Gaeltacht ar an dé deiridh?
April 2, 2013
‘We don’t have any such thing as a Gaeltacht any more,’ says Seosamh Mac Donnacha in the current issue of Comhar. He says that most of the people living in the Gaeltacht are bilingual native speakers, and that they don’t acquire the two languages at the same speed or to the same level of proficiency.
We must ask ourselves a basic question: What is a Gaeltacht? Up until now, the Dublin Government has been happy to draw a line and create an ‘Indian reservation’ without proper infrastructure. Mac Donnacha says that a child brought up in the Gaeltacht would not be able to get basic services through Irish, he would not be able to get a complete education through Irish, he would not be able to get a job without English, and he would not be able to speak to the gardaí in Gaoth Dobhair in Irish.
That is the biggest problem facing Irish in the Gaeltacht and in non-Irish speaking areas: there is no Irish in the environment. When you go into a big paper shop here, you see hundreds of magazines in English (most of them rubbish, but that’s another story.) You cannot get an Irish language magazine in any paper shop in Derry. By the way, you can buy Paris Match in the city centre every week.
If you go abroad, you can pick up the local language very quickly. It is spoken everywhere: on the street, in the house, in the shops, in offices etc. You hear the language all the time on the radio and on the television. You see newspapers and notices in the language. You are constantly in contact with the language- an obvious fact. But that does not happen in Ireland. And a language cannot develop unless it is used continuously in public life.
There is only one country in the world where you can get a job in the public sector without knowing the national language- that is the mad house called Ireland, of course, a land of useless politicians and soulless bureaucrats.
Well, St. Patrick’s Day is over. Irish will be put back in the drawer for another year. But if we keep on going the way we are going, we will go to the cupboard some day, and there will be nothing in it.
www.derryjournal.com
