A language barrier
By Joe Horgan
It must be what the term lip service actually comes from. It must infuriate Irish speakers, activists and lovers of the language beyond reason.
Yet some time soon the likes of Bertie Ahern will stand up somewhere at some opening or some gathering and speak a few introductory words in Irish before getting on to the main business of speaking in English. He will allow his lips to utter a few words of the old tongue and then move swiftly on. I suppose it keeps some of the old heads happy and in Fianna Fail land suggests that the idea of an Ireland Gaelic and free has not completely gone away. It has though.
Even as Ireland swaggers around with the Presidency of the EU it is refusing to press for the Irish language to have full status as a working European language. That kind of gesture is presumably not statesmanlike enough for the government and its civil service suits. God forbid that they be seen on the big stage prattling away about marginal issues when they could be showing how important and mature they are on much broader issues.
Whatever the status of the Irish language, whatever the questions as to whether it is dead, dying or alive, it is a part of Ireland. It may not be heard on the streets of Cork, Dublin, Limerick or Derry but then Irish dancing is seen in very few of those cities’ nightclubs and that once moribund activity is now an international export.
Most Irish people don’t speak in it, dream in it or think in it but like Bertie Ahern they could nearly all pay a bit of lip service to it. It is the first official language of this state. So does the government wish to send out the message that as a truly grown up regime, fully aware of international concerns, fully immersed in the global economy, comfortably hanging out with the big boys, that such a local concern is off the agenda.
Has the day finally come, officially sanctioned, when the true treatment of the language is admitted and the government makes it clear that as our colonial masters had told us, Irish is the language of the past, the language of poverty, it has no place in the future, no place on the international stage.
It is true that no other comparable nation lost its language the way Ireland did. It is true that no other nation just stopped speaking its own tongue the way we did. We were the first subjugated by colonialism and one of the first to throw that off. But in the meantime we lost an awful lot, including our own language as a central part of Irish society. Many historians claim that whatever pressure the British authorities put on the language that in the end the Irish people just surrendered it.
This ties things up nicely for those who in their revision of Irish history have sought to move away from that school of thought that blamed everything on Britain's oppression of the heroic Irish and it is true that the story was often more complicated than that bias allowed.
Still, when one orthodoxy is just replaced by another, the picture remains as tilted as before. If we accept that in the end much of the demise of the language came down to the population giving it up we must also consider just how the population arrived at that stage.
One historian gives us a vivid picture of how this came about. She states that it should never be overlooked that “even before the 19h century began the Irish language had been banished from parliament, from the courts of law, from town and county government, from the civil service and from the upper levels of commercial life. Even by 1880 Irish had ceased to be habitually spoken in the homes of all those who had already achieved success in the world or who had aspired to improve or even maintain their position politically, socially and economically. The pressure of 600 years of foreign occupation had killed Irish at the top of the social scale”.
So in all honesty what treatment of Irish would you expect from the successful merchants of Fianna Fail and the money loving Thatcherites of the Progressive Democrats.
Still the irony of the so-called republican party treating Irish so shamefully is startling. The status of the language has been a basic tenet of Irish republicanism in all its varied forms even as uprisings and wars were being carried out in English. Yet here we have the direct descendants of De Valera, the party that more than any other couldn’t stomach the dilution of the republican ideal not even bothering to enhance the status of a language that in truth they never really invested in anyway.
I have written before that I have found it hard to detect Irish here as a living language and I still believe that a fundamental aspect of our experience as the children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants was that we grew up without the cultural rooting of a language. Cutting an acquired Irish accent doesn’t quite have the same effect.
But Irish is not dead. People do speak it. Its legacy affects the way Irish born people speak English. It is still a part of Irish culture. It is hanging on in there. It would be such a shame if the final conclusion for the language comes about at the hands of faceless, soulless politicians and bureaucrats. The kind of people who judge culture in terms of debit and credit. The kind that will value the Irish language in terms of profit margins and when it is found wanting bin it if they can't flog it.
If we ever do end up saying fagaim slan to the Irish language we can still say it was the British that left it battered and beaten but we’ll have to admit it was our own masters who wouldn’t rescue it.
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