Following his shock resignation from the post of An Coimisinéir Teanga or the Language Commissioner senior civil servant Seán Ó Cuirreáin appeared yesterday before a joint-committee of the Oireachtas made up of Teachtaí Dála and Seanadóirí to explain his reasons for quitting the equality posting. Despite wide-spread interest by the country’s Irish-speaking population no members of the two government parties, Fine Gael and Labour, attended the meeting nor did any representatives of the Socialist Party, the SWP-PBP or Independents. A more pointed message from the coalition government and others to the position of Irish-speaking citizens and communities in our society could hardly be given. The Irish Times carries a report on the meeting, the only representative of the Anglophone national media to do so:
“Irish language Commissioner Seán Ó Cuirreáin has said the Irish language is being continuously driven out to the margins of Irish society in a process accelerated by the inaction of Government, the civil service and the public sector.
The commissioner used his last appearance yesterday before the Oireachtas sub-committee on the 20 Year Strategy for the Irish language to make a comprehensive and wide-ranging condemnation of the State and Government’s dispensations towards the language.
No TD or Senator from either of the Government parties, Fine Gael or Labour, attended the meeting attended only by parliamentarians from Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, as well as independent Senator Ronán Mullen.
In his presentation, Mr Ó Cuirreáin was highly critical of the Government’s record on the Irish language.
“The neglect in promoting the language scheme element of the Act has resulted in severe restrictions on the progress which might have been made. I believe there is no possibility that the new system being introduced to increase the number of civil servants fluent in Irish will succeed.”
The commissioner has calculated that the scheme would take some 28 years to increase the number of fluent speakers in a core Government department for Irish to just 3 per cent from its very low present rate of 1. 5 per cent.
He gave as an example a claim by the Revenue Commissioners that a third of all their press releases were being issued in two languages. But when his office checked, it emerged that they were being issued only in one language. And then, once a year, it was getting four months’ worth of press releases translated in one go (long after their period of usefulness or topicality had expired) in order to cut down on translation.
Mr Ó Cuirreáin also referred to comments made by retired senior civil servant Seán Mag Leannáin, who said there was “growing evidence that there is a strategy afoot to do away with what’s left of Irish in the public life of the country”.
He said the State had two simple choices – to look back at Irish as our lost language, or forward with it as a core part of our heritage and sovereignty.
Mr Ó Cuirreáin said that the State was not providing services through Irish in Gaeltacht areas “without terms and conditions”. As a result, the State was effectively saying to Gaeltacht people: “Speak Irish among yourselves, but don’t speak it to us!””
Can anyone now doubt that there is a deliberate policy within the ruling establishment of the state as currently constituted to extinguish the Irish-speaking population of our island nation through a system of institutionalised discrimination and neglect? That there are those in power and influence who wish to make a Daorstát Éireann, an unfree Ireland, for our Hibernophone citizens and communities?
UPDATE: Eoin Ó Riain has translated the full address of Seán Ó Cuirreáin to the Oireachtas committee on the Hidden Ireland blog where the former Language Commissioner explains the reasoning behind his resignation. It represents a shocking condemnation of the Irish state and of the biased attitudes which pervade it.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
The full text of the Coimisinéir’s address may be read in translation at The Hidden Ireland! http://galltacht.blogspot.ie/2014/01/floccinaucinihilipilification-state.html
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Do the 850 year long culteral repression of the Irish now continues under a so-called Irish Government
Castlereagh must be laughing down there in Hell.
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Unfortunately true.
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we’re f*cked, sionnach: it’s through the decades old deliberate obfuscation by elected governments but more recently with the ideologically driven sublimation of the very concept of a national identity as being “racist” – in effect a change in the language of “Irish” as oppressor of ethnicities and races by anti-Irish republicans in the main – means as long as Irish speakers refuse to speak out against the accusations of racism, media and media obsessed politicians will ignore that which (ostensibly) Irish people seem not to give a rat’s arse about: writ large it means without immediate mobilisation by sympathisers, the language will be dead before the nation state by 2050 @
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I agree. Which is why I have deliberately tried to frame the argument here through the prism of “indigenous rights” and such like, which are accepted as “good” by western societies and their ostensibly “liberal” do-gooding elites. I have used the terminology of the anti-Irish consensus against itself, terminology it would favourably use if applied to native or minority languages and cultures in North and Latin America, Africa, Australasia, etc. That is one way of tackling the mindset displayed in our national newspapers. By getting inside it and subverting it from the inside out 😉
I should also add of course that the method of “instruction” that I challenge Anglophone conformity with is the one so many traditional Irish language activists have a problem with. It is too “radical”, “militant”, “confrontational”, “in your face”, etc.
Yet what I claimed had happened, was happening and would happen when I started this blog two-and-a-half years ago is now being reflected in the views of mainstream Irish language activists. Albeit in more polite or timid terms.
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well said, sionnach: unfortunately it’s the Irish electorate’s genuflection to the ‘other’; it is the confessional state/herd mentality/conformist supplicancy towards EU federalism specifically that will kill off dissenters – questioning the “European Project” was inevitably going to be considered ‘racist’, which wasn’t the case at the time of the Maastricht Treaty (or later with Fiscal Compact) – fiduciary or fiscal illiteracy was the main stick to beat non-Unionists — the appearance of carbon-copy Anglocentric/xenophobes NIPs are truly depressing but inevitable in a vacuum, where dialogue in this state and in the media on open-border immigration is verboten @
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/today-with-sean-o-rourke/programmes/2014/0116/498202-today-with-sean-o-rourke-thursday-16-january-2014/?clipid=1395650
http://www.theguardian.com/profile/johnpalmer
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Lip service seems to be ingrained in anglophone bureaucracies. All is not well over the water …
http://cymdeithas.org/node/4733
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That is just ridiculous 😀
What’s next – will he set a minimum number of words that must be spoken every day?
That’s not a proper communication, but a farce.
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Incremental steps: we can’t expect much from politicians anywhere but leadership needs to be pooled and not seen in isolation!
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/education-how-did-we-get-the-teaching-of-irish-so-wrong-1.1667065
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The point was that a section of government charged with promoting use of the language was working internally entirely in English, a case of “do as I say, not as I do”. This only leads the general public to treat the whole business, and the language by association, with utter contempt.
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Agreed. And perhaps the very intent.
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It seems that the Baltic region is having its own language issues or is that media exaggeration?
“I was reminded of relations between Poland and Lithuania which pre-date the Great War and remain pretty cool despite outward appearances. There are ongoing tensions in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius where Poles are putting up signs in Polish while Lithuanians living in Poland are complaining about that their language is being removed from the Polish curriculum. Obviously the situation in Ukraine is much graver but these smaller tensions continue to brew under the surface and they are manifold.”
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Thanks for the link, Marconatrix.
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