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Post by kj on Feb 6, 2020 21:07:51 GMT
I've had a bit of a change of heart concerning the Irish language lately.
I am still, and always will be, profoundly ashamed of my incompetence in the language and my laziness in attempting to rectify it. I still believe every true patriot should speak it and it would be a glorious dream if it were ever to become the first language of the country (a dream whose likelihood diminishes by the day, I think).
But I no longer believe that Gaeilge is somehow intrinsically a barrier to globalism or liberalism. There is nothing inherently conservative about any language. This view has been influenced by a few things, most lately by Maolsheachlann's Burkean article where he discussed his liberal, Gaeilge fluent friend. I also recall the last time I tried to revive my Irish with the help of TG4: I was looking forward to some escape from PC nonsense, but lo and behold the drama I tuned into was set in a Gaeltacht village which was like a miniature Babylon of multi-ethnic stew and sexual promiscuity.
So that's how I feel at present. I guess I had been guilty of romantic notions of insular safety in rural Ireland and so on.
Perhaps the only real barrier to globalist nonsense is the Catholic faith, but then again we seem to have a Globalist Pontiff so I really don't know...
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Post by cato on Feb 6, 2020 23:24:05 GMT
I have a good friend , a rather traditional priest from the Gaeltacht who argued this very point 20 odd years ago. Yesterday in the bus coming home from work I heard a young man argue very loudly in Irish on the phone behind me. This is a very rare event in Dublin and was genuinely startling. As he left the bus I couldn't help notice his six inch long crystal ear rings and bright pink hair.
This gentleman may be a daily Latin mass goer, a card carrying National Party member and studying Brehon law for his doctoral thesis but I jumped to certain conclusions about his world view.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Feb 7, 2020 10:31:49 GMT
I'm currently reading a volume of Colm Cille lectures about a group of poets called the INNTI poets who came to prominence in the seventies, in Dingle. The most prominent were Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Liam Uí Muirthile.
They wanted to write in Irish, rooted in the actual speech of the Dingle Gaeltacht. But they also wanted to embrace the counter-culture, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, etc. (I'm not putting words in their mouth, this is what they actually proclaimed.)
A lot of their poetry was about the intermingling of the old and the new. Artists and intellectuals love ambiguity and complexity. They like to have it every way, they find binaries boring.
That's all very well, but it seems to me that the "junior partner" in such marriages, or the weak relation, is always going to lose out. And, indeed, some contributors to this volume of essays do indeed point out that rooting one's poetry in the actual Irish spoken in the Gaeltacht, and the life of the Gaeltacht, is only possible as long as the Gaeltacht itself survives-- and (as the critics pointed out) there's not much of it left, even less now than in the heyday of the INNTI poets.
You can't have it every way, all the time, surely. Sometimes it's like the red squirrel and the grey squirrel-- one overpowes the other. You couldn't put all the animals in the zoo in the same big enclosure. Surely you need protectionism of some kind at some point.
Someone else on this forum, some time ago, pointed out that many contintental European countries have their own languages but are no less liberal and globalized for that. Sweden has its own language but is the poster boy for liberalism.
I guess, in the end, I would consider preserving Gaelic to be conservative by defintion; you are, at least, conserving something. That is, Gaelic itself. I wouldn't make any bigger claims for it than that.
But maybe that's not such a small feat, after all. I was watching a news report on the general election on TG4. Representatives of all parties could give interviews in Irish, some of them very fluently. I don't think this would have happened without the efforts of Irish language revivalists. Gaelic could easily have gone the way of Cornish or Manx.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Feb 7, 2020 11:52:21 GMT
I became frustrated at a debate on immigration on Facebook, with the usual claims of "racism" and "there is no mass immigration here", "the Irish people abandoned their own culture anyway", etc. etc. The debate was among Catholics. I posted this on my own page:
I've pretty much decided to give up trying to convince people that cultural homogenization is a bad thing, that globalization is a danger, that specialness and difference are worth preserving, and that the euphoric stampede towards the global village is misguided.
You mostly just get clichés thrown in your face: openness, inclusiveness, diversity, pluralism, new frontiers, etc. etc.
All i see is a tide of sameness spreading over the world. Quite the opposite of diversity.
I remember, when I was a boy, daydreaming about writing a play which could only be performed on one night of the year, in one place, as a corrective to mass media and mass production. I've been worried about these things that long. It took a lifetime for my thoughts to develop as they have, and doubtless they will develop further. But there is nothing knee-jerk or unconsidered about them.
Maybe it's because I had been outnumbered in the other debate, and because I got somewhat heated in it, but many of the people who had been arguing with me about immigration "liked" this post. Perhaps that was just magnanimity, but I hoped it showed that it IS possible to convey to them that there is something worth worrying about when it comes to cultural homogenization, no matter what stance you take on immigration, globalization, the E.U., etc. etc.
By the way, I hadn't even been arguing any particular stance on the immigration issue-- just that mass immigration to Ireland IS happening and that there are legitimate concerns. I had even said I am willing to defer to the Pope and bishops on this issue.
There seems to be a cohort of rather bullish (mostly relatively young) Catholics who are positively enthusiastic about globalization. I don't know whether it's through loyalty to Pope Francis, or whether it's something they feel independently. I don't get it. They talk about "nationalism" as though it's some oddity, but it seems to me that people have always been attached to their own culture and way of life-- that's the norm-- globalization and pluralism is the innovation.
Since globalization seems inevitable, I wonder is there some way to preserve cultural traditions within it. That seems the only hope to me now.
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Post by cato on Feb 7, 2020 14:01:10 GMT
Mary Kenny had an article in last week's Irish Catholic on John Waters running for the Dail. The article was entitled "There is no Mass immigration ". There was only one line in the article which repeated the headline but she gave no facts. Surely over 17% of new Irish, almost 1 in 5 is a big number? If that's not big what is? It's like pro abortion advocates stating 10,000 abortions in Ireland is not opening the floodgates. I wonder what levels we need to arrive at before we can express concern.
30% of Dublin city homeless social housing now goes to non nationals. Why do they get priority over the thousands of Irish homeless? Globalisation rewards the very rich and punishes the very poor.
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Post by Young Ireland on Feb 7, 2020 21:17:20 GMT
Mary Kenny had an article in last week's Irish Catholic on John Waters running for the Dail. The article was entitled "There is no Mass immigration ". There was only one line in the article which repeated the headline but she gave no facts. Surely over 17% of new Irish, almost 1 in 5 is a big number? If that's not big what is? It's like pro abortion advocates stating 10,000 abortions in Ireland is not opening the floodgates. I wonder what levels we need to arrive at before we can express concern. 30% of Dublin city homeless social housing now goes to non nationals. Why do they get priority over the thousands of Irish homeless? Globalisation rewards the very rich and punishes the very poor. To be fair, a large portion of that 17% are the children of Irish people who emigrated and subsequently returned. This graph is from 2013 but it does illustrate the point I am trying to make: www.populationpyramid.net/migrants/en/ireland/2013/As regards the level of immigration, it actually declined slightly this year according to the CSO, and it is still well below Celtic Tiger levels: www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/pme/populationandmigrationestimatesapril2019/As regards the social housing issue, I suspect that foreign nationals may be overrepresented among the homeless: remember that the homeless man kill recently in Dublin was an Eritrean. The problem is not immigration but a lack of supply, or more accurately a lack of supply where it is needed. |
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Post by cato on Feb 7, 2020 23:58:16 GMT
Mary Kenny had an article in last week's Irish Catholic on John Waters running for the Dail. The article was entitled "There is no Mass immigration ". There was only one line in the article which repeated the headline but she gave no facts. Surely over 17% of new Irish, almost 1 in 5 is a big number? If that's not big what is? It's like pro abortion advocates stating 10,000 abortions in Ireland is not opening the floodgates. I wonder what levels we need to arrive at before we can express concern. 30% of Dublin city homeless social housing now goes to non nationals. Why do they get priority over the thousands of Irish homeless? Globalisation rewards the very rich and punishes the very poor. To be fair, a large portion of that 17% are the children of Irish people who emigrated and subsequently returned. This graph is from 2013 but it does illustrate the point I am trying to make: www.populationpyramid.net/migrants/en/ireland/2013/As regards the level of immigration, it actually declined slightly this year according to the CSO, and it is still well below Celtic Tiger levels: www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/pme/populationandmigrationestimatesapril2019/As regards the social housing issue, I suspect that foreign nationals may be overrepresented among the homeless: remember that the homeless man kill recently in Dublin was an Eritrean. The problem is not immigration but a lack of supply, or more accurately a lack of supply where it is needed. Thanks for that information Young Ireland which I will look at in more detail later. I do not recall any discussion of this issue whatsoever during the recent General Election debate. When we were debating Free Movement of people in the 1990s we were told by virtually all politicians that it was scare mongering to suggest any one would come to Ireland to avail of our relatively generous welfare rates. If you are to have free movement we need equal rates of social welfare in Europe. Our relatively generous rates do attract people here . That's perfectly rational human behaviour. Some of us would do it if welfare rates were higher in Poland. Government welcomes free movement but hasn't resourced this ; be it schools , housing and healthcare. Those who suffer most are the Irish poor who have to compete with the poor new Irish for limited resources. The rich new Irish have pushed up rents in Dublin and our big cities as they competed with locals for a limited stock of housing. This is not racist but you get shouted down as such if you mention this as a factor in the rental crisis. The numbers that have come in are historically high whatever the precise statistic. We have never had a multicultural society on this island. We now do and it will bring serious problems especially as the native traditional culture is itself in serious trouble. It is hard to expect successful integration when we are not too sure ourselves what it means to be Irish! |
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Feb 8, 2020 9:29:34 GMT
The numbers that have come in are historically high whatever the precise statistic. We have never had a multicultural society on this island. We now do and it will bring serious problems especially as the native traditional culture is itself in serious trouble. It is hard to expect successful integration when we are not too sure ourselves what it means to be Irish! I think this is the essence of the thing. There's a certain double-think being urged on us; we are told all day long that the "new Ireland" is multicultural, diverse, etc., but we are also told that we don't have mass immigration. Well, it can hardly be both, can it? |
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Post by Séamus on Feb 13, 2020 8:24:31 GMT
I have a good friend , a rather traditional priest from the Gaeltacht who argued this very point 20 odd years ago. Yesterday in the bus coming home from work I heard a young man argue very loudly in Irish on the phone behind me. This is a very rare event in Dublin and was genuinely startling. As he left the bus I couldn't help notice his six inch long crystal ear rings and bright pink hair. This gentleman may be a daily Latin mass goer, a card carrying National Party member and studying Brehon law for his doctoral thesis but I jumped to certain conclusions about his world view. I can now recall someone remarking rather snidely,years ago, that Faith of Our Fathers or We Stand For God was only sung at sporting events because few people had enough grasp of Irish to sing their own Anthem. Was there any truth in that? At any rate,it would seem that Boris Johnson is the one that's been reading Fionn McCool legends. Considering Boris' stand on Scotland's independence, a neo-giant's bridge is possibly as much a possibility as Sinn Fein's referendum for removing the Union Jack from Ulster |
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Feb 13, 2020 9:06:59 GMT
I have a good friend , a rather traditional priest from the Gaeltacht who argued this very point 20 odd years ago. Yesterday in the bus coming home from work I heard a young man argue very loudly in Irish on the phone behind me. This is a very rare event in Dublin and was genuinely startling. As he left the bus I couldn't help notice his six inch long crystal ear rings and bright pink hair. This gentleman may be a daily Latin mass goer, a card carrying National Party member and studying Brehon law for his doctoral thesis but I jumped to certain conclusions about his world view. I can now recall someone remarking rather snidely,years ago, that Faith of Our Fathers or We Stand For God was only sung at sporting events because few people had enough grasp of Irish to sing their own Anthem. Was there any truth in that? At any rate,it would seem that Boris Johnson is the one that's been reading Fionn McCool legends. Considering Boris' stand on Scotland's independence, a neo-giant's bridge is possibly as much a possibility as Sinn Fein's referendum for removing the Union Jack from Ulster I've tried mentally running through Amhrán na bhFiann in m head. I think I can sort of make a stab of it-- with recourse to a few syllables of humming. |
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