Aisling Nic Giolla Bhéin sits in a tiny child’s seat in one of the prefabricated units that make up Scoil an Droichid on the Ormeau Road in Belfast. She is leading the chorus of Na Trí Mhuicín – or Three Little Pigs in English – with some of her young charges.
The chorus is joyous, ending in peals of laughter in a school that hopes to finally have a permanent home on the other side of Ormeau Park in September, 2026 – 30 years, almost to the day, since the school began life.
“We’re at 181 pupils at the moment, so there is no room. The classrooms are tiny. Even the Portakabins are old, bar the nursery; that came new,” says Nic Ghiolla Bhéin.
The pressure is proof of the increasing success of Irish-language schools across Belfast. This success was on full display two weeks ago when then-president elect Catherine Connolly visited Oireachtas na Samhna in the city’s Waterfront Hall.
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The five-day celebration of the language was held in Belfast for the first time in 20 years. Even though it was in Co Antrim, the event was opened by Irish Minister for the Gaeltacht, Dara Calleary.
Today, Scoil an Droichid is one of 10 Irish-language primary schools in Belfast which, along with one secondary school, offer concrete evidence of the gains the language is making.
The growing number of pupils is seen elsewhere, even in traditionally Protestant east Belfast, where Scoil na Seolta’s numbers are going “through the roof”, according to its co-founder Linda Ervine.
The Irish language is not about politics, Nic Ghiolla Bhéin insists, even if Stormont and other establishments in Northern Ireland become exercised about street signage or complain that Irish is being forced on the unwilling.
“People have always wanted to politicise the language. For me, and for all us of here, that’s not what it’s about at all,” she says.
“In Europe, most people are bilingual. Why wouldn’t you give that to a child? It’s not about lessening English. That’s not what the Irish language is about. It’s not about taking away English or getting rid of an English sign.”
Growing up in nationalist Lenadoon in west Belfast in the 1980s, she was the only child in her street to go to Irish language school and was often “teased and things like that”.
Her school, Bunscoil Phobal Feirste, survived on the backs of parents who had a rota for street collections. “We were our own wee community. If we didn’t do things for ourselves, nobody else was going to do them,” she says.
“It was a different way. It was about community ethos. Even small things like calling the teacher by their first name. A sense of, ‘I respect you and you respect me, and we work together’.”
The use of teachers’ first names by children – the same rule still applies today – was “massively frowned upon by neighbours, believing it wasn’t a respectful thing to do”, she remembers.
Now 18 years in teaching, Nic Ghiolla Bhéin, the school’s acting principal, says some people still have misconceptions. “Some believed children were just being taught Irish, that they weren’t doing maths or science.
“Some still have that attitude. We teach everything that English-medium schools do. We just do it through Irish,” she says, adding that nearly all of her pupils come from homes “where their mother tongue is English”.
Consequently, they are immersed in the Irish language from the minute they come in, through play, though art, not just in class. “It won’t work otherwise. That in itself is different,” she says.
“Everything is done through Irish. English is taught as a subject. Until the later stage of P3 (first class in the Republic), there is no English spoken,” says Nic Ghiolla Bhéin.
The level of Irish in the home varies across the city. In west Belfast, more children go to Irish-language schools whose parents went to those same schools, “so the use of Irish at home will be higher”.
Not every parent who sends their child to an Irish-language primary school wants to send them on to an Irish language secondary school. Some feel they will not be able to help their child with later studies through Irish.
Sometimes, geography plays a role, because the only secondary school in Belfast, Coláiste Feirste, is too difficult to get to every day.
Irish-language schools survive by “a trinity approach”, she says, with the school, parents and the wider community working together: “One can’t work without the other; we all need each other to build upon this.”
Offering an example as we speak in a corridor of the school, she points to a Republic of Ireland football jersey worn in 2022 by Mark Sykes. The Bristol City midfielder played at underage level for Northern Ireland before declaring for the Republic.
“He’s a past pupil of here. I taught him back in the day. That was his first international and he gifted it to the school. His first shirt, so it’s special that he came back to us,” the acting principal says.
Success creates its own problems, however. Currently, more than 400 students leave each of Belfast’s Irish-language primary schools. Coláiste Feirste can absorb less than half that number.
Scoil an Droichid has 10 teachers, along with vitally-needed support staff. Recently, the Education Authority recruited two of their people – a compliment to the quality of the staff, but a headache nonetheless.
Nearly 150 teachers graduate annually from west Belfast’s St Mary’s University College, but less than an eighth can teach in Irish language-schools immediately. “You can speak Irish fluently, but you need to understand immersion education,” she says.
In east Belfast, Scoil na Seolta, which started as a pre-school nursery four years ago, moved to its new home on Montgomery Road in February, welcoming its first primary school pupils in September.
Like Scoil an Droichid, Linda Ervine’s school is housed in temporary buildings on lands once occupied by Short Brothers’ guided weapons division, supported by the Irish Government’s Shared Island Fund.
Ervine, the Scoil na Seolta co-founder, told The Irish Times demand is rising in what is still a largely Protestant area, even though it faced planning objections and intimidatory banners early on.
Unionist politicians have long resisted the Irish language, she says. “I suppose they see [it] as part in parcel of what they call the greening of Ulster,” Ervine says, referencing a view held by some that Northern Ireland is incrementally shifting towards a united Ireland.
“There are people who feel very threatened by that. I don’t see that. What I say is we have our own dialect here. We are Ulster people, I am an Ulster person, I have a great pride in that and this is who I am.”
The school has had “small little bits of trouble, but nothing too much: missiles thrown and things like that”, she says. “We clean it up, we get on with what we do and what are we about. We’re about educating children.”
