One of the unanticipated consequences of the housing crisis has been its impact on the Irish language, as native speakers are forced out of Gaeltacht areas by wealthy people from Dublin and other parts of Ireland snapping up holiday homes or investment properties.
Over 106,000 people live in Ireland’s six Gaeltacht areas of Cork, Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Meath, Mayo and Waterford, of whom 63 per cent indicated they could speak Irish in Census 2022 – down from 72 per cent previously. The Galway Gaeltacht has the highest proportion of daily speakers of Irish at 39 per cent. The number of daily speakers of Irish, outside education, has fallen 13 per cent since 2016.
Language is very much an ecosystem, and the environment in which it is spoken is critically important. The home is the most likely context for the use of a minority language, so any break in the chain of language transmission from parents to children (and others) has consequences for the long-term survival of the language. To reverse the process, Professor Margaret Noori says “the language must be returned to the children and the home.”
But what happens when homes in Gaeltacht areas are thin on the ground?
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In Galway county between 2016 and 2022, housing stock grew by five per cent. At the same time the number of holiday homes grew 13 per cent to 4,286. In Mayo, the number of holiday homes increased by 23 per cent to just under 6,000. More than 40 per cent of the houses in the Language Planning Areas of South Kerry, Tory Island and North Donegal are holiday homes, occupied for a fraction of the year. Nearly half of all houses in Gaeltacht areas are holiday homes.
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Short-term letting platforms are profit-hungry global behemoths, not small-time pin money enterprises, and are widespread in Gaeltacht areas.
A report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) which was published on Friday found while Airbnb and other letting platforms are not the primary cause of Ireland’s rental crisis, those properties were concentrated mainly in tourist hotspots along the west coast. Westport in Co Mayo and Killarney in Co Kerry had the highest concentration accounting for one-in-three private rented properties and one-in-six respectively.
The ratio of entire properties listed for rent on platforms such as Airbnb compared to those available for private rent is in some cases as high as 90 to one (Kerry); 48 to one (Donegal); 27 to one in Clare, and ten to one in Waterford, all places with significant areas of Irish speaking (for the moment.)
With more than 500 entire homes as short-term lets in Connemara alone, Irish speakers struggle to find somewhere to live in Gaeltacht areas. It is ironic to see Airbnb promoting properties for rent in Gaeltacht areas during Seachtain na Gaeilge at the same time as residents say short term lets are accelerating the language crisis by forcing native Irish speakers to move elsewhere.
The State has historically been the most important actor ensuring the long-term survival of the Irish language, usually through the education system. In the 1920s, for example, elementary science, hygiene, nature studies and domestic studies were dropped as compulsory subjects in primary schools in order to make room for “singing, history and geography, and Drill” all to be taught as Gaeilge.
According to UCD’s Dr Iarfhlaith Watson, however, the State has long “been withdrawing its policy of producing an Irish-speaking nation and in recent years has focused more on Irish speakers as individuals.” But language is fundamentally a social behaviour, not just an individualistic skill. Irish is a now minority language.
For the State, the Irish language is still important, but now mostly symbolically. For many speakers of Irish, however, it is integral to their identity.
A lack of homes in Gaeltacht areas is one of the ways the housing crisis has become a linguistic and cultural crisis.
It is in recognition of this that the Welsh government’s Language Communities Housing Plan commits to “taking immediate and radical action using the planning, property and taxation systems to address the negative impact that second homes and short-term holiday lets can have on the availability and affordability of housing for local people.”
Here, the Revised National Planning Framework (NPF) doesn’t mention housing and the Gaeltacht together. Neither does the Government’s 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030 refer to housing. Both documents have failed to identify a core threat to the language’s continued existence. This is, quite literally, planning to fail.
New planning permission regulations for short-term lettings have been diluted to towns of more than 10,000 population and will have no positive effect on Gaeltacht areas and will be of no assistance to most rural families, including Irish speakers, looking to house themselves. Proposals in the Programme for Government to introduce specific housing targets for Gaeltacht areas are weak and too little, too late, if they happen at all.
Under Article 9 of the Housing (Gaeltacht) (Amendment) Act 2001, the Government has the power “to make schemes for the provision of grants or other financial assistance to a person towards the cost of the erection or improvement of a dwelling house in the Gaeltacht”. Grants for this were suspended by the Government in 2009, but they could be brought back again.
Established in 1980, Údarás na Gaeltachta, the regional authority responsible for the economic, social and cultural development of the Gaeltacht, has created employment with the aim of ending emigration and retaining indigenous Irish speakers. But if it is not possible for employees of local enterprises to house themselves, the hope that employment will retain Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht is futile.
Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
