THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 66

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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And any attempt to revive the Irish language on the basis of cutting off any section of the Irish population from the equipment of the English language in the battle of life would be, in my judgment, as futile as it would be inhuman. But in the first place the purely Irish-speaking districts are precisely those from which our present educational system banishes any effective knowledge of the English language by insisting upon teaching it, not in the language which the pupils understand, but in the very foreign language the rudiments of which they have yet to learn, and which is thus presented to them in a shape that is unintelligible, discouraging, and repulsive. It is as if you proposed to grind the Greek verbs into the head of an English child by talking Homer at him. All that the Gaelic-speaking child is really taught is an unjust and paralysing sense of his own inferiority and stupidity. But the cardinal error of the foes of the Gaelic language is that a smattering of English is the beginning and end of wisdom for an Irish peasant. The true decisive factor in this problem is not the shamefully-treated youth of the Irish-speaking seaboard, who are deliberately prevented from learning either Gaelic or English effectively for fear they would prefer Gaelic, but it is the far more numerous section of the population who understand both Irish and English. In the county of Kerry, for example, according to the census returns just published, while the number of persons who speak Irish alone is 4,481, there are no less than 69,700 out of a total population of 179,000 who speak both Irish and English. It is this bilingual population by which the possible future of the Irish language is to be gauged. Who will deny that their intelligence, far from being cramped, is strengthened and diversified by a knowledge of the two languages? They experience no … continue reading »

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