The death knell of the Irish Language

For all those posters who moaned about “not another thread of the alarming decline of spoken Irish” it certainly has generated a lot of debate, if much of this debate has been tit for tat spats, more heat than light.

A couple of points: someone mentioned the lack of a written record of Irish literature. My understanding is that nearly all Irish folklore and poetry in music in times past was an oral tradition, because very few Irish speakers in an impoverished 18th and 19th century rural Ireland could read or write.

Secondly - the long-standing belief that the majority of Irish spoke English until the famine is incorrect. I remember a historical geography lecturer when I was an undergrad in college teaching us that the large-scale shift from Irish to English speaking was much more gradual and took place largely between the 1650s, after Cromwell’s scorched Earth campaign, spreading out from the Pale and provincial towns, acelerating after 1750 and by the 1850s Ireland had become largely English speaking, as the aftermath of the famine was in full effect.

English was an urban language and as the rural Irish poured in the Dublin and the other towns, they lost their Irish.

When I was in Galway last week I was in the Galway museum and there was the statue of the Galwegian Irish language poet Padraig O’Connaire. The statue used to be outdoors on Eyre Square but was decapitated in 1999. Of note in reading about the statue and the poet was the total zeal Eamonn deValera had in enforcing his warped version of Irish revisionist culture on the newly independent fledgling State, with O’Connaire playing a key role in this movement.

If everyday Irish is to be saved or revived properly, a completely radical rethink is needed as the legacy of the decades of enforced teaching to generations of schoolchildren and the cultural snobbery often associated with the language which has alienated many people.

Look at Wales, spoken Welsh is in pretty rude health and Wales has been highly Anglicised for a lot longer than Ireland. We could learn lessons from Wales.