Readers Blog: Hostility to Gaelic is centuries-old and tribal

You’d think, from media coverage, that unionist hostility to the Irish language was a recent phenomenon; as if that hostility could have been avoided if Irish speakers weren’t so unmannerly.

However, the hostility is centuries-old, and will not be influenced by anything that nationalists might do or say. In the 1500s, the anti-Irish poet, Edmund Spenser, noted that it “... ever been the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered and to force him by all means to learn his”.