Services in Irish are a basic human right
Secondly, the raison d’être of the Irish state is the promotion of bilingualism as opposed to Anglicisation, which is desired neither by the Irish nor the English peoples.
What of state monies expended on speech therapy for Irish-speaking children and stroke victims? Is it expenditure on special needs (good?), on healthcare (good?), on the elderly (good?), or on Irish (bad/wasteful?).
If the demand for annual reports is low, publish them electronically and print off hard copies on demand only.
Do all such reports need to be printed on glossy cardboard?
Translation costs are not the issue here; if certain people have an anti-intellectual disdain for Irish, could they at least be honest about it.
Irish, without which there would be no Irish identity, has been spoken here for over 2,000 years and was the home language of the vast majority of our people until the mid 19th century. Marginalised under colonial rule, many Irish-speaking children had Irish beaten (or worse, ridiculed) out of them.
Irish may once have been in retreat, but that is a trend which we are now reversing.
It is not a question of whether a separate identity/society/nation can survive the loss of its language. The question is: how long can a separate identity/society/nation subsist after such loss?
What became of the Cumbrians of northern England whose P-Celtic language was lost in the 10th century? What became of the eastern European Germanic Goths?
Answer: assimilation.
Had the Poles abandoned Polish as their language following the partition of their country between Prussia, Russia and Austria, would Poland have re-appeared on the map of Europe? Of course not.
For a society, the loss of language is the loss of self.
Dáithí Mac Cárthaigh
Uachtarán
Chonradh na Gaeilge
Sráid Fhearchair
Baile Átha Cliath 2
