‘The last thing it will do is stop people from learning Irish’ - leaflet attacking language will only encourage more to learn it, bunscoil principal says

Leaflets opposing Irish that targeted attendees of a class in Belfast may prompt more people to learn Irish, the principal of a bunscoil has said.

Police are treating the placing of the leaflets, which said most Irish people “should hate the Irish language”, as a “hate incident”.

They were left on the windshields of between 10 and 15 cars parked in the Dublin Road area of Belfast on Monday evening, close to where a free Irish language class for adults was taking place in the Points Bar.

The anonymous leaflet claimed “English is our mother tongue” and urged people to “oppose the forcing of the Irish language on the Irish people by the government”.

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One attendee of the class said she thought the incident was “low-level intimidation” and said it was “a wee bit scary”.

However, the person or people behind the leaflet has been warned “the last thing it will do is stop people from learning Irish”.

In a letter to the Irish News, the principal of Bunscoil Mhic Reachtain, an Irish language primary school in Belfast city centre, said such incidents will have the opposite effect, and will only encourage more people to learn the island’s native language.

Dr Séamas Ó Donnghaile said he agrees that English “is unquestionably the mother tongue of so many people here”, but added that “Irish is my hereditary tongue and it’s one of my children’s inherited languages”.

“The bilingual pupils in my school enjoy classes in sign language, Chinese, Spanish and recently they started learning – wait for it – Latin.”

The leaflet claimed Latin “would do much more for the Irish people” if it was taught in schools.

“The mind-blowingly immature messages about English being a mother tongue stated the obvious about Ireland’s second official language. I invite the same person to our school if s/he wants not to be seen for all time to be of limited intelligence and totally bereft of neighbourly attributes,” Dr Ó Donnghaile said.

“The flyers prove that we have a long way to go before we can say that people here are tolerant, understanding and open-minded.

“I would entrust the teaching of that to our P1 pupils as they are culturally and spiritually more generous than the author of the flyers - who is now another classic example of what’s wrong in too many parts of our community.

I imagine that the author of the flyers speaks only one language, doesn’t hold a library card, and will never understand how linguistically impoverished they are. After all, monolingualism - having one language - is the ‘21st Century’s new illiteracy’.”

He added: “The brains behind this folly should understand that such an act may prompt some people to join one of the scores of Irish classes in Belfast – so we can take an inevitable positive from this incident. The last thing it will do is stop people from learning Irish.”