Béal Feirste Abú!

An interesting piece from Public Radio International (PRI) on the Irish-speaking community in Belfast and the work of Linda Ervine, which I’ve highlighted several times before on An Sionnach Fionn (though you might need to ignore the hackneyed language in the original article).

“Lower Newtownards Road in East Belfast is solid Protestant territory. It was a hot spot for sectarian violence at the height of the troubles.

Today, British flags flutter from fences. Murals of masked gunmen adorn the sides of buildings. It’s pretty much the last place you’d expect to find people learning Irish.

But inside a community center, about a dozen people from the neighborhood are doing just that.

You wouldn’t have seen this a few decades ago. Just ask Sandra Irvine.

“When I was at school, I was brought up in East Belfast, yes, in a very Protestant area and for me to learn Irish would have been considered very strange,” she said.

But she had always been curious about the language.

“I did actually attempt to learn Irish, but couldn’t find anywhere that I could go to, so it was in my mind for a very long time, but it wasn’t an option,” Irvine said.

Now, Irish is an option for people like Irvine. East Belfast Mission hosts classes five times a week.

This push for Protestant Irish learners is largely the work of one woman: Linda Ervine, the center’s Irish language development officer. It’s her job to convince people who, at best, see the language as irrelevant and, at worst, as an enemy tongue to care about it. She tells them to look a century into history, to when plenty of Protestants here spoke Irish.

“What the language does is, it allows people to explore the idea of Irishness in a non-threatening way,” Ervine said. “We are Irish. I feel I’m Irish.”

This means a lot coming from Ervine. Her brother-in-law, David Ervine, was a well-known member of the Ulster Volunteer Force — a protestant paramilitary group. He did six years in prison before leading Northern Ireland’s Progressive Unionist Party.

“It was almost like we give people permission from the Protestant community,” Ervine said. “Like, if we could do it, it was alright, sort of took the sting out of it or something.”