Irish: if we really care about it, let's stop the pretence [Independent.ie]
- Published: 13 February 2011
Six out of 10 parents, according to new research, think children should be tortured daily. Or forced to learn Irish up until Leaving Cert, to give the practice its official name. The survey? Oh, that was carried out on behalf of Comhar na Muinteoiri Gaeilge, a support organisation for Irish language teachers.
That's a bit like using a survey by the Babar Institute to claim that six out of 10 people who visit the zoo think elephants should be given more sticky buns.
As it happens, I don't believe a word of it. That is, I believe 61 per cent of parents claim to want Irish to remain compulsory, in the same way that people, if asked by pollsters, would express a desire for less rain, or for Dart carriages to smell of hollyhocks and freshly baked bread. I just don't believe that so many parents actually care that much about the subject, since, if they did, they could make a greater effort to use Irish with their children in their own daily lives.
In fact, I'd go further. If you're not making the effort to speak Irish regularly, then your advocacy of the language carries no more weight than the views of a deaf man on how loud the juke box should be played in bars. It's just another example of the tendency to heft responsibility for doing the right thing on to other people's shoulders whilst carrying none of the burden oneself.
Same goes for Irish teachers. If the maintenance of Irish as a compulsory core subject is so dear to their little Gaelic hearts, then they should start teaching it better. That way, it might come to be seen as something worth fighting to preserve, rather than a drain on a curriculum already weighed down with pointless distractions.
The battle is definitely on. Fine Gael has already committed itself at the national level to ending compulsory Irish at Leaving Cert -- a policy which hasn't gone down well in the Gaeltacht, where they've been raking it in for decades making children miserable in their wretched summer schools. Labour's never exactly been keen on the language either, perhaps in revenge for the fact that culchies still refuse to vote for it in the same numbers as Dublin 4 metrosexuals.
If the defenders of Irish language teaching want to keep the gravy train going, they'll have to fight back with something more robust than a poxy survey and a few pious platitudes. Fail, however, and they'll only have themselves to blame.
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