I

In the lamentable 2020 Programme for Government signed by three parts of Ireland’s permanent Partitionist Party, we find that the English-language introduction ends with a single long sentence in Irish. Then at the end of the réamhrá that follows—this being the Irish-language introduction to the document, that is, a translation of the introduction that has just appeared in English—we find the same sentence, which was already in Irish, translated into Irish, in a significantly tidier fashion. 

From the introduction:

Éire atá ar thóir láidreachta ó thaobh an gheilleagair agus ó thaobh na sochaí sóisialta de, ceangail a thógáil agus a neartú ar an oileán seo agus a bheith mar ghuth dearfach don chomhoibriú idirnáisiúnta – seo ár dtiomantas.

An Ireland that is in pursuit of strength in terms of the economy and in terms of social community, to build and strengthen bonds on this island and to be an affirmative voice for international cooperation – this is our dedication.

From the réamhrá:

Geilleagar agus sochaí na hÉireann a neartú, naisc a dhaingniú ar fud Éireann agus guth dearfach a ardú ar son na comhoibre idirnáisiúnta: dóibh siúd a thiomnaítear sinn.

Strengthening the economy and society of Ireland, fastening bonds across all of Ireland and raising an affirmative voice for international cooperation: to these are we dedicated.

One imagines a lone Irish speaker connected to one or another of the miserable entities that contributed to this nonsense programme finding the unwieldy sentence in the text they were translating and unhesitatingly subjecting it to the same process as the Béarla of the rest of the introduction. There is something here that speaks to the role of Irish speakers in their own country: the choice to ignore or correct the mistakes of their fellow citizens, usually followed by a lurch into the foreign but familiar landscape of English. 

II

The exodus into English was accomplished once the imperial authorities could see that the provision of an apparent social good—education—actually offered them one more weapon to use against the natives. The aim of the attach: to abolish our language. This would be accomplished through the use of a child-sized stick, the bata scóir, to herd our ancestors, not yet our ancestors—being only children, tiny terrified bodies—brutally into a new space, through a bloody stumble over a stile they entered into the flattened terrrain of the coloniser. We live in this strange place still; as Macdara has ably pointed out, any tour through our country will serve to prove that the occupation remains in place, like the tightest plastic wrap. In a sense the English could leave the twenty-six counties after the War of Independence content that their work had been completed: Ireland was legible, made sensible, safe for Capital, while the poison of the continuing Occupation in the north-east would be at work indefinitely thereafter.

Let us be clear that it is not true that Ireland is a bilingual country. There are fluent speakers of our native language, certainly, but spread so thin amongst us as to seem lost. Macdara recalls the man (not a Gaeilgeoir, if the present writer recalls correctly, just a chancer) who evaded a traffic fine because, having received the notice in English, he demanded one in Irish, which took so long to raise that the notice period had by then expired. There was also the surprising case of Macdara’s colleague who once asked him what language he had signed off his emails in, as if an Irish person in Ireland might be choosing, in correspondence with other Irish people, to use a totally foreign tongue. To be Irish is to see many such cases, to be a witness to lives lived incompletely in either language, though one aspect of a postcolonial State is that most of the population will not notice this ongoing harm, so natural does this hateful situation seem. But there is a branding point here: even having a cúpla focal marks an Irish person out as ever so slightly different from the monolingual unsophisticates of the Anglosphere, amongst whom most Irish people must in all honesty count themselves. 

Better a ceremonial language than none at all, one might think, though that is a tough argument to uphold when one encounters on a bus a sign saying: Ná fág bagáiste sa phasáiste: Do not leave baggage in the passage. Irish has words for baggage: the word mála is well recognised—it is the word used in school for your schoolbag—so why not use málaí? Again, there are multiple words for passage, bealach is a straightforward one: way, passage, thoroughfare. In this case (and there are many others) the use of Irish is almost mocking, confirming the relegation of the language to a nowhere place, making us see a language kept undead through the ministrations of uncaring bureaucrats. The word Béarlachas sums it up: English-ish, meaning a speaker who thinks in English, and uses sloppy Irish filled with poor-quality sentence construction and horrible loanwords. Vótáil Tá, we see during referenda, meaning Vote Yes, although the language has no V, highlighting the alien nature of the loanword—what is wrong with roghnaigh, to choose?—and no word for yes, tá (meaning is) being the affirmative response for questions asked using the verb to be.

III

During the Revolutionary Period, enthusiasm for Irish was a mass phenomenon, tied in with the other interests of the period—socialism, feminism, vegetarianism, for the most advanced nationalists—and directed towards the removal of the Occupation. Possibly it was this very association of the language with popular political activity that explains the interest of the State, after most of Ireland became independent, in denigrating our language. Even elementary rules of pronunciation are not taught: we are told about the broad and slender vowels, but not that consonants can be both broad and slender, so it is a matter of guesswork or, at best, intuition, as to whether an S in a word is to be pronounced like a S or a SH sound in English (broad and slender forms respectively), or a D is like a DTH or a J sound in English (again broad and slender respectively), this despite the presence of a law in the language to assist you. In this way, the language is scrubbed clear of its specificity, introducing Béarlachas into every word.

Certainly the spiteful and strange Far Right activity underway, stoked by Liberal Right politicians and media, has no interest in the language: it would be too much effort for them to learn it, and their interest is in the new Internationalism of conspiracy and resentment, not in Irishness as such. This leaves Gaeilge as a safe space for the activity of decolonisation, cultural and political.

A final thought: it is an interesting feature of Irish speech that those who stick to the rules taught in school betray thereby their lack of Fluency, it being a demonstration of Fluency to break through the notional rules of An Caighdeán, the Standard, releasing the living language, a thin but lively thing that skips away from its State-sanctioned imprisonment. Irish is both absent and present enough in our culture to seem everywhere a haunting thing but it is the unruly spirit we need for our work. See it flee, follow, it returns us to our land, our land to us. There where, as the poet says, there is a seat for all at the assembly of the conquest.