Last week a video was circulated across various social media platforms which quickly drew the attention, and the ire, of thousands of Irish people. A young, glum-faced Irish woman was recording herself sitting in the back of a taxi alongside her friend. In the background, the driver, a man with a generic foreign accent, could be heard scolding her.
The reason? She had the gall to speak to her friend as Gaeilge in his taxi. She meekly protests, as Béarla, that Irish is the language she normally speaks with her friend, to which he asserts that it is nevertheless rude of her to speak in his presence in a language he can’t understand.
Those with any sense of irony were quick to point out the outrageous hypocrisy here. As anyone who lives in Ireland will know, immigrants who now make up over one fifth of the population in the 26 counties by and large have zero issues speaking in their own languages in front of Irish people, regardless of the setting. As one prominent nationalist commentator observed, “this is what we have been subjected to in our own country for the last 25 years.” This reality, combined with the sheer shamelessness of a foreigner in Ireland telling an Irish woman to stop speaking her own language in her own country, unsurprisingly provoked a slew of outraged reactions.
Ansin a tharla rud éigin aisteach. Seeing the comments her video was receiving, the young woman who had originally posted the video on X deleted it. She then posted again, stating that those who had commented on the nationality of the taxi driver had gotten the wrong message. She had only intended to highlight the anti-Irish language attitude which, dar léi, comes from Irish people, and the fact that the man in question was a foreigner was neither here nor there. She then accused the “far-right” of being “as bad as the Brits,” and with an ungrammatical call for the Irish people to “bí níos fear,” privated her X account. The incident encapsulated the strange relationship of the Irish left to the Irish language in the age of mass migration.
While the Irish language has continued to decline in the Gaeltacht regions to the point where it is perilously close to extinction as a language of community, it has received a new lease of life among a new class of largely urban, young, highly educated and highly politicised Gaelgeoirí. This new breed of Irish speaker is closely associated with left-wing activist groups such as An Dream Dearg social media content creators, and most famously, the rise of the notorious hip hop trio, Kneecap. Forget Gaeltacht grants and TG4 documentaries about old men fixing fences in Inis Oírr, the Irish Examiner tells us—Kneecap have put the Irish language “back into the bloodstream” of a generation.
Some online right-wing commentators have dismissed Kneecap’s popularity as artificial, pointing to the attention that has been generously lavished on them by establishment media. It is my opinion however that these commentators are missing the forest for the trees. Heavily promoted as they may have been, Kneecap have become a conduit through which the youth of Ireland have expressed tribal identity in the age of globalisation and deracination.
“Identity’s everything—I think a lot of people in Ireland, up the north side of it anyway, are having an identity crisis. Once you speak the language, you know who you are as a person.”
– Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó hAnnaidh, Kneecap member, in a 2022 interview with Vice News.
Amongst the members of the new Irish-speaking community one will generally find the same ideological positions that you will see among college educated left-wing youth across the west: a passionate devotion to Palestine and other third world causes, LGBTQ+ ideology, and of course a strong support for mass immigration and multiculturalism. These individuals have generally reacted with hostility towards the anti-immigration protest movement that has gathered pace across Ireland in the last couple of years. “They call themselves patriots, but they can’t even speak their own language,” has become a common refrain directed towards predominantly working-class anti-immigration protesters. Laughter and ridicule directed at poor Philip Dwyer abounded when he was unable to respond in Irish to a left-wing Gaeilgeoir. A TG4 journalist gloated that he could not find any evidence of “far-right” usage of the Irish language to communicate amongst themselves. Unsurprisingly, when protests were conducted by native Irish speakers in the Connemara Gaeltacht villages of Carraroe and Carna—one of which resulted in the intervention of the Public Order Unit—against the imposition of asylum centres in their communities, this managed to avoid media attention altogether.
For the Irish-speaking leftists who have pinned their stripes to the mast of mass migration, one can imagine that the sight of a foreigner objecting to the use of Irish must have felt like something of a betrayal. However, to those capable of objective analysis, it will be no surprise that most immigrants in Ireland lack the grá for ár dteanga dúchais.
The desire to learn and speak the Irish language as an Irish person is a fundamentally nationalistic impulse. It arises from the knowledge that this was the native language of our ancestors before they were subjugated by a foreign occupier. The Young Irelander Thomas Davis, in the mid-nineteenth century at a time when the language was rapidly fading across Ireland, wrote that to impose a foreign language on a people was to “separate them from their forefathers by a deep gulf.” Davis tells us that a national language is a “surer barrier, and more important frontier, than fortress and river.”
If a national language is a natural barrier, one must wonder, of what use could it be to those who proclaim “no borders, no nations”? To speak Irish as an Irish person is the highest expression of our ethnic identity—it bridges the gulf between us and our forebears and asserts our distinction from the rest of the world. The leithidí of Kneecap on the Irish left understand this on an instinctual level, and they will often make references to their ancestors whose native language and culture was beaten out of them—yet paradoxically, when Irish identity is discussed in the context of immigration, they will deny that one’s ancestral heritage has anything to do with whether they are Irish or not.
What, then, is the future of the Irish language in a country where a rapidly increasing segment of the population lacks any ancestral link to it? The Gaelic Revival took place in almost entirely homogenous Ireland, a country in which people could appeal to a shared ethnic heritage. By contrast in the multi-cultural “Eyeland” of today, appeals to common ancestry become impossible, because such a thing no longer exists. If a second-generation Nigerian immigrant is just as Irish as a McCarthy or an O’Brien, can they not claim that the Yoruba language of their parents is just as Irish as An Ghaeilge, and is just as deserving of legal status? After all, you’re likely to hear Yoruba spoken in the streets of Dublin or Limerick today. In a country which in every passing year becomes more unrecognisable, things which were once taken for granted will have to be re-considered.
This is not a purely hypothetical issue. In the north of Ireland, unionists like Arlene Forster have cynically argued against legal status for Irish by pointing out there are more speakers of Polish than Irish in Ireland. As far back as 2008, one will find accusations from media personalities that Gaelscoileanna were facilitating “social apartheid” by allowing parents to send their children to immigrant-free schools. The requirement of proficient Irish for members of An Garda Síochána has been dropped as part of a push for a more diverse workforce, and there have been calls from politicians to do the same for trainee teachers. The diverse base of students was used as justification to prevent Synge Street’s conversion into a Gaelcholáiste, and last year, it was reported that even Gaeltacht schools are being forced to teach through English to accommodate a surge in refugee students. Across the water in Scotland, unionists who have long opposed funding for Scotland’s endangered Gaelic language have found an unlikely ally in a former SNP candidate of Pakistani heritage who has claimed it is “racist” to fund Gaelic over languages spoken by brown people.
Left-wing Irish language activists have consistently ignored the ways in which multiculturalism has been used to erode the status of the Irish language in Irish society, instead focusing on the few examples of people of foreign extraction who have learned Irish to promote the plainly delusional idea that mass immigration will facilitate a new Gaelic revival. Faced with the incongruity of their values, they have adopted a wilful blindness, one which they will not be able to maintain for much longer. The reality is that the vast majority of immigrants have no interest in learning anything about Ireland’s history, never mind our language. For a great many of them, the fact that we are an English speaking country will have been a major reason for their decision to immigrate here.
If mass immigration reduces the ethnic Irish people into a minority in our own homeland – something that could occur in as short a timespan as 15 years according to one analyst—anyone who advocates for the Irish language will face questions as to why the new majority in Ireland should care at all about preserving a heritage which does not belong to them. These are questions the Irish left have avoided asking themselves, and to which they have no answers.
As a right-wing Irish nationalist, I must give credit where it is due, and acknowledge that in the modern age it is those on the left who have done the most to bring the Irish language back to the forefront of cultural life in this country, and right-wing nationalists must strive to be more like the left in this regard, especially if we wish to be taken seriously as nationalists, as opposed to mere xenophobes or racists. It is a tragic irony that the same left fail to understand that by supporting and defending the mass immigration policies of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, they are complicit in the destruction of the type of society and nation in which the Irish language can continue to survive and thrive.
Ireland stands at a crossroads between two visions—the Ireland “not free merely, but Gaelic as well” envisioned by Pearse, a country proud and confident in its own unique culture, language and identity – or the “island at the centre of the world” espoused by the Leo Varadkars of this country: the multiculti, cosmopolitan tax haven for tech multinationals, where renters commute to their office cubicles before returning to shared apartments with Indian IT workers and Brazilian Deliveroo drivers.
The leftists who think they can have both are pulling in two opposite directions—and at some stage they will have to choose between the two.
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