HOW’S DEAR OLD IRISH AND WHERE DOES IT STAND?
Stepping Stones into a Sociolinguistics of the Irish Language

PANU PETTERI HÖGLUND, Master of Arts (Åbo Akademi University)

This article was supposed to be submitted to the first seminar of minority languages of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Valencia, Spain, in summer 2002. I couldn’t afford to go there though, so it has been made available on the Net.

Glacaim buíochas ó chroí le Bryan Butterfield a cheartaigh mo chuid Béarla - I extend my sincere thanks to Bryan Butterfield for correcting my execrable English

The sociolinguistics of Irish presents an uniquely interesting field of study, because, to paraphrase Máirtín Ó Murchú, it is not quite about the conventional majority/minority language dichotomy. According to the latest data, published in Spring 1999 in the monthly Irish language magazine Cuisle (which proved regrettably shortlived), there are now about 80 000 native speakers of Irish in Ireland. This allows us to infer that the number of speakers has already stabilised, for as early as in the beginning of the eighties, about fifty thousand seems to have been arrived at as the most realistic figure. The geographer Reg Hindley’s book The Death of the Irish Language - A Qualified Obituary has been perceived as the cornerstone of Irish sociolinguistics, but its methodology has been challenged, for instance, by Anders Ahlqvist, University of Galway, who stated in an interview with the Finnish university magazine Yliopisto, that if Hindley’s criteria were applied to Finland, it would hardly be possible to find a native Finnish speaker there either - according to Hindley, a real native speaker should have spent all his life in the same place speaking Irish with the same neighbours. Hindley might have been trying to make a point about the way emigration decimates the Irish-speaking districts, but if so, he clearly missed the point. Of course, emigration is a problem and a threat to the language; but it would be rather bold to suggest that an Irish-speaking emigrant’s linguistic skills must, in an irreversible way, be affected by a long stay abroad. Actually, native speakers of Irish frequently come back to the old country after their years abroad and participate, even actively, in cultural life in the Irish language. It should thus not be thought that all those Irish-speakers who leave for the United States are forever lost to the language.

Hindley’s book was received much more enthusiastically than it deserved, because it fits only too well in with what Camille O’Reilly calls the dead language discourse in her book about Irish language in Northern Ireland. It is above all a discourse, i.e. an attempt to recreate or to sustain a perceived reality by reproducing established rituals of discussing matters relating to the discourse - or, implicitly, suppressing questions, arguments, and opinions, which are not compatible with the discourse. As Ó Ciosáin has stated in his reply to Hindley’s book, to say that Irish is a living language is, in this discourse, a nationalistic (i.e., by implication an unscientific) argument. According to O’Reilly, those representing the dead language discourse often see Irish as part of a perceived de facto alliance of conservative, nationalistic forces in Ireland, including, for instance, the Catholic church and the anti-abortion movement. Opposing the Irish language is thus perceived as tantamount to protecting liberal rights and civil liberties against reactionary chauvinism. In recent decades, attempts to equate the language movement with the IRA have been very common - especially among Northern loyalists, of course, but also opponents of the language in the Republic of Ireland.

The dead language discourse as defined by O’Reilly has influenced popular images of the Irish language both in Ireland and abroad, and can even be adopted by native speakers, salient as it is in public debate. However, the linguistic scholar should take the slogans associated with this discourse with more than just a pinch of salt. The discourse is based on the assumption that speakers of Irish and any persons using the language in everyday life are by definition romantic nationalists, who cannot be “objective” about the language. This leads, however, to the obviously untenable conclusion that the scholar who does not speak the language is more “objective” and more of a serious scholar than the one who takes the trouble of learning and using the language.

As Ó Ciosáin states in his pamphlet, speaking about the “death of the Irish language” is also problematic, because it inspires images of an innate decay and failure of the language, a kind of divine predestination unstoppable with profane political measures - whereas it would be more appropriate to see the speakers of the language as marginalised and oppressed in society.

Of the 80 000 native speakers today, only 30 000 live in the traditional Irish-speaking districts in the west coast (called the Gaeltachtaí; the singular form Gaeltacht is frequently used collectively, to refer to them all together). The others probably live predominantly in the bigger towns and cities, where the networks of the Irish-speaking subculture might be numerically very strong - in Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath), Cork (Corcaigh), and Belfast (Béal Feirste), there probably are much more Irish-speakers (i.e. even more first-language speakers; active secondary bilinguals probably exceed the number of the first-language speakers anyway) in absolute numbers than in the west coast villages, but procentually speaking, they disappear among the urban masses. Instead of a language community, urban speakers live in a subculture of networks consisting of Irish-speaking families. People involved in the networks are frequently either non-native speakers or first-generation “neo-natives”, who have been brought up in Irish by non-native parents. To what extent genuine first-language speakers of west coast vintage participate in these networks, is a question that has as yet not been answered, as far as I know. There is a prejudice about genuine native speakers’ not being interested in the revival of the language, a prejudice that suggests that people moving, say, from the Aran Islands to Dublin wouldn’t get involved in the Irish-language subculture; but it remains to be seen whether this is really the case.

The influence of genuine native speakers’ Irish on that of the urban networks should definitely not be ignored. Regular tours to the Gaeltacht districts constitute an important element in the Irish-language subculture. On the other hand, it must be remembered - as several commentators before me have repeated in different contexts - that a network is no substitute for a community, and that the language attrition rate is high among children brought up in Irish by secondary bilinguals in the non-Irish speaking part of the country.

Anyway, despite these difficulties, we should forget about the dead language discourse and see Irish, in principle, as just another minority language - not more “dead” than most of them, although due to its place in society an interesting exception from most of them.
IRISH AND NATIONALISM

The roots of modern Irish nationalism can be partly traced back to Theobald Wolfe Tone, who led the rising in 1798, partly to the tradition of rural secret societies. Wolfe Tone wanted the Protestants and Catholics of Ireland to forget about their mutual conflicts and unite against the common enemy - that of British supremacy. However, the rural conspirators he cooperated with were simply too accustomed to denominationally defined frontlines and intercommunal violence to grasp his message, or to apply his ideas to practice. Hence the rising degenerated into precisely the kind of sectarian violence Wolfe Tone wanted to prevent. Even in the twentieth century, the same dissonance between non-sectarian theory and rather sectarian practice has been characteristic of the so-called “physical force nationalism” in Ireland.

Wolfe Tone was not yet interested in Irish as a resource that could be exploited for nationalist purposes. In fact, most of the 19th century Irish national politics concerned Catholic emancipation and Home Rule type issues, i.e. about political rights, without much cultural content. Nationalist thinkers, such as John Mitchell and Thomas Davis, could give token praise to the ancestral language, but real linguistic preservation was only attempted by Protestant intellectuals (!) in Belfast in the first decades of the 19th century. During most of the century, linguistic and cultural societies were established, but most of them never developed beyond scholarly clubs dedicated to collecting manuscripts and copybooks with old poetry. These societies were mostly interested in the reliquies of the classical bardic poetry (i.e. 17th century or older) and in the classical standard language: living dialects were often perceived as debased and worthless.

Finally, Douglas Hyde (Dubhghlas de hÍde) established the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) in 1893. To start with, this organisation wanted to preserve Irish as a spoken language and create the necessary social institutions, above all an educational system partial to the language. The League was in the beginning ecumenically minded and non-sectarian - Hyde was himself a Protestant. The original stance towards politics was also neutral and conciliatory: Hyde stressed the role of the organisation as a common ground for Protestants and Catholics alike. This policy did take effect: some of the key figures in the early years of the League were Protestants, above all Seosamh Laoide (Joe Lloyd), who was in charge of their publications.

Gradually, the situation changed. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as VC or the Fenians, a secret society of militant nationalists based in the Irish-American community and probably to some extent inspired by rural conspiration, developed in the 19th century into a profoundly influential underground network, which infiltrated both the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association (or Cumann Lúthchleas Gael, a body devoted to promoting national sports, such as hurling - iománaíocht - or Gaelic football, an Irish variant of mêlée, rugby, and American football) converting them into recruiting grounds and using them for agitation. Only in the 1920s, in the independent Free State, could the Gaelic League concentrate upon its real task again; but even then, its work was marred by old grudges and bitter memories of the Irish civil war fought at the beginning of the decade.

The nationalist takeover led to several important members’ leaving the League, but they were mostly Protestants, such as Seosamh Laoide or Douglas Hyde himself. Other members initially joining the League because of their cultural and linguistic interest in Irish, were simply carried away by the rising tide of nationalism: they were inclined to approve of the takeover, or themselves changed with the times. There was also the plausibly sounding nationalist argument that the language could only be safe in an independent Ireland.

When the nationalist movement in the nineteen twenties divided into two groups, i.e., the Free Staters, who accepted the dominion status offered by Lloyd George after the armistice in the War of Independence, and Republicans, for whom only full and unrestricted independence was acceptable, a self-serving and self-reproducing tradition of nationalism was born, for which no independence is ever independent enough.

To start with, Republicans were defined by their refusal to vow loyalty to the King, as required from all members of the Free State Parliament. When Éamon de Valera, the Republican leader, later on won the elections and declared the former Free State a Republic, thus abolishing the vow of loyalty, some Republicans never accepted this Republic - from now on, the Northern statelet was to be the main symbol of the “British connection” to be broken up, the focal point of the “struggle for independence”. It seems that every time part of the active, fighting Republicans - terrorists, if you prefer this word - are satisfied to lay down their weapons and accept a compromise, some Republicans always refuse, styling themselves from now on the only, real, true etc. Republican movement (the old IRA in the 1920s; then the Provisional IRA in the 70s, when the so-called Official IRA went into politics as a communist party, giving up armed struggle; now the Real IRA, which does not accept the Good Friday Agreement), which is striving to create the “original” Irish Republic.

The Republic the IRA aspires to is a Utopian dream often painted in colours reminiscent of the Marxist utopia of a perfectly just and righteous communistic future. The point of this juxtaposition is, that neither IRA men nor communists have ever been very apt at finding out the necessary concrete methods of how to construct this ideal world, once its enemies (internal or external) have been defeated. The card-carrying IRA member seems, for instance, to expect that if the “British connection” has been severed, the Irish language is restituted (by itself?) as the vernacular language of all Ireland; he does not spend much time on practical preparations and plans for this restoration. If the Irish language is suffering, this kind of a nationalist does not necessarily commit himself to practical work for the benefit of the language cause - it is more probable that he interprets this as evidence to the effect that Britain is still oppressing the Irish and that armed struggle must be resumed. Nothing can ever be a disadvantage stemming from Ireland and Irish society, which should be fixed by the Irish themselves - the culprits are always and invariably the Brits.

This means that Irish nationalists and the language movement are not quite so comfortably allied as is commonly thought. In fact, an active nationalist, a Sinn Féin member for instance, is probably no more interested in personally contributing to the linguistic revival than the Irish man in the street. Both the active nationalist and the rank and file Irishman are most probably friendly but passive about the language - as one jokester said years ago in an Irish-language magazine, if you could learn Irish by drinking a sip of a magic drought, most Irishmen would be willing to drink it - but in the life of nationalist organisations, as in the life of most Irishmen, the role of the language is limited to symbolic phrases (tiocfaidh ár lá! saoirse! sinn féin!).

On the other hand, people who were initially only vaguely nationalistically minded can proceed to armed republicanism and terrorism through the language movement, because it is easy, as a language activist, to reach the same conclusion as Patrick Pearse did in his day. This famous nationalist leader (executed by the Britons after the Easter Rising in Dublin 1916) started as a language enthusiast, but drifted into believing that the future of the language could only be secure in an independent Ireland. In a similar way, Seán South (Seán Sabhat), originally a young language enthusiast, joined the IRA to take part in its Border Campaign in the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, to be killed in this campaign and to be celebrated as the resistance martyr par excellence. Commitment to the language cause requires long-suffering and forward-looking cultural work. But as nobody knows yet, what is the best and most productive way to extend the usage of a threatened minority language, the language movement tends to go astray or is satisfied with maintaining the positions attained. Thus, impatient young idealists can easily succumb to the temptation of the quick fix offered by armed force republicanism. This means, that instead of helping the language cause along, the armed Republican movement has actually been draining the language movement of some of its best-equipped and most gifted people, having them killed in action or imprisoned by security forces.

Consequently, it is possible to see nationalism and language as rivals, rather than allies. Even in the beginning of the twentieth century, the recruitment and agitation of the Gaelic League were often impaired by the fact that the national volunteer force - the Catholic self-defence organisation being the fledgeling Irish army - had already recruited all young men to be drilled and trained to use rifles, leaving no time or people to be had for Irish language work. Very often the IRA fighters and supporters quite frankly believe their own war to be the best possible work for the Irish language, thus infringing upon, say, Internet discussions in Irish, orationing at length in English about something related to their struggle (but not even distantly to the language) and be plainly astonished at the negative reaction this force-feeding of English provokes in what should be an all-Irish discussion forum.

THE GAELTACHT

The word Gaeltacht (in Classical Irish orthography Gaedhealtacht, Scots Gaelic Gaidhealtachd) means both in Ireland and Scotland a district where a variety of Gaelic - Scots Gaelic or Irish - is still spoken as a native language and passed orally from generation to generation. In Scotland, native speakers are mostly found in Skye and the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides), although even in the Scottish mainland some residual dialects are still heard. In practice, the Gaelic of the Hebrides is largely used as a standard language, in radio transmissions for example, which has, however, led to the peripheric mainland dialects’ being left behind by the development of the Scots Gaelic standard language, media, and culture.

In the Irish Gaeltachtaí - this is the plural form - the main problem is the absence of anything reminiscent of the Hebrides - of an accepted standard language based in the Gaeltacht community. The Gaeltachtaí are spread all over the west coast.

In County Donegal (Dún na nGall, though the Irish-speaking coast is often called Tír Chonaill) the most important stronghold is the Rosses area (na Rosa) south of Bloody Foreland (Cnoc Fola), where the west coast turns eastward, becoming the north coast. Besides, there is the relatively isolated Tory Island (Toraigh); the Aranmore Island (Árainn Mhór); and the nowadays very diluted Irish of Central and Southern Donegal. Donegal is west of Northern Ireland, belonging to the historical Ulster province, but not to the Northern statelet.

In Connacht, there are Gaeltacht areas in County Mayo (Maigh Eo), such as Carrowtaigue (Ceathrú Thaidhg) in the northern part of the county, and some areas in Joyce Country (such as Tourmakeady, Tuar Mhic Éadaigh) near the border of County Galway. No Mayo Gaeltacht areas can be characterised as strongholds, most are actually rapidly turning to English. The northern Mayo dialects are an interesting hybrid of typically Ulster and Connacht features and would have made a good base for a standard language: their demise must be pitied. The south Mayo dialect is very similar to Connemara-Aran Irish, which is today the numerically strongest variety of the language. This dialect is, with some variation, spoken in Connemara (Conamara), i.e. the coastal area west of Galway, as well as in the Aran Islands (Oileáin Árann): Innishmore (Inis Mór), Inishmaan (Inis Meáin) and Innisheer (Inis Oírr). Moreover, there is a colony of Connemara Irish speakers in Ráth Cairn, County Meath, near the towns of Trim (Baile Átha Troim) and Kells (Ceanannas Mór).

There are more native speakers of either the Ulster or Connacht dialects than of Munster dialects, which are found, above all, in Kerry (Ciarraí), in the Dingle Peninsula (Corca Dhuibhne). However, there are smaller areas in Coolea-Muskerry (Cúil Aodha - Muscraí) in the interior, as well as in Cape Clear Island (Oileán Cléire) and in County Waterford - the so-called Ring of Waterford (An Roinn). However, Munster dialects have had an impact upon the development of modern Irish literature. This is due to the prestige of the dialect in the earliest revival literature. The first native writer of Irish after the establishment of the Gaelic League was Peadar Ua Laoghaire (or Ó Laoghaire), a priest born in the Coolea-Muskerry area. His most influential writings were the folkloristic “novel” Séadna and his autobiography Mo Scéal Féin. In the nineteen twenties, the authority of the southern dialect was further strengthened by the autobiographies of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Peg Sayers and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, all native speakers from the (now depopulated) Great Blasket Island (An Blascaod Mór) off the coast of Kerry. Their books became compulsory reading in Irish schools, and are still widely studied. Before Ireland’s new independence, the authority of Munster Irish was additionally boosted by the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League, in Dublin: its members preferred Munster dialects, and the branch produced quite a cadre of well-trained and influential people who were to play an important part both in the language movement and in the nationalist movement. The dialectal provincialism of the Branch was well-known, as was its esprit de corps: as the in-joke went in the beginning of the 20th century, the Keating Branch went scouting for new members any time a train from Cork arrived at the railway station.

The borders of the present Gaeltacht areas have been officially defined in the nineteen fifties. This means that it includes areas which have since then been anglicised, or never were very Irish-speaking to start with. Reg Hindley has interpreted the situation as a progressive Anglicisation, but my fellow countryman Jonas Holmqvist, who recently travelled extensively in the Gaeltacht areas speaking to the local inhabitants, has drawn a somewhat different picture in his contributions to the Internet mailing list GAELIC-L in August and September, 2001. Mr Holmqvist’s results induce one to think that the Anglicisation may look much worse than it is, because some very strongly Anglicised areas were assigned Gaeltacht status to begin with. While the encroachment of English can hardly be overstated, Mr Holmqvist’s field research seems to imply that the real, as opposed to official, language border may have been more stable than pessimists tend to assume.

It is quite probable that the real linguistic situation of the Gaeltacht districts can only be assessed in terms of such concepts as diglossia and compartmentalisation. Whilst even such an important commentator as Máirtín Ó Murchú has denied the existence of an Irish-English diglossia in Irish society at large, seeing indeed its absence as one of the most important reasons to be concerned about the future of Irish, this should not make us think that there is no diglossia in the Gaeltachtaí themselves. Indeed, unsustainably pessimistic evaluations of the linguistic situation in the Gaeltacht may be, at least to some extent, due to the sociolinguistic illiteracy of such researchers as, say, Reg Hindley, and to their ignorance of the reality of bilingual communities. Such Gaelicised in-migrants to the Gaeltacht as Gearóid Denvir and Éamon Ó Ciosáin have in several contexts implied that there is a diglossic distribution of the two languages in several Gaeltacht areas - a distribution that might be strong enough to coax even non-native speakers into using Irish if and when appropriate, if they spend a long enough time in the Gaeltacht to be absorbed. However, the extant information is scant indeed, and more research into the question of diglossia in the Gaeltacht is needed. It is possible that there are substantial differences in diglossic distribution between different Gaeltacht dstricts.

The choice of the language is presumably influenced by such circumstances as the necessity of keeping distance from so-called “blow-ins”, people who buy summer cottages in the Gaeltacht without feeling the need to assimilate linguistically; however, even the presence of Irish-learners from Anglicised parts of Ireland is a factor, as well as the institutional status of the language in shops, schools etc. Non-Irish speakers can be accosted and spoken to in English as a matter of course; besides, the attempts of language-learners to practice their Irish with just about anybody who comes down the road might be perceived as tiring and impolite, so that native speakers can simply refuse to speak Irish with strangers.

First language tourists who came to the Gaeltacht were seen as sympathetic individuals you could make friends with. But as early as in the beginning of the 20th century visits to the Gaeltacht had developed into a fad and a fashion among urban intellectuals, and the visitors could not be regarded as individual personalities anymore, but as a faceless flood of strangers, disrupting the accustomed way of life. Even farming and fishing was made almost impossible by nosey intruders entering the houses and asking inappropriate questions. On the other hand, it would not have felt proper to chase away these “gentlefolks”, either.

The survival of the Irish language in the western seaboard, of all places, was probably due, above all, to social isolation and bad traffic connections. The coast was spared the worst of the potato famine, perhaps because fish and seaweed made the coastal population less dependent on potato than the interior, where the social structures keeping Irish alive were shattered and crushed by the starvation: the family members and neighbours you used to talk Irish with were gone - dead, scattered in the poorhouses or else had emigrated - and you were left poor and destitute, begging for food in broken English. When society started to recover, it rebuilt itself with the English-speaking, prosperous east as the starting point, so that Irish was ousted as the remnant of a decayed society, with the new structures supporting only English. The western seaboard was the only part of Ireland to any extent cut off from this development: people living there were not interested in eastern Ireland, they preferred to emigrate directly to the New World or - especially from Donegal - to Scotland. Those living in the United States indeed contributed substantially to the livelihood of those left in the old country, and it is probable that the viability of the Irish-speaking communities (and thus the language) was to a relevant extent strengthened by this contribution.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the famine was long overcome and population increasing in the western seaboard. British authorities established a committee, the so-called Congested Districts Board, to find solutions to the real or predictable problems caused by this overpopulation. The work of the Board did not lead to any concrete results, but it did create something of a tradition: even in independent Ireland, the work of the board was drawn upon by subsequent State committees dedicated to making the Gaeltacht economically viable. The Gaeltacht people themselves had, however, little say in the work of such bureaucracies. They were more involved, for instance, in the 1930s campaign for giving Gaeltacht people the possibility to migrate to other parts of Ireland, where more arable land could be found; this scheme, spearheaded by the modernist writer to be, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, led to the creation of the artificial Gaeltacht in Ráth Cairn, County Meath. This pilot project had, however, no followers. When Gaeltarra Éireann, the Gaeltacht industrialisation agency, was established in 1957 in order to establish industries in the Gaeltacht to provide jobs, some of the plants founded there practically rather accelerated the demise of the language, attracting monolingual English-speaking managers where no competent Irish-speakers could be found - and those that could, were often ex-American emigrants with English-speaking spouses and children. Besides, the Gaeltacht people were not represented in the Gaeltarra management. This situation has changed only in the 1970s, when a new Gaeltacht Authority or Údarás na Gaeltachta was established: its management does include elected representatives of the Gaeltacht. It is symptomatic, however, that both the Údarás, the Irish-language radio (in the 1970s), and the television channel (in the 1990s), only came about in response to popular protest. Neither the broadcasting system nor the Údarás have quite proved up to expectations. In particular, it has been a shortcoming that the Údarás has not sufficient powers to stop the flood of the “blow-ins”, wealthy English-speaking in-migrants, who unwittingly raise the prices of houses in the Gaeltacht, thus forcing young native speakers to seek accommodation elsewhere.

Údarás people are justly proud of the projects - from the Irish-language crêches and kindergartens to industrial plants for employment - their coordination and organisation work has helped to realise, but as a Finn, I feel compelled to ask the question, whether these supposedly stunning achievements aren’t just routine matters that would be, in some other country, routinely solved by local government. In fact, it seems quite plausible to state that the precarious state of the language is somehow related to a seriously lacking system of local government. J.J.Lee, among others, has seen “parish pump politics”, i.e. the frequent intrusion of strictly local matters into parliamentary decision-making in Ireland, as a consequence of bad or non-existent local government. I would find it hard to disagree. The fact that the Údarás and its projects are needed at all is probably another consequence, and it well fits in that there seems to be little political will to develop the Údarás into a genuine autonomous government. The gap between Ireland and, say, Spain could not be broader: indeed, the significant successes achieved in reviving the Catalan language are certainly causally connected with the post-Franco constitution guaranteeing far-reaching regional autonomy.

IDENTITY

If “identity” were just a slogan, nobody would bother to learn Irish. As a medium of communication, English is available to the vast majority of Irish people today. A substantial number of active members in Irish language networks are secondary bilinguals. This means, that lots of native English speakers frequently communicate among themselves in a non-native language which seems to offer much less, culturally, than their native language. It is worth asking, what “identity” is, if it is enough to persuade a certain percentage - probably a stable percentage - of Irishmen to indulge in learning and promoting Irish.

It could be argued, as the “dead language discourse” would have it, that Irish is the defence of a Catholic and nationalist Ireland against a sinful, secularised, sexual, and socialist modern world. At some stage in the history of independent Ireland, this cliché did hold some water: there indeed were people who wanted to use Irish as a means of isolating Ireland culturally and intellectually from atheism and communism (and above all, anything else that could be branded one or the other). Since those days, however, much has changed. Nowadays, the Irish language scene is as politically pluralistic as the Anglophone life in Ireland is: individual proponents of a Catholic conservatism are found among Irish-speakers - notably the teacher and writer Ciarán Ó Coigligh - but even their stance might, to some extent, be mitigated by the fact that as Irish-speakers, they are often forced to cooperate with less backward-looking language activists. There have been original left-wing thinkers and litterateurs engagés in Irish, too (notably Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Seosamh Mac Grianna), and writers depicting sex, sin, urban slums or rural misery in a naturalistic way (Pádraic Ó Conaire the elder, Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, Breandán Ó hEithir); even older Irish literature, such as the eighteenth century poetry (say, Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna and Brian Merriman) was rather bold about sexuality. Even the Protestant contribution to the language cause is now celebrated by the Methodist Irish-language writer of biographies Risteard Ó Glaisne, thus giving the lie to the allegation that the language is somehow intrinsically Catholic, “Taig-talk” or “IRA terrorist lingo”. “Identity” as a reason to learn Irish is, consequently, not to be equated with escape from liberty in any way.

Although English is now the majority language, the Irish still have a precarious relationship to it. Many Irishmen openly declare they don’t want Irish or like it, but convulsively and neurotically denying Irish any value is only the manifestation of an identity crisis. Although a good “way with words” - certainly with English words - is appreciated in Ireland, with even young girls dreaming of becoming prose writers, the Irish variety of English has never quite been accepted as a vehicle of Irish identity. Although local vernacular English is amply used in literature, there is no national standard of the language, distinct from British and American. As far as I have observed, there is no conscious language planning going on to develop an Irish standard English - de facto standards are another story - but bookstores are crammed with guides to the British standard usage, proscribing typical “errors” by Irishmen.

The Irish consequently still seem to regard their variety of English as a failed attempt to emulate the British model, not as a native variety in its own right. The difference from, say, the Swedish of Finland is striking. Although Swedish language planning in Finland is bent on preventing the Swedish of Finland from drifting too far away from the metropolitan variety, it mainly focuses on keeping technical terminology up to date and making metropolitan Swedish terms known to Swedish-speaking media professionals in Finland, as well as fighting recent loan influences from Finnish. However, regional expressions from the Swedish dialects in Finland are tolerated or even encouraged as an enrichment, and sometimes a domestic variant is preferred to the metropolitan term even in technical terminology (the well-known example is raffineri for “[oil] refinery” instead of the metropolitan Swedish raffinaderi, which is rejected because it is longer and clumsier). The Swedish of Swedes is not idealised: in fact, the predilection of Swedes for English loan words is in Finland frequently seen as indicative of the inferiority and corruption of metropolitan Swedish in comparison with the Finno-Swedish variety. No Swedish-speaking Finn, living in Finland, would dream of consciously emulating the accent and intonation heard in Sweden - in fact, he probably finds it effeminate and ridiculous.

The identity crisis is to some extent reinforced by English literature. When English is studied at school, pupils must, as a matter of course, get acquainted with English classics. However, unconsciously racist attitudes towards the Irish are, after centuries of religiously motivated antipathy and outright wars between the two island nations, sometimes found even in books written by the most enlightened and liberal British writers. This means that a young Irishman must read and stylistically emulate a literature that may insult him with racist insinuations typical of war propaganda. Of course, the same applies even better to British popular culture, especially the gutter and tabloid press, which employs a populist style well suited to reproducing and recycling old clichés about the “wild Irish”.

Thus, it can be stated with some plausibility that the Irishman is still the stepchild of the English-speaking world. English is not his language in the way Irish would be, if he spoke it. J.J. Lee sees indeed the language loss as the probable cause of “exaggerated anglophobia” and fruitless IRA republicanism: being speakers of the same language and largely dependent on British popular culture, they are too close to the English and feel the need to distance themselves: “It [= the loss of Irish] may also have been a reason why the Irish have remained hyper-sensitive to English views of themselves, reflected recently in their indignation at the spate of Irish jokes on English television. Many Irish were incapable of seeing that these reflected much more on the condition of England than that of Ireland” (LEE, page 669). The point is, that if the Irish spoke predominantly their own language, they would have a popular culture and a gutter press of their own, where they could tell to each other their own jokes about the English instead of being constantly exposed to English jokes about themselves and feeling the need of - if I am allowed to use Northern Ireland street vocabulary - “getting even with the bastard” who told the joke.

CONCLUSION

As Éamon Ó Ciosáin lamented in his riposte to Hindley’s book, the field of Irish sociolinguistics has largely been left to such amateurs as Reg Hindley, who, albeit not strictly speaking inimical to the language, do not know it and might be blinded by the dead language discourse. The Irish language has been pronounced dead or dying time after time, even century after century, but if it is dying then it seems to take it an awful lot of years to get on with it. Irish is no more “dead” than other minority languages, endangered as it might be.

Instead of blindly reproducing Hindleian clichés about the death of Irish, it should be asked, whether the project of restoring Irish as a vernacular by establishing an independent Irish state - the project of combined cultural and political nationalism, upon which the Irish state was built - is dead. The answer to this question is probably yes.

In fact, the unspoken assumption of the project being by its very nature unreasonable and crazy has led to a situation, in which even quite reasonable demands for better service in Irish are warded off as the nonsense of cranks. Indeed, it seems that as the official first language of the state, Irish is worse off than as just a recognised minority language with well-defined linguistic rights. Most people seem to think that the constitutional first language status has never been meant to be anything else than a token provision, never to be put into practice. Irish has, thus, de facto less institutional support than Swedish in Finland. A recognised minority language status along Finno-Swedish lines might indeed have better possibilities of being taken seriously, even in Ireland.

At the same time, it must be stated that Irish is still widely felt, even by ordinary people, to be the “real” national language. Any schemes to promote it meet with wide popular approval, if not directly with active will to participate. Voluntary Irish-language activity, such as the Gaelscoileanna, the Irish-language schools for children in anglicised areas, is widespread and popular. Although the active Irish-language “scene” probably comprises only 5-10 % of Ireland’s population, there is an immense potential of dormant Irish speakers that could response positively if modern mass media were used in a more innovative way to promote the language. The fact that much of this potential is in disuse leads many people to believe in the hackneyed phrases of the dead language discourse. The successes of the language movement, which are considerable, tend to be overshadowed by the fact that the country is littered with potential, but as yet failed, Irish-speakers.

An important problem that merits further sociolinguistic investigation is the relationship between urban language enthusiasts and rural native speakers. There is reason to believe that there is a conflict of interest between these two groups. Above all, culture and literature in Irish seems to be tailored to cater not for the native speakers, but the learners. There are plenty of textbooks of the Irish language, but a chronic shortage of schoolbooks for native children. The books that are available, are often told by the Gaeltacht teachers and other people to be “in the wrong dialect” - an euphemism, I think, for stylistically clumsy and grammatically shaky translations of English-language originals by non-native translators, rendering the books almost unreadable for a native speaker, especially one who is not accustomed to reading the language. Indeed, the fact that much writing in Irish is easily recognised as non-native might be one of the primary reasons why native speakers are said to be unwilling to read the language.

This is indeed one of the great challenges of the language movement today. The interests of those learning Irish for the sake of identity are not identical with the interests of native speakers. There is a possibility that the kind of Irish written, spoken and created by urban non-native speakers among themselves develops into a self-perpetuating tradition distinct from Gaeltacht speech, and that this kind of Irish will be perceived as the “real” Irish language. There is a very real danger that urban speakers misappropriate the language for themselves, leaving genuine Gaeltacht speakers, their speech and their culture marginalised not only in Ireland at large, but even in the Irish-speaking Ireland.
Relevant Literature:

BALL, Martin (Ed.): The Celtic Languages. Routledge Language Families. Routledge, New York and London 1993

COOGAN, Tim Pat: The IRA. Completely Revised New Edition. Harper Collins Publishers, London 1995

KUHA, Tuija: The Significance of Language for Irish Identity. [Pages 105-115 in:] Celtica Helsingiensia. Proceedings from a Symposium on Celtic Studies. Edited by Anders Ahlqvist et al. Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 107 1996. Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki 1996

LEE, J.J.: Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge University Press 1989

MAC AONGHUSA, Proinsias: Ar son na Gaeilge. Conradh na Gaeilge 1883 - 1993 - Stair Sheanchais. Conradh na Gaeilge, Baile Átha Cliath 1993 [a history of the Gaelic League]

MCCOY, Gordon and Maolcholaim SCOTT (editors): Aithne na nGael - Gaelic Identities. Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, and ULTACH Trust, Belfast 2000

Ó CIOSÁIN, Éamon: An tÉireannach 1934-1937 - Páipéar Sóisialach Gaeltachta. Leabhair Thaighde, An 74ú Imleabhar. An Clóchomhar Teoranta, Baile Átha Cliath 1993 [the history of the left-populist newspaper An tÉireannach, which also includes a minute description of contemporary political life in Ireland and its interaction with the Irish-language life]

Ó CIOSÁIN, Éamon: Buried Alive: A Reply to The Death of the Irish Language. Dáil Uí Chadhain, no year mentioned (first published in 1990 in the last issue of the periodical Graph)

Ó CONGHAILE, Mícheál: Conamara agus Árainn 1880-1980. Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, Conamara, ISBN 1 900693 96 8 [an analysis of the depiction of rural life in the Gaeltacht of Connemara in the last century, in novels and stories written by local authors]

Ó CONGHAILE, Mícheál (Editor): Gaeltacht Ráth Cairn - Léachtaí Comórtha. Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, Conamara, ISBN 1 900693 91 7 [a series of lectures originally broadcast on the radio in 1985, about the land reform movement of the native speakers in the 1930s and the establishment of the Irish/language colony in County Meath]

Ó CRIOMHTHAIN, Seán: Lá dár Saol. An Gúm, Baile Átha Cliath 1991 [an autobiographical book by Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s son]

Ó DONNCHADHA, Diarmuid: Castar an Taoide. Coiscéim, Baile Átha Cliath 1995 [a long essay attempting to combine cultural nationalism with modern sociolinguistics; the author is an important Irish-language educationalist]

Ó GLAISNE, Risteard: De bhunadh Protastúnach. Carbad, Baile Átha Cliath 2000 [a history of Protestant Irish-language activists]

Ó HÁINLE, Cathal: Ó Chaint na nDaoine go dtí an Caighdeán Oifigiúil. [= “From Vernacular Speech to Official Standard”. Pages 745-793 in:] Stair na Gaeilge in ómós do Pádraig [sic!]Ó Fiannachta. [= “The History of the Irish language - Festschrift to Pádraig Ó Fiannachta”]In eagar [= edited] ag Kim McCome et al. Roinn na SeanGhaeilge, Coláiste Phádraig, Maigh Nuad 1994

O’REILLY, Camille: The Irish Language in Northern Ireland. The Politics of Culture and Identity. Macmillan’s Press, London & New York 1999

Ó TUATHAIGH, Gearóid et al.: Pobal na Gaeltachta - a Scéal agus a Dhán [”The Gaeltacht community - its story and its fate”; a collection of articles by native writers about all the different Gaeltacht districts]. Raidió na Gaeltachta agus Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, Conamara 2000

As well as the journals Yliopisto (Helsinki, twice a month during the academic year), Comhar (Dublin, once a month), and Cuisle (Dublin, once a month in 1998-1999); and the Irish-language mailing lists GAELIC-L, GAEILGE-A, and GAEILGE-B