Ban the Irish Language

Everybody’s Irish ancestors are from Cork. Okay not everybody’s. If your ancestors are not from Cork, then they are from Mayo.

If you don’t believe me, ask somebody. This has been true since before county boundaries were firmed up with the growth of Gaelic games.

The association with Cork makes sense given that ships sailed from there, but Mayo? Just how many people emigrated to America by first taking the 3:45 train from Westport of a Sunday?

However and whyever, it makes Mayo important. Recently deceased former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, and former Irish President Mary Robinson are both from Mayo. Even that famous Australian from New York, Mel Gibson, is a Mayo man at heart. As is Grace Kelly, except for not being alive anymore and for being a woman when she was.

And because Mayo is important, I read the Mayo News online. A couple of days ago I was reading an article by Anton McNulty on the state of the Irish language. Following on from Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny’s proposal to make Irish no longer a compulsory subject in for school (specifically for the Leaving Cert), there is a discussion as to how teaching Irish might be effective.

The world over if you do a survey of the subject kids hate most in school it’s Mathematics that is the most common answer. In Ireland Maths comes second after Irish. Being a freak I liked both Irish and Maths, and learned to keep quiet about it.

the source of love or hate for the language usually has its roots in your experience of Irish in school. The consensus is if you were lucky enough to have a teacher who gave time to Irish, your appreciation for Irish would flourish

The problem with this theory is that it should mean whole classes taught by the same teacher would grow up with an appreciation for the the language, so I think having a teacher who gives time to Irish is only part of the answer.

If after 75 years of being compulsory, more people hate it than can speak it, the sytem is not working. And it’s producing teachers who learned it in that environment. Foras na Gaeilge are advocating a system which rates oral skills of teachers highly. This should seem obvious, but having little kids do written exercises in grammar before they can actually speak the language was never likely to endear Irish to any but people lacking social skills. It’s not how you learned your mother tongue for example.

Tomás Ó Ruairc, the education programme manager for Foras na Gaeilge advocates the international approach, where the teacher will teach the language through that language rather than the mother tongue. When I was 12 I got a teacher who taught Irish through Irish, and instantly the previous seven years of painful and destructive learning was brushed aside as I learned to actually speak a language through thinking in the language.

But more than ending the compulsory studying of it in school, and applying the common sense of oral skills before reading and writing that we all know would work, the language would flourish nationally if it was banned in all its forms. Forget the making of it as another European official language - it should be downgraded as a non-language in Ireland.

The Government would simply have to say to the nation that while they like the language, the people have had their chance, but didn’t take it, and so to save costs the language was to be abolished completely rather than be allowed to struggle on for decades causing misery and embarassment.

Right now if the Irish Government passed a law saying no Gaeilge was to appear painted on pub walls, on menus in Galway or Temple Bar, on bus and train tickets, that road signs were to be in English only, that TG4 could only broadcast in English (and only so long as they never said what the T and G stood for), that no lyrics could be sung, let alone recorded, in Irish, and that being heard to speak in Irish would result in on-the-spot fines - do you doubt for a moment but that the result would be a popular mass movement bringing fluency to a nation that likes to not do what it is told?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 10:52 am and is filed under Gaeilge, Ireland. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.