Prospero | Johnson: Irish

Living in hearts, not in mouths

The Irish language is officially recognised, lavishly supported, universally taught and hardly spoken

By R.L.G. | DUBLIN

THE first words that greet a visitor arriving at Dublin’s airport are likely to be unfamiliar: Slí Amach. Underneath is the English: Exit. The message and the meta-message are both clear: that is the way out, and this is a country that spoke Irish, one of a handful of surviving Celtic languages, long before the arrival of English.

Johnson’s last column looked at the expansive multilingual policy of the European Union, which allows any member state’s official language to be an EU language. This means 24 official languages. Despite the cost, this is sensible, given that no country wants to participate in any organisation that impinges on sovereignty as heavily as the EU does without being able to use its own language when making the rules.

But Irish poses the sternest test of that principle. Monolingual Hungarians or Portuguese should be able to follow EU decision-making in their own language. So should Germans or Spaniards who aren’t comfortable in English, or simply prefer the ease of their own language.

But Irish became an EU language only in 2007, 34 years after Ireland joined the (then) European Economic Community. Just 1.8% of the population speaks Irish daily outside of the education system, mostly in the Gaeltacht regions, those small, mainly western pockets of the country where Irish is the main community language (see map). The only monolinguals are small children in Irish-speaking families who have not yet begun school. English, of course, dominates the rest.

Passionate devotees of Irish say that it is a vital part of the country’s identity. They protested sharply last year when John McHugh, a newly appointed minister for the Gaeltacht, was found to speak no more than halting Irish. (He was shipped west for a few months to improve it.) On the other side, Irish-language sceptics accept its cultural importance, but find state support too costly. Irish goes far beyond those signs at the airport. Pupils must learn Irish for years at school. Many jobs require proficiency in Irish. The state subsidises Irish-language radio and television. Is it worth it? Aidan Doyle wrote in the Irish Times that

it is no accident that Gaeltacht Affairs is in the same portfolio as Arts and Heritage. The language is something we have inherited from previous generations, like round towers or dolmens, but by the same token most of us would as soon live in a round tower as speak Irish on a daily basis.

This might be expected from someone who found Irish lessons in school tedious, but Mr Doyle is a lecturer in modern Irish at University College Cork.

Irish supporters have the legal upper hand, though. The constitution lists Irish as “the national language” and “first official language”; English is merely “a second official language”. State requirements for legal documentation, court interpretation and the like act as a full-employment programme for competent Irish speakers and writers. EU status adds even more official recognition, though this is not all that expensive; only a subset of official documentation is legally required to be translated, and a small team manages the job. But is even this necessary? Mr Doyle, quoted above, claims that the few people demanding Irish-language interaction with the state are usually Anglophones doing so on principle.

It is hard to compare the situation of Irish with any other European language. Basque and Catalan have far more native speakers. (Indeed, Polish has an order of magnitude more native speakers—in Ireland—than Irish does.) Breton, also a Celtic tongue, has roughly as many native speakers, but France gives Breton nothing like the support Irish has. Rough analogues are Maltese and Luxembourgish: they are official in Malta and Luxembourg, but in both countries people are routinely bilingual, and most official business is done in other languages (English in Malta, French and German in Luxembourg). Scottish Gaelic is far weaker still than Irish; Welsh, on the other hand, is in stable shape, thanks to support for broadcasting and teaching.

To understand the emotional attachment to Irish, a non-European example is useful. More than a century ago, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, an emigrant to Palestine, was consumed by the quest to revive Hebrew as a spoken language. Other Zionists pragmatically considered German for an official language, and many spoke Russian. But both languages also smacked of domination. Yiddish, itself a German dialect, was the most widely spoken, but it represented diaspora and weakness. Hebrew, though, had a millennia-old written tradition, and on an emotional level, no language could be more Jewish. The Zionists improbably succeeded in reviving Hebrew, now the dominant spoken language in Israel.

This was not the most practical thing to do. But language identities are much deeper than practicality, as the cases of Irish and Hebrew show in different ways. Irish will not succeed as Hebrew has—it has to compete with the most successful language in world history. For every Irishman proud of the country’s Celtic language is another one just as proud of the achievements of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce in English. But at present there remains an uneasy majority in favour of spending Ireland’s scarce resources—in budgetary support and school hours—on keeping Irish in its unique place: a national language learned and cherished even as it is barely spoken.

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