A great article over on Diaga Language which relates to my own piece yesterday on the lack of state-subsidised and accredited Irish language courses for adult learners in Ireland. As always you really should read the full post but here are the main points:
“…I’ve been looking to find an advanced course over the last few days in Irish.
It’s been a bit of an odyssey to be honest and it seems like the whole organisation is chaotic.
…we saw that the Basques have a unified system of language centres (over 150) spread around their provinces with the great majority being run by the local councils. They’re present in every city and medium to large town and they serve between 40k & 50k people per annum.
So I was thinking about doing an extended Irish language course over the coming months and I’d really like to do one which would allow me to get the certified and standardised TEG certificate. So I went to their website and saw a lot of courses that follow that official curriculum and I though great. Well, not really.
It turns out that the courses available are all run either in the few major cities or in the Gaeltacht and by a whole variety of different organisations. That’s not really suitable and even a commute would be out of the question.
Then I went to Foras na Gaeilge’s website. There, they give you a handy list of the organisations who run different courses (using different curricula, unfortunately). So I manually went through them all, going from one homepage to another and still couldn’t find a course that wasn’t either in the Gaeltacht or Dublin, Cork, Belfast or Galway.
Brainwave, Google search. So I came across a page on Gaelport.com where they had maintained a comprehensive list of courses available around the country along with who were running them. Unfortunately it’s not been updated for the coming school year because Gaelport was one of the Irish language organisations whose funding was cut and therefore had to shut down. It seems strange to me that the one place where I was able to find a substantial list of courses available had been axed in the recent reorganisation of the Irish language semi-state sector.
It also seemed strange that in the reorganisation there was nothing done to create a unified body in-charge of adult education and provision of courses both within and without the Gaeltacht, like the Basques, Catalans, Frisians and others have. Why wouldn’t they make it easy for adults to find Irish language courses?
There are two issues here. First, why is the adult learning sector so dispersed, with many different organisations offering courses which don’t even use the same curriculum even though we now have a standard learning framework?
Second, and maybe this is tangential to the first point but why are there so few (almost none) classes and courses available outside the biggest cities and the Gaeltachtaí? What about people living in the big towns in the many counties that don’t have big cities or Gaeltachtaí? Why are they loads of courses in Dublin and none in Kildare or Wicklow (to name two)?
Why is there not just ONE body responsible for providing adult language learning courses in ALL counties which follows the same standard curriculum? It doesn’t seem like a hard thing to organise or maybe there is something I’m missing here?”
The missing thing I would suggest is the antipathy of the state towards its own national and first official language and the institutional desire of the state to inhibit its use. This then exploits an already fractured and weak Irish-speaking community by fostering divisions and playing voluntary groups (essentially charities) off against each other in the allocation of resources. From 1919 to 1922 the embattled revolutionary government of Ireland had a Roinn na Gaeilge or “Department of Irish” with a senior cabinet minister responsible for the language. However since then the responsibility for the Irish language and Irish-speaking communities has been kicked around various minor ministries and is currently split between an extension of the Department of Arts and Heritage (I kid you not) and the notoriously hibernophobic Department of Education. It seems that when it comes to the Irish language the government of Ireland cannot do after several decades of peaceful independence what it could do while fighting a national liberation struggle against a foreign occupying power. Incredible!
To ensure that Irish-speaking citizens are on an equal footing with their English-speaking peers, and for the state to fulfil its constitutional duties, a dedicated “Department of Irish and Irish-Speaking Communities” overseeing all government functions in relation to the Irish language is absolutely essential. Such a ministry, represented by a senior cabinet minister, could subsume many of the roles currently divided amongst a number of state departments and bodies, from translation services to regulatory enforcement. It could also supervise a system of free Irish learning courses associated with new community-based “Irish centres” across the country (similar to what was already promised by all parties in Dáil Éireann years ago but never fulfilled – or likely to be).
This is government practice and policy in a host of nation-states and regions around Europe and beyond so why not here? If the world can do it why can’t the Irish?
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
The difference is that in most other countries “national and official” languages are really national and official, because most of the population can actually speak them.
Irish is a regional minority language at best and is more or less treated like that. Calling it ‘national” in the constitution does not make it so.
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Yes but there are plenty of examples where what are now national languages spoken by majorities were previously regional languages spoken by minorities, including the likes of Lithuania (The Book Smugglers, Lithuania, Ireland and the Freedom of Language) and Latvia (From Irish Ireland to English Ireland).
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sionnach – that’s sticking it to Jānis :p
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Unless there is a major change in attitude of the Irish I can’t see that happening in Ireland.
That Book Smugglers movie is a great example.
If people really want it – they can defend their own language from an actively hostile government that is trying to eradicate it.
On the other hand – if people don’t care – the government can’t do much – and I think that the Irish government is already doing more than it should.
Like teaching Irish to everyone at school instead only to those that want it or putting up street signs in Irish everywhere and not just in the Gaeltacht.
I don’t see the same level of support from the private sector for some reason.
Private companies do not offer even the most tokenistic support – they do not even bother with fadas in Dún Laoghaire and just put up signs like “DUN LAOGHAIRE SHOPPING CENTRE”.
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Lets not forget that places like the Basque country, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, Wales, the Brussels region and Frisia have all been successful in recent times in increasing language competence, both spoken and written, within their regions by delivering a comprehensive system of adult language education. In all those areas their indigenous language has been under the cosh for a time but they are now stabilised or even making a come back. In Ireland that is not the case and the only rational explanation for that is that which an Sionnach pointed out above.
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Some time ago I found a couple of items on YouTube where people were stopped in the street and spoken to in Irish (or invited to speak Irish) and they almost screamed and ran off, well not exactly but you get the idea. Now however I’ve come across a couple of more recent (?) ones which are much more positive.
Here’s one :
It’s very interesting that somewhere in there there’s an Irish/Estonian couple, and he was almost embarrassed that she had her own language and he didn’t, or not very much, so he decided to change that. So it’s possible that globalisation, or perhaps “europeanisation” might actually work in favour of Irish and other small languages.
Then by following links I seemed to find a lot more Irish language clips than before (maybe I somehow missed them?) including many by young people, and especially noticeable was how many of the comments were in Irish too. Dare we begin to hope that a new generation is taking ownership of Irish rather than seeing it as something imposed by school etc. ??
Of course there are also comments of the “I wish I could speak Irish, but …” variety. There should be a fund, like a swearing jar, where every time someone says that, they have to put a £/€ in. That would fund Irish language development for the next century probably — LOL!
Here’s a choice comment that really sums it all up :
” Oh how I wish I had taken more notice in my Irish lessons at school! I’d love to speak it. I’m fluent in Italian but can’t speak my own mother tongue. The way it was drummed into us at school made me detest it, but now that I’m older it makes me regret not learning. Then the family moved away from Ireland so that was the end of that! Shame! ”
Don’t they say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions …
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in fairness i don’t buy into any of that anymore, Marconatrix.
most irish people just don’t care and they don’t want to listen: people fail languages and science subjects in school every year; majority cannot speak a continental language; and almost 20 percent of population are functionally illiterate – because, we’re told, of the time and money teaching a “dead language”
unseemly historical truth of course is that money, influence and doctrinaire conformity co-opted the national language in beating the population into submission – an *instrument* of oppression, not the cause: the revolutionary aspirations were destroyed by the middling catholic classes in first half of last century with second half dissolving sovereignty by supplanting one unionist ideology with another (UK/EU=$$) – but then most don’t want to know this – “we’re part of a global village” (libertarian chorus) – “we were all greedy”
these people are entitled of course to their opinion (the usual vox pop – as you say, the “wish I had taken more notice in my Irish lessons at school”) – but people are influenced by media commentators (as we know in last six years of recession with elections and referendums)
inference: conform to the standards of behaviour dictated by convention – or risk ridicule and ostracisation
once irish cultural identity is divorced from the language, it all becomes meaningless – like an english literature course without etymology module
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Sorry, I don’t see the connection between literature and etymology. People, including writers and poets, use the words available in their language for meaning and effect, but on the whole without any thought as to their derivation. Indeed apart from obvious recent loans, without historical research you wouldn’t know where your words came from. Nor in my experience is this something that’s taught in school, apart from the odd passing mention perhaps.
Anyway, back to the main topic. I was just trying to sound a note of optimism for once, and look what I get for it — lol! I don’t know, attitudes can change, they’re just fashion. Admittedly you can’t just learn a language overnight, so there’s more to it than wearing the latest trendy hat or whatever. Nevertheless it seems in Ireland the problem is not so much that people don’t know any Irish, more that they know it (from school) but don’t use it. So that might more easily be turned around by a simple shift in attitudes. It could also be a generational thing to some extent. I’ve heard it said of Manx that their revival had to wait until the generation that associated the language with poverty and ignorance had all passed on and taken their negative attitudes with them. There may be some truth in that.
So anyway here’s a silly vox pop — enjoy!
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Whoops, seem to have got the like to a whole series of YouTube uploads. The one I was after is is “Can Irish People Speak Irish?”, it’s #44 in the list to the right. Gabh mo lethsgeul.
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Sorry, I don’t see the connection between literature and etymology.
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I think he meant that once you remove Irish language from the Irish cultural identity (and replace it with English or any other language) it becomes a completely different identity with few links to the previous identity.
Or something like that.
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At home our first laguage was Irish
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thanks vm m. and j. (apologies with truncations; smartphone limitations): all true – i had yesterday’s ‘heritage’ day events in mind and the 2013 cultural shakedown of tourist money… Sionnach is in some ways right about subsidies – as we see today – http://independent.ie/entertainment/music/we-need-to-introduce-a-quota-for-irish-music-on-our-airwaves-30531664.html – but the language is more than culture, you know? it’s like the bedding people sleep on, or the tools people use to fix their bicyles – languages are taken for granted but Ireland English is deemed to be paramount for ‘inward invesment & tourism’, a ‘marketable quality’, ignoring that multinationals come here principally for tax breaks and many tourists come here for personability qualities watered down in other countries by rabid consumerism and ideology of the self — only thing for the Irish language is for people to do same as 100 years ago: set up their own schools, printers, organisations without any state involvement and build anew
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set up their own schools, printers, organisations without any state involvement and build anew
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I can agree to that.
For a language to survive – there must be support from the ordinary people.
Who teach the language to their children, speak it in the family and generate new content in it.
Without all that – it does not really matter what the government is doing.
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