Irish speakers in demand in Brussels and even in sunny Greece

Within two days of Irish achieving full parity as an official European Union language, job adverts seeking Irish speakers popped up in an unexpected place.

The vacancies sought someone with "superior Irish language skills" and a "customer service mindset", and offered a full relocation package including flights, private health insurance, temporary hotel accommodation, and help finding an apartment in . . . Greece.

The vacancies for Irish-speaking digital business consultants, quality analysts and supervisors are at call centre business Teleperformance Greece, which provides technical support and customer care on behalf of big tech companies.

Chief human resource officer Triantafillos Alexopoulos said the request for Irish-language speakers had come from their clients, and that he assumed it was connected to the new status of Irish as full EU working language.

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“There is a lot of people that continue to speak this language and feel more comfortable to communicate with this language,” Alexopoulos told The Irish Times.

Customers who select the option to get help as Gaeilge would be put through to the Irish speakers at Teleperformance. If the call volume was low, the Athens Gaeilgeorí could be asked to handle English-language calls as well.

The successful applicants would join a multilingual team that covers 45 European languages, including Flemish, Finnish, Icelandic, and various languages of Spain. While salaries aren't much by Irish standards, they are double the norm in Greece, Alexopoulos said.

“We call it the Mediterranean experience,” Alexopoulos continued, name-checking the culture, food, museums and the beach. “Due to the pandemic, 95 per cent of our employees are working from home remotely from Athens, or from all over Greece.”

The Teleperformance vacancy was not the only international Irish-language opportunity to pop up this week. Dutch international recruitment service Undutchables has placed an advert for an Irish-speaking “mortgage specialist” to work in The Hague.

A background in Irish mortgage lending, higher education in economics, business, or law, and C2 or native-level Irish is required for the position, which involves financial analysis and reporting and is likely to come with a substantial salary. In typical Dutch style, there is an option to work just 24 hours a week, though a full 40 is preferred.

But the real hubs for Irish-language jobs in the EU are of course Brussels and Luxembourg.

There, the ranks of an old hard-core of Irish speakers who work on translation and interpretation in the EU institutions have almost tripled in the last five years, and are set to top 200 this year.

Office life among the Irish-language staff is led almost entirely as Gaeilge, albeit with home working shifting many of the conversations to videocall, email, and chat.

But the presence of the language reaches further than that.

"If I'm meeting friends, in a restaurant or cafe or in a bar or whatever, it's often Irish we speak," said Seán Gunning, a 2020 graduate from law and Irish at University College Cork who is part of last year's new intake, recalling an incident when he overheard a stranger in Brussels speaking Irish on the street.

“It’s mad to think that when I’m at home in Cork I wouldn’t be speaking nearly as much Irish as I am when I’m here in Brussels.”

Donegal Irish

The slightly random international reach of Irish is not news to Jim Maher, who works on international affairs at the European Parliament and set up the institution's Irish language Twitter account. In a former life, he taught Irish at a university in Minneapolis.

“I have literally been on a bus in San Francisco talking Irish, and somebody shouted down the bus in the thickest Donegal Irish imaginable and jumped into the conversation,” Maher recalled.

Another time, he was caught out in a queue at the Fernsehturm television tower in east Berlin. “My friends and I decided to start gossiping about some of the people who were in front of us in the queue. And somebody right behind us jumped into the conversation, and we were completely mortified.”

Aileen Glynn, a European Commission translator who went to the all-Irish Coláiste Íde boarding school in Dingle, described her work as rewarding and said she felt "proud" working side by side with the teams of translators into other languages. "You realise that it's a language just like English, or French, or Dutch. It has a place and a purpose."

Maher Maher - who credits his teacher Michael Quinlan of Rahealty National School outside Thurles for his grá for the language - offered an international perspective.

“Few people might actually realise that there are more universities and colleges in north America teaching Irish than are teaching much bigger languages like Greek or the Scandinavian languages, for example,” the European Parliament senior policy adviser said. “There are tens of thousands of languages on earth, and most of them are in a weaker state than Irish.”