We must be off our chumps. Utterly off our chumps. That or, we are a hypocritical, lying, morally-lazy people, writes Kevin Myers.
Either way - the idiot-explanation, or the humbug-theory - has brought us to the pretty pass that we are now officially an Irish-speaking people, and all documents, communications, advertisements and cheques emanating from government, national and local, and semi-state organisations must be in Irish. They may not be in English alone.
This is immoral and insane: but it is typical of the Stalinist instincts of those grisly Gaelgoir Revivalists, who understand nothing whatever about human nature, truth and freedom, and everything about coercion and representing politically congenial falsehood as truth.
Here is the truth. We speak Irish about as much as the Alaskans speak Eskimo. The President cannot, unassisted, address the citizens of Ireland in Irish. Neither can the Taoiseach conduct a debate in Irish. Nor can the Tánaiste or virtually any other minister or deputy in the Dáil. What most of them can manage is a faltering essay through the baffling thickets of half-remembered Leaving Cert Irish, before they dry up and revert to their own native tongue, English. However, our public stance is that our language is Irish, best represented by an Irish-language station whose programming-backbone is in English. It is all a fatuous charade.
Last April, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation conference heard the story of Sinead, Aishlin, and Venessa Feely from Fermanagh. They teach in Clondalkin, one of Dublin's most deprived areas, in a school which has trouble finding any teachers at all, never mind good ones.
As it happens, the Feely sisters are not good teachers. They are simply outstanding, admired by pupils and staff alike.
But because they cannot speak Irish, they're going to have to pass the Scrúdú Cailiochta sa Ghaeilge (SCG) for teachers from outside the State. This lunatic measure has an 80 per cent failure rate. If they don't pass it, they go on half-pay, or their contracts will not be renewed - and this, of superb teachers of the kind we desperately need. So not merely are we punishing deprived, working class children by making them spend hundreds of hours "learning" a language they detest, thereby hindering their education in more vital areas, but we are now punishing them a second time, by depriving them of the very teachers such youngsters need, and on similarly ideological, morally bankrupt grounds. And of course, comparable linguistic injustices are being inflicted on immigrant children, even as they struggle to learn English.
Yet far from attacking the basic iniquity of this system and demanding these insane hurdles are removed from teachers' careers, INTO merely demanded that their members be given 10 years to prepare for their SCG tests.
Well, you might as well give teachers 10 years to split the atom for all the relevance such projects have on their ability to teach. And what happens if they fail after the 10 years' study? Are they lesser teachers the day sitting the evil SCG test than they were the day before, and so now deserving of dismissal? This is actually wicked. We are squandering the lives and educational futures of the most deprived people in Ireland for a piece of ideological nonsense which would only make sense in Hoxha's Albania.
The fate of the Feely sisters should have caused a paroxysm of anger. It didn't, because this is a society which abjectly conforms with agreed pieties. The abysmal cowardice and intellectual wooliness of INTO typifies our pathological reluctance to confront the dogmatic lunacies of our Irish-language social engineers. How else could the Dáil have passed the lunatic language law which came into effect earlier this year? Having failed - as they have repeatedly through the history of the state - to get the people to speak Irish, the Language Stalinists of The Department of the Gaeltacht, the Islands, Humbug, Bullshit & Bullying are now settling on a policy of giving the appearance that we are an Irish-speaking people.
This is done simply by outlawing English-only documents, advertisements and even cheques emanating from state and semi-state organisations. All government business must appear to be in Irish, so giving, of course, countless fresh job-opportunities to their Gaelgeoiri chums.
Thus it is now illegal at the site of a lethal road subsidence for local authorities or gardai to erect an unaccompanied "Danger!" sign. Yes, illegal, for English-only signs are now unlawful in Ireland. But they can erect a sign saying "Contuirt" (danger) with, if they want, the word in English. Yet "Stop" exists in both languages: to escape allegations that it is the English form of Stop which is being used, will the authorities have to erect signs which say STOP STOP, the first being Irish, the second English? Moreover, to erect any road-sign in English in the Gaeltacht, even alongside the Irish, is now illegal. Yes, it will be against the law to try to save lives with the word "Danger" in the Gaeltacht.
And of course, no matter how many people die because of this, at least it will enable us to insist that Irish be recognised by other governments and the EU as an official EU language. And that will be that. Not a Gaeltacht will be saved, nor a semi-colon of the language will be preserved. But in the chancelleries of Europe, state documents will register Irish as the official language of the Irish people, just as all the road signs in Ireland repeat the Great Language Lie. This is both contemptible and criminal: all in all, pretty much par for the linguistic course.