So where are just 153 Irish-speaking families remaining in Mayo, Cork, Waterford and Meath, are there? Well, there's only one proper response: start a new television station, preferably one per family. Oh yes, and double the grants for people who speak Irish. And quadruple the marks awarded to students who do their astrophysics and Hebrew Leaving Certs in Irish. And what else? Perhaps outlaw English, maybe, and pluck out the tongues of English-speakers.
How long will this farce of pretending that Irish is a viable language on the point of restoration continue? It is over, dead, finished. You can squander any amount of taxpayers' money on it; you can point triumphantly to the popularity of the Gaelscoil network; you can exclude people from employment because of their criminal failure to speak the first national language. It doesn't matter. Irish is finis, kaput, finito, or as we gaeilgeoirí say, marbh.
Statement of the obvious
Why is it so difficult to say this? Why is this statement of the irrefutably obvious likely to trigger not a reasoned discussion, but a venom-flecked tirade of abuse from the professional gaeilgeoirí, with their straggling beards and their geansaí and their look of woebegone victimhood? The truth is there before us, provided by Donncha Ó hÉallaithe, himself an Irish-language activist: and the best of the activists, being closest to the coal-face, usually can be relied on to know how thin the vein of coal actually is. And also, being honest people, they are not afraid to speak the truth: because if you love something, as these activists genuinely do, you are doing no service to that love by lying about its condition.
Donncha Ó hÉallaithe's figures suggest that of the 80,000 who live in Gaeltacht areas, only 20,000 use Irish as their first tongue. In the Donegal "Gaeltacht" around Glencolmcille, just 8 per cent of the people speak Irish. In Ballinskelligs, it is 5 per cent. In Barna and Moycullen, it is 3 per cent, as it is in Dungloe. This is no longer the first national language we're talking about; this is Urdu.
We even have this degrading process in which children are interviewed to see if their Irish is good enough, and if it is, they get €260; and if it is not, but their families have applied for the grant, they get €130 anyway. Where else but in the insane world of linguistic social engineering would you get a government grant merely because you have applied for one? The farce continues throughout the rule of law: to be a Garda, barrister or solicitor, you have to pass an Irish exam. This will test not your ability to speak Irish, but your ability to pass that exam. And Irish will never enter your career again.
This not treating the language with respect, but as a hurdle.
Our Irish language programme was a product of its time, the end of the Great War, when people everywhere thought the New Man could be perfected by the state. In the US he was to be Teetotal Man. In Italy, he was to be Fascist Man. In Germany, he was to be a Stormtrooper. In Moscow, he was to be a Proletarian. In Ireland he was to be Peig Sayers.
Educational priority
Elsewhere, these fatuous experiments have been abandoned, but in Ireland the state machinery is still humming because no-one has the nerve to turn it off, and so admit the entire project, which has cost literally billions and billions, has achieved almost nothing. But not quite nothing: for the educational priority given to a language they would never speak ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
This crime is not confined to the past. It remains a crime today. One quarter of all our children leave school functionally illiterate in English, yet they will have squandered at least a couple of thousand hours on not learning Irish. That's about the amount of time it takes to become an astronaut.
So this adventure in linguistic Stalinism is not only wrong in itself, both for the distortions it causes in educational priorities, and for the sheer waste of money involved; and it is positively wicked in the damage it does to the most disadvantaged people in Irish life - the children of the sink estates we have so skilfully constructed around almost every city and large town in Ireland.
Yet far from this scandalous waste of money being high on our political agenda, it is not on it at all. Our political establishment still lives in abject terror of being found unpatriotic on the language question. It is the last of those zoological curiosities left over from the founding of the State: the holy cows which became white elephants.
Labour Party
Even the left is infected. Perhaps because of its roots in James Connolly's Gaelic-Marxist mumbo-jumbo, the Labour Party in particular is in thrall to the mythology that a peculiarly Irish, egalitarian virtue is available within the Irish language: cue references to the Brehon laws, the high place of women in Gaelic society, the absence of private property, et cetera, et bloody cetera. And so, with just a bit more effort, the language will be revived, and we'll be living in a Celtic socialist paradise.
We've had the effort. We can do no more. In fact, if we were remotely honest with ourselves, we'd end the farce now. Believe me, one day history will judge us as harshly as we judge previous generations for their cruelty and their hypocrisy towards children. The compulsory Irish language policy is not merely an abject failure. It is morally wrong.