The minor flutter of controversy in the wake of the Department of Education's announcement that Irish will no longer be a compulsory requirement for secondary teachers has been interesting both for the regret of those who decry the move and the obvious delight of those who approve.
The two greatest enemies of the Irish language have been those who hated it and those who loved it more than anything else. As someone who once moved in their midst and spoke their language, I know what is in the hearts of those who religiously attack Irish.
I once imagined that I hated it too, but what I really hated was the fanaticism which demanded that I learn it at all costs, and this rendered me sufficiently fanatical to resist.
Only in recent years, and with the greatest of difficulty, has my white-knuckle resistance relaxed sufficiently to allow something of my native tongue seep into me.
We cannot save Irish without deconstructing the fanaticism initially unleashed to defend it but which now actually serves to imprison it. For this reason, the abolition of any compulsion around the language can only be good.
The fact that many of us regard it as a badge of honour that we do not speak our own language is a measure of how much we hate ourselves, and is therefore a phenomenon to be studied with the greatest diligence.
In each of us, and perhaps especially in those who most vehemently denounce the Irish language, reside two apparently conflicting ideas: one, that we are Irish and can never be anything else; two, that being Irish is perhaps the most unattractive of our attributes, this latter being the product of our experience of colonisation.
If you were to propose, as a means of ensuring that knowledge of Irish remained at a rudimentary level throughout Irish society, that each citizen be taught the language on a daily basis for 14 years from the age of four upwards, you would be told that it sounded like a risky strategy.
But this is what the Irish educational system has achieved. Most of us leave school having been bombarded with Irish for the duration, but with no more than a passing acquaintance with the language as a tool of communication. In some strange way, the teaching method kept the language alive but only just.
It is as if, by studying the language as we did, we stayed in proximity to something we both loved and hated, and that, in consequence, our capacity to make progress was stymied by the inertia created by the collision of this love and that hate.
There can be a tendency, in analysing this, to focus too simplistically on the compulsory element. The fact that we had no choice but to study it, we tell ourselves, turned us against the language. But it has often struck me, listening to or reading the fulminations of those who claim to despise their native language, that what they fear above all is that they themselves might one day be called upon to speak a sentence in Irish. I mean to say, old bean, what if all those mad, bearded Galegoers were ever actually to succeed in reviving Oirish? Summon up an image of any one of them and imagine him uttering some everyday phrase in Irish - "Dia is Muire dhuit, old chap". Difficult, eh?
By the same token, those of us who have made efforts to pick up where we left off with Irish frequently bear testimony that our greatest problem is acquiring the self-confidence to speak it in an uninhibited manner. We have the words, but have difficulty in uttering them. These are alternative sides of the same coin.
Some time ago, during a Gael Linn course in spoken Irish, our teacher mentioned he had written a letter of complaint to Teilifis na Gaeilge about the pronunciation of the abbreviated form of the name of the station. "Tee na Gee", he contended, was incorrect; the proper pronunciation was "Tay na Gay". His point was that the sound we gave the words owed more to the slender vowels of English than the broad vowels of Irish. This sounds like the kind of fanaticism I mentioned before, but it actually makes a central point about our relationship with spoken Irish.
This fundamental distinction in the sounds of the two languages, I believe, holds the key to why we simultaneously appear to desire and despise our native language, and can only with the greatest difficulty make the kind of progress in learning it which outsiders can achieve without difficulty.
As a consequence of our prolonged enslavement, all of our aspirations, individual and collective, are tied up with a notion of progress inseparable from our idea of a successful English person. To become more sophisticated, civilised or refined means to follow a pre-existing pattern, among the cardinal elements of which has to do with the way we speak.
If one Irish person wishes to parody another, he will often do so by imitating his speech patterns in a manner as to depict him as being incapable of speaking English in the proper, approved manner. In general, this simply means broadening the vowel sounds. In other words, what we regard as the mark of inferiority is the tendency to speak English using sounds which we unconsciously associate with Irish. It is not difficult to see how this unconscious idea might result in a subliminal antagonism to the sounds of our first language.
Even as we progress in our knowledge of English - the language in which resides our hopes of prosperity, respect and self-sustenance - we are haunted by the sounds of our native tongue, which all the while threaten to sweep us back to poverty and ignorance in a sudden wave of broad vowels.
The relationship between Irish and English is therefore not like that between, say, English and Spanish. In a sense, Irish and English are opposites, representing competing aspirations and incompatible worlds.
Compulsion under these conditions is like driving a bent nail: the more you hammer the worse things get. Rather than providing us with the essentials of our first language, the way most of us learnt Irish did little more than keep alive the fear that we might not, after all, be able to transcend our innate savagery and take our place among the civilised nations of the earth.
The problem many of us experience in learning Irish, therefore, is not intrinsic to the language itself, but a product of the mindset which has internalised the colonial programme as the only option for advancement.
But this also means, paradoxically, that the Irish language can never be completely killed off. In projecting their self-hatred on to the nation and its language, those who despise Irish fall into the ultimate trap of the post-colonial condition: the illusion that the demonised self-image of the oppressed native can be ridiculed out of existence.
On the contrary, the authentic, unrealised, unspoken aspiration to be free and whole again survives best under oppression and denigration, in much the same way as a tooth preserves its roots by engaging with hostile pieces of food.