IT IS of course in the utmost bad taste to pronounce so early on in the life of TnaG.
It has barely begun and to pronounce its obsequies now would be grotesque. But is it so, wrong to repeat questions that this column has asked before about Teilifis de Lorean?
Nobody agreed with what I said before and I was roundly attacked but for the moment anyway, it looks as if the raised by this column about TdeL were justified.
I do not enjoy having those doubts. My own preference is that the Irish language, such as it is, should be preserved. This does not mean we should en gage in the meaningless pieties which so often pass for opinion in Irish life.
The truth is that the Irish language has a place in our communal heart barely farther away from its virtuous centre than black babies. Nobody would ever dare say let black babies die, though we do let them die all the time.
Thin and Thinner
And nobody would ever say, as things stand, the Irish language is just about dead and a television station broadcasting the most mellifluous Irish unwatched by any but the few already dedicated enthusiasts will, never revive the language's fortunes.
What are those fortunes at the moment? Thin, and growing thinner. The numbers of actual Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht diminish constantly. With the death of each native speaker dies part of this thing called the language.
What is left is not representative of the Irish language, any more than the English of a few baronies in Armagh or Antrim or a parish or two in Lincolnshire or a county in Alabama is representative of the vast wealth and wisdom of the English language.
The truth is that we do not know very much about most of the many Irishes which have gone the way of spoken Etruscan or Assyrian or the dialect of Ferns and Bargy.
What was Louth Irish like? Meath Irish? Wexford Irish? Offaly Irish? What were the many Irishes of Tipperary like, in cadence and lilt and vernacular and slang and colloquialism? These tongues are gone, and will not return to us this side of paradise.
What we have left are a few growths of linguistic lichen in Waterford, Cork, Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Donegal. To describe these lingering outcrops, as lichen, as I did before, infuriated defenders of the language. Why? Lichen lasts forever, no matter the weather, no matter how inauspicious the conditions. I hope lichen is a suitable metaphor.
But I don't think it is. And I don't think that spending millions of pounds in the constituency of the Minister responsible for commissioning TdeL is going to be able to make the language more lichenous than it already is.
Rescuing a Language
No doubt spending less money in Dublin, where the majority of Irish speakers live and where there is a plenitude of television talent, would not rescue the language either. But it would represent a saving of millions, and not involve the absurd duplication of resources which TdeL has done.
In saying this, I have to repeat what I have said before - I want the Irish language to survive - but not, in reality, enough to go to the trouble of learning the language and then speaking it.
And in that regard I am in the overwhelming majority. Virtually everybody wants the language to be saved, though few people actually go to the trouble - of speaking it themselves.
And virtually everybody would sympathise with the sentiments of Gabriel Rosenstock who, when welcoming TnaG said: "If it succeeds, the consequences could be far reaching. A received diet of Anglo American fodder, on which the majority of the nation's children are raised, leads inextricably to the acquisition of hip phrases and the attitudes and values therein, enshrined."
Yet the fodder is being consumed, and we cannot stop it. Not just the Irish language is threatened, as he points out. Many forms of Hiberno English are disappearing very fast indeed.
I recall with horror the convent schoolgirl in Kerry who thought I was complimenting her when I told her I could detect no trace of a Kerry accent.
Soon, the ability to speak Dort will be the cherished ambition of every upwardly mobile child in the land. It is an appalling prospect and I have not the least idea how to stop such popular cultural movements.
They happen and they are outside the control of those of us who are against them. Elites and intelligentsias wail and politicians squander the public purse in vain.
No doubt in a few years time, some politicians, anxious that Hiberno English is being lost, could start a television station in the Coombe, with Coronation Street redubbed into true Dub.
But it will not stop whatever linguistic drift is occurring. These things happen, like ice ages and polar shifts, and they are outside the power of leaders to prevent.
That was why Canute sat waiting for the tide to come in - not in the belief that he could repel such marine movements but to prove to his courtiers that he could not.
Exquisite but Catastrophic
Everybody has treated the initial viewing figures for Teilifis na Gaeilge with exquisite good manners. They are in fact catastrophic. Though the population of the Gaeltacht areas alone is 83,000, a mere 13,000 people nationwide, watch TdeL daily.
Perhaps they would have settled for the £1,000 a head it costs us to give them the station every year. Now we hear that the plain people of Ireland - the ones who are expected to learn and speak Irish - have not even got the right kind of aerials to pick up the TdeL signals.
At least a quarter of the PPoI would need to pay £40 to get new aerials. Tell me. How many will?
Another question. Where did the Minister responsible for this state affairs, Michael D. Higgins, get the figure last October that up to 95 per cent of the PPoI would be able to receive TdeL?
And another question to TdeL. If, as they say, some people in the viewing sample have not tuned to TdeL, why not?
One possible key for the survival of the station comes from Cork where Irish Multichannel transmits it on the same wavelength as soft porn but at a different time.
No doubt its viewing figures are higher there. And perhaps it is even known as TnaGig.