A MINOR DUP figure having a fleering go at Irish was the last straw. Unionist behaviour towards the language has sickened a significant number of northern Catholics. This is a particularly humpy camel, as the resignation on Monday of Martin McGuinness acknowledges.
Over Christmas and New Year Sinn Féin got more earache than they expected thanks to Arlene Foster, and Paul Givan. Carrickmore and Creggan, maybe even the Culmore Road have swallowed enough in the name of ‘transition’.
Foster’s contemptuous ‘ludicrous’ and ‘misogynistic’ displaced sense as well as responsibility. The DUP determination to insult their neighbours while all the while insisting on the dignity of Protestant traditions helped pushed the RHI clash well past the tipping point.
The £50,000 funding that sent Irish students to the Gaeltacht, nipped off by Paul Givan as he headed home for Christmas, was peanuts in comparison to those millions heating the sky. Idle Givan vandalism or minding his back after his photographed kick of a Gaelic football? But from a functionary previously distinguished by ladling out cash for flute bands what the meanness chiefly radiated was contempt.
There are Gaelgóirí SF supporters, probably at least as many who loathe them. The language does not belong to them. Even to those who may never learn much, less speak it, history, poetry, place and family names breathe Irish. People know what it stands for, and recognise the ugly disrespect mouthed in the past by the likes of Gregory Campbell and Sammy Wilson, continued by their junior colleague.
Many, not academic history students, still know well that Irish was suppressed as part of English and Scottish settlement of this island. To belittle Irish is to belittle those of whom it is part and deny Irishness its equal place in today’s Northern Ireland.
Last February, Fermanagh Grand Orange Lodge – presumably relevant to Foster thinking - responded to a Caral Ní Chuilín-sponsored consultation on Irish provision . Ní Chuilín’s ‘Líofa’ scheme to encourage Irish was probably doomed when Givan got his office. The Impartial Reporter noted crisply that the lodge had ‘disagreed with every single suggestion’. Irish as a minority language should not be given official status ‘any more than Ulster Scots, Polish, Lithuanian, or any other language. ’ In fact Polish, ‘much more prevalent currently’ said the grand lodge, should have higher consideration.
The response used better English than most Orange offerings, though it could not disguise contorted thinking. There should be no provisions for place names in Irish. ‘Most, or indeed all, of our place names, are already based very strongly on Irish and Ulster Scots. Therefore why, once again, are we putting Irish in a position that is above any other minority language? It will simply be seen as divisive and so further demean the language itself.’ ( Pretend courtesy?) There were ‘no Gaeltacht areas in Northern Ireland to our knowledge’ and any attempt to establish them will ‘simply lead to further disrespect, and suspicion.’
In 1986 Conservative NIO minister Richard Needham was as lacking in self-awareness, if less contorted than Fermanagh Orangemen, as he retreated from commitments to the language implicit in 1985’s Anglo-Irish Agreement.
‘Any movement towards bilingualism in Northern Ireland should be strongly resisted’, he told Dublin ministers. Then, as Irish state papers recently released record, he put it more bluntly. Dual language placenames? ‘Over his dead body.’ From a descendant of big Anglo-Irish landowners in Co Down, this was surely tin-eared.
The official face of Northern Ireland is still mostly British. Yet Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt, civil and liberal in spurts, disgraces himself by saying he is on the alert for a DUP-SF deal on an Irish language act. Which would be intolerable why, Mike?
To SF voters, the soft support that sometimes generates votes, as indeed for the rest of the non-unionist world, republicans in Stormont have looked steadily humiliated. Peter Robinson made overtures to the Catholic, nationalist part of the community he was supposed to front, as first minister in a shared office. The gestures dissolved before they could be tested.
Foster’s DUP merely trod in the pattern of disrespect and insult.
One small personal observation. A late returner to a language I never properly spoke, a couple of intensive weekend courses in Glencolmcille, obviously not subsidised, showed me language classes giving young people both educational and cultural experience. Well worth funding, at least as valuable as subsidising flute band teaching, and bonfires.
Givan is probably not grown up enough to recognise that. But his political culture looks no more mature.
