Irish Language Revival

I agree he's inconsistent, but he probably deserved his audience with the Queen. Still, if he really was livid at not being invited, it has its comical aspect to it.

I don't really get anti-Irish language people. Well, I should, because I used to be anti-Irish language, but I still don't get it. The objections to reviving Irish are so obvious that it seems redundant to make them-- they make themselves. It's difficult. It's impractical. We've been trying so long now without much success. There are exponentially more good books to read in English, Spanish, French, and other world languages. It won't give us any economic advantage (probably). We should be learning French or German or Chinese instead, to help us compete in a global economy.

But it reminds me of people who are anti-Christmas. Because it's a waste of money and you eat too much and it's crass and vulgar and it's a commercial racket and you find yourself thrown together with people you don't like and why should we behave differently at one time of the year and not another....and you think...."Well, all that is so obvious, there must be a reason people do it anyway."

I read his writing each week, which is tribute enough. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don't, but certainly in the barren fields of Irish journalism, it is a good thing he is there.

I'm reading a book called Voices Silenced: Has Irish a Future? by James McCloskey, a linguist. Its description of language death on a global scale is deeply depressing me.

I've been trying to read more Irish recently, but I realize that it's speaking it that keeps it alive. I did chat to one of my colleagues in Irish for awhile, but it quickly became apparent that he wasn't very keen on it. There are other Irish speakers in my workplace, but not people I particularly want to talk to.

Anyway, if there is any Irish speaker on the forum who lives in the North Dublin area, or even the Dublin area, or perhaps even someone who works in UCD, it would be great if we could meet up and speak in Irish-- send me a message. (I must restrict this to blokes to keep my good lady happy...)

This morning, the panel on the morning show on Radio Na Gaeltachta were discussing Brexit, the proposed boycott of goods manufactured in the West Bank, and whether we should be proud to call ourselves Gaelic.

They all agreed that Brexit was a bad thing (and the British people didn't realize what they were doing, etc.), and that the boycott was also a good thing. One fellow argued that it should be legitimate to criticize Israel without being called an anti-semite. I agree with this, but I wish they would extend that logic to other matters.

They all agreed we should be proud to call ourselves Gaelic, although this did lead to some virtue-signalling. They considered the idea that Irish language schools were racist. One person texting in said that, while most parents sent their kids to Irish language schools for the right reasons, some sent them for the wrong reasons-- to avoid immigrants. One member of the panel suggested there should be quotas (of what, he didn't say). Another member of the panel suggested that Gaelicism was cultural and not racial, and therefore open to everybody. I do actually agree with this, but at the same time, people tend to identify with the culture of their parents. I do wonder whether, at some stage, there will be pressure to remove Ireland's status as the first official language, if people of non-Irish extraction outnumber the native Irish, or continue to increase in numbers.

There was also a discussion of a West Cork pub which has banned mobile phones. They all approved of this, and so do I.

I follow a chap on Twitter called Ciarán Ó Coigligh, an Irish language writer and poet. I think pretty much everyone on this forum would admire him-- he is staunchly pro-life and socially conservative (he actually joined the DUP), and got into trouble with his former employer DCU for speaking against the gay agenda. (They suspended his email account-- how petty.)

I'm impressed by Ciarán's approach to Twitter-- he tweets bilingually, in Irish and then the same thing in English.

I've been so inspired by this that I've decided to mimic it in my everyday life. I have now started, every now and again, repeating something I've just said (in English) in my own poor Irish. I've explained to people what I'm doing so they are not bewildered, but I'm aiming to do it as widely as possible, outside formal situations like work meetings. And I also intend to do it in written communications (táim chun a dheanamh freisin i gcumarsáid scriofa).

My Irish is poor so there is no guarantee at all that anything I say or write is grammatically correct.

This is my reasoning:

1) As Irish language revivalists never cease to argue, it is SPOKEN Irish that matters when it comes to revival. So, although I read a fair amount of Irish (mostly the Irish language journal An Sagart), I don't feel I'm doing anything to help revive the language.
2) It will hopefully help my own Irish improve. Actually using something, even a little, can often make a big improvement.
3) Irish will never become more widely spoken if only proficient Irish speakers speak it, and if people aren't willing to risk sounding foolish or saying something incorrect.
4) I don't think we should only be focused on a full-scale revival-- all or nothing. I think that ANYTHING that gives everyday life a national flavour is good. People complain that bilingual street signs, and the cúpla focail at the start of a speech, and having terms like Taoiseach and Garda and the Luas, are lip-service and purely ceremonial. But surely it's better than nothing. Surely anything that gives everyday life a more national flavour is good?

Anyway, that's what I'm doing. Sin a bhfuil mé á dheanamh. I call it The Ó Coigligh Approach.

I honestly can't say Gaelicism is not at least in part racial. The absurdity of it not having at least something to do with being a Gael is revealed partly in what Maolseachlainn said: "I do actually agree with this, but at the same time, people tend to identify with the culture of their parents. I do wonder whether, at some stage, there will be pressure to remove Ireland's status as the first official language, if people of non-Irish extraction outnumber the native Irish, or continue to increase in numbers."

No one's going to want to learn Irish when there's a significant proportion, even if still a minority, of their people in the country who speak whatever language they took from their old homelands, with English being at best a trade language to deal with outsiders. Without us explicitly coercing them. And if you don't want to coerce them then you're out of luck, you have to limit immigration, or target immigration in preference to cultures and populations more amicable to assimilation into Ireland and Irish culture, which apart from having its own implicit racial connotations, most people, even conservatives, are unreasonably squeamish of. And if you don't want to do that, then trying to promote Gaeldom is a waste of breath and effort. No one's going to want to assimilate into a culture whose language is already a minority in its own homeland when they ALREADY don't want to bother to learn English in their own communities, as evidenced in other English speaking countries across the world and developing here as well.

I am against quotas for immigrents being sent to Gaeltachts, for the explicit purpose that its going to do NOTHING to promote Gaeldom in the immigrant communities for the above reasons and does nothing more than to hurt the native Irish who want to have their children learn Irish, both in discouraging people who send their children there for the 'wrong' reasons (as if preferring their kids being in an all Irish environment, even racially, is somehow an immoral thing, which it isn't) but also in pushing out families who want their children sent there for the 'right' reasons. Sorry no room for your children, Mr and Mrs McKenna. Need to save room for the quotas of non-Irish in the Gaeltacht.

Are you seeing the absurdity yet? At best you'll get a minority of the immigrant kids sent there who take it to heart, some who'll learn a bit and forget in a year or two (I am reminded of how I learned and then mostly forgot Spanish despite studying it in school from lack of practical use, as well as what I learned of French and sadly, Irish) and those who'll pass the time until they're out of this 'Irish Prison' they've been forced to go to, (assuming, very likely, most of the immigrant families didn't particularly care all that much to send their kids their for cultural reasons and likely did so because of some benefit proposed, or to just keep their kids busy and far away for the Summer) possibly resenting the process in the long term.

As for the Gaeldom being nonracial issue, I know some here don't care much for ethnonationalism, I understand the reasons why and that's fine. But its not only wrong, its dangerous to make it a moral issue, and to make a hard separation between race and culture. Ireland is not a proposition nation, it never was, it never will be. To think there's no connection and it doesn't matter is as silly as saying it doesn't matter if you replace all of Japan with Chinese people, so long as all the Chinese people speak Japanese, they'll be Japanese, right? Now imagine the same scenario but make the racial difference more drastic and you'll see the absurdity of the sentiment writ large. If somehow that doesn't apply to Ireland and Gaeldom, or anywhere else for that matter, I'd love to hear the reasons why.

In this day and age of massive international finance capitalism, globalism and the mass movement of peoples, to be this namby pamby about addressing the ethnic relationship language and culture has, and pretending its not related at all, because of fear of being akin the Ethno-idolotars who make race their religion is naivete in the extreme at best and actively helping our enemies at worst. I am not accusing anyone here of that, I am accusing the general fear in the conservative movement as a whole of addressing this issue.

Now, ALL OF THAT ASIDE, with regards to wider revival of the Irish language:

I was delighted to learn the Ulsterian dialect of Irish is still extant. I had been lead to believe for a long time there that it had been extinguished, I had thought the Gaeltacht over in Donegal (Irony of Ironies, the 'Fortress of Foreigners, from back in the day when Irish Tuathes viewed eachother as seperate countries entirely, something that carried over from Pagan times I imagine before Christianity and the Vikings and all of history), was Connaughtan or some other State mandated dialect. Turns out for the longest time Ulsterian was the 'bridge' dialect of Gaelige between Irish Gaelige, Scots Gaelic and Manx due to ancient migrations and settlements from Ulster to these places. The displacement and destruction of Gaelic civilization in Ulster broke this continuity however. I think the Ulsterian spoken in Donegal was already slightly different from the Ulsterian spoken in Eastern Ulster, like regional variations perhaps, and ever since the plantations as both Scots Gaelic, Manx, and Ulsterian Irish developed, they drifted farther apart in intelligibility.

So Ireland still retains all of its old dialects of Irish extant in various places. Even Travellers' Cant if you want to include the language of the Irish Travellers, which I do, I do not consider them a separate ethnicity from the Irish, just simply as another tribe of Irish culturally and linguistically. Closer to us than the Scottish Gaels are, and the Highlanders are pretty close as it is. I think Traveller's Cant is basically the Irish equivalent of Cockney, clearly I'm insulting one or the other here but I am not sure who.

However, as to the revival of Irish language as a whole, we're really going to need to step up our game. Not only are we going to need to give economic incentives to teachers to produce classes of students proficient in Irish, we're going to need to do that AND organise cultural festivals and competitions, again with incentives and rewards for the promoting of the spoken and written forms of Irish. Poetry competitions, songs, (both Popular and Traditional, as much as I hate the state of modern music). But more than that, it needs to be coercive in a certain respect.

I do not mean coercive in the sense of holding a gun to peoples' heads, I mean making life actively inconvenient to not be able to speak and read Irish. This is how the English made most of the island learn to speak English in a short amount of time after the Penal Laws were imposed. It is also how Israel made the vast majority of their population, which came from different countries speaking many different languages speak Hebrew, they basically made the Hebrew speaking population of Israel increase from 1% to above 70% in the space of a decade. Basically you're going to need to have everything written in Irish, roadsigns, textbooks, everything.

With nothing written in English.

As a whole, and if they are not super enthused to begin with, people are lazy, and thats more true to the modern Irish than anyone else I feel right now. You can teach every schoolchild to speak Irish, but if they have no call to read, write or speak it in day to day life, it will die off in their minds. The same was true to me (it also hurt that the curriculum I was given in school here in the North was hideously boring, with falling apart out of date textbooks from decades previously. This ties in to what I previously said about minority populations retaining their native languages in their own communities. Its simply easier to speak the language you have always spoken all the time when you don't have to speak anything else. In their case they speak English only because the overwhelming population around them does. If they ever increase to a percentage where they can just get away with managing their own internal affairs without speaking English, most of them just won't bother to learn it in the first place. This has been observed in nearly every other country with large immigrant populations, especially ones from the Mass migration era where these populations simply never had to go through most of the minority process in some countries at all and simply slotted in to a community from their own country right away. This was also true of German and Italian communities in America as well, although the Americans were far more aggressive than we have ever been in enforcing their language laws over there. Its a universal problem.

Modern Irishmen, being lazy and if given the option of doing everything in English (read maps, road signs, directions, news postings, etc) they simply will. It doesn't matter how many roadsigns you have in dual language, they'll just read the one that's easier because they grew up with it, for some thats Irish, for almost everyone, that's English. This is what I mean by having some level of coercion, it has to be difficult to not speak or read Irish in Ireland, otherwise no one will truly bother to make it a day to day practice apart from the truly dedicated who will always be the minority. Its the carrot and the stick approach, you need to offer rewards and incentives to speak it, and at the same time, make it more difficult not to.

Otherwise we're never going to get anywhere barring a miracle, and simply 'letting things be' hasn't worked out for us on any matter regarding conservatism, traditionalism or the restoration of Ireland, and never will.

On the bright side, we were probably more culturally Irish in 1819 than we are now. Political independence didn't really seem to do much to foster our distinctiveness, even before cultural cringe and revisionism set in. The great strides in the preservation of Irish culture (the GAA and the Irish language revival) happened before independence.[/quote]











Independence was often viewed as the solution to all our woes as a nation and on balance it was an improvement on what went before. However it isn't a magic bullet and small nations are limited in what they can achieve particularly if they are poor , located next to a powerful neighbour that takes most of their exports, and has one fifth of the island that is passionately opposed to independence.


The main advantage to independence is that we take decisions that effect us not some far away institution that does not have our interests at heart. The recent economic crash and our insignicance in the EU show how hollow are claims to sovereign indepence are .

Conservatives in the anglosphere have traditionally been wary of the state or have advocated a small state. In Ireland conservatives often saw the state allied with the church as the main instrument in control and in promoting national ideology. As Maolsheachlann points out above the Irish cultural renaissance was a 19th century phenomena , ironically often promoted by cultural nationalists of the protestant faith with unionist leanings.

I am unsure of the idea that culturally Ireland is going to be swamped or somehow Irishness will become a minority in Ireland. Ireland is becoming like the USA , New Zealand , Australia the UK etc for primarily economic reasons . It is up to us to decide whether we put any demands or responsibilities of citizenship on new comers. If we don't promote assimilation then we as a state have only ourselves to blame. Learning the original language , traditions and history of our island would be one way of achieving this goal.

I have major reservations about the recent influx of foreigners into Ireland. We were repeatedly told this would never occur and that people who brought the subject up were scare mongering. No party ran on a pro emigration policy and the people were never consulted on the biggest demographic change in our history. This is a huge risk and gamble. Again recent Irish state sponsered gambles have ended in tears.