Resumo de The Death Of The Irish Language

Publisher: Routledge, 1990

Reviewed by: David McKenna

When the Irish Republic achieved its? independence in the early 1920s, there was every reason to suppose that the Irish language would rise again to take the place it had enjoyed in the ?Island of Saints and Scholars? of the 7th and 8th centuries AD. Indeed, that prospect ? along with certain other realities ? was enough to induce some of the English Ascendancy culture to ?up-sticks? and leave the new republic, convinced that Irish dreams were about to become uncomfortably realised.

And yet, it did not happen. Nor ? after 80 years ? has it done so. And yet this fact is barely whispered about in Ireland. But Reg Hingley has done so. In his 1990 book he traced this unhappy story, in all if its? hypocrisy, its? pride and its? misplaced nationalist aspiration.

It is a tale whose plot has remained unchanged. If there had been a real national will to revive the language at the point of independence in the 1920s, it might well have been done. But, with an especially Irish logic, it was decided to pass the task on to the children of the nation. The reasoning was of the form ?the English beat the language out of our Irish children, so we will beat it back into them?. And millions of Irish adults can testify (should they care to do so) that beating was exactly the instrument used to re-inculcate the ?first official language? into their hearts.

But children are not stupid, and hypocrisy is the first of the adult crimes which they learn to recognise as such. The children of Ireland saw quite clearly that they were (in the vernacular) being ?sold a pup?. They could see that Irish existed solely and wholly in an artificial classroom environment; very few people spoke it in the real world. And those few who did so spoke the remnants of isolated regional dialects, mutually unintelligible to each other, and especially so to the standardised version devised for Irish classrooms.

So, while the Government made valiant efforts to preserve the illusion of a living, breathing idiom, even the favoured areas of the Western seaboard ? primed with grants and tax incentives as long as the inhabitants would aver that they were full-time Irish speakers ? drifted inexorably toward the tongue of the invader. Again the tale remained the same, for this was just the way in which the language had originally been lost. Though the romanticists would point to English oppression (which certainly had existed) it was solid practicality which had killed the Gaelic tongue. Ireland was a small part of a global Anglophone empire ? and to get a job within it demanded English language skills. Even when the Irish fled beyond the Empire ? driven by the famine of the 1840s - they chose Anglophone destinations such as America and Australia, where their ?native? tongue gave them an immediate advantage. The Irish aristocracy, who had fled some centuries before the famine, went to non-Anglophone countries such as France and Spain, and were lost forever to the Irish nation.

All of this is clear enough to me, as an Irish person. And it is clear enough to my children, who are currently struggling through the same Irish educational system which insisted that the Irish language was to be the cornerstone of my upbringing. My sons can see well enough how little connection this requirement has with reality. And, like my parents before me, I have to explain to them that their perceptions are accurate, but that they must accept the greater reality that the State insists that they learn the ?first official language? if any significant educational or employment opportunities are to be open to them. Again and again they ask me ?Why??. And I have to admit to them that it is ultimately by the will of the majority of the Irish people that they learn their lists of Irish verbs. In opinion polls, in public meetings, in the letters pages of newspapers, the Irish people continually assert that not only do they personally speak the Irish language (a twisted memory of their schooldays) but they want their children to do so too. And thus, by implication, they aspire to recreate a Gaelic-speaking Ireland. And no mere gesture this ? they increasingly validate their aspiration by sending their children to all-Irish speaking schools, where the concepts of Euclid, Shakespeare and Jesus are imparted in this artificial tongue. And why not, when this will give the children concerned extra marks in their final examinations?

Even for someone immersed in it for all his lifetime, such an attitude is hard to understand. I have read the apologetics, listened to the arguments, yet am still confounded. The example of Israel, and the revival of Hebrew, gives hope to Irish enthusiasts. But the Israeli context was entirely different, which is conveniently ignored by the Gaelic romanticists. In the past, noted Irish artists, such as the playwright John B Keane, have spoken out against the current official Irish language strategy, and for their rouble earned only scorn and rejection. Mr Hingley has done so from the intellectual perspective. But on this one, it would seem that Irish hearts are set in stone. We will not abandon our stated commitment to our language, though we have long ago abandoned its? reality.

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