Is it no really time to assess how much the irish language costs us all?

wolfpawnat

The Gaeltacht I was in was Dingle, and what really made me laugh was all the crap about the new secondary school in the town was been given grants for being a Gael Scoil and the parents were objecting. All of those objecting were from originally outside of the Gaeltacht. Though I was originally a Cork woman, I respected that when the family moved to Dingle I would be educated through Irish and just got on with it! It really ticks me off that people market themselves as Irish speaking to get the moola but not bother with the language itself.

Grudaire

wolfpawnat wrote: »

The Gaeltacht I was in was Dingle, and what really made me laugh was all the crap about the new secondary school in the town was been given grants for being a Gael Scoil and the parents were objecting. All of those objecting were from originally outside of the Gaeltacht. Though I was originally a Cork woman, I respected that when the family moved to Dingle I would be educated through Irish and just got on with it! It really ticks me off that people market themselves as Irish speaking to get the moola but not bother with the language itself.

+1000

And I think there is much to be said about changing the grant system.

starbelgrade

donegalfella wrote: »

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I managed a band a few years back - at the time, there was an internet site that ran a download chart for bands who were not signed to record labels in the UK. The idea was, that the bands who generated the most interest through their fans, gigs & self-promotion, would get to the top of the charts & genrerate interest from record labels.

A friend of mine came up with a program that generated 10,000 hits per week to my band's page. With that & some other clever bits of skulduggery, the band signed to a major within 6 months.

To cut a long story short... Web "hit" numbers are meaningless.

T runner

donegalfella wrote: »

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And the sooner people with inferiority complexes about their nationality stop attacking Irish from a political viewpoint that hasnt been relevent since independence, the sooner we can have some rationality in this debate.

Any political reaction for Irish was to counter the deliberate and determined efforts by the supranational British rule in the nineteenth century and before to exterminate the Irish language.

The proportion of Irish spoken was reduced from a large majority to a large minority in a couple of generations. How you can attribute the values of rationality and democracy to a regime where the vast majority of people were discriminated against based on the language they spoke is a question only you can answer.

donegalfella wrote: »

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Most of these have been done relatively recently. Technically since the foundation of the state ofcourse, as when Ireland was ruled suprenationally by Britain speakers of Irish were very heavily discriminated against.

None of these policies has had any actual, demonstrable effect, in that the number of fluent Irish speakers has been in steady and persistent decline since the eighteenth century, a decline that came to deserve the adjective precipitous in the twentieth. It could be argued that the above policies only encouraged resentment of the Irish language among a heavily English-speaking population, and to create a destructive mentality of entitlement among the gaelgoirs themselves.

The back was broken in the 18th century after the famine when discrimination and persecution against Irish speakers meant that 3-4 million people were forced to learn English meaning the major language of the country had changed.

It's interesting to imagine what might have happened had the government not subjected the language to aggressive and heavy-handed "revival" policies. It might actually be in a healthier state today.

Naturally would be in a worse state.

donegalfella wrote: »

Gaelport.com attracts a minuscule number of web surfers.

One million per year (their stats are from a professional source)

TG4 has a minuscule viewership (at least for its Irish-language, non-sports programming; shows like Pimp My Ride and The OC, which the station uses to inflate its audience figures, don't count).

Reference please for that piece of Pimp Your Bull****?

Raidió na Gaeltachta has a minuscule listenership. Irish-language books and documentation have a minuscule readership.

And what about Irish speaking schools? Have they minuscule attendance?

cyclopath2001

T runner wrote: »

One million per year (their stats are from a professional source)

Unique people, repeat visitors, hits or page impressions? Name the professional source? How are those stats audited?

Mike 1972

And what about Irish speaking schools? Have they minuscule attendance?

Has anyone ever considered the possibility that parents who send their kids to Irish speaking schools may be doing so for reasons other than the fact that the school in question may happen to be (nominally) Irish speaking.

Apart from perception (correct or otherwise) that such schools enjoy better funding or that the Gaelscoil may happen to be most convenient in terms of distance/access in many towns parents who dont want to send their kids to a religiously controlled or gender segregated school have no option but to send them to the local Gaelscoil.

In such instances the parents may regard the fact that the school teaches through Irish (although Ive heard of "Gaelscoil's" where the only time this actually happens is when the inspector pays a visit) to be advantageous, disadvantageous (albeit outweighed by other considerations) or completly indifferent.

Permabear

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wolfpawnat

Why is it that the people that think that Irish should be left in the stone age believe that all of us who want it in our lives are crazy and that we should lay over and allow it be abolished. I love Irish, I do not believe there should be a financial incentive to learn it though and I do believe that there should not be preferential treatment to those that answer their Leaving Certs as gaeilge either.

I am sending my son to an Irish bunscoil (primary) school as soon as he is old enough, not for grants or anything other than to educate him in a way that does not force Irish down your throat as was the way I was thought. My love of the language only occured when I moved to Dingle and I was told that Irish was the only language to be spoken at most times! When you are truly submerged in a language like that it is easy to learn.

Daithinski

pawrick wrote: »

this does nothing to preserve our language - it just adds to the bad feelings towards it for being a perceived waste of time.

money would have been better spent on sending children to a gaeltacht for a week.

It does actually protect the language by creating jobs, this attracts people to learning irish in university.

Creating jobs for irish speakers is going to do more for the irish language then sending some kids to the gaeltacht (in my opinion)

This sounds to me like a diversionary story away from the real scandals in this country. ie NAMA and all the other ways crappy politicians waste money.

NewDubliner

Daithinski wrote: »

Creating jobs for irish speakers is going to do more for the irish language then sending some kids to the gaeltacht (in my opinion)

You mean pay people to speak Irish?

Where does the money come from, the taxpayer?

sceptre

T runner wrote: »

One million per year (their stats are from a professional source)

I'd like to see some sort of source for those stats. I couldn't even find such a reference on their own site (I browsed it in english just to be sure).

NewDubliner

sceptre wrote: »

I'd like to see some sort of source for those stats. I couldn't even find such a reference on their own site (I browsed it in english just to be sure).

Their privacy statement should disclose what data they're collecting and how they do it?

dresden8

wolfpawnat wrote: »

My love of the language only occured when I moved to Dingle

Surely you mean An Daingean?

beggars_bush

we should double our spending on the Irish language.

make it the only official language of the state, like Israel did.

fund compulsary Gaeltacht courses places for every secondary school pupil in the country, who wants to go.

set up more Gaelscoils

boost TG4 programming 'as gaeilge'. especially cartoons, music programmes, dramas and documentaries.
establish a proper nationwide Irish radio station. RnaG is brutal

thebman

Daithinski wrote: »

It does actually protect the language by creating jobs, this attracts people to learning irish in university.

Creating jobs for irish speakers is going to do more for the irish language then sending some kids to the gaeltacht (in my opinion)

This sounds to me like a diversionary story away from the real scandals in this country. ie NAMA and all the other ways crappy politicians waste money.

This sounds to me like your looking for a job and speak Irish.

beggars_bush wrote: »

we should double our spending on the Irish language.

make it the only official language of the state, like Israel did.

fund compulsary Gaeltacht courses places for every secondary school pupil in the country, who wants to go.

set up more Gaelscoils

boost TG4 programming 'as gaeilge'. especially cartoons, music programmes, dramas and documentaries.
establish a proper nationwide Irish radio station. RnaG is brutal

You need to buy a newspaper, there have been some interesting changes in the economy since you apparently last read one.

Permabear

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T runner

donegalfella wrote: »

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So its a political enterprise now and not a nationalist one. You have You have realised that your charge of the Irish Language being nationalistic in the early part of the 20th century is ludicrous giving the British State's policy of exterminating it meant it had to be nationalistic out of necessity.

How much much more money are we going to spend in our effort to "counter" a linguistic transformation that happened in this country three centuries ago?

Again we are not trying to counter a transformation (of the ugliest kind) that happenned 150 years ago we are trying to keep an indiginous language alive that has been spoken in Ireland for 3000 years. (95% of that time by the vast majority of the population).

Especially when the vast majority of today's Irish population is quite happily English-speaking?

The large numbers of children in Irish speaking schools betrays a will of a large amount of parents that their children be bilingual does it not?
Or are these parents just deluded romantic nationalists like the everyday Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht areas of Ireland.

If you'll read my post, you'll see that (a) I wasn't trying to ascribe rationality and democracy to the Penal Laws; and that (b) I was talking about the anti-democratic, often explicitly irrational agendas espoused by Anglo-Irish champions of Irish nationalism such as W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

I read your post. You claimed that the Gaelic revival was against democracy, modernity and rationality. Was the Brisish states brutal supression of irish speakers, language and culture a shining beacon of these traits? Or was it an example of inhumane, uncivilised and bestial wielding of power?

Can you not see that any association of Irish with nationalism was minor in comparison to the hugely political and savage way the British state enforced its language and its own national agenda on Ireland?

So what? Many people elsewhere in the world speak the languages they do because of their histories. Brazilians today overwhelmingly speak Portuguese. Mexicans speak Spanish. Australians speak English. Sorry, but you can't wind the world clock back a few centuries and undo all this.

Many of the native people in these lands still speak their own languages. Clearly you would suggest that they cease to do this and their languages and areas (the poorest) receive no state help. They are backward and parochial after all and will always be inferior while they keep up the jungle talk.

One big difference in our histories. The native people here are still in the vast majority and are in a position of rule. There is a strange minority who still seem to have the subdued inferior colony mentality and demand that the indiginous language be cut from Aid (even though it is in danger of dying and the remaining speakers are some of the poorest people in the country.)
They insist that it is not cosmopolitan and their youngsters should listen to only modern music, instead of both traditional and modern.

Having young people speaking both languages will not enrich their lives or their experience of living in Ireland: it will turn them into leprechaun loving dung heads and knock us back 3 centuries.

starbelgrade

T runner wrote: »

Having young people speaking both languages will not enrich their lives or their experience of living in Ireland: it will turn them into leprechaun loving dung heads and knock us back 3 centuries.

(You forgot the bit about them carrying pigs under their arms
)

Permabear

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starbelgrade

This thread is sometimes engaging & sometimes pointlessly enraging.. so can I ask -

How much does the Irish language cost the country every year (in total)?

And how is it spent / breakdown costs?

And maybe then we can discuss the relative merits of what the value of that spend is. Otherwise, we can continue to dance in circles indefinitely.

Rebelheart

starbelgrade wrote: »

This thread is sometimes engaging & sometimes pointlessly enraging.. so can I ask -

How much does the Irish language cost the country every year (in total)?

And how is it spent / breakdown costs?

I agree. So, can I ask how much does the English language cost this country every year (in total)? And how is it spent/ breakdown costs? How many pointless reports are published in that language and how much do they cost? How many tens of thousands of people are forced to learn that language in order to have their work permits renewed in this state? How many hundreds of millions are spent promoting the English language in this state via free English lessons, book grants, additional teachers and much, much more?


Oh, let me guess: without English this country would be an economic and cultural backwater like France, Germany, Sweden, Finland and all those other [evidently backward and insular] places where people speak their own language and, very often, at least one other.

This is a truly amazing discussion indeed.

O'Morris

starbelgrade wrote: »

How much does the Irish language cost the country every year (in total)?

And how is it spent / breakdown costs?

I found this article which gives a figure of 6.2 million euros spent on translations in the six years since the passing of the official languages act.

It says the actual amount spent is probably far higher but even if you double it to 12 million over 6 years that still works out at only 2 million a year. I assume that we still have at least a million people working and paying taxes in this country and so the cost to the taxpayer of translating documents into our native language works out at at no more than 2 euros a year.

Whatever about the overall costs of supporting the language, the cost of translating documents into the Irish is trivial when compared with the amounts we spend every year on foreign language support for people newly arrived in this country.

As linked to by PaulieD in an earlier post:
http://www.independent.ie/education/...m-1372313.html

Non-national students should be segregated until they can speak English as the current €126m annual spend on support teachers isn't working, according to the Opposition.

Assistance to foreign national children who don't speak English in our schools has cost the Irish taxpayer almost €300m in the past three years alone, new figures obtained by the Sunday Independent reveal.

RedPlanet

beggars_bush wrote: »

we should double our spending on the Irish language.

make it the only official language of the state, like Israel did.

Does anybody actually want to learn irish?
Very few. Most of us live quite contentedly speaking English.

Interesting you cite Israel as an example.
From what i understand, they did violence to their language. They totally changed it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

You won't get the Gaelgoirs on this island signing-up to a similar radical over-haul of the language.

eddyc

Rebelheart wrote: »

Oh, let me guess: without English this country would be an economic and cultural backwater like France, Germany, Sweden, Finland and all those other [evidently backward and insular] places where people speak their own language and, very often, at least one other.

This is a truly amazing discussion indeed.

In the countries you listed there, the vast majority of people are raised in they're respective majority languages, French, German etc. This is done at no cost by the parents of these children.

It costs the government nothing. Most people in those countries speak that language anyway and on an unrelated note, millions of people from the countries you listed learn English as it improves their employment prospects.

The problem here is that the way in which the government promotes the irish language doesn't improve the lives of the vast majority of irish citizens. Those who speak it would regardless of tax money being spent on it or not.

Those who don't should be left alone to not. People are being MADE to speak this language regardless of their feelings on the subject.

Its actually funny that people will cry foul over the people of Ireland being forced to speak English years ago, yet when our own government does it in the name of 'the irish culture' its all grand like.

Permabear

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dlofnep

eddyc wrote: »

Its actually funny that people will cry foul over the people of Ireland being forced to speak English years ago, yet when our own government does it in the name of 'the irish culture' its all grand like.

Wrong.

Irish was banned from the curriculum in the national schools. English is not banned today. People are not being forced to speak Irish, but they are being offered an education (which does need work) to enable them the chance to learn it.

So no, your comparison is completely without merit.

Permabear

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thebman

dlofnep wrote: »

Wrong.

Irish was banned from the curriculum in the national schools. English is not banned today. People are not being forced to speak Irish, but they are being offered an education (which does need work) to enable them the chance to learn it.

So no, your comparison is completely without merit.

How are people not being forced to learn it in schools? You can't get a leaving cert without speaking Irish. I consider that forcing. If I wanted to go to college I had to learn Irish and speak it in school during Irish class.

Daithinski

It seems to me that this thread is a re-run of many other threads. There are people here who were complaining about money being spent on the Irish language while we were in the height of the so called Celtic Tiger.

They have an anti-irish speaking agenda, and are just using the economic crisis as an excuse to have another bash.

And in conclusion, if you don't like money being spent on the Irish language, tough sh1t.

Permabear

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