The role of the Irish language became prominent in the Irish presidential election, not least because only one of the three candidates to receive nominations is a fluent Irish speaker – the one who became Ireland’s 10th president, Catherine Connolly. The debate about the importance of our Head of State having a command of the language took various forms but was largely reducible to the proposition whether fluency in Irish should or should not be a requirement for the holder of an office symbolising Ireland.

The word ‘symbol’ is key because many supporters of the Irish language engage in the language in that way only; it is symbolic of Ireland, propped up by theoretical defences. In her inaugural address on November 11th, President Connolly announced that she would make Irish the first language of Áras an Uachtaráin, and she also cited the old dogma, ‘tír gan teanga, tír gan anam’/ ‘a country without a language is a country without a soul’. This may prove another instance of theoretical advocacy. Although the first and most authoritative language of the state – judicially and constitutionally – is Irish, there are extremely rare instances when the authority of the Irish language version of the constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, is cited as superseding the English language version. Contradictorily, English is in practice so preponderant in all aspects of Irish public life that it voids claims made for Irish (except in theory).

Connolly said: ‘Irish will not be spoken in a low voice in the Áras; it will have first place as a working language’. What is the basis for the implication that speakers of Irish are forced into speaking it in a ‘low voice’? The subtext is that the language continues to be oppressed. Yet Connolly’s predecessor as president, Michael D. Higgins, who held the office for fourteen years, routinely interpolated Irish in his speeches and never faced censure for doing so.

Sounding that keynote for Irish as an oppressed language is an anachronistic view, far truer in the 19th or 20th centuries than in this one. While the state could cite the primacy given to the language in the educational system and in the civil service since the state’s foundation over a hundred years ago, a dominant attitude towards the language has been that the English language is infinitely more important. Associations of the Irish language with defeat and marginalisation prevailed. The broad inability or unwillingness to rethink the language and embrace it as a beautiful addition to daily life has done far more to keep it down than anything else. The challenges that Irish faces (and there are many) no longer stem from oppression, but from a lack of activism in using it at every level of Irish society.

Connolly’s words chime with a march held in Dublin on September 20th in which over 25,000 people demanded increased support for the Gaeltacht – the biggest march in support of the Irish language in our history. There was not a ‘low voice’ among the marchers. The strength of the turnout bespeaks a growing confidence in expressing the language and its centrality to our heritage. The immediate concern of the marchers is that the housing crisis constitutes a particular threat to the Gaeltacht. When the next generation of an area whose language could disappear in daily use cannot afford to live in the Gaeltacht, an emergency is heaped upon an emergency. If President Connolly makes speaking out in favour of Irish a recurrent theme of her presidency, a focus on the new-found confidence in Irish that animates that organised activism would be a good place to start, swapping a vocabulary of affliction for a vocabulary of gain.

Irish speakers are accorded a legal status in the state in the 21st century that was badly lacking for most of the 20th century. For example, in 2001, a landmark case in the Supreme Court, O’Beoláin v. Fahy (2001), established a precedent that the state must provide Irish-language translations of Acts of the Oireachtas even if the president signs a legislative bill in the English language only. That paved the way for a move at a supranational level, in the European Union. Since 2022, Irish has had parity of esteem with other EU official languages – and all EU documents must now be translated into Irish.

The view from the North is, as it tends to be, a little more complex. The flowering of the Belfast Gaeltacht, Irish-language hip hop and trad groups are suggestive of a mini renaissance. The Northern Ireland Assembly also managed to establish an Irish-language commission to support the language this October. Probably most remarkable is the work of Linda Ervine in East Belfast in establishing community classes and now an Irish-language school (Gaelscoil) in an area traditionally hostile to the language. Her premise is that the Irish language pervades our shared cultural heritage and our place names. Ervine faces down threats to her life to take those initiatives in unionist East Belfast, displaying an appreciation of the richness of Irish that is often forgotten south of the border where many take language rights for granted.

This debate ultimately goes back to reframing the language, to rethinking its anchors and associations and envisaging a new trajectory for it. There are definite stirrings of that happening in Ireland now. So, perish the nonsense that recently arrived people to our island could feel excluded by our using Irish (that is not something that keeps the French up at night when they speak Français). An act of espousal is worth a world of doubts, hesitations and objections. Next time you are in Dublin and want to order a cup of coffee you could make a point of doing so in Irish: ‘Tabhair dom cupán caife, le do thoil’. Whether the server has been raised in Ireland or is a foreign national they will probably decipher the order. If you want an espresso (for which there is no distinct translation into Irish), why not make up your own translation? ‘Tabhair dom caife luais, le do thoil’. The server may well have arrived to work on the Luas (the tram system in Dublin) for years and never once wondered what the word ‘luas’ means. It means ‘express’. Tír gan teanga in úsáid, tír gan teanga i gceart: a country without a language in use is a country whose language has not fully come into being.