Ireland

Article 8 of the Irish Constitution states that Irish is the national language of Ireland and the first official language and that English is recognised as the second official language.

Article 2 of the July 2003 law on official languages states similarly that:

“[…] The official languages are Irish (the national language and the first official language) and English (the second official language), as set out in article 8 of the Constitution.”

In the education system, both Irish and English are compulsory subjects for all from four to 18 years of age. Only with The Official Languages Act 2003, however, which was adopted by the two Assemblies on 14 July 2003, were the rights of citizens to use Irish in civil society on a daily basis enshrined in law. It was a first step towards a legal framework designed to reinforce the use of Irish within public sector institutions and promote equality between the two languages in practice.

Essentially, this text sets out that every citizen has the right to ask for and receive written or spoken information in the national language from any State body. It provides for the simultaneous bilingual publication of adopted laws and documents which might be of interest to the public, the translation into Irish of proposed laws, the right of all to be able to hear and use Irish in court, the use either of only Irish or Irish and English in spoken advertising and the use of both languages in letters from the authorities and on road and other signs. Over the past three years, progress has been made in this area, with bilingual signs being widely seen on roads and at bus stations, railway stations and airports.

There are no areas of contention with the European Commission over national texts allowing consumers to access information in Irish. Since 2007, Irish has been an official working language of the European Union. Even before this date there was an official Irish version of the procedural rules for the European Communities’ Court of Justice. European Community publications and documents are automatically available in Irish:

• certain publications of the Official Journal which deal with important issues for European citizens;
• documentation intended for the general public concerning the institutions and policies of the European Union, particularly in the areas of health, education and justice.

When Irish became one of the official working languages of the EU, the authorities gained new courage in promoting the first national language and the frequency with which it is used. The latter seems to still be a problem, judging from the number of articles and readers’ letters published in the daily press.

On 14 July 2003, the Irish Parliament (Oireachtas) approved the text of the planned law on the equality of the official languages. This law is known as the Official Languages Act 2003 and was intended to give a legal basis to the status of Irish and English as official languages. As such, it guarantees the right of citizens to use either language, determines a minimum level for the use of Irish and creates a Commission to ensure that the law is properly applied. The law is all the more important in the eyes of the Irish for the fact that all previous methods used up until now have quite clearly failed, such as the measures taken in the 1990s.

The law specifies that the State has sole responsibility for protecting the Irish language. The new law has three main objectives:

• to encourage the publication of brochures and official forms in Irish;
• to employ specialists in the service of the Gaelic-speaking community;
• to offer services adapted to specific needs, such as infrastructures and establishments in the sectors of education, media and planning.

The most important objective is to support concretely the development of the language, going beyond purely symbolic measures. Nonetheless, the law does not oblige anyone to use Irish in their daily lives and rests at measures designed to encourage. It also provides for the creation of a position of ‘official languages commissar’, a sort of mediator, to handle grievances and complaints put forward by citizens regarding services offered in Irish. An appropriate system of penalties and sanctions is also planned. There is a bilingual version (English with a French translation) of this recent law available online at http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/AXL/Europe/irlande-loi2003-bilingue.htm

The law provides for the creation of an office with responsibility for ensuring its proper application, run by a director reporting to the Ministry of Culture, Heritage and Irish Language Regions. The Ministry of Education and Science, for its part, ensures that the law is respected in terms of the teaching of Irish in the education system, as required by the Education Act 1998. In contrast, an Irish linguistic institute, founded in 1972 to develop research and reflection on the issue of Irish, working alongside the Ministry of Education to evaluate requirements and analyse the impact of projects in the linguistic domains, was closed down in 2004 by the authorities.

The Irish Government recently announced the appointment of 200 new language teachers to combat the increased influx of immigrant children into schools. In addition, the regulation which limited the maximum number of language assistants per school to two was removed. There are currently around 28,000 children in the Irish school system whose first language is neither English nor Irish. There are 1,450 language assistants working in schools (879 at primary level and 371 at secondary level), compared with just 262 in 2001. The language assistants’ sole purpose is to help immigrant children learn English. The government plans to create 350 more posts in 2008/2009.

The Official Languages Act 2003 also sets out rules on the role of the public sector, which is required to ensure that a sufficient number of its staff have mastered Irish, particularly in the Gaeltach regions, where Irish is officially protected as a vernacular language. In this part of Ireland, which includes the counties of Galway, Donegal, Kerry, Mayo, Cork, Meath and Waterford, if the law was followed to the letter, Irish could potentially become the only working language of the authorities. In practice, this is far from being the case.

In Ireland, pupils attend primary schools until they are 12 years old. Most of these schools are financed by the State, which supports all schools whether they are private, non-religious or religious. Lessons are taught in both English and Gaelic. In the Gaelscoileanna, or Gaelic language schools (235 primary schools out of a national total of 3,157), lessons are taught exclusively in Gaelic. This is also the case at secondary level, where there is a network of Gaelcolaiste (40 secondary schools out of a national total of 741) which teach entirely in Gaelic.

The Ministry of Arts, Sport and Tourism recently unveiled details of a new national development plan for 2007/2013 in arts and culture. Out of the 1.3 million euros assigned to the project, 904 million will be used to finance cultural development in the strictest sense of the word, while 226 million is earmarked for the implementation of a more offensive linguistic strategy designed to promote the use of Gaelic in daily life.

In Ireland, it is not compulsory to learn a foreign language.

All foreign languages find themselves in the position of MFL3 by virtue of the fact that there are two national languages in Ireland. Exams in these are only available at simple levels. For historical reasons, French remains the most popular MFL3 at secondary school in Ireland, with 59% of students choosing to study it. Trailing behind is Germany, with 14% of students, followed by Spanish with 9%. All other languages are at less than 1%. This is an average over a six-year period, bearing in mind that numbers can rise as high as 65% in the Junior Cycle and fall to 53% in the Senior Cycle. The unusual situation with French is not enough to avoid the threat, however, that in the medium term, foreign language options may no longer count when applying to universities or technological institutes. These latter strongly favour English and would like to turn language learning into a purely individual enterprise for pupils and students.

A pilot programme for introducing foreign languages at primary school level was launched in 1998 in the context of the Modern Languages in Primary Schools Initiative. 450 primary schools are currently participating in the initiative, offering 20,000 children in the third and final years of primary school the option to start learning Italian, German, Spanish or French. Unfortunately, this programme, which is a success in the schools where it has been piloted, is seen by a number of parents as a failure because it is in use in only 10% of schools and has not widened to be offered in all. Nonetheless, the Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation is consistent in its calls to remember the importance of starting children learning foreign languages early. More than anything else, the difficulty undoubtedly lies in the fact that the two national languages are so far from being regulated that foreign languages can only receive a secondary attention from the authorities. This attention is particularly focused on improving the acquisition of linguistic competencies at the turning point between primary and secondary school and ignores the numerous calls for a national linguistic policy to be defined.

The Irish authorities seek to impose legal requirements on the use of Irish as first national language. The symbolic nature and identity of Irish remain very strong. Nonetheless, the government has to bear in mind that Irish is the native language of a very small proportion of the population, that almost all citizens use only English in their daily lives and that the business world is exclusively English-speaking.

The Ministry of Culture, Heritage and Irish Language Regions (Gaeltacht) has taken various measures over the last ten years to relaunch the practice of Gaelic in the western part of Ireland, which nonetheless remains the tip of the iceberg. It has supported certain medias, created organisations to promote the Irish language and supported Gaelic language institutions. Its efforts have come to little, due to the lack of any specific legal framework on the use of Irish in civil society in general and the absence of a national linguistic policy bringing together all the languages spoken in Ireland. Irish is still a long way from the position that it should rightfully hold under the terms of the Constitution’s provisions and the Charter for Quality Service for the Consumer, signed in July 2000 by the Government. It is probable that now that Gaelic has been recognised by the European Union (in January 2007), there will soon be changes to the school curriculum which will affect the status of Irish in one way or another. Recent debates have cleared the way for the launch of a national plan promoting Gaelic.

Indeed, the government is preparing to launch a grand 20-year strategy for promoting Irish, based around 13 main objectives, of which the most important are:

• developing a bilingual society;
• helping families who want to teach their children Gaelic;
• paying more attention to the teaching of Irish in schools;
• making the use of Irish for exchanges between the public and the State more widespread.

In 2004, 92% of Irish said that Gaelic was important to them, their country or both. Out of 4.3 million inhabitants, however, only 1.6 million say that they can speak Gaelic. Every week, a broadcast on TG4 demonstrates the scale of the problem and the resistance being faced.

(2009)