A NICE woman named Niamh, Salmon from RTE asked me on Prime Time the other night to discuss the PDs report on the future of the Irish language. I declined, on the grounds that every time I speak about this issue I am hit by a deluge of hate mail and abuse, some of which I even understand, and all on the grounds that I am against the Irish language, am anti national, unpatriotic, West Brit, etc etc etc.
And since the Prime Time discussion would centre on the nature of primary school teaching of Irish, and I was educated outside Ireland until my late teens, I had no personal experience to draw on.
So, no Prime Time, no hate mail, no accusations that I was anti national, etc etc etc. But on second thoughts, this is not good enough. Look out the window and observe the weather, and describe what you see. Nobody will blame you for what you say. But look out the linguistic window and describe what you see and you're in trouble. I think it's time I got into trouble again.
Coercion and hypocrisy
I am not against the Irish language. Only a fool can be "against" a language. But I am against coercion, and I like to think I am against hypocrisy, though no doubt some people would say that hypocrisy is my defining feature.
Whatever, the truth is that the entire language policy of the State throughout its history has been based on the twin pillars of coercion and hypocrisy, and though both are less evident today than they once were, they remain its defining features.
Nobody uses Irish in the governance of Ireland, outside the Department of the Gaeltacht. Few debates are conducted in Irish. No area is policed in Irish outside the Gaeltacht - and I wonder about the fluency of constabular Irish even there.
We have a host of largely unwatched television programmes in Irish certainly unwatched in working class areas. In addition, we have an entire Irish language television station sited - oh, quite fortuitously - in the constituency of Michael D. Higgins, the viewing figures for which manage to scramble as high as 6,000.
Allowing for the £30 million or so it cost to build the station and run it for its first year, that means about £100 a week per viewer. Yes, admittedly far vaster numbers dip into the channel out of curiosity and then dip out again; but they area not viewers, they are tasters. And they do not like what they taste.
Sophisticated medium
How could they? Television is a vastly complex and expensive medium, requiring unusual talents. The English speaking population of Ireland is not enough to generate enough such talent to provide quality programmes for an entire schedule; how can the tiny authentically fluent Irish speaking population be expected to produce hours of quality television for an audience which is literate in the most complex and sophisticated television culture in the world, namely, Anglo American?
All of the above is obvious and I have said it before when one hears even Michael McDowell coming out in favour of TnaG, I know this voice is in public a lone one. But curiously enormous numbers of people support what I say in private. They are reluctant to speak out in public about it, because of the abuse to which they fear they will be subjected.
The overwhelming consensus to date has been that the educational standards associated with Irish are wrong, but that it is right that the language be compulsory. That was an argument I once concurred with. I don't anymore.
To force working class children to spend 2,000 hours learning a language which most of them detest is folly. We pride ourselves on our booming economy and the quality of our graduates to the point of nausea; we stay silent about the vast numbers of teenagers who are leaving school every year, barely literate in English never mind any other language. Is it sane, is it wise, is it even moral to oblige such children to attend Irish instruction that their entire political and social culture simply abhors?
Money and time squandered on this idiocy cannot be made good from elsewhere. Both, and the lost opportunities to learn other skills, are gone for ever. Yet we prefer to choose politically correct coercion than listen to what the people actually want; and they do not want to speak Irish.
I might think their attitude is regrettable - and I do: if I were to have a child, I would send the creature to an Irish speaking school, and not just because I would be then spared having to help out with the homework - but it is cultural imperialism and class condescension to make them learn what they, abidingly, do not want to learn.
Is it not illustrative that so many Northern Catholic schools have such little uptake in Irish, proportional to the Catholic population? No group is more "nationally minded" in the island; yet that group remains largely uninterested in speaking Irish.
Never mind what opinion polls tell us about what people say they want - an Irish speaking nation; saying the opposite is the national equivalent of approving of sin. The point is that very few people can be bothered to spend the time and energy learning the language. They are prepared to learn many things; but not Irish.
We are spending £300 million a year on the language, which is palpably dying. It is spoken by enthusiasts; and enthusiasts by definition are marginal. Talk of what happened in Wales, Catalonia, Israel is meaningless, and money spent emulating their unique situations is as useful as Philip II sending galleys into the English Channel simply because they worked so well in the Mediterranean.
There is a logic which we ignore. Irish should be a voluntary subject only. All children in the State should have the right to learn it; but the State has no right to compel the unwilling to learn it. It is that simple, and should be capable of rational discussion; and now let the abuse begin.