Sir. The current Census form due for completion on April 28th has a new question: "Indicate whether the person can speak Irish by inserting a tick in the appropriate box. If the person can speak Irish please indicate frequency." We are told in the notes that: "This question should be answered for persons aged 3 years and over. Leave blank for children under 3 years of age."
Furthermore - "Any person who fails or refuses to provide this information or who knowingly provides false information may be subject to a fine of up to £1,000." No indication of any quantitive measure of ability to be applied is given.
How is any household head to know what standard to apply or how to assess ability to speak? Are we to have domestic orals? Does speaking Irish involve knowledge of a vocabulary of 500 or 5,000 words? Does it mean ability to converse with the same facility as one does in English? Does the exchange of the token phrases with which some politicians and others involved in conspicuous nationalism used to interlard their speeches count as speaking Irish?
My OED defines statistics as numerical facts or data and a census as an enumeration of the population with the statistics relating to it.
How can these questions be answered objectively? How can they produce numerical facts or data or any basis for statistical analysis?
How are they part of a national census?
For those of us who remember what it was like to grow up in the period of Irish language coercion by the State when access to many jobs and, in some cases, promotion was related to oral tested ability to speak Irish this is no trivial matter.
One is driven to ask is there a hidden scenario? - Yours, etc.,
Park Avenue,
Sandymount, Dublin 4.