a quote from Sinead O'Connor's song
You really wouldn't want to pay too much attention to Sinead. No, we weren't paid anything during the Famine or at any time to not speak Irish to our children. People did speak Irish at home in the nineteenth century and up until the middle of the century most children were educated through Irish in the hedge schools (except for Dublin and the surrounding counties within the old Pale area).
creating and maintaining irish speaking areas.
Strangely enough there are quite a few fairly fluent Irish speakers in Dublin. There was debate about the state of the Irish language recently where an audience member, a young Polish woman who has grown up in Ireland, spoke of how glad she was that she learned Irish in school as a compulsory subject. (Some people would like to see it as optional).
"The young woman who spoke from the audience in the Upfront programme, and who was born in Poland and raised in Ireland, could see the moral and spiritual utility of a native language in its native place. She expressed the same sentiment that Irish people feel. She could feel the importance of language and culture, and she said that it made her feel connected to this country which she now calls her home."
"What the Polish girl in the audience in RTE recognised is what Patrick Pearse recognised. A nation's language nurtures its soul. Tír gan teanga, Tír gan anam. Perhaps it is this spirituality and nationalism that is disliked by the neoliberals. After all, that is a rival sense of belonging to the "our liberal/European values" nonsense of fluctuating globalism that our leaders are committed to."
