A chara. I would like to welcome Fintan O'Toole's well balanced article (June 7th) on the Teilifis na Gaeilge debate. Mr O'Toole does not seem to be an Irish language enthusiast himself but he acknowledges the "cultural cringe" associated with many of those who are against the Irish language television project. However, while Mr O'Toole is getting, at some rather important points, I think he misses out on some of the subtleties of the situation.
He is right to distinguish between the hypocrisy associated with the notion of the "first national language" and what he, sees as a more tenable argument for Teilifis na Gaeilge on the basis of minority rights. He is right when he attributes the hypocritical stance to many of our politicians. However, he over simplifies the true situation when he tries to convict the present day Irish language movement of this, hypocrisy.
This may have been true in the past, and it is admittedly true of certain sections of the language movement today. However, the language movement is not a single organisation or front - many different ideological standpoints are accommodated within it. It seems to me that in recent years the ideology of minority rights and cultural pluralism has been more to the fore in the language movement than what Mr O'Toole would call the myth of the first national language.
However, it is only when a myth no longer seems to adequately explain our social and cultural reality that we call it a myth. Thus, while we should certainly beware, of the oversimplifications of the past, we should also be wary of new oversimplifications, such as the notion that the Irish language question is only about the rights of a separate and distinct minority group. Mr O'Toole points out that about five per cent of the population use Irish as a first language and that this makes them a minority group of the same order as the Protestant community.
But the fact of the matter is that the Irish speaking community is not directly comparable to Protestants, Italian speakers or any other such minority groups. Research indicates that only 25 per cent of those "who heard Irish spoken frequently (always or often) in their childhood home experience the same usage now . . . Quite simply, Irish speaking networks are neither numerous nor strong enough to absorb and retain more than a minority of the children of Irish speaking homes, once they become independent adults." (Committee on Language Attitudes Research, 1975.)
Yet, in spite of this loss of 75 per cent due to intermarriage and societal pressures, the Irish speaking community (leaving aside the particular case of the Gaeltacht) manages to make up this devastating generational effect by recruiting new members from the wider population. What other minority can boast of such a record? Surely the existence of such a potential reservoir of Irish speakers in the wider population points to a certain "national" significance for the Irish language, although not in the exaggerated manner of the past. There is a certain sense in which the Irish language belongs to the people of Ireland and not just to a small minority who use it intensively. Repeated surveys have shown a strong ideological attachment on the part of the majority of Irish people to the language. The notion of the "first national language" exaggerates in one direction, the notion of "minority rights" in another. The truth lies somewhere in between. Le gach dea-ghui,
Goirtin na Coille,
Bale an Chnoic,
Dun Laoghire,
Co Bhaile Atha Cliath.