To deprive a child of fluent, natural language is to deprive that child of clear thought and self-expression. To deprive a people of their language amounts to a kind of non-violent ethnic cleansing. This is something which the Irish, with our history, should understand only too well. So why has it been so difficult for the Irish deaf to gain acknowledgment for their own language, Irish Sign Language (ISL), as a civil right with the same status as oral language? And why have they no schools which educate through ISL as a first language?
One reason, some deaf adults argue, is the paternalistic education system for the deaf designed by hearing people and dominated by the Catholic Church, which controls the male and female schools for the deaf, St Joseph's and St Mary's, in Cabra, Dublin. Currently, deaf children are educated through "total communication", a combination of lip-reading and laboriously taught speech. The emphasis has been on absorbing deaf children into the mainstream, rather than on recognising their unique culture. Educators of the deaf have so abhorred the idea of using ISL as the main method of communication in classrooms that they have imposed a "rigid and harsh anti-signing strategy", claims John Bosco Conama, honorary secretary of the Irish Deaf Society. He recalls that "children were not encouraged to sign to each other and one would be severely punished if one was caught signing". This "unconscious psychological abuse" has resulted in an adult population of deaf people who lack confidence, motivation and interest in political participation, thereby leaving services for the deaf in the hands of hearing educators.
Conama believes that depriving deaf children of learning ISL not only prevents them from reaching their intellectual potential, but also inflicts "psychological damage on deaf children. They have been led to believe that signing is inferior and that they have to learn to talk and lip-read in order to gain respectability in society".
Pat McDonnell, a teacher of the deaf at St Joseph's, the school for deaf boys at Cabra, likens discrimination against the deaf to the attitudes exposed by States of Fear, the RTE documentary series on institutionalised abuse. The main theme of States of Fear was that a major problem of abuse, which everyone could see, was ignored. Similarly, the education system today is reluctant to confront the mistakes it has made in its policies of educating deaf children. McDonnell is among those who believe that the situation may change only when a European Court case is taken by a deaf person who was deprived of ISL and forced to learn through oralism.
Much research evidence backs up the claim that deaf children deprived of learning ISL from infancy are short-changed in terms of their ability to fulfil their intelligence, according to Dawn Duffin, a linguist who teaches at the National Training and Development Institute, Roslyn Park College in Dublin. Crucial to intelligence is the acquisition at an early age of a "first language of fluency". For deaf children, ISL is ideal. Deaf children educated in the tradition of total communication can be taught speech, lip-reading and "sign" through English syntax, but because they cannot hear English language, they will never have the potential for fluency. And without fluency, intelligence cannot be fulfilled because fluent, natural language is required for thought and creativity.
"I'm not a fan of the systems that exist for deaf people here. I think it is only a matter of time before a deaf person takes the Irish Government to court for having compromised their first-language fluency," says Duffin. Total communication doesn't enable deaf people to understand at the level of first language fluency. Oralism, on which total communication is based, uses signed language like spoken English. "For example, there is a sign for `how', a sign for `are' and a sign for `you'. That doesn't work because it assumes that the deaf child can sign in the syntactical English structure, which they don't understand because they have been unable to hear it," she says.
In ISL, which is an internationally recognised indigenous sign language, there are no "words" with English equivalents. Instead, each sign represents a concept. The sign - or visual movement - communicates the concept directly to the brain without the need for oral language.
"Language is about a conceptual understanding that you represent in a modality. Most of us represent this modality in speech. But vision and movement comprise as good a modality as speech," Duffin explains.
At the heart of the education system's reluctance to see ISL as a minority language, is its view that deafness is a medical problem rather than a cultural characteristic, explains Helen Saunders, a deaf linguist who completed her masters at TCD. The medical view sees deafness as an impairment to be overcome by teaching deaf children to speak and lip-read through "oralism". In Saunders's experience, which she describes in her master thesis, Growing up Deaf in Ireland, oralism was so dominant that deaf pupils who learned signs were actually segregated from hard-of-hearing and deaf pupils who were being taught through oralism. "Strenuous attempts were made to eradicate signing," she states. But deafness is a cultural condition, not a medical problem, many deaf adults are now arguing.
"A cultural view of deafness implies that deaf people are normal and that sign language and deaf culture need to be understood as aspects of human diversity rather than as `impaired' or `inadequate' in relation to the hearing world. An educational programme based on a cultural understanding would give a cultural role to Irish sign language," says Saunders. Brian Crean, from Dublin, the first Irish graduate of Gallaudet College in Washington DC, the only liberal arts university in the world exclusively for the deaf, says that as a child he was taught lip-reading and speech, but never felt part of the action. Like many deaf young people, he felt isolated and ignored. "It wasn't until I arrived at Gallaudet, where communication is through American sign language, that I could stop saying, `What? What?' all the time," he says.
Brian, the first deaf student to pass the Leaving Cert at St Joseph's, says that Irish deaf children and their parents deserve the educational choice of learning through Irish sign language. He is currently campaigning full-time for the setting up of a model school for the deaf in the Republic, where teaching would be through ISL rather than oralism. The Irish Deaf Society endorses the project, believing that education of deaf children must be transformed.
Some 90 per cent of deaf children are born to hearing parents and, in the Republic, parents have been thrilled to allow their deaf children to be taught to speak and lip-read, and to be absorbed into mainstream education. What Irish parents haven't understood, however, is that oralism is like placing a blind child in a room full of seeing children and expecting the child to absorb the ability to see. "There is a crucial period between infancy and age five for acquiring a first language," says Sarah Burns, a speech and language therapist at TCD who also supports the model school project. If we are exposing the deaf child only to speech, we run the risk that we are limiting the child's access to language.
If the child picks up sign language later, he or she may not be as proficient because that crucial early learning period was lost.
"For many children the system has been successful, but my concern is for those for whom it has not been successful and for whom it will not be successful."
Regina Duggan, the principal of St Mary's, the girl's school for the deaf at Cabra, says she sees no reason to change the school's ethos of total communication, although some teachers there are currently learning ISL. "There are two deaf teachers at St Mary's and we would like to have more," she says.
"Direct discrimination" has been practised against the deaf by the Department of Education and the deaf have been deprived of their civil rights, believes Pat McDonnell. For example, deaf people are excluded in the Republic from educating other deaf people, he asserts.
"There would be a small number of attempts to include deaf people as part of an educational support team in schools, but they would not be formally recognised as teachers. The Department of Education medical exam for all teachers prevents deaf people from qualifying as teachers. "There are deaf `teachers', but they work in post-primary departments which don't require the same medical qualifications. If deaf people want to train as teachers they have to go abroad."
"In a sense, the deaf community in Ireland is a lot like the Irish community within Europe. Ireland is very small and Irish is spoken by a few, yet we want to be allowed to speak it and to have an Irish identity within Europe. In Ireland, we don't apply the same rules to other minorities that we expect to have applied to ourselves by Europe," McDonnell adds. "The Irish should be more sensitive to these minority issues."
Brian Crean can be contacted at 21 Cypress Park, Templeogue, Dublin 6. (01-4905697) email msdp@indigo.ie.