The Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) joked that he spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to his horse. Guess where he came from. In those days, one could be multilingual without being multicultural, writes Declan Kiberd.
Things have changed. Fewer students every year learn a foreign language at our secondary schools. Last June, the employers' group Ibec expressed concern that only 2,411 took Spanish (now a major global language) in this year's Leaving Cert.
Since 1997, numbers taking Spanish, Italian, French and German have dropped from 79 per cent to 72 per cent.
All of which, said Ibec, was "very worrying from a business perspective". Our future citizens will need to sell goods and services into all of these foreign-language cohorts.
The truth is, of course, that it was the introduction of a "business perspective" into Irish education which helped to create this very real crisis. Faced with ever-increasing new options of "sexy" modern subjects, many students have turned away from the more arduous challenge of mastering the complex grammatical rules and spoken conventions of a foreign tongue.
These trends have been notable in the United States for some time. There, universities offer seemingly endless choices between separate, self-contained 12-week courses based on anything from "The History of the Olympic Games" to "The Films of Alfred Hitchcock".
Confronted with such mouth-watering possibilities, fewer students opt for "Elementary French 1" or "Advanced Italian 3". Taking students through the various levels of language acquisition - a task which consumes years if done in a disciplined way - has proved all but impossible in such unitised systems.
This is one reason why, when terrorists struck New York skyscrapers on 9-ll, US intelligence had no Arabic speakers to gather information "on the ground" in the plotters' countries of origin.
In older times, under a different imperium, the British always trained specialist Arabists to assist in such work: but the Americans were caught flat-footed.
As in war, so in business. The market model of instantly-saleable courses, once unleashed in education, helps to close off possible future business markets. It illustrates the ways in which unbridled capitalism, appealing only to short-term tastes rather than long-term interests, can end up devouring its own entrails.
Choice is good, of course, but only within realistic constraints. Children should start a foreign language at primary level. To blame our Irish language policy for these sad trends would be absurd. Most of those who are proficient in Irish are among the precious few who have also mastered a foreign tongue. It is Gaeilgeoirí who often pop up speaking French, Italian or Spanish at a continental event. Our Government has generously funded recent purchases of James Joyce manuscripts and has given much money for the current centenary celebration of Samuel Beckett. Joyce was the product of an Italian department; and Beckett of the French school at TCD.
Yet it is professors of the modern languages departments of our schools and colleges who have voiced the fear that current trends may lead to their eventual closure. There is a contradiction at the very heart of Government policy.
All of which is to remind ourselves of what Ibec didn't bother to emphasise: the cultural value of studying foreign languages. Beckett once told his startled mother that "in France they cook, but in this country we only open tins". These days, the French still grow most of the vegetables they eat, while we import most of ours. They still promenade on summer evenings in local squares, while we sweat over unpayable mortgages in overpriced homes.
Irish holiday-makers (mostly monoglot) are now returning from visits to the Continent. Soon the inevitable "price-checks" will appear in newspapers, marvelling at the differences in the cost of a lettuce in Dublin and Dijon.
This is all trivial, even demeaning, stuff. Yet it prompts a wider question. Do we Irish have a general sense of culture any more, or just an obsessive fixation on an economy to be primed?
Are our great artists - like Joyce and Beckett - what we have now to conceal Tiger Ireland's lack of a common culture?
The Great Writer as Cultural Figleaf? Now there's a topic to engage a team of scholars for the next five years. Government grant-aided, of course.