One Hundred Years of Irish Language Policy, 1922–2022 by John Walsh

Abstract

Reviewed by: One Hundred Years of Irish Language Policy, 1922–2022 by John Walsh Peadar Kirby (bio) John Walsh, One Hundred Years of Irish Language Policy, 1922–2022 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022), 384 pages. When welcoming the Irish language achieving full status in the European Union at the beginning of 2022, President Higgins made the following call to all Irish people: Now I say throw off all the inhibitions, the excuses, the laziness and as the language of our ancestors becomes at every level in daily usage in the European Union, let us go and make a resolution to give it a place in our daily lives at home – i lár an aonaigh, inár ngáthchaint. It is particularly appropriate that in the centenary year of the foundation of the independent Irish state, our native language achieves full status as an active working language of the EU. This can be regarded as one of the achievements of what was undoubtedly the most ambitious and far-reaching policy objective to which the young state committed itself – namely the revival of the Irish language. Yet, despite it remaining an objective of public policy, it often appears to the interested observer as the policy that dare not speak its name, a rhetorical commitment supported by severely insufficient policy measures and largely isolated from the rest of the state’s activities, with the exception of primary and secondary education. Even the lack of any central focus on language revival as part of the centenary celebrations of the state reveals its marginalised status, which I have little doubt would greatly surprise and sadden the leaders of our independence struggle were they to return to today’s Ireland. A timely resource John Walsh’s scholarly yet very accessible review and assessment of a century of revival efforts is therefore a very timely publication and deserves a wide readership. It is also an excellent resource for those of us who want to take seriously President Higgins’s call to reembrace the language. Walsh, an associate professor of Irish in the University of Galway and vice-dean (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and People) in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies in that university, is uniquely placed to give a broad assessment of not just the many efforts made to revive Irish but, just as important, the broader role of the language in Irish public life. His 2011 book [End Page 310] on the role of the Irish language in the country’s socio-economic development1 had already broken new ground in international socio-linguistics, and his research on languages such as Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Catalan, Basque and Galician, particularly on new speakers of these languages, gives him an unsurpassed ability to compare Ireland’s revival efforts with revival efforts elsewhere. Walsh very tellingly begins with the enactment of the Official Languages (Amendment) Bill passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas last December, which modestly strengthens measures to support the language, most especially the pledge to have 20% of recruits to public bodies competent in Irish by 2030. Juxtaposing this measure with a protest the same day outside the Dáil by schoolchildren about the Department of Education’s failure to provide a Gaelscoil in their area and a decision by the Minister of Justice the following day to weaken the status of the language in the recruitment of Gardaí, Walsh writes that ‘taken together, these three events illustrate some of the ideologies and contradictions in relation to policy on the Irish language, a century after the Irish state was founded’. The bill came about largely due to the ‘doggedness and persistence of activists and the support of a handful of politicians who are committed to promoting Irish as a living, spoken language and to improving public services for Irish speakers’. However, he highlights that it took ten years and three changes of government to achieve, and he concludes: Furthermore, the passing of almost a century between the foundation of the state and strengthened legislation to provide services in Irish is a telling illustration of the marginalised place of the language in the policy arena, despite its exalted constitutional status. Walsh sets himself the...