Irish language rights still being denied

The decision by the North’s Education Authority to cut funding for Irish Language youth provision in West Belfast has been met with anger throughout the Irish language community and led to an angry protest outside the organisation’s headquarters in Belfast city centre.

Students and pupils from the city’s Irish medium schools, teachers, parents and youth workers from the Glór na Móna organisation the only group in the North that provides Irish language youth services, gathered in Academy Street on Tuesday 1 March to demand that the Education Authority remove its threat to cut 98% of the organisations £86,000 funding.

The threat to Glór na Móna’s funding comes amid fears that the British government is set to renege on its promise to pass the Irish Language and cultural legislation promised in the New Decade New Approach (NDNA) agreement.

This latest controversy surrounding the language came in the week prior to the publication of the report of the Irish Language Strategy Panel which recommends that a “key goal” of government should be that 500,000 people should have a knowledge of Irish while 20,000 should have Irish as their main language within 20 years. The panel also outlines the requirement to increase positive attitudes to Irish within the Unionist community.

Conscious of British foot-dragging a Sinn Féin delegation met NIO officials on Tuesday 8 March.

• Órfhlaith Begley

Afterwards West Tyrone MP Órfhlaith Begley warned the British government of the urgent need for it to fulfil its commitments and to introduce the Irish Language Act, that was agreed in June 2021.

Begley said, “Irish Language legislation will not only deliver crucial rights and protections for people, but it will also play a positive role in supporting the ongoing and energetic revival of the Irish language across our island.

“Sinn Féin will continue to hold the British government’s feet to the fire and work to ensure that they fulfil their commitment to implement the Irish Language Act” said Begley.

Despite signing up to the Irish language and cultural rights provisions of the NDNA the DUP blocked its passage through the Stormont Assembly, this resulted in the British government, under pressure from Sinn Féin and Irish language groups, committing to introducing the necessary legislation in Westminster.

With the assembly executive suspended due to the DUP walkout, and elections scheduled for May, the fear now is that the British Government will drag its heels and break yet another commitment to the Irish language community especially with the DUP and Jim Allister reinvigorating their anti-Irish campaign with the TUV leader, in particular, linking it to their anti-protocol protests.

While giving evidence to the ‘Northern Ireland’ Affairs Committee in early February NIO Minister Conor Burns maintained that the legislation around culture, identity and language which the parties signed up to in the NDNA document would be introduced in Westminster provoking both Jim Allister and the DUP’s Carla Lockhart to accuse the British government of a partisan approach to the NDNA agreement.

Allister and the DUP argued that by bringing forward the language provisions agreed in NDNA which includes an Irish language commissioner, an office for Identity and Cultural Expression as well as a commissioner to promote language and arts associated with Ulster Scots the British government is showing bias and partisanship towards the Irish language.

At the same time, by refusing to implement legislation to “guarantee unfettered access” to the “UK internal market” the British are displaying an anti-Unionist bias according to the TUV leader!

For many gaeilgeoirí the actions of the Education Authority came as no surprise given that the organisation is under the jurisdiction of DUP Education Minister Michelle McIlveen who as Agriculture Minister in 2016 notoriously changed the name of the Fisheries Protection Vessel named by Sinn Féin Agriculture Minister Michelle Gildernew Banríon Uladh, to Queen of Ulster!

McIlveen argued that DAERA (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs) as a new department, as distinct from the old Department for Agriculture, needed a fresh identity and logo and adopted a single language, English only, policy.

Outlining the effect of the EA cuts which Glór na Móna had been receiving since 2009 Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, director of Glór na Móna, maintained that they threatened frontline Irish-medium youth services amounting to hundreds of hours of weekly face-to-face youth work delivery and the loss of jobs in the sector.

“This undermines the equality agenda of the Good Friday Agreement and the Department of Education’s statutory duty to encourage and facilitate Irish-medium education”, argued Mac Ionnrachtaigh.

The opposition to the Irish Language and any legislation that acknowledges its place in Northern society takes on irrational undertones especially when the editorial in the Unionist daily the News Letter accuses republicans, not all Irish language enthusiasts are republicans, of having an “unceasing sectarian agenda to change the character of Northern Ireland), to undermine the country and to behave in a triumphalist way”.

This inflammatory language demonises those who promote Irish and want to live their lives through Irish and generates a hostile attitude to gaeilgeoirí.

This is evidenced in the Orange Order’s opposition to a proposal by Queen’s University’s An Cumann Gaelach to the university’s authorities to establish an Irish Language residency scheme allowing gaeilgeoirí to be housed together in halls of residence similar to those in the 26 Counties, Wales and Scotland.

Joshua Patterson of Queen’s Orange Society, with no sense of irony, said that the scheme would create “cultural apartheid”, ignoring the fact that there is an Orange Order residential scheme at Croom Elbow, named after the coffee house where some of the original founders of the so called ‘Glorious Revolution’ met in the Netherlands.

The accommodation building is used by the lodge for meetings, events, and also by the Orange Societies of both of Ulster’s universities.