OPINION:The aim to increase the number of daily speakers to 250,000 requires unrealistic rates of increase
THE PUBLICATION this week of the Government’s 20-year strategy for the Irish language was the culmination of various research studies, expert reports and extensive consultations, over a 10-year period, on the crisis in the state of Irish in the Gaeltacht.
The process started in the year 2000 with the setting up of Coimisiún na Gaeltachta, tasked with the preparation of a plan designed to stem the erosion of Irish as the everyday language of the community in the last few surviving Gaeltacht areas.
Coimisiún na Gaeltachta reported in 2002. The government, after some delay, eventually commissioned a comprehensive linguistic study which was published in 2007. The prognosis was stark: the tide was ebbing fast on Irish as an everyday language in the few remaining Gaeltacht communities.
The report concluded that Irish could survive as “the predominant community and family language” in the strongest Gaeltacht areas only for another 15 to 20 years, unless the Government adopted a number of specific recommendations in order to “form the basis of an integrated strategy to address the linguistic challenges facing the Irish-speaking communities at present”.
After a decade of procrastination during which the irreversible process of language shift was progressing like a cancer in the few remaining Irish-speaking communities, the Government eventually produced its 20-year strategy.
From a Gaeltacht perspective the strategy is a disappointment for the following reasons:
* There is very little offered by way of an integrated strategy for the existing Irish-speaking areas, who are facing complex challenges as they grapple with language shift in their communities.
* It postpones once again the need to redraw Gaeltacht boundaries based on linguistic criteria, rather than the political considerations which informed the drawing of the boundaries in 1956.
* It intends to turn the State agency Údarás na Gaeltachta into an “Irish Language and Gaeltacht Authority”, functioning on a national basis and thereby diluting its Gaeltacht focus.
From a national perspective the strategy is overambitious in seeking to increase the number of people who use Irish on a daily basis, outside the educational system, from the 2006 census level of 72,000 to 250,000 by 2030.
Where did this figure of 250,000 come from? It seems it was imposed politically on the team of international experts who advised on the drafting of the strategy. While they accepted the 250,000 target as “worthwhile”, they state in section 3 of their report (“The Limits of the Strategy”) that “the research baseline of sociolinguistic data to support such a projection does not currently exist”.
I have done the calculations. It would require an annual rate of increase of about 6 per cent, compounded each year to achieve the 250,000 target by 2030. This is overambitious and should be looked at. It is my fear that a language strategy that sets for itself overambitious targets is likely to fail or to be abandoned for seeming to be a failure.
A more realistic target, while still ambitious, would be a 10 per cent growth every five years. This would give a figure of approximately 120,000 daily users of Irish by the year 2030. This target could be achieved if some of the excellent recommendations in the strategy were implemented, which would support the development of networks of Irish speakers in urban areas, thereby providing the necessary context for Irish speakers, living outside the Gaeltacht, to use the language more frequently.
The 20-year strategy will do little to reverse language shift in Gaeltacht communities, despite the fact that such was the objective set by the government when this process was set in motion 10 years ago. Indeed, the stated intention of shifting the focus of Údarás na Gaeltachta away from the Gaeltacht may be an implicit admission by the State that attempting to save Irish as the everyday language of the few remaining Gaeltacht communities should be abandoned in favour of the worthy but softer option of language promotion throughout the State.
The strategy fails to grasp the nettle of the Gaeltacht boundaries. At present, according to the 2006 census, 95,000 people live within the boundaries of the Official Gaeltacht, as set out in 1956. However, if the minimum criteria for Gaeltacht recognition, recommended in the Comprehensive Linguistic Study on the Use of Irish in the Gaeltacht (2007), were applied, then the population should be 44,000.
It was hoped the language strategy would deal with this thorny problem and redraw the boundaries of the Gaeltacht to reflect fairly the linguistic reality and then concentrate efforts on language maintenance within the new boundaries. Instead it proposes to waste scarce resources on the drawing up of expensive linguistic plans for maintaining the Gaeltacht status of communities in which Irish is effectively dead as a community language.
Such a strategy may be designed for political rather than for sociolinguistic reasons. It offers little hope to those few remaining Gaeltacht areas, which are still Irish-speaking and are struggling, against the odds, to maintain the unbroken linguistic link that goes back 2,000 years in their communities.
Donncha Ó hÉallaithe was until recently a maths lecturer at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. Over the last 10 years he has conducted research into the use of Irish in both Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht areas. He lives in the south Connemara Gaeltacht and is a frequent commentator on Irish language and Gaeltacht issues on RnaG and TG4