Brand Ireland must not be allowed to die
The Government must reverse its policies against immersion in Irish language schools, writes Marc Coleman
Sunday January 03 2010
Before you go making any New Year resolutions, remind yourself of last year's resolution and ask yourself -- be honest now -- did you stick to it?
I stuck to mine.
This time last year, I decided to use Irish in my everyday work. I made a note of those people with whom I came into working contact who were fluent, and I even changed the answering message on my mobile phone. Incidentally, the number of people with some fluency in Irish is surprisingly high: 1.8 million.
My willingness to display grammatic incompetence was heroic. My clangers were hilarious. But although still far from fluency, I am now the first member of my family in more than 200 years to use Irish on a regular basis. The reason for my success? A brief spell of total immersion in a monolingual environment.
Unfortunately, misguided Government policy is stymieing the chance for tens of thousands of children to grow up in Irish-speaking environments. In a policy that will have disastrous economic as well as cultural effects, the Government is forcing schools in the Gaeltacht to spend a certain amount of time teaching English. Kids will learn English anyway, bombarded as they are by it outside of school from the age of zero. The question is whether Irish is being given a fair chance as well by exposure for a few hours a day.
If Government policy is adhered to, we will continue to be like Britain -- whose schoolchildren are notoriously bad at foreign languages. And because language is the root of all intelligence, Irish and British children perform badly in the Pisa studies of competence in mathematics and science.
Because the continental schools get language right -- teaching children fluency in two and sometimes three languages from an early age -- they get everything else right as well. We cannot even teach our kids their own language, so our school system underperforms across the board.
This failure is destroying our culture, and in the long run it will undermine our economy. On the culture front, there is no argument. Like the mountain rock pools that feed
our lakes and rivers, the Irish language may not be the most visible source of our culture and identity, but cut it off and that culture and identity will soon dry up. Even if we don't speak it regularly, the mere act of learning Irish when we are young influences profoundly how we think, how we talk, how we interact with each other, how we write and how we sing.
Our national complacency in this area is making Ireland drift into a mid-Atlantic no-man's land. If we are not careful, Ireland will become nothing more than a cultural hybrid of England and the US. And if we think that tourists -- particularly the diaspora -- who support over a quarter of a million jobs will pay Irish prices so that they can spend their holidays watching English soccer in our pubs and hotel lounges, we've got another think coming.
Brand Ireland will survive only if there is something of substance behind it. And that substance will die out unless we do something about it.
This new decade will be one of economic renewal. But it should also be about a renewal of our language and culture. It's time to rid ourselves of our post-colonial hang-ups and inferiority complexes about our language and identity.
It's also time to get rid of stupid arguments about the Irish language. The idea, for example, that Irish would harm our competitiveness and that our knowledge of English is an essential competitive advantage. Two countries very similar to Ireland -- Finland and Israel -- show just how wrong-headed this idea is. Most of their inhabitants already speak English. But because they have brought their native languages back from extinction -- for example, from a few thousand people a century ago, five million people now speak Hebrew -- Finns and Israelis are much better than us at learning other languages.
As a result, their scientists, engineers and researchers are also smarter.
Knowing English isn't a source of international competitiveness anymore, it is merely a vital prerequisite to being able to trade. Competitiveness -- real competitiveness of the sort you can brand abroad and trade from -- comes from native genius.
The Government must reverse its policies against immersion in Irish language schools, particularly in the Gaeltacht. And it must go further. Having been on the retreat for decades, a determined effort must now be made to consolidate, regrow and eventually extend the Gaeltacht regions in Donegal, Connacht, Kerry, west Cork, Meath and Waterford.
The main reason should be to ensure Ireland remains Irish. But the economic importance of this is also crucial.
To the old saying, "Is Tir gan Teanga Tir gan ainm," we should add, "Is Tir gan Teanga Tir gan geilleagar."
Marc's new book 'Back from the Brink' is on sale now
Originally published in
