One Hundred Years of Irish Language Policy, 1922-2022

Tá mo mhórbhuíochas tuillte ag na cairde seo a chuir comhairle mo leasa orm go minic, a chabhraigh liom cruacheisteanna a réiteach agus a thug misneach dom in am an ghátair: An Dr Dorothy Ní Uigín agus Dónall Ó Braonáin (Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge) agus an Coimisinéir Teanga, Rónán Ó Domhnaill. My father Peter and my family Clare, Micheál, Jack, Aoife, Jamie and Sharon encouraged me along the way. My husband Declan Coogan has earned my deepest gratitude for his unstinting support and belief in me throughout this project. I dedicate this book to the memory of my late mother Anne, who passed on her respect for Irish to me and re-learned it as an adult.

Galway, January 2022

Taken together, these three events illustrate some of the ideologies and contradictions in relation to policy on the Irish language, a century after the Irish state was founded. The enactment of the revised Official Languages Bill was a key turning point as it strengthened existing legislation and contained the potential to increase substantially the provision of public services in Irish. It came about due to the doggedness and persistence of activists and the support of a handful of politicians who are committed to promoting Irish as a living, spoken language and to improving public services for Irish speakers. They were aided by a more favourable political climate due to the presence in government of two parties that are relatively supportive of Irish, the centre-right Fianna Fáil and the Green Party. Although there are weaknesses in the new legislation, not least the absence of a date by which all services would have to be provided in Irish in the Gaeltacht, it represents the best political outcome in the current circumstances. However, the fact that it took ten years and three changes of government to achieve illustrates the low priority given to Irish by the other centre-right party, Fine Gael, which held power for much of the decade that the legislation was under review. Furthermore, the passing of almost a century between the foundation of the state and strengthened legislation to provide services in Irish is a telling illustration of the marginalised place of language in the policy arena, despite its exalted constitutional status.

A final point relates to media coverage of these stories. Irish language radio, television and online media covered all three items in detail, but they were marginal in English-language media, although one outlet pounced on the apparent contradiction between the new 20 per cent requirement for public bodies and the downgrading of Irish in the Garda Síochána. There was an absence of even a basic understanding of the language policy and the familiar negative commentary claiming a discrepancy between the new Act and a supposedly non-existent Irish-speaking community (e.g. Newstalk, 2021). When it comes to language matters, Irish- and English-language media often inhabit parallel universes.

2. Context and aims

All of the issues touched on in these anecdotes – education, public administration, legislation, media, the Gaeltacht and speakers – are discussed in the chapters that follow. Using the framework of language policy, the book highlights the contradictions between the stated policy aims and their execution, examining how ideological clashes between civil society and the state, or between different arms of the state itself, can impede or retard implementation.

Following the rhetoric of poorly defined ‘gaelicisation’ in the early decades of the state, the policy trajectory has shown slippage towards a vague ‘bilingualism’ since the 1960s, on the back of broader socioeconomic transformation of Irish society. A discourse of minority rights has emerged since the 1980s, and Irish language policy has since found itself caught between the remnants of the historical rhetoric of the ‘national’ language on the one hand and on the other by the notion of Irish as a minority language spoken actively only by a small core group. Although the focus of this book is on the Irish state as the main driver of Irish language policy over the past 100 years, I will also examine the impact of Irish language activism in Northern Ireland and consider the role of Irish speakers in the North in the future development of the language. No account of Irish language policy would be complete without an analysis of the situation north of the border, particularly since the late 1960s when the roots of many current initiatives began to crystallise in the context of the Troubles.

A key objective of this book is to contribute to a deeper understanding of a well-known minority language revival effort: policy towards Irish since the foundation of the Irish state. There has been no single in-depth wide-ranging analysis of Irish language policy in twenty-five years since Ó Riagáin’s milestone account (1997). In the chapters that follow, I seek to answer the following central questions: how has Irish language policy functioned in the historical arc of this study? How have competing ideologies and broader socioeconomic and socio-political contexts shaped its formulation and implementation? To what extent can Irish language policy be considered a success or failure? The volume will synthesise existing research on the topic, position it in the context of the theoretical fields of sociolinguistics and language policy and provide a thematic analysis, based on rich primary sources, of various strands of Irish language policy over the past century. The time is ripe, after 100 years of independence, to assess critically the considerable efforts of the Irish state and Irish language civil society to bring about their stated aim of the revival of Irish.

3. Theoretical framework

3.1 The rise of language planning

Until the emergence of sociolinguistics in the mid-twentieth century, linguists were focused on structuralism and did not generally enter in discussion about behaviours in relation to languages. The field known as language planning has its origins in the post-Second World War period when economists, social scientists and linguists alike believed that ‘planning’ would provide solutions to social problems. The 1960s and 1970s were the era of ‘classic language planning’ associated with leading scholars in the new discipline of sociolinguistics such as Einar Haugen, Joshua Fishman, Uriel Weinreich and Charles Ferguson. Attention was paid to the language ‘problems’ being experienced by newly independent post-colonial states in Africa and Asia as they decided which language or languages to use in public administration or education. The approach was highly interventionist and top-down, with the emphasis on the political authority of central government:

As well as criticism of the functionalism and evolutionism inherent in classic language planning, a ‘one language, one nation’ approach was dominant and there was little tolerance of diversity within a given political entity (for an analysis of the role of nationalism in language policy, see Wright, 2013). Furthermore, there was the problem that a heavily centralised approach would ignore real world complexities: