The Present Social Context of
the Irish Language

How many speakers of Irish exist is a perennial chestnut. There are certainly a number of official Gaeltachts where Irish long ago ceased to be a spoken language; by contrast, there's at least one real Gaeltacht that isn't official, Rath Cairn in County Meath. All of the real Gaeltachts also have significant populations of "blow-ins", frequently without any Irish, which means that counting Irish speakers even in the Gaeltacht isn't as simple as counting the people who live there. In absolute terms, there are far more speakers of Irish outside the Gaeltacht than inside it. However, the level of ability of many of these speakers, not surprisingly, is limited, and so how many of them you count depends mostly on how big or small you want the end figure to be. In the most recent censuses (1991), over a million people in the Republic and over 140,000 in the Six Counties reported themselves as having a reasonable proficiency in the language. What that self-assessment actually means is endlessly debated. Less commonly discussed is the fact that the figure keeps going up, which may mean an increase in language ability, or an increase in willingness to admit to it, or even just an increasing desire to think of oneself as Irish-speaking. What it can't mean is anything particularly bad for the language.

The great challenge to the survival of the Gaeltachts has always been economic; they are traditionally the poorest parts of the country. But with the burgeoning Irish economy and a long tradition of special government grants for the Gaeltachts, particularly in housing, their economic problems have fallen behind their social ones. Reduced populations have brought the same problems of social disintegration to the Gaeltachts as to rural communities everywhere. The net fall in population masks an even greater fall in the Irish-speaking population, because of significant immigration of retirees, artists, foreigners, and so forth attracted by a clean environment, a safe community, and savage natural beauty. Very few of these immigrants have any ability in Irish on arrival. Many, probably most, make sincere efforts to learn it, but are frequently stymied by a number of factors. Everyone in the Gaeltacht can speak English, and it's easier for both parties to speak the common language than to stumble along in a language in which one party doesn't have much ability. Irish-speakers in Gaeltachts have an ingrained habit of speaking English to almost anyone they don't know personally, presumably left over from a time when there wasn't anyone else who could speak Irish. Every Irish speaker has also had experience of hostility to the language, and as they naturally want to avoid being attacked, they play it safe and speak English.

As mentioned above, there are far more speakers of Irish outside the Gaeltacht, but generally with limited ability. They enjoy only limited opportunities to use the language, and those opportunities are in a restricted social range. They suffer all the limitations one might expect from a lack of significant contact with authentic speakers. The Irish language movement has also suffered from a regrettable obsession with avoiding vocabulary borrowed from English, leading to a neglect of every other aspect of language ability, most notably pronounciation, but also idiom, syntax, stress patterns, and so forth.

There is some degree of tension between native speakers in the Gaeltacht and committed speakers in the Movement. The latter envy the former for their command of the language and their community support in speaking it. The former envy the latter for the institutional support they have, and sometimes even suspect them of making money from the language. People in the movement object to the liberality with which native speakers borrow words from English, considering it lazy and bad for the language. Native speakers resent learners telling them how to speak their own language properly, particularly when the same learners generally have terrible pronounciation.

A large number of language-support institutions have been established over the last few decades. (Clicking hyperlinked names in this paragraph opens a new window for the appropriate website.) There are a few weeklies in Irish, notably Lá and Foinse. There are more literary magazines like Comhar and Inti, and a weekly column in Irish in the high-brow newspaper, the Irish Times. There is a full-time radio station, Raidió na Gaeltachta, and a recently-established television service, TG4. There are quite a few organisations dedicated to promoting the language, such as the venerable Conradh na Gaeilge, Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge, Glór na nGael, and so forth. There is a semi-state body, Foras na Gaeilge, responsible for allocating government funds to these organisations, and a local authority, Údarás na Gaeltachta, which allocates grant money in the Gaeltachts. Other Gaeltacht affairs come under the government Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. There is also a government translation and publication service, An Gúm, under the Department of Education. There is a wide and rapidly growing network of Irish-language schools, Gaelscoileanna, which are a grassroots phenomenon with powerful local support but a lot of resistance in the Department of Education.

The distance between Gaeltacht and Movement discussed above is also evident in these institutions. The movement is centred in Dublin and dominated by members of the urban middle class, while the Gaeltachts are less well-off rural communities on the west coast, as far from the corridors of power as possible. Not surprisingly most institutions have been much more responsive to the needs of the movement than to those of native speakers. The new official standard, first published in 1958, has won devoted acceptance in the movement, but has been by and large rejected by native speakers. Editorial decisions in every publishing sphere from school books to newspapers to television programs are directed at learners, not at speakers. Many non-speakers in Ireland have difficulty conceiving of the use of the language outside of a school milieux, and while this is usually attributed to the fact that they have almost no other exposure to it, it's probably also due to the learner-centered nature of the language movement itself. The outstanding exception to this trend is Raidió na Gaeltachta, which although a national service, is broadcast from within Gaeltacht communities and is directed primarily at them. It is the only institution to have had any impact on the daily lives of native speakers at large. Teilifís na Gaeilge is also beginning to have this impact, although it does not concentrate explicitly on the Gaeltacht.