Sometimes you wonder if the world of pundits isn’t a bit like The Wizard of Oz – lots of impressive-sounding judgements that leave you cross-eyed with admiration as you wonder how the head that produced so much wisdom could carry all s/he knew.
Thoughts on the Irish language tend to exemplify that. For example, Arlene Foster at present is using it as a Union flag to rally her punch-drunk forces; ‘There will be no Irish Language Act!” she declares, adding as justification that there would be a better case for having a Polish Language Act, since there are more Polish-speaking people in our dear north-eastern nest than Irish speakers.
I’m not sure if she’s right on the numbers thing, although she could be. But numbers are not the point. The Irish Language Act is being sought because Irish speakers – or some of them anyway – believe an Irish Language Act is the best way to protect and help develop the Irish language. The key point which Arlene and God knows how many commentators don’t get is that preservation and development of the Irish language is not sought for some utilitarian reason. Of course all Irish speakers can speak English. On utilitarian grounds there is no case for preserving the Irish language. But there remains a key reason for its preservation, not always articulated clearly even by those devoted to the language.
Consider the whale. Or the orang-outang. Or the giraffe. Now consider how you’d react if you were told that any of these three creatures was on the verge of extinction. Most of us would feel deep regret, not because we use a giraffe to get to work or because we use the orang-outang to give our car a push when it stalls. We value them because they are huge, complex, beautiful creatures, and our world would be the poorer if they did not exist.
The same applies to the Irish language. As with poetry or art or music or literature, there’s no reason why we couldn’t get through life without it. But our lives are lit up in all sorts of deep, complex ways by their existence. Likewise the Irish language. Anyone who’s even dabbled at learning it, or who’s studied the way we use the English language, would be struck by the unique qualities, the elegance and music of Irish. And yes, Viriginia, the same could be said of many other languages. But it just happens Irish is our language.
A final thought: those who’d support the protection and development of Irish need to choose their arguments carefully. I’ve just read a piece by a prominent Unionist commentator, where he argued that the cost factor in having government documents translated into Irish is really no longer a factor. “A technical breakthrough last year by Google means machine translation is on the cusp of being indistinguishable from human translation.”
I googled “Newton Emerson knows as much about the Irish language as my cat’s tail.” The translation came back “Is amadán an fear sin”. It may be true but it’s a joke as a translation.
Dr C, i don’t know how reliable slugger o’Toole is as representative opinion but even the ‘big U’ unionists on there are in favour of some sort of ILA and no one is convinced by these fantastic numbers that the DUP are throwing around.
The ‘argument’ against an act is lost.
However, the DUP know that the faithful DUPped will come a running if there’s something to rally around and in this case it’s the ILA.
the best way to pull the rug from underneath them is to break the perception that Gaelic is for republicans. Linda Ervine and Ian Malcolm have created the beachhead for this battle but others have to pull their weight too.
It’s important SF don’t take the DUP bait on this one.
The DUP have painted themselves into a corner with point blank refusals to contemplate any kind of legislation., no matter how inocuous.
Very foolish. They could have agreed to a Scottish-style Act at minimal.cost some.time ago and put this to bed. There refusal to do so has only made it a bigger issue and makes it less likely the Provos will agree to a less pervasive Act.
That is an accurate and fair point MT.
I think it is the first time I have read what is undeniably a personal opinion from you.
It would be nice if you stopped referring to us as provos but it is a step in the right direction.
There is hope yet.
MT – please don’t use ‘Provos’ when you mean Sinn Féin.
The lion stirreth,Jude.
“MT – please don’t use ‘Provos’ when you mean Sinn Féin.”
Why?
I thought Linda Ervine was the best thing that ever happened to the Irish language. A light in the cultural darkness here. Absolutely no excuse for not talking Irish these days with the amount of classes available: Lean araigh leis an obair.
You should come here more often Am Ghobsmacht.
I see the point you’re making, AG, and it’s got merit. But I really think to say to those in SF who espouse Irish ‘Sorry, your presence is offensive’ is really not just acceptable. EVERYONE is welcome to the Irish table (sorry about the cliché); those who would object to the presence of some – the problem lies with them, not those they object to.
Indeed Dr C but there’s no reason why SF couldn’t lend a hand.
I speak as a pragmatist so I tend to jettison the sentimental side of things.
I understand that SF are entitled to use it and many of them are no doubt passionately proud of one of Europe’s oldest languages and feel miffed at the suggestion of holding back a bit, but for the harvest it would yield I think it’d be a small sacrifice indeed, would they really lose out by holding back on posters of Gerry Kelly with Irish text?
I was chuffed when NI21 started using Irish in their posters, I saw this as a balancing act. Sometimes I think I could throttle Basil McCrea…
This debate – about an Act the provisions of which are unknown – is bizarre.
How do we know an Act would cost money if we don’t know what the Act would do?
The Assembly could pass an Act that simply said ‘The Gaelic language is recognised as a regional language’. It wouldn’t cost a penny yet the commitment to ‘pass an Act’ would be met.
Why not debate the possible contents of an Act?
This is my problem also MT about a Irish language act. I’ve never heard a full explanation on what exactly it would be from any of the parties supporting it.
It’s impossible for me to support or reject it without these details.
If however the objective is to promote and expand the numbers of Irish language speakers, then I think any act no matter how comprehensive will work.
The ROI have one of the most comprehensive support for the language anywhere and still it’s numbers are dwindling. It’s been recently reported that even in the traditional strongholds in the Gaeltacht they are concerned at the diminishing numbers who use the language. TG4 had a program on a while ago called No Bearla about a fluent Irish speaker attempting to travel around Ireland north and south only speaking Irish. He struggled to get by with most people either not understanding him at all or only picking up a tiny amount of what he said.
Any efforts to revive the language need to be a bottom up, rather than a top down approach. This is not something that more government is the cure for. Saying that however in the long run trying to keep the language alive in any meaningful sense is a bit like trying to hold back the tide.
It’s a shame though because I would say it would be a terrible loss to the Irish culture if it were lost.
* any act no matter how comprehensive will not work
Apologies writing in a hurry lol
I used to work for a company that had a very lean period that pretty much trended with the arrival and departure of a certain sales manager.
The mystery to the cause of the lean spell was solved when I offered a friend’s translation services to which he replied “no need as i just use Google translate and send off an introduction letter to a prospective client…”
I was stunned into silence at the thought of all those German, Norwegian and French companies receiving gobbledygook with our company’s letterhead attached.
Work picked up again following his departure.
Following his departure did he get a PR job in Stormont?
Naw, he was over qualified…
At school, I learned both Latin and Ancient Greek, both even then so- called ‘ dead languages’ How glad I am that I did, especially Latin for the sheer beauty of the construction of the language and, equally, as an invaluable means of understanding the many words in English which are derived from it. So too with the effects of the Irish language on our day to day English. Those in themselves would be good reason to preserve the Irish language. But, as well, for me, there is. a deep sentimental attachment to the language of my forefathers. Why would anyone want to destroy that.
Beyond the odd phrase with my youngest son, I rarely use Irish.
I would like to know more and hope to one day be able to have a conversation with him in Irish.
Does Arlene consider me an Irish speaker as it is important to me that there is an Irish language act. What I want it to do is enshrine the Irish language as native to this part of Ireland, to recognise that we need to use that, to encourage it to be taught in schools.
In time there will be jobs in translation, it will be a benefit in getting jobs just as it is in the south.
It should be a part of the experience of visiting Ireland, to see street signs and cultural information in both languages as you would in many countries who rely on tourism revenue.
As for cost.
It costs what it costs same as there is an expense to promote many cultural attractions or social needs.
I am a net contributor to tax, I have paid in many times more money into a public purse than I have taken out.
Nationalist taxes cannot be taken for granted any longer. Cost is not an excuse.
I already object to paying my tax to a UK I feel has no legal or moral right to be in Ireland and I will oppose it until that changes also but I will keep paying it in the mean time.
Keep denying this and there is only one logical outcome. Irish people will object and eventually refuse to keep paying taxes to a biased british exchequer.
I remember you telling us that you had purchased a package for learning Irish. How are you getting on? I hope it wasn’t an empty gesture and that you are,at last, doing something useful with your time. Or are you like Martin McGuinness who ‘just can’t learn it’. I know it’s not necessary to be an Irish speaker to be Irish but the bigger numbers would take the wind out of Snarlene’s sails. Learn the basics so you can truthfully fill in the next British census.
MT – please don’t use ‘Provos’ when you mean Sinn Féin.
fiosrach – please don’t call the ex-First Minister ‘Snarlene’. It’s just abusive.
I was copying a previous post,Jude, but I accept your admonishment.
I did chuckle at it I must admit.
Fios, possibly the electorate will more effectively take the wind out of her sails!
“possibly the electorate will more effectively take the wind out of her sails!”
If you think that then you don’t understand me at all sherdy.
I don’t give my loyalty lightly, but when I do, it isn’t based on popularity.
Sinn Fein is a 32 county party, it is this family who span all of this island, the very talented young people emerging from every part of this island, the growing numbers of people from all over working as one. The bus loads of people coming north from as far as Cork, travelling overnight to help canvassing.
It is this family I am part off.
Sinn Fein will be the largest nationalist party after this election without a doubt. Whatever losses there may be over the opposition to Sinn Fein there is all over these islands, will not change that loyalty one bit. If anything, it will strengthen our resolve.
It is about the coming together of people as an all island movement, which will grow over time.
If you cant see that yet and prefer to gloat at every set back along with the others, you are entitled to do so. But it will not take any wind from our sails as it is not your support that matters, but the coming together of people all over this island.
I am not a 6 county republican.
Perhaps the soul searching will not be limited to those in the south sherdy.
I don’t think we are on the same page fiosrach.
I don’t have enough hours in the day as it is – but I like to think I am doing something useful that will guarantee a better future for my children than I had myself.
That is pretty much what the rest of my life is dedicated to.
Yes, I bought the CD and I listen to it in the car when there isn’t something interesting on the radio.
On top of that, I engage with my children who enjoy simple phrases and I hope to learn as they do.
It isn’t a gesture to me though. It stems from a teenage memory when I was over in Europe and we were talking about languages in a bar. I mentioned that Ireland did have our own language but was scundered when I was asked to speak it, that they would like to hear it.
To have to say I didn’t know now to speak it was so embarrassing that it is a memory that never left me.
When I got back, I went to the local cumann and learned for a few months over the summer. I went back the following year but had lost everything I had learned.
If you don’t use it you lose it and what we need is much more use of it in daily life.
For me it is nothing to do with Arlene or any british census. it is a deep sense of shame that under british shackles our identity has been subliminally suffocated and stifled. I believe the path Sinn Fein is embarking on has the potential to do this.
Let’s face a few facts here .what we are really dealing wirg in Norneverland is simple philistinism. It has always been the case……
The polymath Goethe described the philistine personality, by asking:”What is a philistine? A hollow gut, full of fear and hope that God will have mercy!” He also added :
“… the Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own, but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own.”
How many out there think that the DUP are not abrim with philistines?
You meet them on foreign holidays,Harry, the people who are disgusted that the Spanish don’t speak ‘the German Queen’s English’ and only it is cheap and has British pubs and British caffs they would prefer Canada or New Zealand. It’s a matter of pride with them to be a monoglot in this sea of bar-bar.
Go raibh maith agat mor, I’m still laughing. Years, many of them ago, we, me then a young teenager, put up street names as an teanga naisunta, in our village, which, ’til we erected it, had never had a sign telling people where they’d arrived.
Charlie Armstrong, then cathaoirleach to our local authority, came out with two on duty colleagues, demanding they get him a ladder with which he could remove the will of the locals, he didn’t last long, the signs, and commitment, remains.
One day, Arlene will be deputy first minister, her political party second largest in the devolved legislature, ansin, slan agus crabh as.
If that was An Port Mór, mark, then you will know that the signs are gone mostly and the battle with the council, which cost £1000 was lost in the courts.
It is the big fort, and signs remain, the language Act will reinstate the signs, the boul Charlie didn’t like them, the colleagues he asked for a ladder laughed at him, soon, we can laugh at Arlene.
If you want others to do our thinking for us, to make new words for us to say, make all our TV programmes, write all of our books, dictate our history to us, decide what is and is not part of our culture whether it be shamrocks, leprachauns or shillelaghs – then you should cut all funding to Irish North and South.
It’s a bit the first national language.
The main problem south of the Black Sow’s Dyke / Díog na Cránach Duibhe, Esteemed Blogmeister where the Leprechaun is concerned is not so much that those in favour of currying their can of yoghurt put forward careless arguments but rather that no arguments are put forward at all.
For it is a truthiness universally acknowledged in the Liffeyside media that the Leprechaun is the dialect of the Do Do; therefore as no more Dough should be squandered on same, Dough being time, thus there is no airspace devoted to it.
Apart, of course, from when the Southern Yunes wish to, erm, curry favour with their Northern Yune counterparts.
As happened the other day when Pat ‘Patio’ Kenny took the surname of the Ard-Rúnaí of Conradh na Gaeilge, Julian de Spáinn, as a cue to tighten the thumbscrew as if he were reprising The Spanish Inquisition itself.
Personally, The Perkin finds it a pointless exercise for one Irish person to attempt to convince another Irish person of the merits of Leprechaun. It is just one of those things that one gets or one doesn’t. A bit like, say, the Fifth Movement of Beethoven’s Sixth. You either get the sublimity of the Shepherd’s song or you don’t. Lán stad, full stop.
Which is not to say that one should remain silent in the face of the omniscient bleating of the Neo- Know Nothing monoglots. For two reasons:
-To allow their nihilistic stickiness triumph by, erm, default is to banish the St. Patrick’s (all two of them) from Ireland in the wake of the snakes and to instal San Adreas the Quaker as the new patron saint of Paddyland.
-Secondly, and possibly more importantly, it is great gas altogether having a right good go at the gubadawns and gomalogues of West Britannia; it makes shooting catfish in a vat seem like an exercise in the darker part of differential calculus.
Take, as target practice, one of the sacred verses from the psalter of the linguistic defaulters:
-Culture is always something that was
Something pedants can measure
Skull of bard, thigh of chief, depth of dried up river
Shall we be thus forever?
Shall we be thus forever?
Shall we indeed. This is taken from a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, who is, alas, thus no more. It summarises his disdainful view of what he labelled ‘The Old Foolishness’, i.e. the Leprechaun. Or, T.O.F. to be anagrammatical about it. An anagram which F.O.T. takes great delight (intellectual, like) in endorsing, erm, emphatically.
Fintan O Toole (for it is he!), the finest mind of the Free Southern Stateen, surprisingly fails to see the pig-irony involved in Paddy Kavanagh’s taking up the T.O.F.-nosed view of the lingua franca of Paddy Stink and Mickey Muck.
As a poet PK was , of course, superb but as a cultural analyist couldn’t hit a haggard with a H-bomb. In golfing terms, he could drive like Sterling Moss but as a putter was more like Joe, a dead loss.
Consider his most popular achievement: the lyric of Raglan Road. It has been said before that this poetic part of Dublin 4 ’d never have got off the page if PK hadn’t thoughtfully arranged its marriage to the the musical equiv of the depth of a dried up river.
That would be the tune of a 17th century harpist from Sligo, name of Tomas O Coinnialláin:
-Fáinne Geal an Lae.
So, ironically, the tune which had (supposedly) had its, erm, ‘lae’ lived to sing another day. Call it Chucky 2 / Tiocfaidh a dough.
Indeed, over the most Christmas past when in modern day Monaghan in all probability a martyr- mother still milked the cows to the accompaniment of her hungover husband on the melodeon, The Perkin heard on the same Dublin radio programme two supposedly incompatible songs:
The Luke Kelly fellow sensitively bellowing the refrain of Raglan Road and also, the voice of the newly deceased Debbie Reynolds ebbing away from the final strains of a Tammy half in love with easeful death. , Away from the never to be forgotten cottonwoods, where the old hooty-owl forever hooty hoots to the dove.
The connection, ar ndoigh/ of course, between the two songs being:
-Lae and L.a.E.
The latter stands for the unsung songwriting duo of Livingston and Evans: Jay and Ray (for it is still they!) who did as much as any pair to write the soundtrack of the Fabulous Fifties:
Apart from Tammy, they also contrived to bedeck the decade with Buttons and Bows, Mona Lisa, Mr. Ed, Silver Bells, Que Sera, Sera etc etc etc.
But then, as the latter day Sir Oracles of the Neo-Know Nothings will have it:
-No way can Lae and L.a.E. be laid together without the Plain People of Ireland being made to pay for it, and through the nose too.
Truly, do these N-K-Ns not know the half of it.
Are you actually Ronnie Barker? If so, great fake death BTW.
That is probably the first and last time that the Irish language has been compared to the Fifth Movement of Beethoven’s Sixth. But you are right, you either get it or you don’t. But just because you don’t get it now doesn’t mean that you won’t at sometime in the future.
Patrick Kavanagh came from a place where the Irish language was spoken up until very recently. It would seem that he was raised in a house where some Irish was spoken. Here is the return form for Patrick’s house in 1911 census which states that the family spoke Irish and English. http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai003103862/
Dear sweet jayzuss , Mighty Perk you ‘ve just unearthed the hastily buried embarrissing memory of a six-year old’s first stirring of the loins…. or is that the trouser-lions?…My older sister was probably tasked at keeping me out of mischief for an hour or two on a Saturday afternoon….a dark picture-house in the late 1950s …. and the virginal (!) Debbie Reynolds .singing “Tammy” by the aforemnetioned Livingston and Evans…indeed !!!…That affair lasted until I discovered Ava Gardner….!!!
What I’m beginning to wonder is if the Irish translation of DUP isn’t, in fact, actually, ‘Sinn Fein’ – I mean, with themselves being pretty much on their own on this one (or whatever the acceptable English translation of Sinn Fein is – although I’m sure your get my point).
It would be a most delightful irony.
Dr C
I think you should print this post and hang on yer wall, look how many people (normally at each other’s digital throats) are in broad agreement.
Not quite Ronnie B., Am Ghobsmacht, a chara, but still, doing porridge all the same.
A sign, if one were needed, that San Andreas the Quaker truly is the Patron Saint of ‘the only English speaking country in the EU’.
One was sentenced in 2016 till the next February 29th for having sung Tammy to the tune of Tabhair dom do Lámh/ Give me your hand. The (alleged) crime being, it was Tammy’s turn, in a leap year.
No amount of pleading to the bleeding Judge that Tammy, being from Toomebridge, was a pronounced member of the male persuasion, would suffice.
The origin of the term ‘to do porridge’/ ‘ag déanamh leite’ –in this instance for doing time for Tammy – is explained by the ominous sign over the entrance to the prison here in Mountjoyless:
-Leite the People sing-sing.
Never was a truer phrase ever coined.
Truly, when behind bars, time hangs heavily on one’s hands and besides, Tammy never comes.
The walls are grim,grey and high but one is groundbound and cannot fly.
Oh, for the wings of an avian gardiner !