Forty years ago, in the dark days of literary censorship, the musician Ronnie Drew came up with a good idea. He suggested that all the masterpieces of literature, then banned by the censors, should be translated into Irish and sold to the public in cheap, government-subsidised editions, writes Declan Kiberd.
"This," he wickedly proclaimed, "would provide the Irish people with the greatest possible incentive to learn their own language."
He was joking (I think), but schemes no less fantastic had been tried by successive governments in the attempt to promote Irish. Students taking public examinations could earn bonus points just by writing their algebra equations in Gaelic rather than English lettering. If you were a mathematical genius, as well as a dab hand at the cló Gaelach, you might score 110 per cent on a paper, a feat undreamed of by Albert Einstein (but well within the mental capacities of an Éamon de Valera).
Far from advancing the cause of the language, such policies brought it into disrepute with those who found them characteristic of "the land that lost the leprechaun but found the pot of gold".
Few of the policies for promoting Irish had much success. Last week a report showed that more and more students are opting out of its study in our school system. Of the majority which does take it, few emerge after 13 years of classes able to hold a conversation in the language. Minister for Education Mary Hanafin believes that, far from holding ever more examinations at various levels of competence, the State should find ways of making Irish more attractive to young people and of developing their abilities in the spoken language.
The decline is not just in Irish. Numbers taking French, German and Italian are in free fall too. So is the understanding of the rules of grammar. Mastery of the complex protocols of a second or third language seems just too arduous a challenge for many of the PlayStation generation.
In earlier generations, the ruralist emphasis of the school syllabus was blamed for poor progress at Irish. The reminiscences of Peig Sayers, a weathered old Kerrywoman, were felt to have little relevance to kids who walked home from school through streets filled with dope-dealers and glue-sniffers. As far back as the 1960s, the great writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain lamented the fact that the bulk of writing in the modern language seemed to have been designed "for an audience of credulous schoolchildren and pre-conciliar nuns".
Irish became fatally associated with pious puritans and trouble at school. Worse still, it came to be seen by many not as a truly national language, but as the careerist qualification of an affluent state class.
Now, even that grim cachet is gone, as the Irish bourgeoisie finds other measures of its own superiority, as well removed from the zones of culture or the arts. Contemporary Irish writing is brilliant and the syllabus texts bang up-to-date, but it all seems to make no difference.
The speed and rigour with which people mastered English in the 19th century contrasts utterly with their failure to remaster Irish in the 20th, despite massive support from the State. The reasons cited in history books for the loss of Irish in the 19th century - the toll taken by the Famine, the example of Daniel O'Connell and the effect of using English in the national schools - do not include the most potent factor of all: Irish declined only when large numbers decided no longer to use it.
The truth is glossed over lest it shed light on the current situation - Irish people can still decide whether or not to speak their own language.
Even as sections of the middle class abandon Irish, communities in less advantaged areas have set up thriving Gaelscoileanna. And TG4 has helped modernise usage, while encouraging thousands to maintain "passive" competence. Most people, when polled, regard the language as essential to identity, but few are optimistic about its survival. Many, for this very reason, support the idea that it should be mandatory in schools.
That seems a self-contradictory, even crazy, position. Four generations of parents, since the foundation of the State, have in effect said "as for learning Irish, our children will do it for us". But we can't keep off-loading that responsibility on to schools. Saving a language is a lot more than a teacher's job.
If kids themselves were polled - something that is in fact illegal - 80 per cent might not want to do Irish at all. But maybe it would be better if they had that choice. Perhaps the remaining 20 per cent, who studied the language for love, might make the sort of commitment to it that could prove of wider value to the community. The Irish might be seen as a gift rather than a threat by the next generation.