Walking in central Dublin one day late last year I overheard two people, a father and his young daughter, speaking in Irish. Nothing odd about that, you might say. The reason I mention it is because I am fairly sure this was the only such conversation I chanced upon in any public place in the entire year of 2003, writes Enda O'Doherty.
Yet there are those who will tell us, indeed have been telling us with increasing vehemence for some months, that Irish is a language spoken by huge numbers of people - as many, indeed, as speak Maltese or Latvian - and that it is a bloody disgrace that the Government will not make the EU accord it full recognition.
I don't need to tell you that if you walked down the street in Riga you would have no trouble hearing spoken Latvian (plus a bit of Russian, I'm sure). So where, I wonder, are the 100,000 people in this country who supposedly speak Irish every day actually hanging out? And why are they so shy of the rest of us? In the 19th century, a period during which the use of Irish declined catastrophically, children overheard speaking the language in school were liable to be beaten. In this their teachers were probably acting with the best of intentions: speaking Irish meant poverty and English was necessary for social, or more often geographical, mobility.
A chief national aim of independent Ireland was to revive the language, or at any rate arrest its decline. Knowledge of Irish, or the ability to pass exams in it, was made a prerequisite of entry to the universities, civil service and teaching. Changed fortunes indeed, for in an undeveloped economy where jobs were scarce, fluency in Irish, far from being a mark of poverty, was now the passport to every mother's dream: permanent and pensionable state employment. And so the teachers, acting with the best of intentions, beat the children, not for speaking Irish this time, but for speaking it badly.
If official Irish language policy has failed in the revivalist aim it set itself it has at least been successful in two areas. It has allowed the reproduction in each generation of a Gaelic intelligentsia which has kept alive the study of the old literature and the popular idiom. More problematically, it has facilitated the growth of an Irish language nomenklatura in education, administration and the cultural bureaucracy. It is presumably this group, for whom things have not been going so well of late, that is chiefly behind the campaign to open up new career opportunities in Brussels and Strasbourg. An understandable manoeuvre, I suppose, though I don't know if the rest of us will wish to facilitate them in this matter so totally extraneous to the health and survival of the language.
Sean O'Faolain, writing nearly 60 years ago, was pessimistic about the chances of reviving Irish but quite clear about its continuing value and the sense in which it is still our language: "It has now gone underground \ become the runic language of modern Ireland. Even though only a dwindling few think overtly in it all of us can, through it, touch . . .a buried part of ourselves of which we are normally unaware." What O'Faolain thought desirable was the study of language not for patriotic reasons but for its own sake.
Worse than linguistic patriotism, however, is the use of culture and language as weapons against "the others". We have seen Irish subverted to this end for many years in the North and we now seem to be presented with an equal and opposite reaction in unionism's discovery of "Ulster-Scots" and its potential, given "parity of esteem", to get up the collective Fenian nose.
I have yet to come across a Irish nationalist on this side of the Border who doesn't regard the traditional dialect of rural north Ulster as a rather hilarious joke - an attitude which may largely derive from ignorance, or even snobbery, but also relates to a deeply felt need to represent unionists as a people of no culture. A few hours on a fascinating website (www.ulsterscotsagency.com) brought home to me, however, that far from being, as I had been told, simply "English with a Ballymena accent", Ulster-Scots was quite recognisable as the everyday language of the country children who, over 40 years ago, travelled in to attend my (Catholic) Derry city primary school. It was, in fact, a language I spoke, or at least understood, long before I could manage a word of Irish.
It is also, I have learned, a language, or dialect (a language being merely a dialect with an army and navy) which is rich in racy vocabulary and boasts a long tradition of popular verse. Now that I am on the mailing list of the Ulster-Scot newsletter, with its always fascinating articles ("Rangers' founder was the son of a Co Down woman"), I expect my re-education to grow apace.
Whether Ulster-Scots has much of a future outside the academy is another question. The odds are not much in favour of the survival of any minority culture. Do today's teenagers in Ballymoney or Broughshane speak like their grannies or like the cast of Friends? (I would love to think a mixture of the two: "I was, like, danderin' along the loanin' an' she was, like, gulderin' out of her. . . ") Realistically, it may well be the case that this old tongue's best hopes of survival in the short term actually do lie with its current sponsors in the "Proud to be a Prod" movement. If so, that is a pity. Languages don't actually have a religion.