Irish Lives, but Mostly as a Nationalist Gesture : Old Language May Not Get Much Older

DUBLIN, Ireland —  Irish, one of the world’s oldest languages, has retreated to the rocky shores of western Ireland where it is making its last stand against the 800-year-long onslaught of English.

It is one of Ireland’s most readily recognizable gestures of independence--its first official language and a compulsory class in schools.

All official signs and documents, from telephone books to parking meters, are bilingual. The country abounds with such signs as aerfort/airport, telefon/telephone and oifis an phoist/post office. It has an Irish-language radio station and several daily Irish-language television shows.

Each newspaper has a page or two in Irish, and a colorful all-Irish tabloid called Anois (Now) has just been launched.

A Hypothetical Tongue

For a long time, though, Irish has looked far healthier on paper than it is in actual use.

From being the first language of as many as two-thirds of Irishmen 150 years ago, it has declined to the point where no more than 5% of the 3.5 million people in the independent Republic of Ireland, in the south, speak it fluently.

Virtually all are concentrated in remote pockets grouped asthe Gaeltacht, in the western countryside, and the people there speak English, too.

“The language is under the same pressure as the corner grocery. I don’t see how these Irish speakers will survive,” says Diarmuid O Donnchadha, who heads Gael Linn, one of several organizations devoted to preserving Irish culture.

Predating Latin by centuries, Irish is the oldest Celtic language that can be reconstructed from written sources. Although heavily Latinized by Norman conquerors, its tortuous grammar and pronunciation seem impenetrable to outsiders.

Not Just Any Gaelic It is deliberately called Irish, rather than Gaelic, to distinguish it from Scottish, Welsh, Breton and Manx Gaelic and to strengthen the bond with Irish nationhood.

After the southern 26 counties of Ireland won independence from Britain in 1921, the government’s zealous campaign to stamp out British influences included making Irish the first official language, with English second. Up to a third of the school curriculum was in Irish, and schoolchildren who failed their Irish examination could not enter universities, the civil service, the police or the army officer corps.

Gaeltacht families received government subsidies just for speaking Irish, although many were antagonized by state inspectors who would try to trap them into speaking English in order to cut off payments.

But English remained the dominant language. The revival of Irish, according to a book called “A View of the Irish” by Brian Cleave, “never became reality. . . . Very few children wanted to learn it--their parents did not speak it, nor did anyone use it in ordinary life.”

To the ordinary child, Cleeve said, “it seemed a totally pointless and hideous exercise.” The result, he writes, is that “most people haven’t spoken Irish, and never did, and never will.”

Three Dialects Another problem is that there are three Irish dialects conforming to three of the four traditional regions of the Irish island--Ulster, Munster and Connacht. In Ulster Irish, “how are you?” is “cad e mar ata tu?” In Connacht, it is “cen chaoi a bhfuil tu?” And in Munster, it is “conas ta tu?” Litriu Nua, an official amalgam of the written dialects, has done little to erase the inconsistencies in spoken Irish.

In the euphoria following independence in 1921, “people were learning Irish as a means of expressing anti-Englishness,” Dublin architect Christopher Morris said. “They all still genuflect politely to the language, but only provided someone else learns it,” he said.

Morris, who says he speaks Irish but opposes force-feeding it, headed the Language Freedom Movement, which in 1970 brought about the abolition of the school examination requirement. But Irish remains a compulsory subject in the curriculum.

He said his most bitter opponent was Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, which regards the language as a weapon in the fight to drive the British out of Northern Ireland and unite the island.

Sinn Fein’s dilapidated Dublin office is one of the few places where one finds Gaeilgeoiri, language devotees, chatting in Irish.

“Irish has no commercial value except for teachers of the language,” said Micheal Mac Giolla Phadraig, editor of the Irish-language page of the daily Irish Press. But if I didn’t have the language, what would distinguish me from being British? It is something you feel inside. You love it the way you love your mother.”

The Gaelic element also reflects the geographical division of Ireland into the southern republic and the British province of Northern Ireland (Ulster).

A foreigner who thinks he is being polite by calling Ireland by its official name, Eire, may get a cold response. Eire from an English-speaker is often taken as an attempt to accentuate the separateness of Ireland from the British province it dreams of one day recovering.

The paradox of modern Irish was neatly expressed in a recent letter to the Irish Press from lawyer Patrick Madigan, denouncing Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald for failing to reply in Irish to a question put in Irish at a recent news conference.

After bemoaning at length the decline of the language, Madigan confessed, “I write as one who is not fluent in Irish, unfortunately.”