Taking the tyranny out of Irish

The renewed skirmishes about the state of the Irish language, provoked by my colleague Kevin Myers's assessment in his Irishman…

The renewed skirmishes about the state of the Irish language, provoked by my colleague Kevin Myers's assessment in his Irishman's Diary of June 30th, have been as passionate and polarised as for 40 years, writes John Waters

Kevin is essentially correct: the attempts to revive the language have not merely failed but have dragged the enterprise into ridicule and disrepute. The recent saga of the Feely sisters from Fermanagh, highly motivated teachers with no Irish, who, unless they can pass an examination in Irish, will not be permitted to continue teaching deprived children in English, is a telling instance of what, adapting a word from another language, might be dubbed "Irish absurdistan". There are many more.

I find such stories farcical, but I also know that Irish is beautiful, and, unlike English, belongs to us only. The possibility of its final demise is for me a matter of the utmost sorrow.

The weekend before last, I attended the Erris Literary Festival in Geesala, where I heard the great Donegal poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh read from his work. He was just back from Berlin. There is something thought-provoking and awe-inspiring in the idea that, with Irish close to extinction at home, an Irishman who learnt no English until he was seven is transfixing audiences worldwide of people who do not understand a word he utters, but who can connect with these poems wrought of Donegal Irish when they are translated into German, or Chinese or Serbo-Croat.

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Listening, I was revisited by a torrent of conflicting emotions: delight at the vivacity of his work, shame that I understood more in the English translation, hope that somehow we may be approaching a point where the marginalisation of Irish will be its strongest asset.

There are three interconnecting reasons why we do not speak Irish. Firstly, it is a difficult language. Secondly, it is no longer useful. Thirdly, it is the repository of much of our post-colonial neurosis, as the intensity of our debates demonstrates only too well.

But the greatest problem facing Irish is that it is hated more than loved.

Languages attract both love and hate for all kinds of reasons, and can only survive when they are loved more than they are hated.

In an era when our needs were better served by English, we pretended to cling to Irish for the love of it, when really we were responding out of guilt born of the knowledge that something we felt obliged to love was no longer any use. This general condition was exacerbated by official policy based on a spurious notion of culture as residing in the fossil, artefact, custom and convention of the past, on the idea that you could revive the national essence by digging its fragments from the earth. This encouraged a denial, even a repugnance of the living culture that had evolved in the era of outside interference.

Instead of integrating the Irish language into that culture, we created an artificial division based on a counter-productive fundamentalism, an insistence that authenticity was possible only through a rejection of the living, breathing half-alien reality, and an embrace of the skeleton attached to the life-support machine.

In the 20th century, Irish became associated with a smug and moribund establishment, seeking Ireland's mothballed essence. This created a savage counter-reaction, whereby it was widely decided that, if national self-realisation was such a joyless thing, we'd be better off without it. The outcome was predictable.

There are several instances in history where dying languages have been revived at a point of near-extinction, but none where this happened without a tremendous desire on the part of the people that their language not be lost.

Czech and Lithuanian were resuscitated in circumstances where the "opponent" languages had become associated with tyranny. Through nearly a century of official misguidedness, we have created a situation whereby tyranny is plausibly associated with the dying language, while the "competing" culture is perceived as a source of salvation. This is the opposite of what is required.

I find myself in a difficult position: I agree with both sides. I embody the neurosis. But even though I love the language more than I hate it, I still cannot save it, even on my own tongue. Only by breaking down the neurotic resistance to Irish in the wider culture will we all be liberated to contribute to its recovery.

We are, I believe, approaching an important moment: the end of the phase of neurosis and the emergence of an as yet passive and inchoate sentiment about Irish identity, with, at its centre, the vague idea that Irish might, after all, be a rather nice thing to have. The neurosis about Irish is confined to people now over 30, and their hatred, which paralyses the language, is really directed at a generation now on the point of dying out. In a few years, even if we do nothing - perhaps especially if we do nothing - our love and hatred for Irish may be restored to a proper balance. The present skirmish may be one of the last.