Growing up, Anraí Mac Garaidh heard a story about a man who thought he’d gone deaf because he couldn’t hear the sea any more.
The man, Mac Garaidh recalls, was one of 373 people from several Gaeltacht communities on Ireland’s west and northwest coasts that moved to Baile Ghib, Co Meath, under an initiative spearheaded by Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government in the late 1930s.
“He woke up one of the early days [in Baile Ghib]. He thought he had gone deaf, because he was used to the sounds, sounds of the waves, the sea. It was a big change for them. Change of culture, landscape.”
The Land Commission bought more than 1,000 acres in Baile Ghib, which were divided into 22-acre farms and divvied out to 59 Gaeltacht families between 1937 and 1939. The same had happened in 1935, in Rath Cairn – a village 20km from Baile Ghib – when 27 Irish-speaking families moved there from Connemara.
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With them, they brought their native tongue to the plains of Co Meath to create two new Gaeltacht areas. To do so, they overcame differences in dialects – or canúintí – between families, and outside hostility to Irish speakers in their adopted county, among other challenges.
In late March 1937 Mac Garaidh’s father boarded a bus in Fanad, Co Donegal, destined for Baile Ghib.
Driving through Baile Ghib today, nods to the village’s unique history are apparent – road names like Bothar Dun na nGall and Bothar Maigh Eo give clues as to where residents’ ancestors originated from.
“It’s their sacrifice that’s given us the privilege of living in the Gaeltacht that we live in today,” Mac Garaidh says, sitting in the staffroom of Scoil Ultain Naofa, a “bunscoil lán-Gaeilge” in the heart of Baile Ghib. “I think it’s our duty to honour them and to ensure that the status of the Gaeltacht here is preserved, because we’re under threat.”
With a general election looming, battling that threat – and seeking governmental support to do so – was to the fore of conversation when local educators and community activists met over tea and KitKats in Baile Ghib.
It might seem unfair but there has to be positive discrimination in favour of Gaeltacht people to keep them in the area
— Anraí Mac Garaidh
According to 2022 Census data, 1,179 people living in the two Gaeltacht areas in Co Meath are Irish speakers, or 59 per cent of the population. Of that number, 425 said they spoke the language “very well”, while 297 said they spoke Gaeilge daily. At the last census, 40 per cent of the population nationally said that they were Irish speakers.
Scoil Ultain Naofa principal Niamh Uí Fhaogáin says a lack of affordable housing in Meath Gaeltacht areas is preventing native Irish speakers from staying in their homeplace. Uí Fhaogáin is a Rath Cairn native, her grandfather having arrived in the village in 1935 from Leitir Móir, Connemara.
“I know many of my friends speak Irish, their spouses speak Irish, but they just can’t compete against the market that’s there at the minute,” she says. “Then someone’s coming in, buying the house, and they might be bringing English into the community.”
Other families, who may be without ties to Baile Ghib but want to raise children through Irish, are prevented from building houses because of Meath County Council’s local-needs planning criteria, Uí Fhaogáin says. Under these, the local authority considers factors such as family ties to an area before granting planning permission.
Mac Garaidh, who is principal of St Patrick’s Classical School in Navan, notes that unchecked housing development, with units sold on the open market “purely for profit”, has the potential to decimate a Gaeltacht.
“That is always a threat in any Gaeltacht – not just here, in the west of Ireland as well,” he says. “It might seem unfair but there has to be positive discrimination in favour of Gaeltacht people to keep them in the area.”
Uí Fhaogáin agrees that she made a conscious decision to teach within the Gaeltacht. “I think it’s important, if you have Irish that you should be able to give it to the cheád ghlúin eile [next generation].”
But she says that there needs to be more government support for young Irish speakers to live in the Gaeltacht – not least Irish-speaking teachers.
As in communities across the island, many people in their 20s and 30s have left Baile Ghib for opportunities abroad. “There’s an awful lot of young people from here gone,” says Máirín Ní Shiadhail, sitting between Uí Fhaogáin and Mac Garaidh in the staffroom.
And yet despite these challenges, there has been a renewed community vigour in recent times, agrees Ní Shiadhail, a retired teacher and community activist.
Where once our native language was seen as a signifier of poverty, people now view their Irish as a “badge of honour”, says Ní Shiadhail, whose parents arrived in Baile Ghib from Fanad and west Kerry. Local initiatives promoting the language as well as different events marking the history of the village and its people are a means to preserve the Gaeltacht in Baile Ghib.
Government investment could help support locals in their efforts – for example, the funding of an community development officer in Baile Ghib, through Udarás na Gaeltachta.
“Development officers could oversee the youth club, the Irish classes, the organisation of events, the organisation of festivals,” says Mac Garaidh.
What kind of government those in Baile Ghib believe will support in their efforts to preserve their Gaeltacht is a little less clear.
Says Ní Shiadhail: “I just would like to see some change [in government], because for me – and I’m 73, next birthday, and I’ve been interested in politics all my life – I have seen nothing dramatic happening in my lifetime.”
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