While the Anglophone extreme in Ireland are foaming at the mouth (or more accurately, the keyboard) over the suggestion by a government minister that he might support the phased introduction of genuinely bilingual road signs in the country – where the Irish text will no longer be obscured through the use of different fonts and positioning compared to the English – in Scotland they are also seeking to establish “parity of esteem” between the native and adopted languages of their nation. From the Scotsman newspaper:
“GAELIC will appear on entry signs welcoming visitors to Edinburgh’s iconic tourist and cultural attractions under multi-million-pound plans to revive the under-threat language.
Bilingual signage at sites such as Edinburgh Castle could join “Fàilte gu Dùn Èideann” – Welcome to Edinburgh – messages at entry points on key arterial routes into the city as part of a drive to transform the profile of the ancient Celtic tongue, currently spoken by around 6000 of the Capital’s 500,000 inhabitants.
New moves to boost the language have been unveiled in a progress report on the 2012-17 Edinburgh Gaelic Language Plan (GLP), which also envisages bilingual signs at council buildings, the inclusion of a Gaelic translation in the council’s corporate logo and a dramatic expansion in Gaelic medium teaching in city schools and nurseries.
Eben Wilson, director of TaxpayerScotland, called GLP investment “non-democratic” and said: “I think some taxpayers will be put out that their money is being spent in this way when there may well be much better uses for it. The problem is always that it applies special privileges to Gaelic speakers that some people will dislike intensely.”
City leaders and the Scottish Government have already ploughed £3.53 million into Edinburgh’s first Gaelic-dedicated primary school, Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pàirce in Bonnington.
And figures indicate that seven-figure annual spending on Gaelic-based education – which council chiefs said would be the one element of the GLP requiring separate budgetary spending – will rise from at least £1.1m in 2012-13 to nearly £1.4m in 2019-20, with further moves under way to sustain and expand teaching in the language across Edinburgh’s pre and secondary school sectors.
Councillor Deidre Brock, SNP member for Leith Walk, said: “Minority languages all over the world are falling away and this is the national language of Scotland. It should be treasured.””
And if some of those arguments sound familiar take this exposition in prejudice from the letters section of the Irish Independent newspaper:
“I was disappointed and angered to read about Transport Minister Leo Varadkar’s pandering to the Gaelic League lobby in relation to changing road and motorway signs.
The continuing waste of money on the Gaelic language is completely at odds with the glaring need to provide money for essential services.
We seem to be able to find no end of money for the Gaelic language lobby who insist on 52 Gaelic translators in Brussels; support the waste of vast sums on dual advertising and road signs; send us unwanted forms in Gaelic; force us to pay for TG4 and Raidio na Gaeltachta; and support compulsory Gaelic in our schools.
Gaelic is fine for those that want it and let those that want it pay for it.
The Gaelic lobby would have you believe that you are less ‘Irish’ because you speak English. Well I, for one, am glad that we use and speak English. Try telling an American, Canadian, or Australian that they are less so because they speak English.
Bren Kirby
Ballygall, Dublin 11”
Note the insistence on the use of the term Gaelic and the inverted commas around Irish. Get it? But, I wonder, is the writer struck by the irony of living in Ballygall? Or more correctly, Baile na nGall. And does he really think that the bastardized English form is somehow more authentic than the Irish original? Perhaps he and other Anglophone supremacists will now organise to further “de-Gaelicise” the landscape of our nation?
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
In fairness to the Indo, today’s paper had a letter in support of Leo Varadkar before ‘Bren Kirby’, then again ‘John Glennon’ has form –
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/please-show-respect-for-our-language-26617873.html
Indo of course has all this in the interest of balance – and not showing hypocracy of editor having Irish language supplement on Wednesdays as they know that’s the main reason for spike in mid-week sales – money talks! @
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That last part:
” The Gaelic lobby would have you believe that you are less ‘Irish’ because you speak English. Well I, for one, am glad that we use and speak English. Try telling an American, Canadian, or Australian that they are less so because they speak English.”
The idea that if you said to an American, Canadian or Australian that they are not as such because they speak English is foolish. Why? Because these nations mentioned were essentially founded upon the English language and its associated culture.
Ireland on the other hand has completely different origins. ‘Gaelic’ origins this man would no doubt say. We have a duty to not only ourselves but to our ancestors to restore Gaeilge to the national language of our nation once again.
If we don’t it’s better that we return back to the United Kingdom.
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“Bolshevism!”, they’d cry! — I wonder how the new generation of non-Gaelic speaking social scientists and linguists teaching in Irish universities who advocate first nation principles and the rights of native peoples worldwide would compare to the older generation – Séamus Ó Síocháin, Pádraig Ó Fiannachta or Mícheál Mac Gréil – I would have thought most modern Irish leftist libertarians are poor advocates for language rights on this island – http://www.multiculturecrisis.com/
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The Gaelic languages weren’t even native to what is now Ireland, only after the 3rd century were they recorded, what was spoken there before that? Exactly, another language entirely that had nothing to do with Gaelic, there, another contradictory statement from you.
The term ‘Gael’ doesn’t even come from any facet of what the term ‘Irish’ would constitute, because it derived from ancient British Gwydill which was used to refer to the northern British, the Scots and their Ulster Kinsmen, not the Hiberni/Irish.
Languages come and go, born and die out over time, that’s the way it always has been since the dawn of mankind, there was a time Gaelic was never once uttered in what’s now Ireland, and we are now in the age where it is dying out just as fast as when it was introduced, you’re fighting a lost cause, it will die out in time, you can try and slow it down but you can never ever reverse it’s impending extinction in Ireland, as it is at the point of being irreversible now.
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Len, the Irish language in some form or another has been spoken on the island of Ireland for the last 3000 years. That is hardly disputed by serious historians or linguists. Indeed the language’s presence here may pre-date that span by some considerable time, arguably as far back as the late Neolithic.
The Féine were an ancient population group in Ireland covering the west and midlands whose name meant something like the “Wild, Wilderness Ones”. During their expansionary stage in the early centuries AD traders, raiders and settlers from the Féine made their presence felt in Britain. Their Irish name was taken into Welsh as Gwyddelod (through the normal Brythonic reflex). This was later taken back into Irish and applied to the Irish people as a whole as Gaeil (“the Irish people”).
The Féine bear comparison with the origins of the name for the people of England, the English, a word to be found in the Angles, one component population group that went to make up the English of the Medieval period.
Féine > Gwyddelod > Gaeil
Angles > English
Languages do not die by means of “natural selection”, they die by means of human intervention. The near-destruction of Irish was man-made. Its saving will be by the same mechanism.
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I sincerely hope that not speaking English makes me less American. In fact, language is the most powerful decolonizing force (though SAM missiles are a close second). “We Americans” should be speaking the Indigenous languages of the land that we live on, and there are renewed pushes to raise Indigenous children with their languages and teach the languages to settlers, with the view that over generations these languages will displace the colonial English, and help undo the damage done.
English is fine for those who live in England. I’m committed to learning Irish because if I don’t, I’m not Irish. And I AM Irish. Fir gan teanga, Fir gan anam;)
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Good to see the Exiled Irish reclaiming what belongs to them too – the language and culture of Ireland. It is not the exclusive preserve of those born and living here. Nor should it ever be.
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Yes it is, they are the people of the land, the people who run the land, the people who pay their taxes to the land.
Plastic Paddies are just a bunch of mixed up foreigners with an old myth made past from a 16th centuury created identity, enforced by a artificially constructed 19th century Irish history.
You’re not Irish unless you come from the R.Ireland, just like you are not an American unless you were born there, where is the fair sense in letting foreign yankees, canucks, kiwis and Ozzys in hi-jacking someone elses national identity when they who come from that actual country natively can’t claim to be any of these nationalities?
Your views are illogical and contradictory, and this is why they wont be accepted as logical fact, just your mere personal opinions voiced to foster support for your own favoured political views.
It’s the curse of humanity to look backwards for an identity that does not individually belong to you.
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Len, perhaps the Irish-speaking Irish view their identity as being more open and welcoming of the “other” than those English-speaking Irish? Especially when it comes to those of Irish-descent around the world. What matters is not one’s origins but one’s love or commitment to the language and its culture. A fluent Irish-speaking Russian or Finn in Ireland who embraces our indigenous language and culture has as much right to identify themselves as Irish as any non-Irish speaker born, raised and living in Ireland.
Gaelic identity is not prescriptive nor was it ever. Others came and we absorbed them and added their identity to our own. Some of the greatest poets and writers in Irish were of non-Irish descent or birth. Long may that tradition continue.
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