Irish and ‘language snobs’
March 25, 2014
Sir, – Brian Ó Broin (Letters, March 22nd) suggests that the target of 250,000 Irish speakers by 2030 is an achievable one, but only “if non-Gaeltacht Irish speakers begin to shoulder the burden that Gaeltacht people have been predominantly carrying since the foundation of the State – using the language at home”.
How strange to think that speaking to one’s family in what is considered to be one’s native tongue should be termed a burden. Communicating in either one’s first or second language at home should be (largely) a pleasure, not a burden; and I would imagine that for the vast majority of Irish-speakers it is.
If indeed the Irish language is such a heavy load to carry, then it should be ditched without delay. A language that is a burden is worthless.
Yours, etc,
JEREMY CASTLE,
Ballinderry,
Nenagh,
Co Tipperary
Sir, – An Coimisinéir Teanga, Rónán Ó Domhnaill, does not advance his cause by using the slur “linguistic Darwinists” (Opinion & Analysis, March 24th). The survival of the 2,000-year-old Irish language is a tribute to its evolution, not a refutation of it.
Yours, etc,
DR JOHN DOHERTY,
Cnoc an Stollaire,
Gaoth Dobhair,
Co Donegal
www.Irishtimes.com
WorldWise Global Schools – 2014 Grant Call
March 24, 2014
Irish Aid’s WorldWise Global Schools is inviting applications for funding to support post-primary development education initiatives in the upcoming academic year (September 2014 – May 2015).
What is Development Education?
Development education is an educational process aimed at increasing awareness and understanding of the rapidly changing, interdependent and unequal world in which we live. WorldWise Global Schools seeks to increase the engagement of students and teachers with development education by providing funding and support to post-primary schools, school networks and NGOs who work with schools to integrate a global justice and development dimension though curricular and extracurricular activities. Further details of our programme can be found online at www.worldwiseschools.ie and support in Irish is available to participating schools.
2014 Grant Call
If your organisation or a school you work with is interested in applying for a 2014-2015 annual grant, please register for an application at www.worldwiseschools.ie/funding. You may also register by calling 01 6852078 or by emailing info@worldwiseschools.ie. Note that the deadline for receipt of applications is 16 April 2014.
Gael Champa 2014
March 24, 2014
Gael-Champa is a summer sports camp as Gaeilge, providing cultural, educational and sporting activities for children through the medium of Irish!
The camp caters for children from English speaking schools as well as Gaelscoileanna. Activities include Gaelic football, hurling, rugby, volleyball, soccer, basketball, swimming, drama, céilí dance and much more.
Gael-Champa is back this summer! Secure your place online at ;
A Fun-Filled Seachtain na Gaeilge at Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin
March 24, 2014
We had a fantastic Seachtain na Gaeilge here in the Cultúrlann for the whole community both young and old and for both learners and Irish Speakers alike. We kicked off our event on World Book day with the fantastic “Little Festival of Books.” This is the 2nd year we have organised this festival in association with Derry City Council. Children from the city’s 3 Gaelscoileanna came to the Cultúrlann to celebrate books. Lúrapóg Larapóg put on a fantastic show for children performed by children. This excellent performance featured Singing, storytelling, dancing and music and all the children were able to take part. In the afternoon, Gearóidín Bhreathnach, the renowned Donegal Storyteller caught the pupils imagination with a selection of stories and legends, both newly written and long standing. We hope to make this book festival a yearly event.
We also saw the hard work of Club Óige Setanta, Triax and especially the hard work of local Gaelscoil students and the Sollus Highland Dancers pay off when they held an Irish language Flash Mob during Seachtain na Gaeilge. This colourful Flashmob happened in Foyleside to the great surprise of shoppers and it featured Irish Dancing, Hip Hop Dancing and Highland Dancing and a fantastic rendition of the Irish version of “Wake me up”. This performance both surprised and delighted passersby and it certainly sparked their Irish spirit.
Linda Irvine, the Irish Development Officer with the East Belfast Mission also dropped in on the Cultúrlann during Seachtain na Gaeilge to give a presentation and have a discussion about the Hidden History of Protestants and the Irish Language. We also launched an exhibition called “The Living Language” which gives insight into the same topic. This discussion gave learners and Irish Speakers a chance to gain an insight into an aspect of Irish that isn’t known by the public at large and it also gave them the opportunity to discuss problems and possibilities with Linda herself.
We finished off the very busy Irish week with St. Patricks Day in which we had a full day of events available to the public completely free of charge. The Cultúrlann was full with families all enjoying the Story telling, the Balloon Modelling, the Face Painting, the Music Sessions and the especially the Fanzini Bros. These 2 crazy Kerry men brought their Irish Language Circus show to the Cultúrlann and wowed young people and old with their antics.
We had a host of other events during Seachtain na Gaeilge as well and this is only a taste of the programme we had. Now we have to start planning for next year’s events.
Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin
37 Mórshráid Shéamais
Doire
BT48 7DF
Why minding our language is a priority
March 24, 2014
Opinion: Irish speakers assert the right to conduct business with the State in Irish because it is key to survival of the language
The thousands of Irish speakers who marched in Dublin last month for their rights weren’t looking for any special treatment.
The rights of Irish speakers are recognised in article eight of the Constitution and in the Official Languages Act 2003, while the rights of linguistic minorities are provided for in a number of important international documents including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Unesco’s Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights.
Increasingly, it is accepted that the rights of linguistic minorities are basic human rights.
As someone who was raised through Irish in the Gaeltacht and is now trying to raise his own children through Irish, I understand the difficulties faced by Irish speakers.
While many bodies fulfil their obligations willingly and conscientiously, the reality is that basic services in Irish are often made available as the exception rather than the rule.
Indeed, the notion that Irish speakers are somehow arguing for their rights from a position of privilege is one of the many absurdities that feature in the debate about our national language. Speaking Irish or raising a family through Irish is not an easy option.
Irish speakers live, after all, in a country where the majority speak English, and in the battle to save a minority language, the odds are always stacked in favour of the majority language, especially when the majority language is one of the world’s dominant means of communication.
The provision of language rights helps make the fight for the survival of a vulnerable or endangered language that little bit fairer, as languages often live or die depending on their perceived status and the level of prestige they are accorded.
Powerful message
When the rights of a linguistic minority to interact with the State in their own language are recognised, it sends a powerful message from the powerful.
In a review of Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World a number of years ago, the author Jane Stevenson suggested it might be time to adapt the old joke that a language is a dialect with an army, when “the real key to survival is for a language to be a dialect with a civil service”.
Stevenson wrote: “A class of bureaucrats with the power to defend its monopoly can keep a language going for centuries, as can a set of scriptures, while conquerors come and go.”
This is why Irish speakers, including my predecessor as Coimisinéir Teanga, Seán Ó Cuirreáin, have been calling for the recruitment of more civil servants with Irish.
Irish speakers are asking for the right to conduct their business with the State in Irish because the provision of such services is key to the survival of the language, and not because they take a perverse joy in ringing up public bodies only to be put on hold and then told that “the Irish speaker is on holidays”.
These demands are being made by parents struggling against the odds to pass a 2,000-year-old language onto their children in order to preserve what is an important part of both our cultural identity and global linguistic diversity.
Is it too much to ask that children in the Gaeltacht should enjoy the right to basic services, such as healthcare, in their first language, which also happens to be the first official language of the State, according to the Constitution?
While governments since 1922 have made more positive interventions on behalf of Irish than is sometimes acknowledged, official language policy has sometimes consisted of no more than pieties and plámás.
By indulging in empty rhetoric about the importance of Irish, while failing to grant it anything like the status promised by all the lip service, the Irish State, since its foundation, has sent out mixed messages about the value of the language.
The Official Languages Act 2003 and the establishment of Oifig an Choimisinéara Teanga, were important milestones in that they marked a break from the tokenism of the past by giving practical effect to the rights of Irish speakers. The full implementation of this legislation and the continued independence of the Office of the Language Commissioner are crucial to the future of Irish.
There will always be those who view all Irish speakers as fanatics, and there will always be, as the current President of Ireland once put it, “people for whom Irish is not half-dead enough”. These negative views about Irish don’t represent the attitude of the vast majority of the people of Ireland.
On the contrary, research shows that more than 90 per cent of Irish people have a favourable attitude to the promotion and protection of Irish. This continued support is cause for hope, as is the success of our Gaelscoileanna, the vibrancy of TG4 and RTÉ RnaG, and the modest increase in the number of daily Irish speakers outside the education system reported in the last census.
Increasingly vulnerable
Irish, however, is in an increasingly vulnerable position in the Gaeltacht, and experts predict that its days as the main language of the home and community are numbered unless radical remedial action is taken.
Such radical action will require a will that has not always been apparent in the State’s approach to Irish.
In the meantime, only linguistic Darwinists would regard as radical the call for basic rights made by those who marched in Dublin last month.
Rónán Ó Domhnaill is An Coimisinéir Teanga
From Belfast to Belfearg
March 24, 2014
Irish speakers in Belfast are to follow Dublin’s lead and hold their own “Lá Dearg” (“Red Day”) march to highlight their concerns over the language.
Spokeswoman, Miss Caoimhe Ní Chathail, said that Irish speakers in the North had decided to build on the “energy that grew from the Irish-language day in Dublin. The Irish language community, North and South, are “red with anger” about the current circumstances in which our limited resources are being put in danger by state cut-backs and our language rights are being denied to us on a systemic level”.
She said that the European Commission had shown that the Northern Ireland Executive was failing Irish and that some politicians had a “hostile outlook”. In addition, there was “a lack of support for the use of the language in the courts, in the media, in public signage and in the education sector”.
The event was to highlight three demands: a comprehensive rights-based Irish Language Act for the North; the need to develop a comprehensive Irish-medium education system and to ensure that adequate resources be provided for the language.
The march will leave Cultúrlann MacAdam-Ó Fiaich, Falls Road, Saturday 12 April at 2pm and go to Belfast city centre.
www.Irishtimes.com
Líofa 2015 ag druidim Sheachtain na Gaeilge
March 24, 2014
New app for the Leaving Cert
March 24, 2014
Extra resource for students due to take the Irish Oral Exam at the end of the month
With 40% of the marks going for the Irish Oral Exam, an interesting new resource has been launched by www.clevercourses.ie to help Leaving Certificate students.
Sraith Pictiúr 2014 is an interactive app covering the 20 pictures included in the irish Oral Exam. Each story within the app contains audio descriptions, key vocabulary, useful phrases along with English language translations and includes 120 different sample audio descriptions from native Irish speakers to help students improve pronunciation.
Sraith Pictiúr is a great resource for students who are currently preparing and revising for the exam which will take place at the end of March.
The app has been created by expert Irish teachers and past Irish oral state examiners and the Sraith Pictiúr producers say it has been designed to help students build the necessary language skills to create their own versions of the stories to help build the necessary skills to ace their oral exam.
Tiernan O’Neill, Product Marketing Manager with clevercourses.ie, said, “Having met with many Irish teachers in recent weeks, the feedback to date has been very positive, with many also downloading the App to show their students. It also promotes ICT in education which is something we feel very passionately about”.
The Sraith Pictiúr 2014 App is available for higher and ordinary level students and is available on Google Play and iOS App stores. It is priced at between €1.99 and €4.49.
Foilsithe ar Gaelport.com
Cúntóirí Gaeilge 2014-2015
March 21, 2014
Feighlí linbh le Gaeilge
March 21, 2014
