Richard Haass, the latest diplomatic envoy from the United States to the permanently ailing Irish-British peace process, has offered the tentative proposal that the Irish language be granted some form of “official” recognition in the north-east of Ireland. Predictably we are told that politicians from the British Unionist minority in the region will react with fury at the suggestion that the indigenous speech of this island nation is given any recognition at all, underlying of course the essentially colonial nature of the political entity called “Northern Ireland”. From a report by the Belfast Telegraph:
“Richard Haass has risked the anger of unionists after he said the Irish language should be considered for official use in Northern Ireland.
He also called for a Troubles museum to be built in an acceptance speech as he was awarded the Tipperary Peace Award.
Those previously honoured with the prestigious award include Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton.
Referring to the aspiration of many people for Irish unity, he said: “Irish identity could and should be respected in many ways within existing constitutional arrangements, possibly including a larger, official role for the Irish language.”
While Irish already has some legal protections, such a move would likely mean more use of Irish on roads signs, State documents and court proceedings – something unionists consistently and vocally oppose.
After the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, the Government promised to introduce an Irish Language Act, although it never happened.
Then when devolution was restored in 2007, the DUP took the Culture ministry and plans for the act were ditched amid claims it would be too expensive to implement laws that would see Irish enshrined in all facets of public life.”
Financial concerns have nothing to do with the hostility to the Irish language and culture displayed by Unionists (or anyone else). British ethno-national supremacism and the poisonous legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Ireland – now that has everything to do with it. When it comes to Ireland the ideology of British nationalism can be summed up in one phrase: vae victis!
Talking of mind-sets shaped by colonialism the politically-promiscuous Trotskyist John O’Mahony, he of the multiple identities, offers this observation in Workers’ Liberty while discussing Frank McCourt’s turgid poverty porn “Angela’s Ashes”:
“Amidst many terrible things, quite the worst schoolroom oppression of that time was the attempt to use a foreign language, Gaelic, as a teaching medium, except in religion and commerce, for children whose language was English and who lived in a society whose language was, and for generations had been, English. It is still English…”
To which I reply, in the English vernacular, bollocks!
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
haass, like so many others before him, begging for crumbs from the Unionists table –
what’s needed is a way to overturn the table, applying leverage where least expected
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Ben :
The “No Surrender” unionist strategy is working well -> in successfully ensuring there will be a Nationalist majority by 2020, increasing with each year. By 2030, unionists could well have dipped below the 40% mark.
It’s all good.
A Re-United Ireland is inevitable.
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Agreed. I suspect a reunited Ireland will be much more generous to its “British” minority than the “United Kingdom” has ever been to its Irish minority. I hope I’m proved correct.
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Nationalists want to Re-Unite Ireland – and we will, of that there is no doubt. All of that supremacist nonsense is a Orange/unionist/colonial thingy.
Nationalist Ireland has zero interest in lording it over the British minority in Ireland.
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Surprise! Surprise! OO hardliner actually saying Loyalists need to learn from history!!!!
http://audioboo.fm/boos/2278020-warning-to-polish-community-over-12th-july-period-bbcnolan
Has the Daily Telegraph debacle, a threat that Poland will be “displeased” and the Queen shaking gloveless hands with Marty actually driven some message through?
Watch here for a lightning U-turn after 100 years!!
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Or a breakaway movement by more “moderate” Orange Order members? I have no objection to a non-sectarian/non-racist Orange Order, if such is possible. However the present institution, its ideology and links to militancy, is indefensible for a supposedly “cultural” organisation.
Personally I can’t see it happening but stranger things have occurred.
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The whole point of the Orange Order is that it is an avowedly Protestant organisation, devoted to Reformation principles, just as the Ancient Order of Hibernians is an avowedly Catholic organisation, devoted to support for the tenets of that faith, so both are “sectarian”. You then get into a debate about whether “sectarianism” is inherently wrong : all churches could be considered to be sectarian. I think far too much emphasis is placed on the Orange Order, an organisation which now has no direct political, or patronage power and which, based on its own figures, is down to around 33,000 members, a small percentage of the Protestant population. But, I suppose, for Nationalists, it provides a useful bogey man.
Depressing yet again to see “sectarianism” condemned, yet welcome for an inevitable United Ireland, based on, er, a sectarian head-count, with the large assumption that all Catholics will favour that outcome.
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The AOH is a sectarian organisation in that sense, though it does not – by and large – carry the racist overtones that the fringe of the Orange Order does (some of which is not so “fringe”). In its Irish manifestation (as opposed to the Irish-American rivals) it lacks any links to militant/paramilitary/terrorist groupings.
The Orange Order in recent times as very much given substance to its terror links. OO members up to and including the leadership have been playing footsie with elements of the UDA-UFF and UVF for the last two years. It has no one to blame but itself for its own dreadful public image.
I don’t assume by any means that Catholic equates with Nationalist. I know that from personal experience just as I know that Protestant doesn’t automatically equate with Unionist.
As I write I’m looking at an old black-and-white photo of my father as a child standing in a street in Enniskillen with my Dublin-born grandmother visiting her Fermanagh relatives, dated July 1960. Those relatives would probably have included OO members who would have been out marching that month. The story of Ireland is at times all shades of grey.
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