How hatred of the Irish language turned to love

Fine Gael MEP and Senator Jim Higgins spoke last night of how he hated the Irish language as a student and came to love it and become a fluent speaker as an adult. Mr Higgins said that Irish was his least favourite subject at secondary school, and he despised it when he left.

"There was the absolute insistence on grammatical precision. One could accept that there had to be a reasonable grasp of the nouns in their five declensions, but the verbs were beyond me for the most part. Our teacher was a native Irish-speaking priest from Connemara, a former handball champion.

"If you did not master the gymnastics of grammatical correctness, one's jaw was likely to be met by an open hand as if he were hitting a half-solid against the back wall of an alley. Is it any wonder I hated Irish?"

However, as a politician in the 1980s, he began participating in Irish-language radio and television programmes and had come to genuinely love the language.

"I think that, far from witnessing the death throes of the Irish language, we are currently witnessing a resurgence."

Mr Higgins told the MacGill Summer School that statistics had revealed that the number of people indicating they had an ability to speak Irish or use the language on a daily basis had increased from nearly 550,000 in 1926 to 1.5 million in 2002.

Green Party leader Trevor Sargent urged the Government to adopt a more vigorous policy. "Sponsoring organisations like Foras na Gaeilge, important as such organisations' work is, will not transform the linguistic landscape of Ireland. A comprehensive language planning process is needed."

Robin Bury, of the Reform Movement, said his organisation believed that Irish and English should be equal national languages and English should be given precedence in the event of a legal conflict.

Anton Carroll, principal of Greendale comprehensive school, called on the Government to set out a realistic national strategic plan for the language.