Today is TG4's seventh birthday. Is Irish TV's precocious youngster right toreflect Irish as a lifestyle choice rather than a cultrual must, asks Shane Hegarty.
Cowboy movies and Hector Ó hEochagáin. Irish-speaking Muppets and trad music. Foreign movies and good-looking weather forecasters. The glamorisation of the Irish language or the denigration of Gaeltacht culture. TG4 means many things to many people. Today it celebrates its seventh birthday, with a regular audience of 4.5 per cent, undoubted programme-making success and controversy it has never quite shaken off.
"Some now see TG4 as having all this youth and glamour and avant-garde audio-visual work, but there are others who feel that it doesn't reflect the day-to-day concerns of the fisherman or the farmer," explains Niamh Hourigan, lecturer in sociology at University College Cork. In her new book, Escaping the Global Village, she has compared TG4 with other minority language stations and found many similarities. Like the Welsh station, S4C, or the Catalan, Basque and Galician stations in Spain, TG4 has carried the weight of the culture it has come from while simultaneously remoulding it.
"The key to understanding TG4 is its slogan 'Suil Eile', 'another eye'," says Hourigan. "It took a look at the ever- decreasing indigenous Gaeltacht communities, where you'll now hear English spoken in the schoolyards. It realised that in the cities, at third level and the gaelscoileanna, and among the urban middle-classes, the Irish language is not the compulsory thing it once was and which made everyone hate it. Instead it's moved on to become a lifestyle option. They choose to send their children to an Irish-speaking school. TG4 now reflects their interests."
It means that while, from the urban perspective, TG4 appears a success, there are those who believe it has turned its back on the community on its Spiddal doorstep. Hourigan, an Irish-speaker, argues that turning inward seven years ago would have been contrary to the social change lifting the country.
"There was such a rapid transformation of the outside, never mind the inside, that to have been inward-looking would have moved the language and the communities even further from everyday life," she says.
She believes job creation and the influx of audio-visual workers (dubbed the "Connemara 4" set) has infused the Galway Gaeltacht with a new generation working and learning through Irish. "Of course, many would say that, in that transition, elements of the old culture have been lost, some of the traditional music or song, and that in its place is a glamorised, modern culture as Gaeilge," she says. "But I personally feel that it would have been lost anyway."
TG4, alongside Raidio na Gaeltachta, has also been key to the development of the language. English words are assimilated more organically, unlike the contrived translations once foisted upon the language by civil servants.
"Many say that it has diluted Irish and made it slangy. That it's pidgin Irish. That same debate has been going on elsewhere in minority regions. Should you decide to be a purist or do you make it looser and more inclusive?" asks Hourigan.
There are other comparisons with similar television services. Each was established during a period of social change, S4C against a background of surging Welsh nationalism, the Spanish stations following the move to democracy. And each faced the choice between being local or global.
Where TG4 differs is that it represents a language for which there is much State support but which is not as widely spoken as those of other regions. The station also needs, says Hourigan, to reflect a language that has ceased to be key to people's national identity.
"Across Europe we are moving away from traditional lines of nation and religion. We now identify ourselves through projects. You might say: 'I am an Irish-speaking vegetarian who cycles to work.' We collect different aspects to forge an identity that is individual to a person. It used to be that if you were an Irish-speaker then you were seen as legitimately Irish. Now, nationalism expresses itself through different things and you may not speak Irish but you are still legitimately Irish."
She makes an exception for the popularity of the Irish language in west Belfast, nicknamed "the jailtacht", where speaking Irish remains a political and cultural statement rather than a lifestyle choice.
Among minority-language stations, the prevalence of foreign programming has also been a source of debate. While on the Spanish stations these are dubbed or subtitled in the indigenous language, TG4 simply broadcasts them in English.
The argument that they act as bait for new viewers is no longer valid, says Hourigan, because of the constant choice available elsewhere. Of the stations studied, only the Catalan service does not rely on grants to keep afloat and there is growing concern that buying in foreign programmes will weaken both the raison d'être of these stations but also their argument for continued funding.
TG4, however, should have a future in digital television, says Hourigan. "It will suit it and it knows it, although maybe it can't do anything about it for financial reasons. It is a godsend, however, because expanding within a niche is easier to do than when you have general programming. There is a far more focused audience."
In the meantime, as the most visible symbol of the language, TG4 cannot afford to go stale. "TG4 does rely on innovation and freshness and it needs to keep an eye on that," says Hourigan. "It can't rest on its laurels. It doesn't have any laurels."
