If Éamon Ó Cuí v wants to revive the Irish language, he needs to learn some lessons from history, writes Jim Duffy
The row over Éamon Ó Cuív's decision to rename Dingle has striking echoes of past controversies over the Irish language. Irish, and how to make people speak it, has been at the heart of many disagreements since independence; from the enforced requirement of Irish for teaching and the Civil Service, to the deeply-hated Irish language curriculum that probably did more to undermine young people's interest in the language than any other single act.
When a new political elite displaced the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918 their vision of Ireland was dramatically different to what had gone before in one key area, the Irish language. In contrast to the Irish Parliamentary Party, which was closer to the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival in its cultural thinking, Sinn Féin members had developed their ideas through Conradh na nGaeilge. Ensuring an Irish-speaking Ireland was crucial for a whole generation of leaders across the treaty divide, from Éamon de Valera to Richard Mulcahy and Ernest Blythe. But in their radicalism they were out of touch with a population who were largely English-speaking and indifferent at best, hostile at worst, to a language many perceived as "backward".
Unfortunately the route they chose was bureaucratic, not inspirational. Laws and rules were created to force the use of Irish. Without Irish, a police job, a teaching job, indeed any job associated with the new State, was out. Top down rules were issued to a largely indifferent public who soon came to dislike the "you must" rather than the "you should" tone of State policy.
Yet while rules were created, those parts of the State with native Irish speakers, the Gaeltachtaí, suffered a wholescale collapse. Entire counties lost their remnants of native Irish. Douglas Hyde's recitation of his Declaration of Office as president in 1938 was one of the last occasions when Roscommon Irish was heard. The Gaeltachtaí shrivelled to tiny isolated clumps of Irish speakers on the fringes of the south, the west and the north.
One of the principal growth areas for Irish was in tiny mini-gaeltachtaí in Áras an Uachtaráin and various government departments, though even in the departments too the language, after an initial spurt in the 1920s and 1930s, declined into little more than symbolism. Irish became almost invisible within Dáil Éireann, where by the end of the century the State didn't even bother to translate Acts of the Oireachtas into Irish. Symbolic tokenism became the order of the day, hence token Irish names: Bord na Móna. Bord Gáis. Aer Rianta.
By the 1950s and 1960s when the first generation of Irish leaders retired they were replaced by figures whose commitment to Irish involved little more than delivering three paragraphs of an ardfheis speech as Gaeilge. Later Bertie Ahern's government didn't even bother using Irish when naming agencies, replacing Aer Rianta with the Dublin Airport Authority, for example.
So where did it all go wrong? Arguably the passion for the Irish language among the early leaders blinded them to one elementary fact: those Irish people who no longer spoke Irish could not be forced to use it. They had to be won over. The State should have focused its effort on keeping Irish alive in the Gaeltachtaí rather than imagining that somehow, a set of top-down rules was going to make the entire country start speaking the language again. The fanaticism of forced Irish created immense bad feeling among those treated as though their lack of Irish, or lack of desire to speak Irish, made them second class citizens. Even presidents weren't immune. Erskine Childers felt forced to deliver his declaration of office in a language he'd never learnt and could not pronounce, rather than his native English, which he was constitutionally entitled to use. As late as 1990 Mary Robinson was pressurised by a civil servant to make up an Irish language signature. She wanted to learn Irish, and did, but saw no reason to make up a phoney signature.
Few areas went as disastrously wrong as teaching Irish in schools, where a curriculum designed more to make people learn Irish than to want to speak Irish, drove generations of young people away from the language. Peig Sayers's story could have been used, if taught in English, to generate interest in Irish culture. But by being taught through Irish, the cultural potential was lost. Instead all children remembered was struggling in Irish to read a book they came to hate. So both Irish and culture lost out.
All of this sets the context for Éamon Ó Cuív's current language policy. While on the one hand having a Minister with a commitment to Irish is welcome, Ó Cuív has adopted the same "top down" approach that backfired so disastrously before.
Issuing a diktat that the people of Dingle can't call their town by the name they've known it has infuriated the local community, many of them Irish speakers. Insisting that no English appear on road signs in Gaeltachtaí was provocative when all that was needed was that Irish be given its rightful dominance.
Irish is entitled to parity of esteem. But that does not mean parity of print runs. Semi-State companies were forced to print equal number of Irish and English versions of annual reports, when there was only a tiny demand for the Irish language version. So resources and goodwill that could be used to make a real difference to promoting Irish got wasted on piles of unread documents.
With the number of native speakers practically in freefall, the Irish State may well be facing its last chance to save the Gaeltachtaí. If they are lost, and they could well be, an irreplaceable part of Ireland will have been lost for good. The Minister needs to work with Irish-speaking communities, not simply instruct them, as past ministers did. The argument over Dingle suggests that the minister hasn't learnt the lessons of history. And that could be the ultimate tragedy for the national language and for Ireland.