It is quite probable that the real linguistic situation of the Gaeltacht districts can only be assessed in terms of such concepts as diglossia and compartmentalisation. Whilst even such an important commentator as Máirtín Ó Murchú has denied the existence of an Irish-English diglossia in Irish society at large, seeing indeed its absence as one of the most important reasons to be concerned about the future of Irish, this should not make us think that there is no diglossia in the Gaeltachtaí themselves. Indeed, unsustainably pessimistic evaluations of the linguistic situation in the Gaeltacht may be, at least to some extent, due to the sociolinguistic illiteracy of such researchers as, say, Reg Hindley, and to their ignorance of the reality of bilingual communities. Such Gaelicised in-migrants to the Gaeltacht as Gearóid Denvir and Éamon Ó Ciosáin have in several contexts implied that there is a diglossic distribution of the two languages in several Gaeltacht areas - a distribution that might be strong enough to coax even non-native speakers into using Irish if and when appropriate, if they spend a long enough time in the Gaeltacht to be absorbed. However, the extant information is scant indeed, and more research into the question of diglossia in the Gaeltacht is needed. It is possible that there are substantial differences in diglossic distribution between different Gaeltacht dstricts.
The choice of the language is presumably influenced by such circumstances as the necessity of keeping distance from so-called "blow-ins", people who buy summer cottages in the Gaeltacht without feeling the need to assimilate linguistically; however, even the presence of Irish-learners from Anglicised parts of Ireland is a factor, as well as the institutional status of the language in shops, schools etc. Non-Irish speakers can be accosted and spoken to in English as a matter of course; besides, the attempts of language-learners to practice their Irish with just about anybody who comes down the road might be perceived as tiring and impolite, so that native speakers can simply refuse to speak Irish with strangers.
First language tourists who came to the Gaeltacht were seen as sympathetic individuals you could make friends with. But as early as in the beginning of the 20th century visits to the Gaeltacht had developed into a fad and a fashion among urban intellectuals, and the visitors could not be regarded as individual personalities anymore, but as a faceless flood of strangers, disrupting the accustomed way of life. Even farming and fishing was made almost impossible by nosey intruders entering the houses and asking inappropriate questions. On the other hand, it would not have felt proper to chase away these "gentlefolks", either.
The survival of the Irish language in the western seaboard, of all places, was probably due, above all, to social isolation and bad traffic connections. The coast was spared the worst of the potato famine, perhaps because fish and seaweed made the coastal population less dependent on potato than the interior, where the social structures keeping Irish alive were shattered and crushed by the starvation: the family members and neighbours you used to talk Irish with were gone - dead, scattered in the poorhouses or else had emigrated - and you were left poor and destitute, begging for food in broken English. When society started to recover, it rebuilt itself with the English-speaking, prosperous east as the starting point, so that Irish was ousted as the remnant of a decayed society, with the new structures supporting only English. The western seaboard was the only part of Ireland to any extent cut off from this development: people living there were not interested in eastern Ireland, they preferred to emigrate directly to the New World or - especially from Donegal - to Scotland. Those living in the United States indeed contributed substantially to the livelihood of those left in the old country, and it is probable that the viability of the Irish-speaking communities (and thus the language) was to a relevant extent strengthened by this contribution.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the famine was long overcome and population increasing in the western seaboard. British authorities established a committee, the so-called Congested Districts Board, to find solutions to the real or predictable problems caused by this overpopulation. The work of the Board did not lead to any concrete results, but it did create something of a tradition: even in independent Ireland, the work of the board was drawn upon by subsequent State committees dedicated to making the Gaeltacht economically viable. The Gaeltacht people themselves had, however, little say in the work of such bureaucracies. They were more involved, for instance, in the 1930s campaign for giving Gaeltacht people the possibility to migrate to other parts of Ireland, where more arable land could be found; this scheme, spearheaded by the modernist writer to be, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, led to the creation of the artificial Gaeltacht in Ráth Cairn, County Meath. This pilot project had, however, no followers. When Gaeltarra Éireann, the Gaeltacht industrialisation agency, was established in 1957 in order to establish industries in the Gaeltacht to provide jobs, some of the plants founded there practically rather accelerated the demise of the language, attracting monolingual English-speaking managers where no competent Irish-speakers could be found - and those that could, were often ex-American emigrants with English-speaking spouses and children. Besides, the Gaeltacht people were not represented in the Gaeltarra management. This situation has changed only in the 1970s, when a new Gaeltacht Authority or Údarás na Gaeltachta was established: its management does include elected representatives of the Gaeltacht. It is symptomatic, however, that both the Údarás, the Irish-language radio (in the 1970s), and the television channel (in the 1990s), only came about in response to popular protest. Neither the broadcasting system nor the Údarás have quite proved up to expectations. In particular, it has been a shortcoming that the Údarás has not sufficient powers to stop the flood of the "blow-ins", wealthy English-speaking in-migrants, who unwittingly raise the prices of houses in the Gaeltacht, thus forcing young native speakers to seek accommodation elsewhere.
Údarás people are justly proud of the projects - from the Irish-language crêches and kindergartens to industrial plants for employment - their coordination and organisation work has helped to realise, but as a Finn, I feel compelled to ask the question, whether these supposedly stunning achievements aren't just routine matters that would be, in some other country, routinely solved by local government. In fact, it seems quite plausible to state that the precarious state of the language is somehow related to a seriously lacking system of local government. J.J.Lee, among others, has seen "parish pump politics", i.e. the frequent intrusion of strictly local matters into parliamentary decision-making in Ireland, as a consequence of bad or non-existent local government. I would find it hard to disagree. The fact that the Údarás and its projects are needed at all is probably another consequence, and it well fits in that there seems to be little political will to develop the Údarás into a genuine autonomous government. The gap between Ireland and, say, Spain could not be broader: indeed, the significant successes achieved in reviving the Catalan language are certainly causally connected with the post-Franco constitution guaranteeing far-reaching regional autonomy.
If "identity" were just a slogan, nobody would bother to learn Irish. As a medium of communication, English is available to the vast majority of Irish people today. A substantial number of active members in Irish language networks are secondary bilinguals. This means, that lots of native English speakers frequently communicate among themselves in a non-native language which seems to offer much less, culturally, than their native language. It is worth asking, what "identity" is, if it is enough to persuade a certain percentage - probably a stable percentage - of Irishmen to indulge in learning and promoting Irish.
It could be argued, as the "dead language discourse" would have it, that Irish is the defence of a Catholic and nationalist Ireland against a sinful, secularised, sexual, and socialist modern world. At some stage in the history of independent Ireland, this cliché did hold some water: there indeed were people who wanted to use Irish as a means of isolating Ireland culturally and intellectually from atheism and communism (and above all, anything else that could be branded one or the other). Since those days, however, much has changed. Nowadays, the Irish language scene is as politically pluralistic as the Anglophone life in Ireland is: individual proponents of a Catholic conservatism are found among Irish-speakers - notably the teacher and writer Ciarán Ó Coigligh - but even their stance might, to some extent, be mitigated by the fact that as Irish-speakers, they are often forced to cooperate with less backward-looking language activists. There have been original left-wing thinkers and litterateurs engagés in Irish, too (notably Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Seosamh Mac Grianna), and writers depicting sex, sin, urban slums or rural misery in a naturalistic way (Pádraic Ó Conaire the elder, Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, Breandán Ó hEithir); even older Irish literature, such as the eighteenth century poetry (say, Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna and Brian Merriman) was rather bold about sexuality. Even the Protestant contribution to the language cause is now celebrated by the Methodist Irish-language writer of biographies Risteard Ó Glaisne, thus giving the lie to the allegation that the language is somehow intrinsically Catholic, "Taig-talk" or "IRA terrorist lingo". "Identity" as a reason to learn Irish is, consequently, not to be equated with escape from liberty in any way.
Although English is now the majority language, the Irish still have a precarious relationship to it. Many Irishmen openly declare they don't want Irish or like it, but convulsively and neurotically denying Irish any value is only the manifestation of an identity crisis. Although a good "way with words" - certainly with English words - is appreciated in Ireland, with even young girls dreaming of becoming prose writers, the Irish variety of English has never quite been accepted as a vehicle of Irish identity. Although local vernacular English is amply used in literature, there is no national standard of the language, distinct from British and American. As far as I have observed, there is no conscious language planning going on to develop an Irish standard English - de facto standards are another story - but bookstores are crammed with guides to the British standard usage, proscribing typical "errors" by Irishmen.
The Irish consequently still seem to regard their variety of English as a failed attempt to emulate the British model, not as a native variety in its own right. The difference from, say, the Swedish of Finland is striking. Although Swedish language planning in Finland is bent on preventing the Swedish of Finland from drifting too far away from the metropolitan variety, it mainly focuses on keeping technical terminology up to date and making metropolitan Swedish terms known to Swedish-speaking media professionals in Finland, as well as fighting recent loan influences from Finnish. However, regional expressions from the Swedish dialects in Finland are tolerated or even encouraged as an enrichment, and sometimes a domestic variant is preferred to the metropolitan term even in technical terminology (the well-known example is raffineri for "[oil] refinery" instead of the metropolitan Swedish raffinaderi, which is rejected because it is longer and clumsier). The Swedish of Swedes is not idealised: in fact, the predilection of Swedes for English loan words is in Finland frequently seen as indicative of the inferiority and corruption of metropolitan Swedish in comparison with the Finno-Swedish variety. No Swedish-speaking Finn, living in Finland, would dream of consciously emulating the accent and intonation heard in Sweden - in fact, he probably finds it effeminate and ridiculous.
The identity crisis is to some extent reinforced by English literature. When English is studied at school, pupils must, as a matter of course, get acquainted with English classics. However, unconsciously racist attitudes towards the Irish are, after centuries of religiously motivated antipathy and outright wars between the two island nations, sometimes found even in books written by the most enlightened and liberal British writers. This means that a young Irishman must read and stylistically emulate a literature that may insult him with racist insinuations typical of war propaganda. Of course, the same applies even better to British popular culture, especially the gutter and tabloid press, which employs a populist style well suited to reproducing and recycling old clichés about the "wild Irish".
Thus, it can be stated with some plausibility that the Irishman is still the stepchild of the English-speaking world. English is not his language in the way Irish would be, if he spoke it. J.J. Lee sees indeed the language loss as the probable cause of "exaggerated anglophobia" and fruitless IRA republicanism: being speakers of the same language and largely dependent on British popular culture, they are too close to the English and feel the need to distance themselves: "It [= the loss of Irish] may also have been a reason why the Irish have remained hyper-sensitive to English views of themselves, reflected recently in their indignation at the spate of Irish jokes on English television. Many Irish were incapable of seeing that these reflected much more on the condition of England than that of Ireland" (LEE, page 669). The point is, that if the Irish spoke predominantly their own language, they would have a popular culture and a gutter press of their own, where they could tell to each other their own jokes about the English instead of being constantly exposed to English jokes about themselves and feeling the need of - if I am allowed to use Northern Ireland street vocabulary - "getting even with the bastard" who told the joke.
As Éamon Ó Ciosáin lamented in his riposte to Hindley's book, the field of Irish sociolinguistics has largely been left to such amateurs as Reg Hindley, who, albeit not strictly speaking inimical to the language, do not know it and might be blinded by the dead language discourse. The Irish language has been pronounced dead or dying time after time, even century after century, but if it is dying then it seems to take it an awful lot of years to get on with it. Irish is no more "dead" than other minority languages, endangered as it might be.
Instead of blindly reproducing Hindleian clichés about the death of Irish, it should be asked, whether the project of restoring Irish as a vernacular by establishing an independent Irish state - the project of combined cultural and political nationalism, upon which the Irish state was built - is dead. The answer to this question is probably yes.
In fact, the unspoken assumption of the project being by its very nature unreasonable and crazy has led to a situation, in which even quite reasonable demands for better service in Irish are warded off as the nonsense of cranks. Indeed, it seems that as the official first language of the state, Irish is worse off than as just a recognised minority language with well-defined linguistic rights. Most people seem to think that the constitutional first language status has never been meant to be anything else than a token provision, never to be put into practice. Irish has, thus, de facto less institutional support than Swedish in Finland. A recognised minority language status along Finno-Swedish lines might indeed have better possibilities of being taken seriously, even in Ireland.
At the same time, it must be stated that Irish is still widely felt, even by ordinary people, to be the "real" national language. Any schemes to promote it meet with wide popular approval, if not directly with active will to participate. Voluntary Irish-language activity, such as the Gaelscoileanna, the Irish-language schools for children in anglicised areas, is widespread and popular. Although the active Irish-language "scene" probably comprises only 5-10 % of Ireland's population, there is an immense potential of dormant Irish speakers that could response positively if modern mass media were used in a more innovative way to promote the language. The fact that much of this potential is in disuse leads many people to believe in the hackneyed phrases of the dead language discourse. The successes of the language movement, which are considerable, tend to be overshadowed by the fact that the country is littered with potential, but as yet failed, Irish-speakers.
An important problem that merits further sociolinguistic investigation is the relationship between urban language enthusiasts and rural native speakers. There is reason to believe that there is a conflict of interest between these two groups. Above all, culture and literature in Irish seems to be tailored to cater not for the native speakers, but the learners. There are plenty of textbooks of the Irish language, but a chronic shortage of schoolbooks for native children. The books that are available, are often told by the Gaeltacht teachers and other people to be "in the wrong dialect" - an euphemism, I think, for stylistically clumsy and grammatically shaky translations of English-language originals by non-native translators, rendering the books almost unreadable for a native speaker, especially one who is not accustomed to reading the language. Indeed, the fact that much writing in Irish is easily recognised as non-native might be one of the primary reasons why native speakers are said to be unwilling to read the language.
This is indeed one of the great challenges of the language movement today. The interests of those learning Irish for the sake of identity are not identical with the interests of native speakers. There is a possibility that the kind of Irish written, spoken and created by urban non-native speakers among themselves develops into a self-perpetuating tradition distinct from Gaeltacht speech, and that this kind of Irish will be perceived as the "real" Irish language. There is a very real danger that urban speakers misappropriate the language for themselves, leaving genuine Gaeltacht speakers, their speech and their culture marginalised not only in Ireland at large, but even in the Irish-speaking Ireland.
BALL, Martin (Ed.): The Celtic Languages. Routledge Language Families. Routledge, New York and London 1993
COOGAN, Tim Pat: The IRA. Completely Revised New Edition. Harper Collins Publishers, London 1995
KUHA, Tuija: The Significance of Language for Irish Identity. [Pages 105-115 in:] Celtica Helsingiensia. Proceedings from a Symposium on Celtic Studies. Edited by Anders Ahlqvist et al. Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 107 1996. Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki 1996
LEE, J.J.: Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge University Press 1989
MAC AONGHUSA, Proinsias: Ar son na Gaeilge. Conradh na Gaeilge 1883 - 1993 - Stair Sheanchais. Conradh na Gaeilge, Baile Átha Cliath 1993 [a history of the Gaelic League]
MCCOY, Gordon and Maolcholaim SCOTT (editors): Aithne na nGael - Gaelic Identities. Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University, and ULTACH Trust, Belfast 2000
Ó CIOSÁIN, Éamon: An tÉireannach 1934-1937 - Páipéar Sóisialach Gaeltachta. Leabhair Thaighde, An 74ú Imleabhar. An Clóchomhar Teoranta, Baile Átha Cliath 1993 [the history of the left-populist newspaper An tÉireannach, which also includes a minute description of contemporary political life in Ireland and its interaction with the Irish-language life]
Ó CIOSÁIN, Éamon: Buried Alive: A Reply to The Death of the Irish Language. Dáil Uí Chadhain, no year mentioned (first published in 1990 in the last issue of the periodical Graph)
Ó CONGHAILE, Mícheál: Conamara agus Árainn 1880-1980. Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, Conamara, ISBN 1 900693 96 8 [an analysis of the depiction of rural life in the Gaeltacht of Connemara in the last century, in novels and stories written by local authors]
Ó CONGHAILE, Mícheál (Editor): Gaeltacht Ráth Cairn - Léachtaí Comórtha. Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, Conamara, ISBN 1 900693 91 7 [a series of lectures originally broadcast on the radio in 1985, about the land reform movement of the native speakers in the 1930s and the establishment of the Irish/language colony in County Meath]
Ó CRIOMHTHAIN, Seán: Lá dár Saol. An Gúm, Baile Átha Cliath 1991 [an autobiographical book by Tomás Ó Criomhthain's son]
Ó DONNCHADHA, Diarmuid: Castar an Taoide. Coiscéim, Baile Átha Cliath 1995 [a long essay attempting to combine cultural nationalism with modern sociolinguistics; the author is an important Irish-language educationalist]
Ó GLAISNE, Risteard: De bhunadh Protastúnach. Carbad, Baile Átha Cliath 2000 [a history of Protestant Irish-language activists]
Ó HÁINLE, Cathal: Ó Chaint na nDaoine go dtí an Caighdeán Oifigiúil. [= "From Vernacular Speech to Official Standard". Pages 745-793 in:] Stair na Gaeilge in ómós do Pádraig [sic!]Ó Fiannachta. [= "The History of the Irish language - Festschrift to Pádraig Ó Fiannachta"]In eagar [= edited] ag Kim McCome et al. Roinn na SeanGhaeilge, Coláiste Phádraig, Maigh Nuad 1994
O'REILLY, Camille: The Irish Language in Northern Ireland. The Politics of Culture and Identity. Macmillan's Press, London & New York 1999
Ó TUATHAIGH, Gearóid et al.: Pobal na Gaeltachta - a Scéal agus a Dhán ["The Gaeltacht community - its story and its fate"; a collection of articles by native writers about all the different Gaeltacht districts]. Raidió na Gaeltachta agus Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, Conamara 2000
As well as the journals Yliopisto (Helsinki, twice a month during the academic year), Comhar (Dublin, once a month), and Cuisle (Dublin, once a month in 1998-1999); and the Irish-language mailing lists GAELIC-L, GAEILGE-A, and GAEILGE-B