilty of a little bit of rhetorical wind up in my reply to you but I did peg you in one. As I suspected you grew up in an Irish speaking household so therefor your experience of the Irish language has been fundamentally different from 90%+ of your fellow citizens.

You grew up in an environment were speaking Irish was a natural part of the environment and no doubt a fulfilling and and enriching experience.

For the rest of us it was a schizophrenic experience of varying degrees of unpleasantness. If one had the good fortune to have an enthusiastic Irish teacher then one came out of it with a fairly positive attitude about the language. But based on the fact that less than half of the people who come out of the Irish educational system leave with a positive attitude towards the Irish language this would indicate to me that the average pupils experience of the Irish language is closer to my experiences than to yours - a mind-numbingly pointless and irrelevant syllabus taught by unenthusiastic teachers just going through the motions.

JmcConnell also wrote

I did peg you in one.

Oh, I see. I speak and enjoy Irish, therefore my opinions don't count. An interesting concept.

Where is the figure of "just over half" coming from?

The BCI survey on attitudes to Irish, in particular to an Irish language radio station with english lyrics came up with ca 75% pro Irish.

Press release in Irish here with a link to the survey, which is bilingual.

Same press release in English

Looking to the future a significant 78% of respondents felt that Irish language programming should be provided by all radio stations. This compares with 31% who felt that the future development of the Irish language should be the responsibility of dedicated Irish language radio stations. A further 75% of all respondents would like to see the establishment of a dedicated Irish language radio station just for young people. 89% of respondents also felt TG4 was a good model for the future development of Irish language radio programming.

Given the dictionary definition of crank, I'm beginning to think it would be more accurately applied to you than to me.

Maca

It nice to see and hear up close here in Brittany a fairly successful conservation policy for a minority language and culture. A policy that is not based on compulsion or coercion, on language ghettos, or massive subsidies. A language that is still spoken widely despite the real and sustained policy of suppression and marginalization by the central government for most of the last 120 years.

So unlike Ireland and the Irish language, in every way.

Other point. The immigrants clumping together argument is spurious. I've lived in San Francisco, the most multi-lingual city in the US, and the frequency one hears the many non-English languages spoken by its residences in public places matches fairly accurately the home languages stated by the residence of the City and County of San Francisco in their census returns.

That's why I find the numbers about Irish usage and competency reported in the Irish census and other surveys so ludicrous. There are 60,000 Chinese and 40,000 Poles in Ireland, and no matter where I go in the country I can readily hear evidence of their presence. Little sign so far of the self-assessed hoards of fluent Irish speakers.

J McConnell,
you don't seem to be au fait with the current status of Irish in Ireland, probably because It's just not influencing your world but heh, I doubt you know what the Methodists get up to either.

So here are a few facts that might surprise you.

Over 40% of the tourists to An Daingean (formerly Dingle) go there to learn Irish.

Radio na Gaeltachta has an average listnership of 150,000.

There were just 10 Irish medium schools outside the Gaeltacht at the end of the 1950s but that there are 21,894 primary pupils and 5,213 secondary level pupils in Irish-medium education in the school year 2002-3.

There are now over 170 Irish language pre-schools with over 3,000 youngsters.

Parents were three-times more likely to speak Irish at home if their children attended such schools?

Also, the O Riagain and O Gliasain survey on "Public and state support for Irish" found that:

65% agreed leaders should use more Irish in public and in the Dail

69% found more money should be spent to improve the teaching of Irish

70% said the government should provide gaelscoileanna wherever people want them

78% said the government should support and encourage Irish language organisations while

72% said Irish speakers have the right to expect Civil Servants to be able to speak Irish with them.

It seems to me that your views are the views of a very small minority in the Irish Republic. Fortunately, a smaller minority by the day.

J McConnell,

"There are 60,000 Chinese and 40,000 Poles in Ireland.."

So what, what's your point? What has that got to do with an argument that nobody speaks Irish, what is the relevance?

If those people choose to stay in this Ireland, their grand children will not be speaking either Chinese or Polish.

Also, your argument that nobody speaks Irish would be like me arguing that nobody speaks Polish, because, to best of my knowledge, I've never heard anybody speak Polish in person.

But I'm not going to say that no-one speaks Polish because I don't hear it, that would be stupid as I am aware that there are lots of Poles working here.

Why don't you stop exagerating, you might have a point to make but it's getting lost in all the shite you talk.

biffo

You must have missed the earlier argument in another thread.

The simple version.

We have numbers from the CSO on the number of various nationals residing in Ireland. One can easily hear these nationals speak their various natives languages while ambling around the city center of Dublin (unless one is Maca it seems), and, in my experience, most smaller towns in Ireland.

According to all these surveys (all self-assessed it seems), the number of people who speak Irish daily dwarfs the number of resident foreign national. For some reason I seemed to have heard very few of these daily speakers of Irish while growing up and have heard little evidence of it now.

Therefor I have deduced, based on the empirical evidence, that the number who actually speak Irish on a daily basis is a lot less than the number of the various resident foreign nationals.

And now back to our regular programming...

maca

So you must have got one of the good teachers.

Lucky for you. A good teacher can make all the difference.

Mine were, with one exception, from the "just doing this because we have to, not that we really care" school of teaching.

The one exception was a psychopathic thug...

I always thought it was instructive that whenever the teachers wanted to talk among themselves about some private subject in front of the pupils that the spoke quickly in Irish, working on the principal that the pupils would not understand most of what the teachers were saying.

And the teachers were right, even in Leaving Cert classes, most pupils did not have a clue what the teachers were talking about most of the time.

J McConnell

"And now back to our regular programming..."

Hold your horses.

You still haven't explained the relevance. I again repeat the question - so what?

What have Chinese and Poles got to do with it? If the Celtic Tiger goes down the tubes tomorrow. the Chinese and the Poles go somewhere else. Any who stay, their grandchildren will be monolingual English speakers - so what? It doesn't prove or disprove anything in relation to Irish

You are right that numbers of Irish speakers are exaggerated, people claim to speak it who don't.

But you exaggerate in the other direction, you claim nobody speaks it. I know you are talking nonsense.

Anyway, based on your linguistic research and experiences in Wales and Brittany, which so impressed you, what do you think could be done to encourage the use of Irish?

aonghus

Sorry for not quoting my source for my "over half" statement.

I did some quick googling a few days ago and the most interesting and informative study I could find on the subject was a U.C.C study of attitudes towards the Irish language by its staff.

http://www.ucc.ie/ace/Irish%20Language%20Attitudes.pdf

Far from exhaustive on the subject but it does make extensive references to the published literature on general attitudes towards the language in the general population.

My take. Around 20% of the pop have a very favorable attitude towards the language. Based on another source, which I cannot remember off the top of my head, I am assuming that at least half of these very favorables grew up like yourself in an environment were speaking Irish had very strong cultural support - Gaeltacht, Gael Schoile, bilingual parents etc. Another 30% of so had a somewhat favorable attitude towards the language. The rest had somewhat unfavorable view, or very unfavorable. I think the very negatives were around 10%. It seems that I'm not the only awkward bastard out there with a bad attitude...

Got any better sources from the academic literature? If so I would be very interested to see them.

And press releases dont count. Sorry.

JMcC
"It nice to see and hear up close here in Brittany a fairly successful conservation policy"

Fairly successful?
Currently about 450,000 understand the language, of that about 300,000 speak it to varying levels of fluency(Eurolang), this is down from about 1.3 million in 1930. At the beginning of the 20th Century, half the population of Lower Brittany knew only Breton, the other half being bilingual. By 1950, there were only 100,000 monolingual Bretons.
Fairly successful?

"A policy that is not based on compulsion or coercion"

And what has happened? Schools have stopped teaching it. So how do people learn the language if schools stop teaching it?

"The immigrants clumping together argument is spurious. ... That's why I find the numbers about Irish usage and competency reported in the Irish census and other surveys so ludicrous. There are 60,000 Chinese and 40,000 Poles in Ireland..."

You obviously completely miss the point. Irish speakers are not immigrants, they don't clump together like foreign nationals do.

p.s. i'll repeat that I never heard Polish in Ireland, therefore (by your reasoning) Polish is not spoken in Ireland.

"So you must have got one of the good teachers."

I had a complete dick of a teacher for leaving cert actually.

"Mine were, with one exception, from the "just doing this because we have to, not that we really care" school of teaching."

Pretty much the same in most other subjects actually. Few if any of my teachers had much interest.

Interesting discussion. My two cents:

I grew up in Dublin, where I was taught Iri ash (alongside English) for 13 years. I left school speaking two languages badly, regretting that I'd not been educated in England.

I went abroad for several years and taught EFL. It was dismaying to conclude right away that my English was below standard, a direct result of my having grown up in a school and home environment where the language was spoken imperfectly.

It's perhaps very unfair to say this, but I can't help feeling that had there been less emphasis on Irish and more on English then I'd have had a little less catching up to do. As it is, I'm painfully aware that no amount of study in adult life can make up for that all-important grounding when a child.

I say: Let the Irish concentrate on getting the one language right.

Interesting discussion. My two cents:

I grew up in Dublin, where I was taught Irish (alongside English) for 13 years. I left school speaking two languages badly, regretting that I'd not been educated in England.

I say: Let the Irish concentrate on getting the one language right.

Let the Irish concentrate on getting the one language right

This theory that the human brain can only cope well with one language is risible.

Scandanavians (to stay in Europe) have no problem juggling two or three languages. My kids spoke no English for about two years after we came to Ireland, but now juggle Irish, German and English at will.

All the evidence is, in fact, that those who speak and learn more than one language as children do better in both. It is no accident that irish medium secondary schools are high up in the academic league tables that the press every now and then come up with.
That is not to say that language teaching and teachers in this country could do with improvement - it certainly could. But I understand the UK and America have at least the same problems.

maca

I consider the survival of Breton a success because I can actually hear it spoken, *regularly*, by ordinary folk, while going about my business here in western Brittany. I never had that experience anywhere in Ireland (and aoenghus, I was staying in Ballinskelligs in Kerry by the way..).

Breton is an optional subject in the local schools here. I dont know what the take up rate is but I would not be too surprised if it was in the 10% to 20% range. Which I would also guess would be the take up rate for Irish if students were actually given a choice about taking the subject in Ireland...

Breton has survived despite massive and sustained attempts by the French central authorities to suppress it. Irish has declined to the point of disappearance despite sustained attempts by the central government to coerce and compel its use.

I know what conclusion I would draw from these facts.

Want to hear some Polish in Dublin? Listen to the wait-staff in most coffee shops or restaurants in Dublin talk among themselves. You'll get to hear some Polish very quickly.

Even simpler. Get off the DART in Dunleary. Turn left. See the sign for the first coffee shop. Cafe Insomnia. Go in and say hi to all the very nice Polish staff behind the counter. Then take a seat with a cup of their pretty good coffee and listen to the light hearted Polish banter.

I cannot understand a word of it but I find the experience very relaxing..

Let me try to explain further.

My point is that I grew up in a city/country where English had supplanted the original language, Irish. My background is middle class, my parents were well educated, yet the English I heard spoken in the home and elsewhere was inferior to that spoken by our "counterparts" in England. I went on to do a BA and an MA, yet no amount of third-level schooling in English could repair the damage already done. I didn't even KNOW the damage was there until I began to study grammar in real depth. Only then did I see that the Irish version of spoken English falls down badly on many fronts. And I'm not referring to charming locutions such as "I'm only after me dinner". I realize I'm crying over spilt milk but I do sometimes wish I'd been brought up and schooled in an environment where, say, a simple preposition was not quite so often confused with a preposition of direction. (And in deference to all sane people here, that's as far as I'll venture into the exciting world of grammar.)

My point is that a native speaker of English of my age (I'm 42) and social class, growing up somewhere in the home counties, would have imbibed such distinctions from an early age - at home, from his peers, at school. Instead I was forced to spend a great deal of time learning a minor language whose vocabularly was as nothing compared to the richness of English.

My point is that my parents and teachers (and indeed educators and government) might have better served my generation had they channelled their energies into improving the general use of English.

Denny Boy

"Let the Irish concentrate on getting the one language right"

That would be a dumb move according to the following research, as reported by the BBC.

"Dr Ellen Bialystok and colleagues at York University assessed the cognitive skills of" bilingual and monolingual people.

"Half of the volunteers came from Canada and spoke only English. The other half came from India and were fluent in both English and Tamil.

The volunteers had similar backgrounds in the sense that they were all educated to degree level and were all middle class.

The researchers found that the people who were fluent in English and Tamil responded faster than those who were fluent in just English. This applied to all age groups.

The researchers also found that the bilingual volunteers were much less likely to suffer from the mental decline associated with old age.

"The bilinguals were more efficient at all ages tested and showed a slower rate of decline for some processes with aging," they said.'

More at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3794479.stm

Maybe this is the reason that JMcConnell sounds like a bitter, twisted and senile OAP.

Denny Boy

You'll be glad to hear that you are not the only one who has noticed this deficiency in the Irish educational system.

Even the Dept of Education has noticed.

The Dept of Education did a study a few years ago trying to find out why Irish eleven years old did so badly on standardized language and language comprehension tests when compared with their peers in other OECD countries.

Their conclusion. Because so much school time was devoted to teaching (badly) a language with little relevance to a large proportion of the students, not enough resources were left over to teach properly the native language of the vast majority of the students.

I was surprised by the report on two counts. First that the Dept of Education would actually admit in print that compulsory Irish at primary school level was seriously impeding the education of students. And secondly that 25% of all primary school teaching hours was spent teaching Irish. I'd forgotten just how much of the school day was wasted on those pointless lessons.

Aonghus

I missed the ref at the end of the press release

And you obviously did not check out the UCC study which spends a lot of pages doing a comparative study of the attitudes of the university staff compared to the attitudes of the *general* Irish population.

Its full of lots of interesting numbers on the attitudes of the *general* population.

I did not move the goalposts. It just seems like you are pretending they are not there...

If you can find a better academic study (with sources) on the the attitudes of the general Irish population towards the Irish language I would be glad to see it.

I did not move the goalposts. It just seems like you are pretending they are not there...

....

The Irish langauge is dead. And making it an offical EU lanaguge is not going to revive it.

....

If you can find a better academic study (with sources) on the the attitudes of the general Irish population towards the Irish language I would be glad to see it.

That looks like a moved goalpost to me. Why would you place more value in a survey carried out by academics to one carried out by a reputable market research company? And what is the relevance of attitude to your original statement that Irish is dead?

You personally hear Poles speaking polish, and chinese speaking chinese to other Poles and Chinese. You hear Irish spoken less often simply because Irish speakers are not a separate ethnic group to anglophone Irish.

Ballinskelligs was barely Irish speaking in 1956, and had its hinterland cut off when the boundaries were drawn, so that there was, for example, no Gaeltacht secondary schoool available.

Currently, the local people are reorganising to revive Irish as a community language. You will be pleased to hear that the Gaeltacht boundaries are being reviewed taking socio-linguistic factors into consideration
However, if you want to hear Irish spoken as a community language I suggest a visit to:
Inir Óirr

Inis Méain

Corca Dhuibhne west of An Daingean

etc.

Note that I have not claimed anywhere that everything is fine with Irish, merely that your assertion that it is dead is not true.