What history tells us about how the Irish language has been treated in the north of Ireland

Referring to how elements of Gaelic culture were being eroded in Northern Ireland at its birth, Edward Millington Stephens, secretary of the Irish Free State’s North-Eastern Boundary Bureau, wrote in 1924 that Ulster unionists think “the Gaelic movement is in some way directed against the non-Catholic minority, that its object is to provide a rigorous test by which in course of time the non-Catholic may be separated from the Catholics and excluded from every lucrative position in public life, that in fact it is a kind of disguised sectarianism”.

Today, this still holds true for some unionists who see elements of Irish identity such as the language or Gaelic games as an existential threat to their identity, to their communities. Resistance to all displays of Irish identity remains stubbornly high among some elements of Northern society, although the power to prevent the displays has waned significantly since the days of unionist monopoly.

It is worth noting, as David Miller has, that Ulster Protestants before the end of the nineteenth century thought of themselves as ‘Irish’, where even elements of affections “in such gestures as blazoning ‘Erin-go-Bragh’ across the façade of the pavilion of the 1892 Ulster Unionist Convention” were displayed.

By 1912, however, most unionists were shunning their Irishness, attaching ever more importance to their British and Ulster identities. There still were more Irish speakers in Ulster than Leinster at the time. According to the 1911 census, 3.5 per cent of the population in Leinster could speak Irish while 6.1 per cent in Ulster could, although this was mainly helped by Donegal possessing 35.1 per cent Irish and English speakers.

While the Irish Free State made the Irish language the State’s national language, a compulsory subject at schools and an essential qualification for a wide range of public jobs, much to the distaste of Ulster unionists and many Protestants in the Free State, the newly-created Northern Ireland government sought to undermine the language wherever it could.

Robert Lynn, chairman of the committee established to propose structures for the future of education in Northern Ireland, which formed the basis of Lord Londonderry’s 1923 Education Act, said of the Irish language, it is “purely a sentimental thing. None of these people who take up Irish ever know anything about it. They can spell their own names badly in Irish, but that is all. I do not think it is worth spending any money on”.

Unsurprisingly, the Lynn Committee recommended to make the Irish language an optional subject in schools. This was to keep it in line with other secondary languages such as French. This was greeted with hostility from the nationalist community as further evidence of the regime’s antipathy towards its cultural values, relegating their language to the same status as continental ones.

“English was perceived as the appropriate language of citizens of the United Kingdom” Máiréad Nic Craith has written, “and a policy of neglect of Irish ensued. The British government removed the language question from the Northern Ireland census. The magnitude and extent of the Irish-speaking communities could no longer be assessed statistically.” Irish speakers north of the border were increasingly isolated from those in the rest of Ireland.

Brian M. Walker has pointed out that for many Northern nationalists, “the Irish language was viewed not just as an important cultural asset, but as evidence of a separate identity”. Newry native Denis Donoghue described how “learning Irish…was a sign that one’s kingdom was not of the Protestant, unionist world: we lived elsewhere”.

It was made more difficult to learn Irish from 1934 onwards when some Unionist politicians successfully lobbied to end the government payment of grants for the teaching of Irish as an extra subject in secondary schools. One of them, Sir Joseph Davison, said “the teaching of Irish has been largely a matter of political propaganda, and of disloyal propaganda at that”.

The 1973 Constitution Act brought in by Ted Heath’s Conservative government incorporated civil and human rights that had been denied to Catholics in Northern Ireland since its foundation, yet, according to Brendan O’Leary, it made no provision “for the promotion of positive collective group rights—such as the right to speak the Irish language in public forums, or have it displayed on street signs”.

Even though the Good Friday Agreement provisioned for the educational and public use of the Irish language, like how Welsh is used in Wales, the path to seeing that goal realised has been a long and painful one, with significant unionist opposition blocking it at every opportunity. And despite the British government promising a stand-alone Irish Language Act in the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, it only became officially recognised under the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022 which also recognises Ulster Scots as a minority language.

Irish street signs continue to be vandalised, if they are allowed to be erected in the first place. Translink has come under fire for the lack of Irish language signs at the new Grand Central station in Belfast. Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon council has just approved its first-ever bilingual street sign, resisting all efforts up until now, with local DUP MP Carla Lockhart calling such street signs as part of “a concerted effort to cleanse this area of Protestantism”. Her party has form, of course, in diminishing the importance of the Irish language to many in Northern Ireland. The interventions of the sneering Gregory “Curry my yoghurt” Campbell and Arlene “If you feed a crocodile” Foster stand out.

The recent attacks on Scoil na Seolta in East Belfast and on the wonderful work of Linda Ervine are all too familiar. This tampering with civic and cultural rights we see now, as enshrined under the Good Friday Agreement, does not just come from fringe figures like Jamie Bryson and Moore Holmes but still from the heart of political unionism.

This was manifested by Education Minister Paul Givan’s willingness to listen to complaints from the Loyalist Community Council’s David Campbell about Scoil na Seolta and the lack of support it has from the unionist community. The unionist community of East Belfast, or any part of Northern Ireland for that matter, has nothing whatsoever to fear from children learning Irish or playing Gaelic games, but have plenty to fear from the reprobates that David Campbell represents.