Irish Find Big Challenges Facing Small Languages

The Dublin government, which last month took the unexpected step of applying to the European Union for Irish to become an official language, was reminded this week just how difficult it is to sustain its use when a job announcement appeared in one of its Irish-speaking regions.

A UK company said it was setting up a call centre in Gweedore in county Donegal, in an industrial zone run by Udaras na Gaeltacht, the government organisation that promotes investment in Irish-speaking regions.

Anyone working in these special low tax zones would normally expected to be a fluent Irish speaker and to use Irish at work - in line with policies supporting the use of the language. But Contact4 is a UK call centre company offering telephone-based inquiry services for users of the British Inland Revenue, British Gas, and other clients - all of it conducted in English.

For all the government's promotion of the area as an exclusively Irish-speaking domain, Donegal was chosen ahead of Estonia precisely because of its wealth of English speakers.

Pádraig O hAoláin, the investment agency's regional deputy chief executive, is philosophical about the situation: "The way the world is progressing, it's a major challenge to maintain a minority language."

The language has been in long-term decline since the potato famines - and the mass emigration - of the mid-1800s, which depopulated the countryside and pushed the Irish-speaking communities to the Atlantic fringes, where today Irish governments support a number of specially designated Gaeltacht or native speaking areas.

It was Eamon de Valera, pre-eminent leader in post-independence Ireland, who first sought to revive Irish, in line with his policies of economic and national self-sufficiency.

He introduced compulsory studying of Irish at school and for entry into the civil service and professions.

The policy has been relaxed somewhat in recent years. And not unlike the rule that Catholics should eat only fish on Fridays, once the regime was eased there was more interest in the language.

The Central Statistics Office says 1.5m people can speak the language of a total population of 3.9m today, up from 1.43m in 1996.

"From what I can see, it is starting to make a revival particularly among young people," says Graham Herterich, manager of Tri D, a cafe for Irish speakers on Dublin's Dawson Street. "When everyone is doing so much travelling, it's more important than ever to hang on to what makes you different."

While Irish in the Gaeltacht areas is still declining, there is a trend particularly among urban middle classes, to send children to Irish- medium schools.

Eamon O'Cuiv, De Valera's grandson and the minister responsible for Irish and the Irish-speaking regions, has started to take a more assertive stance.

This year he was accused of creating "jobs for the boys" with his ruling that all official documents from bills in the Dáil, the parliament, to annual accounts of state enterprises, be published in the first official language. He then decreed that road signs in the Gaeltacht be in Irish, not bilingual. Anyone wanting to build a house in those areas would also have to be an Irish speaker.

His decision last month to apply for official EU status for Irish took many in Brussels by surprise.

Viviane Reding, the outgoing commissioner responsible for education and culture and a citizen of Luxembourg (the only other member state whose national language is not an EU language), believes Dublin is wrong to seek official EU status for Irish.

"You know what you should do in Ireland? Speak Irish, write Irish, be proud of Irish, use Irish in everyday language and show Irish culture to the 24 nations around you. Making it an official language doesn't bring you a thing."