Given the news yesterday about a group of young people from Ireland being subject to racial abuse by a taxi driver in the city of Glasgow for speaking in their native Irish instead of English here comes another disgraceful story about speakers of an indigenous Celtic tongue being subject to discrimination for not using the English language. A pharmacy in Wales refused to serve medicines to the father of a sick child because he presented a bilingual prescription, one written both in Welsh and English. From the Mail Online:
“A sick baby was rushed to hospital after a supermarket pharmacy refused to hand his medication to his father because part of the prescription had been written in Welsh.
Aled Mann, 34, took the prescription from the family doctors to his local Morrisons pharmacy counter after his one-year-old son Harley developed a chest infection.
But staff at the supermarket in Bangor, north Wales, refused to give him the steroid tablets because they could not read the note as not all of it was in English.
Mr Mann got the medication two hours later after driving back to the GP surgery and waiting for another prescription to be printed in English which he then took back to the pharmacy.
But baby Harley’s condition worsened and he had to be admitted to hospital for treatment the next morning.
Mr Mann and his wife Alys, 33, live in the 2,000-strong seaside village of Felinheli, near Bangor, north Wales.
Their GP Dr Ieuan Parry in the Welsh language stronghold printed the prescription for baby Harley’s steroid tablets in their native language.”
The incident has been condemned by several local politicians and Meri Huws, the Language Commissioner in Wales.
(With thanks to Seanán Ó Coistín, Welsh Not British and others for the heads-up).
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Reblogged this on seachranaidhe1.
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The poetic justice here is that the pharmacy has bought itself a boatload of bad publicity, which is richly deserved. With any luck, they’ll see a precipitous drop in business. People do take note of such idiocy. Of course, that doesn’t help the child or his family.
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While the carrot is generally better than the stick, I do think one or two of these idiots need to be made an example of, just to show that such behaviour is no longer acceptable. Similarly, employers hinting that Welsh should not be spoken by their employees, etc. Time someone was prosecuted. Time for Sceri Meri to earn her six figure salery.
[Silly aside, the Welsh for ‘carrot’ is ‘moron’, there’s probably a clever pun in there somewhere].
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Another thought. When did doctors stop writing perscriptions in Latin? Pharmacists used to be trained to deal with stuff like “duæ omni nocte per hebdomadas duas apiendæ” (from an old book I happen to have, Latin for Pharmaceutical Students, 1940). If they could deal with heavily abbreviated Latin, Welsh should hardly be a problem, especially since perscriptions these days are mostly just the names of ready made commercial products.
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Well it seems this story may be a little more complicated than has been made out, but still I suppose its the marginal cases that define the boundaries, and once you give an inch …
Had a look at the comments in the Mail, the level of ignorance about Welsh and its status within Wales is really shocking, English people seem unable to grasp the idea that Welsh is a modern national language and still the native language of very many people. Part of their identity, not simply a political stance or a hobby.
The Welsh reports and their comments are more interesting, e.g.
http://www.golwg360.com/newyddion/cymru/133661-protestio-yn-morrisons-bangor-yfory
http://www.golwg360.com/newyddion/cymru/133755-protest-morrisons-bangor-tros-bresgripsiwn-cymraeg
It appears that hundreds turned up for a protest outside the supermarket today. The Welsh language comments broadly back the protest but several suggest that the problem is much wider, and that Morrisons should not really be singled out. “Hanna” writes (my translation) ‘… [we] need to look in the mirror also (if not to begin with). Small shops owned by Welsh speakers are just as guilty as Morrisons & Tesco of having monolingual [English] signs, greeting customers in English etc. Let’s use Welsh. It should be everyone’s New Year’s Resolution to start widening our use of the language … Perhaps then we’ll be justified in pointing the finger.’
Elsewhere, “Jac” (my translation) ‘… but the problem is deeper than that. There is a lack of awareness of rights / lack of concern / embarrassment / fear of making a fuss or giving offense etc. that restrains Welsh speakers [from using the language]. There is a real need for the Language Commissioner to work with psycholinguists to challange and change such attitudes as soon as possible.’
I’ll leave it to the rest of you to decide how, if at all, any of this compares with or related to the Irish situation.
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Thanks for the links, Marconatrix. The following is entirely applicable to Ireland and those who speak or might want to speak Irish in public: “There is a lack of awareness of rights / lack of concern / embarrassment / fear of making a fuss or giving offence etc.“
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Thanks. Let me know if you need anything translated. Welsh seems to be in a better position than Irish in having more regular speakers etc., but there are signs of government and bureaucracy behaving in the same way as in Ireland. The Welsh Language Commissioner on being appointed found she had no set standards to regulate. So she thought up a list, arranged for widespread public consultation and taking note of the response, drew up a shorter and clearer list of basic language rights. This went to govenment who naturally rejected it, stalled for months and have just come up with a watered down list of their own, which according to Cymdeithas yr Iaith are little better than the status quo. Will they continue to ‘kick the can down the road’, lets just hope not. As in Ireland, so much adminstration is habitually in English, and the people concerned just don’t see any need to change their habits, and then the public themselves become so habituated to being ‘adminstered’ in English that to demand service in Welsh looks like being a trouble maker. So then they can say there is no great demand for such services … vicious circle. How, short of a revolution, do you rehabilitate and ‘normalise’ a language?
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