Fewer students taking Gaeltacht courses is bad for future of Irish

Posted on Monday, June 06, 2011 at 09:40 AM

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A telling headline that caught my attention today was one from Irish education website schooldays.ie.

The number of Irish students taking summer courses in Gaelic speaking areas of Ireland (in Irish, the gaeltacht) has dropped further.

Now just 25,000 students are making the trek out to the few Irish-speaking localities left in the country each summer to brush up on their spoken Irish ahead of high-school examinations, and partake of the other home-grown delights the Gaeltachtanna have to offer.

This further decline, combined with the increasingly common pattern of Irish students taking out J1 summer work visas to spend their summers working in the States, as well as the rampant and unchecked phenomenon of student emigration, means that there will be very few budding Gaelgóirí left here at all in future summers to perpetuate the language by their visits , memories, and good times they take back home from summers in the gaeltacht.

These summers, once such a a staple of ever Irish school-goer's school holidays, carry the key to the survival of Irish as a spoken language, and prevent it from seeming totally extinct, when in so many other respects it often does.

Irish's main use for the youth of Irelad today unfortunately seems to be as a means of communication on foreign holidays, where (as every Irish holidaymaker can surely remember) it is skillfully deployed as a means of encoding a message that you don't want the taxi driver or hotel receptionist to hear, mustering whatever few words of Irish you have lodged somewhere in your brain, and probably haven't used since the 'Junior Cert'.

As a means of actually engaging in day-to-day communication outside the Gaelteacht, however, it is unfortunately all but extinct, and friends from the Gaeltacht who have come to Cork in search of work tell me that even there its use among the youth is patchy at best, which is hardly surprising given the ubiquity of English and the still limited selection of services and entertainment available in Ireland through Irish.

The instruction of the Irish language in the secondary school system is also lacklustre at best, and despite attempts at curriculum reform most students -- even those with a natural love of the language -- are left cold by antiquated grammar drills, intensive study of out-dated literature and poetry, and scant emphasis on the language as a spoken and living means of communication.

For all those reasons and more those summers spent in the Gaelteacht -- as renowned for being good 'craic' as they are for being effective means of imparting knowledge of Irish -- are very important for maintaining Irish students' connection to Irish in a country that is shunning it and forgetting it in all other respects.

That, and Ireland and the western world's wholesale adoption of American culture, mean that maintaining a little authentic piece of our own culture is more important now than ever before.

Correction

Commenter 'GeorgeDillon' is correct. As I should have pointed out above, the Gaelteacht/Irish college holiday is generally associated with secondary (high-school) students, while J1 summers begin, usually, with college-goers (and as he also pointed out, there are also eligibility requirements on the visa to that effect). Notwithstanding that inaccuracy, I stand by the general point that if summer trips to the Gaeltacht fall out of vogue, no matter at what age, young peoples' connection to the language is in danger, and that will have a knock-on effect on the language's image.

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Bailey2000 | Jun 16, 2011, 10:20 AM EDT

It is a curious thing that Irish traditional music seemed to boom as soon as the Bretons started to pick up on the Pan Celtic link. This made the music fashionable and relevant, where before it was seen as old hat. The Irish language is cursed by being compulsory in the school system. This means it has negative connotations for hundreds of thousands of us who were force fed. Until we take the compulsion away, we will never see a revival.

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eiriamach | Jun 06, 2011, 04:35 PM EDT

GeorgeDillon, I think you're right about the students. The young Irish I've met who work in the US have been university grads. But history shows that emigration can drive Gaeilge to near-extinction, and the impact of so many leaving cannot be benign. One other thing: Gaeilge may be an endangered language, but English is a dying language that's quickly losing the clarity of usage and structure (pronoun & subject-verb agr., passive-voice vagueness problems, etc.) it needs for international communication. It will take centuries, but English, not Irish, is on its way out. Irish gets staying power from its solid structure. It assimilates new vocabulary from other languages, while foreign words imported into English just chip away at it until we get, for ex., a border phenomenon like Spanglish. English is a mess; Gaeilge is neat and tidy by comparison. In my lifetime, the last native Manx speaker died. But now there are more able to use Manx than there ever were when it was a native language. Its literature and history were too valuable to let it die. And so with Irish....

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GeorgeDillon | Jun 06, 2011, 11:55 AM EDT

On a point of detail, our columnist says that the numbers going to the gaeltacht are affected by "the increasingly common pattern of Irish students taking out J1 summer work visas to spend their summers working in the States". This sounds like nonsense to me, for two reasons: First, as long as I can remember--effectively as far back as the 80s--there have been thousands of Irish students coming here during the summers. I have nor read that there is an sudden surge in numbers, in fact I am pretty certain I read that numbers taking the J1 option had decreased in recent years. But second, this is nonsense because we are dealing with two cohorts here. The folks who go to the Gaeltacht are teenagers, in the 14-16 range, high school students. These people are NOT eligible for J1 visas. The J1 visas are taken by college students, maybe 4 or 5 years older than the gaeltacht goers. So, not for the first time, I think we are being fed nonsense by an IC columnist. Having said that, anyone who has read my posts will know that I am extremely pessimistic about the future of Irish. I expect it to have died out as a community language in daily use just about the same time (mid 21st century) as Irish people become an ethnic minority in their own country.

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eiriamach | Jun 06, 2011, 11:21 AM EDT

"out-dated literature and poetry"?? How long after it's written does a poem become outdated? Is Eibhlín Dubh's "Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire" (c. 1773) outdated now? Ba mhór an trua é! Being able to understand songs, poetry, folklore and stories in Gaeilge is one of the best reasons to study the language, though I would guess that Irish youngsters don't spend much time on literature in their Irish classes-- instruction is "unimaginative at best," as you say. People I've met who live in the Gaeltachtaí, however, know and love their songs and stories!

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