Poor Cynthia Ní Mhurchú must have drawn the short straw. As reported on this site recently, the Fianna Fáil candidate in the E.U. elections spoke about the importance of the Irish language to her, a thankless task but a box that, oddly, even in modern times, still needs to be ticked by politicians.
Ní Mhurchú said that the E.U. parliament was treating Irish as a second-hand language. If elected she would “commit to prioritising a new vote in the European parliament regarding the provision of Irish language interpretation in the parliament itself and to ensure the removal of any barriers to employing interpreters with Irish”.
For Ní Mhurchú, Brussels was the starting point if the Irish were “serious” about preserving their culture, heritage and national language.
The EU does, of course, employ translators for written material and God love each and every one of them. It must be like working as a slave in a Roman galley. Still, half a loaf is better than no bread at all. In truth, this writer remembers when such work became widely available and teachers could now answer the age-old question of “What use is Irish?” with a triumphant “You can work with the EU as a translator and live in Brussels”.
After all, omelettes, pommes frites and Belgian beer will trump bacon, cabbage and a pint of Guinness every day of the sophisticated week.
Perhaps one of the more serious parts of discussion with Ní Mhurchú’s assessment about Irish would be blaming Brussels for their failure to promote the language. Is Baile Átha Cliath not more at fault than Brussels in this regard?
Ní Mhurchú’s remarks come on the heels of the government appointing Thomas Byrne to be Minister of State for the Gaeltacht in April. Byrne is, of course, a Fianna Fáil member, the same party as Ní Mhurchú, and found himself getting this little peach of a position because the (current) Taoiseach, Simon Harris, could not find anyone in Fine Gael fluent enough, or interested enough, to take on the onerous task of saying something while doing nothing.
Yep, it really says a lot about Fine Gael, a party that has engorged itself on patronage over the years that it could not find one of its own that bothered enough about you know, in the genuinely fine words of Ní Mhurchú, “preserving our culture, our heritage and our national language that our ancestors spoke in every day…”
Harris’s decision to appoint a Fianna Fáil member to the position did draw criticism from his own party. Former Minister of State for the Gaeltacht, Dinny McGinley, a Fine Gael stalwart for many a long year in Donegal, told the Irish-language website, tuairisc.ie, that he was “disappointed” that no one within Fine Gael had been found to fill the role and that that had given other parties “an excuse” to criticise Fine Gael and their interest in the language.
McGinley, to give him his due, was as blunt as a polite Donegal man can be, saying it was a “mistake” to give Byrne the job, though he, McGinley, was not faulting Byrne. He spoke of how his fellow Donegal man and party colleague, Joe McHugh, had little Irish but set a “good example” and improved his Irish while in the role.
For McGinley, the story showed the language had been “demoted” by the government. He summed up the government’s view of the region with a very funny bilingual one-liner: “Oh God, yeah, cé a ghlacfas an Ghaeltacht?”, that is, “Oh God, yeah, who will take on the Gaeltacht?”
(Put that on a t-shirt!)
Still, with the greatest of respect to McGinley, he maybe should have said that this recent decision gave Fine Gael’s language critics another excuse to complain. The party’s disinterest in promoting the language effectively has been there since the time of Enda Kenny as Taoiseach.
Indeed, one example of crossing the street to pick a fight with Irish was back in 2013 when former Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, decreed that two new ships being built for the Naval Service would not be named in the traditional way after female figures from Irish mythology but after famous Irish writers of English. This would “facilitate greater recognition of the ships when they visit foreign ports and when they are operating in the international maritime domain”.
Well, there you are then, nothing says “greater recognition” for Irish culture than English.
Oh God, yeah, perhaps Fine Gael should do away with that old-fashioned Irish-language name? I mean, it is a wee bit, you know, old fashioned for a modern party operating in the international domain – “Fine” meaning “family group, racial group, race” and “Gael” “Irishman or Irishwoman.”
Oh God, yeah, do not translate that over in Brussels.