Letters to the Editor: Spoken Irish is the key to language revival
'Young people want to speak Irish, but too often we train them to study it rather than use it.' Image: iStock
Aisling Ní Dhiorbháin and Patrick Burke (Irish Examiner, January 1) are right: Young people want to speak Irish, but too often we train them to study it rather than use it.
The pattern described in the article matches what many of us see — lively, playful Gaeilge in the early years, followed by a sharp turn into spelling lists, notes, and exam-driven memorisation.
The result is predictable, and students associate Irish with being “caught out”, not communicating. They leave school with years of exposure, but little confidence to speak.
If we genuinely want communicative ability, we need to treat Irish like we treat sport or music. As a PE teacher, you often hear “use it or lose it” when it comes to training, and the same applies to language. You don’t learn it by watching someone else do it or copying notes about it; you learn it by doing it, little and often, in low-stakes settings. That means:
- Short, frequent speaking moments in every lesson (not one “oral day” once a month);
- Language that matches students’ real lives — school corridors, sport, part-time jobs, friendships, online culture;
- More opportunities outside the classroom that feel natural rather than forced — clubs, matches, events, school announcements, and student-led Irish spaces.
Technology can help here, but only if it supports teachers and reduces pressure.
One practical example is GlórAI, an Irish-language voicebot we’ve built to let students practise speaking privately, get instant feedback, and build confidence without fear of embarrassment.
We’ve even included a ‘Gen Alpha mode’ that uses modern slang as Gaeilge — not to replace good Irish, but to make the first step into speaking feel less intimidating and more like craic than a test.
There are brilliant people hosting Irish-speaking events but, as a former gnáthleibhéal student, I still don’t have the confidence to fully immerse myself. Tools like GlórAI can be a first step into oral practice without the social pressure.
None of this removes the need for strong teaching, resources, or curriculum change. But if we want Irish as a living language, we must reward the skill we claim to value — communication. The more we enable people to speak, the more we make spoken Irish normal, the more reading and writing will follow.
I am furious at the Government’s response to the functionality of X’s Grok and other AI chatbots. Especially as my daughter died by suicide after a video of her naked was posted online.
Media minister Patrick O’Donovan sounds like Elon Musk’s puppet as he removes all responsibility from him over his product, Grok.
He places it solely on the men who have used Grok to digitally undress and make sexualised images of women and girls.
While it is true that the adult users of chatbots should take responsibility, there is also an onus on the producers and the suppliers of the functionality to ensure that there are safeguards built in — safeguards to protect others from harm. Grok should be removed until it has been updated and thoroughly tested.
I quote from a research paper, (Clare McGlynn et al, 2020): “Because the harms of image-based sexual abuse are not sufficiently recognised, victim-survivors struggle to understand, narrate and name their experiences…. their own experiences had been profoundly devastating, but struggled to make sense of that in a society where such acts of abuse are so often excused, minimised and normalised.”
Image-based sexual abuse can result in trauma and, in my daughter, Dara’s case, suicide.
If Google can implement safer controls in its chatbot, Character AI, in response to lawsuits won by concerned parents in the US, then X can do the same with Grok. But before we have more trauma and suicides and before we have to take X to court, our media minister must take a firm line with these tech giants.
Regurgitating Elon Musk’s rhetoric will not do it. We want our Government to protect the women and children of Ireland and the world, not to protect those who facilitate abuse.
Regarding ‘Mother and baby home survivors challenge bishop to help them find over 1,000 children buried there’ (Irish Examiner, December 30): Our Church thinks people will get fed up with this issue and give up.
I can’t decide if the Church is angry that anyone would challenge it, or that the challenge comes mainly from Catholic women.
Each of us is a member of the body of the Church, the same church the clergy are supposed to minister to.
I would remind them that as priests they take an oath to protect the dead. Allow me to inform them that they have missed the mark on that one.
As for those priests I have spoken to over the years who say they can not speak to me on this issue or they would be shipped off to Outer Mongolia, if you are not part of the solution you remain part of the problem.
Grow a pair!
Regarding the opinion piece on Ireland’s meagre defence spending and concerns (Irish Examiner, January 8) Barry Colfer and Cian Fitzgerald are absolutely correct in their assumptions.
This country has benefited from a reasonably isolated geographical position and friendly relations with neighbours since the State’s founding, but now we cannot solely rely upon that.
I am not saying we join Nato, or start building nuclear aircraft carriers and bombers. One, it is impractical for a nation of our size to do so, and two, it completely misses our strategic needs by miles. Yet, when the issue of defence and military spending is raised, these are what a lot of people I see, online and offline, jump to in their minds.
We should not be aiming for Nato membership. I oppose it, as do most in the State, especially in light of recent events. However, we need to come to terms with the fact our world is no longer as safe as it was, and that our best allies can turn on us in a split second.
We must start investing in the Defence Forces. We need more patrol and anti-submarine/underwater detection capabilities for the navy. The air corps is in desperate need of fighter aircraft and military radars to watch our skies. The army must be mechanised further and improved in capability and skills. These are achievable for a nation of our size and economy, as proven by Denmark and Norway.
If we continue to be complacent — and outright ignorant — of our rapidly growing defence requirements, we may be betraying our European brothers and sisters and, consequently, we will leave our sacred democracy in a very, very precarious position.
Much of the discussion about Ireland’s failure to meet its climate targets has focused on the risk of large EU fines.
This framing misses the point. What we are facing is not a sudden punishment imposed from outside, but the cost of an opportunity that was visible years ago and left unused.
In the early 2020s, Ireland entered a period of unusually strong public finances.
Corporation tax receipts surged and ministers spoke openly about windfalls that were difficult to spend responsibly. The problem was not a lack of money, but a reluctance to act quickly or to commit temporary income to long-term projects.
At the same time, Ireland’s climate obligations did not pause. They were legal commitments with fixed timelines, overseen at European level. Emissions rose, deadlines approached, and delay carried a cost whether it appeared in the budget or not.
Instead of accelerating delivery, progress slowed. Major public transport projects were postponed repeatedly. Rail, metro, and light rail schemes spent years moving between planning processes, courtrooms, and revised timelines. Retrofitting expanded slowly, while energy infrastructure and grid upgrades lagged behind stated ambition. Each delay was explained as technical or procedural, but together they formed a clear pattern of under-delivery.
Only later did the financial consequence of this pattern become visible, in the form of a projected bill running into the tens of billions of euro for missing legally binding climate targets. These possible fines are now described as an unfortunate future cost of non-compliance. In reality, they are better understood as an invoice for decisions already taken.
The issue was never affordability. The State did not lack money when action was required. What it lacked was urgency. Public debate focused heavily on the volatility of certain tax streams, while paying far less attention to the certainty of obligations whose costs would eventually fall due.
By delaying investment, Ireland effectively chose where future money would go. It chose fines over infrastructure, penalties over assets, and payments for failure over transport systems, energy networks, and upgraded homes that would have reduced emissions and improved daily life.
The largest cost here is not only the size of the fines themselves. It is what that money failed to build while it still could. That lost opportunity, more than any single missed target, is the real legacy of Ireland’s climate delay.
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