Despite decades of measures designed to protect the Irish language, proposals by a Government body would drastically reduce the numbers of daily speakers in the Gaeltacht, writes Lorna Siggins
Here's a heretical thought. If the Union Jack were still flying over Leinster House, would the Irish language in the Gaeltacht be in such a fragile state? Would we have the current situation where, in spite of the spectacular growth of gaelscoileanna, daily use of Irish in Gaeltacht areas is shrinking to an alarmingly low level and just one in 40 adults claim to use Irish on a daily basis throughout the State?
Last year, the Government passed the Official Languages Act to protect the rights of Irish speakers. That it took 80 years to provide such a legal framework is "a supreme example of State negligence", says Donncha Ó hÉallaithe, maths lecturer at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. In 1963, he says, the then minister for Welsh affairs in Britain, Sir Keith Joseph, set up a committee to examine the legal status of the Welsh language. The first Welsh Language Act was passed four years later, in 1967.
And while we congratulate ourselves on the verve, originality and initiative of the Irish language television station, TG4 - now eight years old - the Welsh have had their own language television channel since 1982.
During the recent European elections, a high-profile campaign was waged for recognition of Irish as a working language in the EU headquarters in Brussels. The Government has now backed the initiative and intends to pursue this status in Europe. The Stadas campaign represents "the latest example of the Irish language movement's propensity for the pursuit of wild dreams", in Ó hÉallaithe's view.
He argues that several decades of State neglect of the language, in clear breach of a constitutional right for people to do business through Irish, have left it very difficult for many State agencies to comply with the provisions of the new Languages Act. Having sufficient civil servants employed to offer a service to Irish speakers is now "governed by the laws of probability".
Harsh words, but the statistics from the 2002 Census represent a harsh reality, according to the maths lecturer's extrapolation and interpretation of same. Based on his recent analysis for Nuacht TG4, the current Gaeltacht area of 90,000 people would shrink to 27,000 if the criteria for Gaeltacht status proposed by a Government body, Coimisiún na Gaeltachta, were implemented.
The proposals, drawn up two years ago as part of a report to Government, involve redrawing Gaeltacht boundaries after the next census data become available in 2006 or 2007.
The Coimisiún's criteria were, and are, pretty reasonable. They state that Gaeltacht status should relate to areas in which at least 50 per cent of the population of the district electoral division (DED) use Irish every day. Ó hÉallaithe applied this measure to the 154 DEDs that currently comprise the Gaeltacht regions, and found that the Mayo Gaeltacht would shrink from a population of 11,000 to two pockets - one in the north-west tip and one in the south of the county, sharing 634 people between them.
Some 12,000 people living in the Galway city Gaeltacht would also lose status, as would the large Gaeltacht area east of the Corrib, he found. Areas which would no longer qualify at all would include Glencolumcille, Co Donegal; Furbo, Co Galway, headquarters of Údarás na Gaeltachta and location of the Department of the Gaeltacht, and the Iveragh peninsula in south-west Kerry. This would leave the two largest Gaeltacht areas at south Connemara, with a population of 11,000, north-west Donegal, with a population of 8,500, and west Kerry with a population of 2,500.
The Coimisiún had advised that other indicators be taken into account when redrawing boundaries, and had further proposed that areas where the percentage of daily Irish usage was between 40 and 50 per cent should be given seven years to reach the required percentage. Interviewed on the subject on Raidió na Gaeltachta on July 8th, the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Mr Ó Cuív, said no Gaeltacht area would be excluded in a boundary revision as long as Irish was still being promoted there and its population showed the right attitude.
The Minister's response might reflect a cop-out to some, or to others it could be another example of the "all or nothing" approach of the Irish language movement, which has led to the current parlous state of Irish as a living entity. Donncha Ó hÉallaithe is witness to this decline in the State's largest Gaeltacht area of Co Galway, where he lives with his wife, Mary Owens, his six-year-old son, Dinny, and four-year-old daughter, Becky.
Irish is the first language in their household, but he knows of many native Irish-speaking couples who still believe that their children will be at a disadvantage if they do not learn English early on.
DURING HIS 30 years living in Connemara, Ó hÉallaithe has seen the community change from "almost 100 per cent Irish speaking to a precarious balance, in which Irish is still the language of everyday discourse among the older age groups but English is rapidly becoming the most common everyday language of communications for teenagers and for the age group in their 20s". This he regards as "the death knell of Irish as the main language of the community".
Originally from Clonmel, Co Tipperary, Ó hÉallaithe's love for the language dates from his despatch to a coláiste samhraidh (Irish college) in the Kerry Gaeltacht as a schoolboy.
Having graduated as an electrical engineer from University College Dublin, he moved to Connemara in 1973 to work with Gaeltarra Éireann, and subsequently took a teaching post at what is now GMIT.
An activist in the Gaeltacht civil rights movement, he was one of a group, along with film-maker Bob Quinn, which established the pirate television station, Teilifís na Gaeltachta - the precursor of TG4 - in Ros Muc in 1987.
The television station, the growth of gaelscoileannna and gaelcholáistí, the establishment of new Irish language newspapers such as Foinse and Lá, the aforementioned Official Languages Act, appointment of Irish Language Commissioner Seán Ó Cuirreáin . . . O hEallaithe regards all these developments as very positive.
However, he firmly believes that a "revival mentality" evident in State policy could still result in the extinction of the language in the Gaeltacht. He assesses the effect this "revival mentality" has had over the past four decades in a contribution to Who Needs Irish: Reflections on the importance of the Irish language today, edited by Ciarán MacMurchidh and published this year by Veritas.
In his illuminating interpretation, Ó hÉallaithe identifies strategic errors which, in his view, resulted in a revival movement gaining more support among urban middle classes than among Gaeltacht inhabitants.
"The majority of Irish language enthusiasts never properly acknowledged how it must have felt for Gaeltacht people who had little command of English in post-independent Ireland," Ó hÉallaithe notes.
He quotes a man from Aran, giving evidence to Coimisiún na Gaeltachta in 1926, who said that "it is only them with plenty of English who are bothered about Irish". Two-thirds of native Irish speakers were being forced to emigrate, and those that remained were regarded as second-class citizens.
The policy of attracting industry to Gaeltacht areas which, through demand for particular skills did not encourage use of the language, also had its effects. The lack of monitoring in relation to impact on the language has been well documented by sociologists such as Prof Mairtín Ó Murchú. Far greater support for the fishing industry, for instance, might have made such a difference to coastal/Gaeltacht areas. Significantly, Údarás na Gaeltachta - and Gaeltarra Éireann before it - has embraced the development of fish farming, which relies on indigenous skills and sites, and has, as a consequence a commitment to the language.
New initiatives including the recognition in the Planning and Development Act 2000 that planning authorities have a statutory duty to "protect the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Gaeltacht" in development plans may have a long-term impact if taken seriously. The recent ruling by Galway County Council on Irish language competence for purchasers of 18 new apartments in Spiddal is the first of its kind.
Ó hÉallaithe urges a shift from the "illusion" of language revival or restoration, and acceptance of the need for language maintenance initiatives in areas where it is still spoken.
"If, in the next 20 years, we could look back and say that language shift in the last remaining Irish-speaking strongholds was arrested, that networks of Irish speakers have been developed throughout the country, that audiences for Irish language programmes without subtitles on TG4 have grown, that the number of children to whom Irish is being transmitted as a first language in the home is accelerating, both inside and outside the Gaeltacht, a lot will have been achieved and the survival of the language may be guaranteed," he argues.
If Irish is allowed to wither away, Irish cultural life becomes "a target rather than an arrow" in the era of mass cultural globalisation . . . and homogenisation.