The war for the Irish language Gaeilge's return has been loudly politicised

A few weeks ago, our middle child started at an Irish-language nursery, one of more than 50,000 children across the island currently educated in Gaeilge (or in Ulster Irish, Gaeilg); when our youngest child was born, we chose a dual-language birth certificate. In our case, these choices were made for essentially apolitical, even romantic reasons: both my maternal grandparents were native Irish speakers, as were my wife’s family a generation earlier, and we want to undo the recent loss of our ancestral language. But within the context of Northern Irish society, the choice to adopt it is often viewed as an overtly political act, both by its supporters and its detractors.

For Ian McLaughlin, a DUP councillor representing the staunchly Loyalist Shankill area, dominated by paramilitary groups, Irish has become a weapon wielded by the Nationalist community against a politically divided Unionist constituency that is now, in Belfast, a minority. The greatest controversy is over Irish-language signage in “interface areas” — streets where Catholic and Protestant communities abut each other, and where Irish-language signage is routinely defaced. For some, like the Catholic writer Malachi O’Doherty, the presence or absence of Irish street signs may unintentionally function as the equivalent of the paramilitary murals and flags that still mark the transition from one area to another, heightening sectarian divisions.

“I think in many ways, it reflects a change in demographics in this area. That’s fine, but it also is taken by very many people within the Unionist community as Republicanism baring its teeth to show that they have more control in this city,” McLaughlin told me. “In many, many streets and areas, the change in signage was not asked for by the residents. It was asked for by Sinn Féin or other Nationalists and their public and political representatives. So there’s a whole issue in there about the democracy behind this.”

“If we’re promoting our identity, they might feel that it’s stepping on top of their identity, but instead of fighting against ours, perhaps they should shout for their own identity,” Ferdia Carson, an activist in North Belfast told me, as live traditional music wafted from the bustling Irish-language Caifé Ceoil below us. “Really like, if you want to be British, my Irishness won’t erode you. Personally, I have no interest in politics… We just promote and are looking for Irish-language rights as an Irish speaker, as a gaeilgeoir… So I’m called Ferdia Carson. So who founded Unionism? Edward Carson… He was a prominent Irish speaker and a prominent hurler, so if I was to meet him today, I’d speak Irish and I’d play hurling with him, even from completely different ends of the spectrum. When did this happen? When did Sinn Féin own Irish? And why can Protestants not take ownership of it?”

Indeed, many Protestants, as the Irish-language historian Ian Malcolm observes, descend from Irish speakers, with both the Presbyterian and Church of Ireland communities possessing strong, if now de-emphasised, traditions of Irish-language worship. As spoken Irish collapsed across the island during the 19th century, due to the Famine and the promotion of English in schools and church, Protestant antiquarians and activists helped ensure both the language’s survival and then its cultural revival. But the Gaelic League’s drift towards Irish revolutionary nationalism, and the shock of partition following the Irish War of Independence, saw the previously neutral language viewed with new disfavour by Ulster Protestants. The days when the burghers of Belfast could welcome Queen Victoria beneath huge Irish-language banners, or the Gaelic League could count the Grand Master of Belfast’s Orange Lodge as a member, were over. Under the new country’s Stormont government, official attitudes towards Irish oscillated between neglect and active discouragement, with Northern Ireland’s remaining rural Gaeltachts allowed to wither and die.

During the Troubles, Sinn Féin’s active promotion of Irish in furthering the Republican cause, like the “Jailtacht” of Republican prisoners learning it in the Maze, simultaneously sparked its present-day revival in Northern Ireland while heightening Protestant perceptions of its politicisation. “The Irish language is a divisive thing in this city,” DUP councillor Sarah Bunting told me. “It has been used, it’s been politicised by Sinn Féin in the past. That quote that’s used to us as Unionist politicians, quite often, is that every word spoken in Irish is a bullet fired in the fight for a united Ireland… People still remember it being used against them through the Troubles. It’s not a fear of the language, it’s hurt that has been caused by people who have used the language in the past.”

As a result of the Troubles, “the Irish language developed even more negative connotations for people from the Protestant Unionist background, and I suppose that has intensified as they’ve seen the Irish language become much more visible”, Malcolm told me. “Personally, I’m from a Unionist background, Protestant. I wouldn’t describe myself as Loyalist, but I’d certainly be Unionist. And I regard the Irish language very, very much as my language.” As Malcolm observes, with Northern Ireland emerging from the conflict’s shadow, his stance is becoming increasingly common: “When I started teaching about 12 years ago, the vast majority of students in my classes would have been from a Catholic, Nationalist background. Now I would say the majority would be from a Protestant Unionist background. So, I think that shows the direction of travel, that animosity and hostility towards the language is diminishing.”

In East Belfast’s Turas cultural centre, on a street surrounded by UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) murals and gentrifying new businesses, Irish-language activist Linda Ervine is trying to change local perceptions. “What we didn’t want to do was set up the Protestant version of the Irish language, we weren’t interested in that,” Ervine told me. “We just wanted to take our place within the Irish-language community, and the interest over the years has just grown and grown and grown.” Yet her plans this term to expand her thriving Irish-language nursery into a primary school or naíscoil in the heart of East Belfast were hampered by local discontent, with hundreds of “concerned residents” attending a meeting organised by Loyalist activists to express their opposition. “They had a public meeting, full of misrepresentation and out-and-out lies,” Ervine told me, “you know, if our children were doing PE they’d all be doing GAA, and before you’d know it, they’d be taking part in the Bobby Sands Cup. You know, madness. But our Facebook is open, our Twitter is open, and if you’d gone on last May you’d have seen our children with all their wee crowns celebrating the King’s coronation. So that’s the dangerous individuals we are.”

For Ervine, rather than a marker of apartness from Britain, the Irish language, like its daughter languages Manx and Scottish Gaelic, serves as a reminder of the intertwined cultural history of the British Isles, dating far beyond the Irish nationalist struggle to reject Westminster’s rule: “What it says to us is that we’re a group of islands and we have these familial ties to each other, and that’s something that we want to build on.” Ervine looks at the relatively uncomplicated bilingualism of official signage in Wales and the Scottish Highlands with something approaching envy. “If we think about ourselves being British citizens, and compare ourselves to the way minority languages are treated in other parts of the UK, there is visibility, there is signage, and of course, we have the right to do that, but unfortunately, the way it’s played out in the media, the way it’s seen then as something irrational and unreasonable, makes my job more difficult.”

As with so many things in Northern Ireland, the country’s troubled history makes alignment with mainland British norms harder. “It’s not valid to see the language as representative of Republicanism or only belonging to Republicanism, because it doesn’t… Should I, as a Protestant, be denied the opportunity to speak Irish, learn Irish, because of something that you see as a wrong in the past? No, that’s just madness.”

It is an undeniable fact that the revival of the Irish language in present-day Northern Ireland derives from the Nationalist and Republican movement, spawning a West Belfast Gaeltacht and a booming ecosystem of Irish-medium schools and cultural centres. Indeed, in some ways Northern Ireland’s heavily charged political atmosphere around Irish, like a time-delayed Gaelic Revival, means the language may be in a healthier state than in the Republic, where it is a compulsory school subject loathed by many. Yet the association with the Republican and Nationalist tradition also presents difficulties for Protestant Gaeilge activists and aspiring learners, forcing them into a position of defensiveness within their own community. “The only people I feel denying me my rights,” Linda Ervine said, “denying these parents their rights to have integrated Irish-medium education for their children, are other Protestants.”

“The Irish language is political, we can say anything is political, anything that has a cause can be defined as political,” Ó Tiarnaigh replied when I asked him whether Nationalist activists should de-emphasise the political aspects of their movement in pursuit of the language’s wider spread. “If you apply the exact same logic to the English language, which inevitably has been the language of conquest and Empire right across the world for centuries, would you say that the English language is a political language?”

In his classic text on ethnic conflict, the political scientist Donald L. Horowitz characterised ethnically divided societies as ones where “rather than merely setting the framework for politics, [group relations] become the recurring subjects of politics” as “conflicts over needs and interests are subordinated to conflicts over group status… and the symbolic sector of politics looms large.” Just like the post-BLM debate over imperial statuary in mainland Britain, demographic anxieties are subsumed in debates over the symbolic realm, in the Northern Irish context focussing on Irish-language signage.

The frozen ethnic conflict, and Northern Ireland’s tenuous position within the United Kingdom, simultaneously preserve strong attachments to cultural identity enviable to mainland eyes, yet also distort the country’s political life into essentially unresolvable tussles over symbolism and public representation. It is ironic that the Loyalist battle to preserve Ulster’s Britishness sets Northern Ireland apart from the easy bilingualism of Wales and Scotland, further embedding the country in an Irish historical and political context. Yet it is also ironic that the legacy of Nationalist and Republican Irish-language activism may hinder its broader acceptance, perhaps to the detriment of the language’s survival. As Nationalist and Loyalist activists wage a symbolic war with each other over the expansion of Irish into the public sphere, it’s hard not to empathise with Protestant Irish activists stuck in the middle, trying to promote the language itself while defanging it of its 20th century political associations.

“I believe the Irish language belongs to everybody, I’ve embraced it, I love it, it’s part of my DNA,” Malcolm told me. “And to be honest, it’s in the DNA of pretty much everybody who was born in Northern Ireland. The problem is that many people don’t realise that, but I think we need to de-escalate rather than escalate.” Yet in Northern Ireland history still looms like an oppressive cloud. Without its political conflict, there would be no revival of Irish in Northern Ireland; yet the politicisation that brought the language back from extinction still makes something as innocuous as street signs a symbolic battleground.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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