Whatever about the North’s relationship with Gaeilge, our own has been fairly dismal for some time

EXACTLY a week has passed since Leo Varadkar and Theresa May indicated that a breakthrough was imminent in the North. After a 13-month deadlock, it seemed as if the powersharing executive at Stormont would be up and running again in a matter of days.

That was the plan, anyway. Whether it was naivety or a particularly plucky sense of positivity on the part of the Taoiseach and the British prime minister is anyone’s guess.

But their optimistic comments did at least suggest that they hadn’t been paying close enough attention to recent history. Even I could have told them it was unlikely to be that simple. Despite the fact that Sinn Féin’s demands for legislation on the Irish language have long been a sticking point, however, I still wouldn’t have betted on the talks unravelling over such a seemingly straightforward issue.

Of course, the big irony here – and one that presumably hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Taoiseach – is that our national and first official language is in such a shocking state on the southern part of the island.

Evidence of early forms of Irish has been found in inscriptions dating back to at least the 4th century AD and possibly even earlier. But the language began its long decline from the 1700s onwards, largely due to factors related to our colonial past. The Gaelic revival movement from the late 1800s onwards had little lasting impact.

The most recent Census results tell their own story. According to the figures for April 2016, more than 1.76million people – just under 40% of the population – said that they could speak Irish. Of that number, however, fewer than 74,000 spoke it on a daily basis outside the education system. Even more telling is the fact that just 8,068 of the Census forms were actually completed in Irish.

The most stark finding of all, though, is that fewer people speak the language daily outside the school system than actually live in Gaeltacht regions. This is probably the clearest evidence we have that the policies of successive governments have been an abysmal failure.

Various Gaeltacht areas were recognised from the 1920s onwards amid efforts to revive the Irish language. But it was the 1950s when they were formally defined as being in very specific areas of counties Donegal, Waterford, Cork, Kerry, Galway, Mayo and Meath.

Despite all the good intentions, the Gaeltacht project didn’t save Irish. There is actually a strong case to be made that it actually helped marginalise and ghettoise the language in tiny rural pockets dotted around the map.

Now the Gaeltacht itself is in danger of collapse. If it means anything at all to the rest of the country, it is only as a place where middle-class teenagers relocate during the summer holidays to drink cheap cider and attempt to cosy up to members of the opposite sex.

Nobody disputes that marketing Irish to the public at large, especially younger members of the population, is a difficult challenge. It is a harsh-sounding language that lacks the romance of French, say, or the obvious passion of Italian or Spanish.

Meanwhile, it also has an unfortunately fusty and old-fashioned image. But that is no excuse for allowing it to wither away; like it or not, Irish is part of what we are.

Failure

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is little in the way of serious commitment to the language at official level. When Joe McHugh was appointed as Minister for State with responsibility for the Gaeltacht in 2014, it quickly emerged that not only was he not a fluent speaker of Irish – but that he only had a minimal grasp of it. Of far greater concern, though, is the way in which the language is taught in our schools.

Granted, things have improved greatly since the days when Peig Sayers’s unrelentingly grim memoir of life on the Great Blasket Island was a compulsory part of the Leaving Certificate curriculum. But it beggars belief that the main emphasis at primary level still isn’t on conversational Irish. It seems fairly obvious that older children are more likely to engage with a language if they actually learn how to speak it first. None of this is exactly rocket science.

Besides, it is not as if the nation’s youth are embarrassed by the very fact of their nationality as was sometimes the case – and often with good reason – in my day. Being Irish is almost considered trendy in the 21st century.

When I was a kid, all we had to boast about in this country was Rory Gallagher and Thin Lizzy. Nowadays any of number of Irish individuals are internationally renowned and respected in the worlds of film, music, books and sport.

Even here at home, both hurling and Gaelic football are more popular than ever. Yet the powers-that-be still can’t manage to get people talking in the native tongue.

One of the few glimmers of the hope in recent years came in the form of In The Name Of The Fada, the TV series which followed New York-born comedian Des Bishop as he tried to become proficient enough in the language to perform a full stand-up routine as Gaeilge. But the show was ultimately little more than a novelty act.

Another RTÉ series, Bernard Dunne’s Bród Club, had greater potential. Fronted by retired boxer Dunne, a former world champion at super bantamweight level, its self-professed aim was to get as many people as possible using their cúpla focal. ‘However much or however little you have, use it,’ the programme’s website urged. ‘Use what you have.’

The series attracted support from the likes of the GAA, Dublin City Council and Iarnród Éireann, as well as various private-sector commercial concerns. Among the celebrities to give their backing were Katie Taylor, Lucy Kennedy, Paul McGrath, Roz Purcell and Tom Dunne. Unless something like Bród Club is followed up with a properly organised public campaign by the relevant authorities, however, the momentum is lost and the enthusiasm soon wanes.

But we can’t just point the finger at our political leaders for this dismal failure. At least some of the blame lies with certain elements within the Irish language lobby itself.

Down through the years, it has been no secret that some of the organisations supposedly involved in promoting the language actually operate like private members’ clubs or secret societies. I’ve heard stories of accomplished Gaeilgeoirí walking out of Irish-language social clubs in disgust after less fluent-speaking friends they’d invited along were laughed at and ridiculed for their efforts.

Call me old-fashioned, but that doesn’t sound like a way to win friends and influence people. The state of the Irish language is such that a clever statistician could probably pinpoint the precise date when there will only be one speaker left in the country.

It is unlikely to be too far away, either. We’ll see who is laughing then.