The status and sustenance of the Irish language stirs passions, this we know, and nowhere more than in Northern Ireland. Just as it becomes the 21st official European language, it also threatens to become a Northern political football. But the debate will not be full or frank.
The two unionist parties clearly think open hostility to Irish is what their voters expect. Though few if any elected DUP or Ulster Unionist representatives believe Ulster Scots is anything more than a dialect, and many deride it in private, they demand parity of recognition to ensure that Irish secures no advantage.
In turn, neither "nationalist" party is entirely unambiguous towards Irish. Sinn Féin and the SDLP both insist it must have official standing and more financial support: apparent unanimity conceals a range of attitudes.
A considerable number think it an inalienable part of identity, a beautiful and cherishable inheritance. Some of the same people also argue that it has been "hijacked by the Provos", demeaned by republicans using it to gall unionists.
New-style republicans who learned Irish in jail, or as part of "the project", retort that it took Sinn Féin to "put the language on the agenda".
These are all voices from within what used to be a cohesive community, now divided by class, politics and varying degrees of religious adherence.
Unionists and Protestants of many stripes make the same claim that Irish has been annexed, draped over a bloodstained record. Some also harbour a visceral dislike for the language and a will to have it silenced, both inherited from well before the recent Troubles. When DUP middle-ranker Sammy Wilson scoffed at "leprechaun language", many Catholics bristled.
Meanwhile, many Protestants for whom Mr Wilson personifies DUP boorishness found themselves chuckling indulgently.
Lovers of Irish who speak it unselfconsciously and use it with subtlety and skill include a considerable number who feel that leading Sinn Féiners mangle it. When Gerry Adams sprinkles it through statements and speeches, some wince at his delivery.
These are people who want Irish to be treated as a natural part of existence, although the most realistic admit this is a tall order.
More than 12 years after the first ceasefire, it might be legitimate to argue that leading republicans should have polished up their pronunciation and grammar. Disdain for the Adams Irish also includes a kind of snobbery.
Conflicted attitudes are hardly surprising. Among people cast as perpetual minority in an alien state inside their own country, the dogged effort to preserve spoken Irish came from a variety of sources. The main reservoir of support was the Catholic Church and school system - though there were also bishops, priests and teachers who neither liked nor spoke the language. In the two cities as in the countryside, many grew up thinking fluency in Irish meant "respectability", closeness to the church, almost a type of piousness, a marker of superior social status in the days when the Northern Catholic middle-class was small and modest. The image of Irish suffered accordingly. Survival came at a price.
The dwindling number of native-speakers in the Sperrins and the Antrim Glens at the start of the last century were for the most part very poor.
They would surely have been baffled to discover that decades later their tongue had become a badge of upward mobility, not to mention that it had been revived in part by IRA prisoners shouting basic phrases from one jail cell to another.
"Jailtacht" Irish has its limitations, but the wonder is that it emerged at all. The most honest detractors will volunteer that since the Taoiseach of the day cannot speak the first official language, it is unfair to mock Mr Adams. And perhaps Sinn Féin, in insisting that Irish must have official support in the North while fielding spokesmen with little or no Irish and no apparent determination to improve, is no more brazen than Fianna Fáil.
But since the republican machine switched Bairbre de Brún away from Stormont to Europe, the top team has no more than two or three with remotely passable Irish, other than Mr Adams. For this reason, if no other, Mr Adams has to keep trudging into Stormont to make ritual remarks "as Gaeilge".
The party called it a negotiating triumph when the St Andrews Agreement unveiled a projected Irish language Act, to be passed at Westminster. Then, in Westminster, Peter Hain dangled the Act in front of Peter Robinson as a possible subject for decision - and of course, assured destruction - in a restored Assembly. Sinn Féin had little to say, at least in public.
Obeisance to the household gods is all very well. While policing dominated for months, lesser subjects have had to wait. Sinn Féin has been quick to learn that politics is whatever works. The saga of the first official language offers plentiful instruction, North and South.