It was about 10 years ago that the Hiberno-English word "crack" began to appear in its Irish form in written English in Ireland.
In its pretentiousness, in its witless posturing that somehow it is Gaelic and that we are preserving something uniquely Irish by spelling it in a supposedly Irish way, it sums up perfectly the ambiguities and the hypocrisy surrounding the Irish language. Spell an English word with a fada, and suddenly we're a nation of Irish speakers.
I have written about this before, and no doubt will write about it again, since I seem to be one of the few people in the Irish media who are prepared to take a hostile line towards the national fantasies over the Irish language.
The unique and fraudulent position of "the language" in our political life is sustained by chronic denial, stupidity and State coercion. And the predictable response to anything said here will either be the ranting, frothing denunciations from Seamus MacGiolla Fada and Anguosa Mac Craic, or a studied neglect, so that no-one need pay any attention to the rude little boy declaring that the emperor has no clothes.
He has no clothes: none. How many TDs opposed Éamon Ó Cuiv's preposterous piece of Stalinist linguistic engineering which made it illegal for any official document in this State, whether from local council, semi-state or government, to appear in English alone? None. You are a shower of cretins and cowards, all cringing in terror that somehow you might be considered less Irish if you stood up and accepted the reality that the Irish language-project is dead. Finished. Over.
The confirmation of its death is the epidemic of the gaelscoileanna, which provide an assured middle-class route to post-primary education, free of charge. (The exception is the Gaelscoil in Ballyfermot, which is the "proof", cited ad nauseam, about how proletarian these schools really are.) The gaelscoil is a middle-class option which will do nothing whatever to save Irish as a living language; Irish is becoming merely the modern Greek, proof of the high social status of those who can quote from The Midnight Court or the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire over the port and nuts.
The Ó Cuiv proposals actually made it illegal to have any signs in English in Gaeltacht areas - though not, needless to say, defining what an English word is. "Stop" is an English word today: it wasn't once upon a time. Words enter and leave languages the whole time; who is to say that "danger" is not an Irish word? And who will feel all the better for it because some French tourists don't know the current Irish word for danger - I'm sorry; nor do I, and nor do most of you - and drive over a cliff? Maybe the apology will be written in Irish also.
One of the more hilarious Ó Cuiv proposals to rescue the language is to designate Achill a Gaeltacht. Indeed, why not? Why not solve Albania's poverty by redesignating it as Kuwait, and solve California's problem with the San Andreas fault by redesignating it as Kansas? I've always had a problem with Meath's flatness: henceforth it shall be known as Nepal.
Language policy throughout the history of the State has been shaped by the alchemist's mad desire to turn lead into gold, combined with an abject political refusal to accept lingual realities. The education of thousands of socially backward children continues to be blighted by the vast amount of time spent learning Irish, as word-games are played to pretend more people speak Irish than actually do.
These games would be almost enchanting if they were not the peak of a very large iceberg of stupidity. "Bus Lána" is mildly entertaining; and by happy chance, it gets round the Ó Cuiv language rule because "bus" is not really an English word, but a Latin word of French deployment, voiture omnibus, which passed through English to arrive in Irish. But what about the ridiculous confection which has been devised for Luas: "Lána Tram"? No doubt it complies with the Ó Cuiv rule of linguistic political correctness, that both words are now in Irish dictionaries: but we cannot pretend other than that "Lána Tram" is a cumbrous and thoroughly unconvincing attempt to gaelicise what is a very Anglo-Saxon term.
As a matter of interest: are the training manuals for Luas in Irish? This is a State body, so it is clearly in violation of the law if the manuals are in English only. I hope our language police are onto this one; also the engineering manuals, timetables, trade-union agreements, contracts et cetera, for DART, Bus Éireann, Aer Lingus, Bord Fáilte, and so on. Is Ireland of the Welcomes, which is published by a Government body, now also bound to be published in Irish also?
But maybe the word "lána" holds the key. It was an English word which had a little clay pipe shoved in its mouth, a cawbeen plonked on its head, and a pair of buckled shoes slipped on its feet. If we throw in a few Irish case-endings and litter our fadas all over the place on written English, maybe we can convince ourselves that the language we are speaking is Irish.
It is not. We can be as winsome as we like about our attachment to the Irish language, and can warble, witter and flute at one another about the craic agus ceol on the Luas as we come in from Ranelagh along the lána tram. The language we speak then is certainly not Irish. It is pious, cúpla focal gibberish.