Irish Nearly Dead Tongue In Free State

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6844, 25 February 1929, Page 4

Irish Nearly Dead Tongue In Free State

Campaign to Revive .Use of Gaelic Fails to Gain Headway

For three years every effort has been made to give Ireland a national language—lrish. It has been taught in the schools. It has been lettered on windows. It stands above English on telegraph forms and Government forms. It has been lectured in and spoken in from the pulpit. But to-day Ireland is as much English in language—with, of course, the ’ slight colouring of Irish brogue—as it was long before the Irish Free State came into existence.

Business is conducted in English. Social life goes on in English. The Church has kept to English. Telegrams and the Government forms, though Irish is printed upon them, deliver their messages in English. In only a few isolated sections of the rugged south-western part of Ireland, chiefly County Kerry, is Irish the native language, and this is so not as a result of the campaign of the Irish Free State, but because the inhabitants of those districts inherited their language from father and grandfather. Children regard Irish as they would Latin and Greek, more as a mental exercise than a living tongue in which to ask for their bread and butter. Trinity College, Dublin, protested for a long time before giving way to pressure to place Irish on a par with other languages. Owen Sweeney, of the Gaelic League, has protested that the churches were not evincing a more lively interest in Irish language development. In the majority of schools in the 26 counties of Ireland Gaelic is taught for one hour each day, but the other subjects of arithmetic, grammar, science, etc., are carried on for four or five hours in English. ' One of the most significant developments has been the marked migration of people from the Irish-speaking districts of the Emerald Isle. Seven hundred persons left Tlrconaill, in Donegal, in one week, Mr. P. F. Baxter, member of the Dali, has been making a special study of this condition.