Many voices in Ireland have been critizing the marginal position in which the own language of the country, Irish, is increasingly left. The latest to join the critics is Irish Language Commissioner Seán Ó Cuirreáin, who has just resigned from his post while delivering a speech in which pessimism regarding the language is the dominant note: in the public sector, "for every one step forward there appeared to have been two steps backwards", he summarized.

Ó Cuirreáin had held his current position since 2003, and his term of office still had to run for a further two years. His Irish Government-appointed office is responsible for designing plans to implement Irish language legislation in the public sector. The commissioner says that in 30 years of experience, he had never seen "morale and confidence so low". According to him, language "continues to drift further to the margins of society including within much of the public sector".

The Irish Commissioner complains of two problems that, in his opinion, should be solved before the situation can be improved. The first one, the fact that Irish is not required to applicants to civil servant positions -its knowledge only counts as a merit. And the second one, there is no guarantee that all state officials who are serving the Gaeltacht areas are fluent Irish speakers. "Forcing native Irish speakers to use English in dealing with the agencies of the State must not be allowed to continue", Ó Cuirreáin says.

A threatened sanctuary

The Gaeltacht regions are located in the west of Ireland, and Irish is the everyday language -or it was until recently- of a substantial part of their population. They are officially designated, and the Government must implement there specific policies in order to maintain its Irish-speaking character.

According to the 2011 census, 69.5% of the Gaeltacht population can speak Irish. The percentage drops as time goes by, and in Ireland it is feared that the situation of minorisation that the language is suffering all over the island could be reproduced in these regions, which in reality should work as a sanctuary for Irish.

In the whole of Ireland, 1,774,000 people ( 40.6% of the total population) claimed to be able to speak the language in the 2011 census. But the use of Irish is highly concentrated in schools, where learning the language is required. Only 77,000 people say they speak Irish daily outside the education system. However, up to 438,000 speakers say they never use the language outside of schools.

Despite these data, Ó Curreáin wanted to leave a positive note in its latest language report. The commissioner said census data show that Irish speakers have increased 7% over the previous census (2006), and that this 7% increase is also to be found in the group declaring to use the language outside the education system on a daily basis. Indeed, the 2006 census showed this group was made up of 72,000 people, 5,000 less than today. "These statistics indicated a positive trend and are good news", the report said.

(Image: Séan Ó Curreáin / picture by Fiontar DCU).