Head over to our T
Journalism in Irish: Waste of Time
Read more about: Feature Gallery, Features 
When I put the headline on this post, I thought, cheekily, that I could have gotten away with just saying Journalism in Ireland: Waste of Time. It would still be a launch pad for a viable post: over the last number of years, journalism in Ireland hasn’t been a pretty place. The big broadsheets have all had a major slimming down, with budgets cut and hundreds of journos turfed out. That was happening before the recession – it was part of the ongoing ‘challenging’ environment facing print media. But now with the recession it can only be accelerated. And of course it has spread to TV and Radio. Newstalk and Today FM have had layoffs and merged their news team (same owner, Denis O’Brien), and of course we all know that RTE is running a deficit of 68m and has begun a major belt tightening operation, so there aren’t going to be major opportunities there for a while. Plenty of gloom there alright, but I wanted to talk about Irish language journalism.
I see that the major universities are still busy running Cúrsaí san Iriseoireacht (Irish language journalism). UCG has a couple of comms/iriseoireacht diplomas, UCD has one, so has DCU. There are probably more I don’t know about. Which makes me wonder where do all these aspiring iriseoirí think they are going to get a bit of work.
Almost all third level education is heavily funded by the tax payer (which is fine at a global level given that education provides a payback for society) no doubt these cúrsaí are too, and perhaps they get and even higher percentage since they are ar son na cúise.
One stark figure should be enough for all those cúrsaí to simply close their doors – it is the number of full time Irish language journalists who make a living from the written word: one. Yip, just one. And that’s the Irish language editor of none other than the English language paper, the Irish Times. His name is Pól Ó Muirí and he became the last surviving member of a species that is one heart beat from extinction – the full time Irish langauge journalist.
About six months ago the always-struggling daily Lá, published in Belfast, shut down. And last weekend the Irish language weekly, Foinse, running since 1996 shut down. It’s advertising revenue collapsed and the grant money from Foras na Gaeilge wasn’t enough to keep it alive. So plimp, it’s gone.
We know that in the present climate there is no way the substantially funded Irish language project, for want of a better term, is going to get more money. But the issue is, given the level of wasteful and frankly nonesensical spending on Irish elsewhere, why funds couldn’t be found to keep the weekly paper going.
Apart from the courses I mention, money is still dished out to absolutely hideously bad private operators for unused online courses and the likes.
But this exposes the insanity of the way the Irish language strategy has been piloted. All sorts of grants were available for Gaeltacht schemes – even thought about 70% of the Gaeltacht is now a fiction – and money doled out on making Irish a working Eu language. Imagine – the intricies of Eu protocols being tranlsated into Irish by Irish-trained linguists in Brussels while the last remaining Irish language news publication is allowed to die. There is no more perfect symbol for the self-defeating, wrong-headed, vested-interest driven thing that is state policy on the so called preservation of the Irish language.
There is some dignity in a genuine failure, an honest best-effort which just cannot succeed. But there is nothing noble about the shambolic, incompetent, rivalrous, clique-infested, and costly failure that is our nation’s effort to preserve its still-dying native tongue.
That’s a very powerful assessment of the area. And depressing too. What thought are your thoughts on where to go from here, or do you think that this is it?
On a slightly different topic, isn’t it remarkable how even the lip service that I recall from when I was in my teens and twenties in the 70s and 80s is now not even bothered with. Is that due to a commercialisation of society or something else?
On behalf of outraged Irish taxpayers I’ll also demand that Latin (tough luck, Waggie!), Ancient Greek and religious studies also be dropped from being funded or subsidised by the state in any way, shape or form (even in the so-called ‘private’ schools of he Roman Catholic Church).
And then we can start on classical music.
EWI:If you are inferring from my post that I advocate removing all state subsidy from more marginal subjects or fields of human endeavour then you are wrong. That is not my point. My point is this: we spend hundred of millions, perhaps more than a billion a year, subsidising the Irish language project. So much of that goes on pet projects, is pure waste, or is no more than clientelism, yet we cannot seem to keep an Irish language newspaper in print – something that would seem to me to be fairly fundamental, even in an era when the newpaper generally is underpressure.
Very condascending attitude towards young Irish speakers. To give them due credit they are a very enterprising group of young people who see that there’s more to journalism than being an employee of a media organisation – we’ve seen an Irish language magazine set up by young people (nós* magazine) and an Irish language radio station set up by young people (Raidió Rí-Rá) in the past 18 months.
WBS,
I think the whole project needs to be looked at in the round. As far as I know the Dept of Gaeltacht and Rural affairs has commissioned a ‘committee’ (not sure who sits on it) to come up with an overall 20 yr language strategy.
I hope that group venture into the territory of reality and leave the fantasy land behind. If you look at the government statement on the language in 2006 it paints the same old dreamscape: ‘Irish is the oldest spoken language in Europe’ it boasts. ‘Ireland is now a fully fledged modern european langauge’. And so the government are striving ‘to get as many of the population as possible to be bilingual’. In short it is pie in the sky, aspirational, and sadly, very out of touch with reality.
Thankfully we get the odd glimpse of reality which might help nudge us back onto a more sensible approach. An NUIG study I think in 2007 showed how Irish in the Gaeltacht is still declining perilously from its already shrunken base and proposed a revision of the boundarys (only about 30% of current residents would retain category A status).
I think the effectiveness of each of the multifarious parts of the whole complex picture needs to be examined – from compulsory Irish in the educational system, to the propping up of the Gaeltacht, to the support for language use by public bodies, etc. Each major arm of the strategy needs to be evaluated honestly to see what is working and what is patently failing.
I think there has been a huge change since the 70s/80s. First in terms of the Gaeltacht – it is a different place now and is more integrated into the main neighbouring urban areas in terms of employment and commerical contacts. This is better for residents in terms of their economic well being, but unfortunately I think it has been detrimental to the language. That economic catch up (where Gaeltacht areas were once always exporting people to, for the last 20 years, had people coming back) was a transformation. But dubious for the language – people returned with spouses and children who were monolingual. Or people became less economically dependent on projects derived from the language – such as gaeltacht colleges and so on.
But in terms of the attitude of the overall population, I think there has been a transformation as well. Not primarily driven by commericialisation I would think, but perhaps, yes the more ingrained consumerist mindset has been a factor. We see now more of a division – whereas many or most people would have been keener to make an effort years ago, now I think there are two distinct (not to say polarised) groups – those who care and those who don’t. (those who don’t wouldn’t care if the language was removed from the syllabus for example, and I think there are way more in this group than in the past). But probably other forces were at play : I think Irish identity has been settling in more confidently to something like: European, but Anglo-Saxon, not-English, but not defined by being unEnglish. The way the national question receded (thankfully) and the relationship with England normalised has to be a big part in this. And with economic catchup and (for a while) prosperity, we could afford a major amount of travel, and for other reasons (economic and cultural) we became hugely hooked in to the big blob that is global culture. I think we became a confident and self assured and stopped thinking we needed to re-susitate artifacts from our heritage to show we were different. None of this means that culturally Ireland is identical to Connecticut or to Brighton. A common underlayer has thickened between all these, but probably has limits. We still have a distinct sense of Irish music and sport for example, and a justified pride in our national (though english language) litterature.
Nor does this picture nessessarily mean that Irish is doomed. On a very dark canvass there are some bright spots – such as the continuing broad support by a significant chunk of the population, despite the growing ‘don’t cares’, and there has been continued and increased state support legally. And then there is the Gaelscoilanna, though I remain to be convinced that their motivation is soley linguistic or that they lead to sustained Irish speaking families much less communities.
Micilín Muc – I didn’t intend to disparage young Irish speakers (I was one myself – until I became unyoung). My criticism is intended at language policy.
But you raise a very vaild point – no strategy is worth a damn if there aren’t people with energy and enthusiasm on the ground as it were. In order for progress to be made there has to be a large element of bottom up pressure and determination. But the top down assistance, incentives, and support needs to be sensible and effective as well.
I think Irish has survived in spite of successive Governments’ policies, not because of.
It’s only future is with grass-roots interest that stem from the growth of Gaelscoileanna etc. and while there is a place for the State to support these kinds of developments they clearly are not capable of taking charge.
I would hate to see the country give up on Irish but at the same time I wish the Government would be honest about it. Either make a real attempt at saving the language or else don’t – we don’t need any more of this face-saving rubbish that does nothing for the actual well-being of Irish.
I find a lot of the debate about the Irish language is very inward-looking. Where are the studies comparing Ireland’s language policies with more successful policies elsewhere, e.g. Wales? Surely there’s much to be learned?
When I was going to school (not today or yesterday) we learned through Irish. In the late 50′s we had the opportunity to make the gaint leap and make the change-over to Irish and be like the Welsh but it never happened. In the recent exam fiaco I heard that the exam in Japanese had to be postponed. Now we know that there is no hope for Irish as a written language not to mind a spoken language.
As regards jounalism it seems that all our media are “singing from the same hymn-sheet” and the “hymn” is entirely predictable.
Bah. Wasn’t aimed at you in particular, Tomaltach – I was just getting my pre-emptive dig in before the “supporting Irish as a dead language…” line gets trotted out here once again by those with no love in their hearts for anything that doesn’t gel with a West Brit worldview.