Irish on the web

["D OC" <donaloc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For the interest of Bob Gould - 'Is mise le meas' means 'It's Myself with
respect' - the most common and formal ending for a letter in Irish/Gaeilge.

Is it political to speak the language? I would say yes, it is an act of
cultural liberation. Tá beo sa teanga dúchais againn fós. The point that you
made about the pows learning it in the Cages is well made - in fact they
have a particular type of Irish. Grammatical errors from the few original
speakers became standardised in 'Kesh' Irish.

I had to laugh when I was speaking to an Irish-speaker from Dublin recently.
He said that the authorities thought every Irish speaker was a 'communist'.
More incredibly, he told me about the time when some lower working-class
parents of children from a very run-down area in NW Dublin went to the
Minister for Education looking for an all-Irish school. He turned them
down - mostly it appears in disbelief that such people would have an
interest in the language - which was at that time largely reserved for the
middle-class in Dublin. Anyway, the parents involved, being the hardy
militants that they were, went and set up an outdoor Irish language school
in the Department's car park for a few weeks. They got their school in the
end. The Irish language schools tend to be less dominated by the Catholic
church - a significant proportion of the Free State's inter-denominational
schools are Irish-medium.

These perceptions are strange given the associations between the language
and backwardness in rural areas. The best speaker in rural areas is usually
either a old hard-line Nationalist or the Parish priest. However, the
language is now being viewed as a dynamic multi-cultural tool which can
bypass the anglocentric dominant forms. A typical event is the development
of the www.craiceailte.com website (its only up a few days now and is a
work-in-progress). Raidio na Gaeltachta is the only channel which focusses
on world music with a particular emphasis on Cuba and Palestine (no less) -
in addition to progressive 'continental' forms.

D OC


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