The Frontline on compulsory Irish

Eliot Rosewater

conorhal wrote: »

A country without a language is a country without a soul.

Firstly, we have a language, English. Whether you like it or not this is the de facto only language spoken here on an official basis; at this stage Polish is probably spoken more than Irish.

You appear to think that Irish gives us a "soul". If we make it a voluntary subject this will not change.

Finally, many countries do no have their unique predominant language; the Americas, for example.

conorhal wrote: »

Your language informs the cadence and idiom's of your speech, that particular way of saying something, even in English that makes you unique.

I'm not aware of any idioms in my speech that derive from Irish. Perhaps you might expand upon Irish's impact upon "Hiberno-English".

conorhal wrote: »

I don’t understand the lack of pride in our language.

People have been forced to learn it, and they resent that fact. They see it as useless.

There are many more aspects to our culture other than Irish: GAA, literature, mythology, traditional music, dancing etc. Unlike Irish, these aspects have been successfully carried through to the 21st century, and people consider them a part of our modern culture. The same is not true of Irish. I would say it's a part of our culture of the past, but not of the present.

conorhal wrote: »

those that would erase their language and history...

This is bizarre. No one is suggesting we erase Irish, and no one is suggesting we erase our history (I don't know where that one came from ). A someone else said, Irish would probably survive its transition to a voluntary subject. And if it didn't, then that would only be proof that the modern Irish people don't want it.

chughes

conorhal wrote: »

A country without a language is a country without a soul.

That's quiet a harsh thing to say about USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many South American and African countries.

Stark

Sleepy wrote: »

If it's a part of our current culture, it'll still thrive when made optional as lets face it, it's an "easy honour" subject (I got a C1 in Ordinary Level after reading my way through the Preacher comics for the two years of L.C.).

I don't think a C in ordinary level is an "honour". An honour would be a C or higher at Higher Level I would have thought. And while Ordinary Level Irish may be a piece of piss, Higher Level Irish was one of the most difficult subjects on the Leaving Cert syllabus when I did it.

sensibleken

donegalfella wrote: »

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heres the CSO stats on Irish speakers

http://www.cso.ie/statistics/irishspeakerssince1861.htm

Irish speakers are on the increase.

Aidan1

Irish would probably survive its transition to a voluntary subject

I suspect strongly that it would benefit from it, not least because over time the memory of being force fed it in school would pass, and it could be enjoyed and celebrated for what it is - a historical language, which has significant cultural value for some people.

@DonegalFella - you might want to be slightly careful with your source, there are those in the Irish language lobby who will use the figures presented elsewhere that Irish was a 'majority language' until the mid 19th century, and that it was the famine that turned the tide (and that people lied in the census for some reason). I'm not convinced by this argument but there is an extent to which the demographic surge in the west in the early 19th century may have temporarily hidden the decline of the language elsewhere.

sensibleken

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I'm not aware of any idioms in my speech that derive from Irish. Perhaps you might expand upon Irish's impact upon "Hiberno-English".

what most people do on boards. give out, tabhair amach. at all, as in i've nothing at all, ar bith.

Macha

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I'm not aware of any idioms in my speech that derive from Irish. Perhaps you might expand upon Irish's impact upon "Hiberno-English".

*To give out to someone - ag tabhairt amach do

I don't know how other anglophones survive without it

Edit: Ah sensibleken got there first.

sensibleken

people have stated that there is no practical use for it so whats the point. personally i have never used Cosine since leaving school. never has education been solely about what is useful.

interestingly, i was taking adult courses in Gaelcultúr and there was a fair few people from abroad, french, polish, australian learning Irish. made me feel quite embarassed as they were better than i was at it.

Permabear

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BluePlanet

And I wonder how many of those are using it only within the context of their PS job.

Permabear

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theredletter

I understand that Maths is definitely a very useful subject to study and it should be compulsory... but... I don't like Maths. I'm bad at Maths. I struggled with Honours. I had to drop to pass. I went to grinds, I did my best and I got an A, but other subjects suffered. More people, generally, complain over and over about how Maths screwed them over in the Leaving Cert. Just because people dislike something does not mean it should be just gotten rid of.

Studying ANY second language until Leaving Cert is definitely advantageous. I know learning Irish in both primary/ secondary really heightened my awareness of how languages work. I picked up French very quickly, got a B1 without much work. I did German up until Junior Cert, and I was able to speak it well enough at the end of the exam. Gotta say Irish's grammar is far easier than French's! Or English's for that matter.. we have 11 irregular verbs in Irish and over 470 in English! Wowzer!

I think it's shameful that Irish people have such a problem learning languages. Most other European citizens have at least one other language (English) and possibly a third. Although there are definite problems in both the way Irish is taught and the teachers who teach it, it is still something we should work on for the sake of linguistic diversity. If Irish was gotten rid of, I'd say make French compulsory. Believe me guys, educationalists in Irish are working on it and they are following how Europeans do it (and they do it WELL). There will be massive changes. Already there is a huge revolution occurring with how it is being taught in the BA. Do your homework guys, it's getting better. It takes longer for the Dept. of Education to realise that others are doing it better.

Irish, Americans and British people get so lax about their English they consider learning a second language as unnecessary or tiresome. Wait til we have to all learn Chinese... It will be the bilingual Irish (whether they have Irish, fluent French or Hebrew!) who will pick the language up fairly easily, while the rest stray behind.

LordSutch

The point that stood out for me on last night's programe was the interview with the school leavers "After forteen years why can you not speak Irish" ??? > This has been the Big question through successive generations since the foundation of the State. I am not Anti-Irish, but is it really healthy to 'study' Irish for your whole school life, only to come out the other end of the system & not be able to speak it fluently :cool:

I think Irish should be 'optional' after Inter Cert.

P. Breathnach

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Firstly, we have a language, English. Whether you like it or not this is the de facto only language spoken here on an official basis...

That's not wholly true. I'm not currently engaged in official business, but when I was so engaged I transacted some of it in Irish because people with whom I was dealing wished to use it. I am aware of people who currently have, and manage to exercise, such a preference. They do it because they like Irish, and in some instances they like it because it is their first language and they feel more at home using it.

...
I'm not aware of any idioms in my speech that derive from Irish. Perhaps you might expand upon Irish's impact upon "Hiberno-English".

There have been scholarly and popular books that deal with the subject. P.W. Joyce's English as We Speak it in Ireland, first published in 1910, is a seminal work, and much of what he found is still relevant today (not all of it, of course, because language constantly evolves). There are modern reprints, so it is available today. It's an interesting read.

theredletter

Camelot wrote: »

The point that stood out for me on last night's programe was the interview with the school leavers "After forteen years why can you not speak Irish" ??? > This has been the Big question through successive generations since the foundation of the State. I am not Anti-Irish, but is it really healthy to 'study' Irish for your whole school life, only to come out the other end of the system & not be able to speak it fluently :cool:

I think Irish should be 'optional' after Inter Cert.

Cameolt...

what's the square route of 340?
describe the events that lead to the 1916 rising.
discuss the theme of isolation in Sylvia Plath's poetry.
paint me a poster for a film festival.
have a small conversation with me in German/ French.
what is the main vein of the heart called?

OK.. so you can probably answer a few of those... but it just shows if there is no need to continue and reuse knowledge it is lost and forgotten. Kids who continue with Irish into BA bring their skills with them and enhance them, as they do in art, French, English, engineering etc. If there is no need to keep writing literary essays/ painting/ doing simple equations, you slowly forget the knowledge and replace it with other knowledge. Absolute cop out of an argument and it is a relatively known fact that leaving cert students completely forget the knowledge they attained the minute the leaving cert is over, unless they have a reason to use it again.

My French was pretty good, nearly fluent! I could hold a good conversation in it. I went to France and I was able to ask where the toilet was and order food. Today my French is pretty much gone because I have no need for French in Ireland.

OhNoYouDidn't

donegalfella wrote: »

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What percentage of the Irish population use algebra or calculus every day? Speak French? Read a map? Read a poem? Use first aid?

You are of course right at a higher level about the Irish Language policy, but not using direct skills learnt in school daily is not a reason to cease teaching it.

OhNoYouDidn't

Camelot wrote: »

The point that stood out for me on last night's programe was the interview with the school leavers "After forteen years why can you not speak Irish" ??? > This has been the Big question through successive generations since the foundation of the State. I am not Anti-Irish, but is it really healthy to 'study' Irish for your whole school life, only to come out the other end of the system & not be able to speak it fluently :cool:

I think Irish should be 'optional' after Inter Cert.

Locigal extrapolation of that is select kids at 5 and give them career streams. You are a scientist, you a writer, you a ditch digger, and drill the skills into them and only those skills. Because the concept of a broad education makes no sense to you.

LordSutch

OhNoYouDidn't wrote: »

Locigal extrapolation of that is select kids at 5 and give them career streams. You are a scientist, you a writer, you a ditch digger, and drill the skills into them and only those skills. Because the concept of a broad education makes no sense to you.

Permabear

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Banned Account

donegalfella wrote: »

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So they can laugh at Ritchie Kavanagh songs of course.

Nijmegen

OhNoYouDidn't wrote: »

Locigal extrapolation of that is select kids at 5 and give them career streams. You are a scientist, you a writer, you a ditch digger, and drill the skills into them and only those skills. Because the concept of a broad education makes no sense to you.

But we do narrow their field in secondary, do we not? Somebody who chooses not to do business at junior level is hardly going to do accounting at leaving?

A broad education - in the broadest sense of the term - is a good thing, but the fact is:

The vast, vast, vast majority of Irish people do not speak Irish, and I believe a majority could not speak Irish.

Irish is a core subject that receives more attention than the optional subjects like history, like geography, like business, like economics, like home ec....

It is a core subject that the children must learn, like it or lump it.

The other two core subjects are Maths and English. There are good, employable, reasons why they are core subjects.

There is no good practical reason to keep Irish as a core subject.

And the leaving cert is practical. It's about scoring the points you need to get the university course you need. The people involved are very much tied into the practicalities of this situation.

Meanwhile, many of them flitter away 100 hours a year of class time on a subject they do not like, that will not aid them in employment (don't ask me, ask the head of HP here in Ireland) and for which the main reason for keeping it a core subject is "culture."

By that reasoning, history should also be compulsory.

Darsad

My 9 yr old has been granted or at least will qualify for an exemption in Irish if we decide to proceed with the application . Anybody got any idea as to what downside not having Irish would have or does the exemption exempt the need to have Irish for UCC UCD etc .

Sleepy

conorhal wrote: »

And where did I say that?

conorhal wrote: »

]I don’t understand the lack of pride in our language.

= I don't understand your point of view

Now more then ever we need to restore a collective identity.

= so everyone should be forced to learn Irish.

Arguments that point out that Irish being taught at primary level assists in the ability to learn modern language have always seemed counter-productive to me. If the best argument for teaching something is that it helps in the learning of something else (that's not founded upon the first subject) why not just teach the something else (i.e. a modern european/international language that's not half made up gobbledegook and is actually spoken widely) at that level instead?

Arguments that 'but I've never used [part x] of the Maths or English curriculum since school either!!eleventy1' are utterly irrelevant since they're an argument for removing that element of the Maths or English course (or for removing the compulsory nature of the most important subjects on the curriculum). These arguments may distract from the topic at hand but they do not support the case for Irish being compulsory

Stark wrote:

I don't think a C in ordinary level is an "honour". An honour would be a C or higher at Higher Level I would have thought. And while Ordinary Level Irish may be a piece of piss, Higher Level Irish was one of the most difficult subjects on the Leaving Cert syllabus when I did it.

I fully agree that my own grade wasn't an honour at all, I used it as an example of how worthless the ordinary level exam was - I paid no attention to lessons for 2 years, spent about 15 minutes reading the English translation of the horrendous book we were supposed to have read (murder on the dart iirc)and got through the exam.

When I did the LC (1998) I never got the impression from anyone I know who did honours that it was considered a hard subject to get an honour in. Difficult to get an A1 in certainly but most with any interest in the subject got C's or B's with little difficulty.

For the rest of us it was just a matter of dropping to pass and making sure you didn't fail it.

I honestly can't see a benefit to the subject being compulsory beyond primary school (and even there, the benefits from swapping it for a real language would be far higher imho). Beyond making an interested group happy that they're able to force their opinion on everyone else what benefits do we get from it being compulsory?

Is putting children with no natural apptitude for language at a disadvantage in matriculation somehow advantageous to society?

Is forcing a subject of questionable merit on anyone with no interest in that subject going to do anything but make them hate it?

Should we be saying that a student capable of 6 A1's isn't worthy of a college place because they've failed Irish?

Should we promote the idea that if you can't speak a dead language you should hand back your passport? Even the Catholic Church were progressive enough to give up on Latin when it had died out!

Is forcing people to study a subject a better means of keeping it alive than trying to foster a love of it in those who might be receptive to it? Wouldn't it make more sense to try ensure the language's survival by spending money on evening classes, artistic bursarys, social groups etc. rather than by wasting it on translating and publishing state documents that no-one ever reads into that language?

Who knows, if you let those students with no inclination for the subject to focus on something they have an aptitude for instead you might even see an increase in that person's academic / economic output somewhere down the line that might help lead to higher state revenue and more money to spend on preserving the language that way?

Permabear

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aDeener

Sleepy wrote: »

I've addressed this subject so many times on boards.ie that I won't do it at length again.

Most people in favour of forcing this language on our youth have only two arguments:

1. It's part of our culture/heritage.
2. 800 years of blah blah blah...

If it's a part of our current culture, it'll still thrive when made optional as lets face it, it's an "easy honour" subject (I got a C1 in Ordinary Level after reading my way through the Preacher comics for the two years of L.C.).

If it's part of our history (i.e. not hugely relevant to our modern culture), it'll be studied by those with an interest in it and kept alive by the many enthusiastic Irish speakers in this country. No doubt many of these will force their children to study it for Leaving Cert if it's optional.

To argue for it to remain a compulsory subject is to argue that you have a right to force your love of something on someone else.

At present, most of the opportunities for employment in the sphere of Irish only exist because our government are happy to waste money (both our own and the European Unions) on it. Bbased on personal experience of watching 5 figures having to be spent to translate a financial report I worked on (which was reckoned to be "makey uppy Irish" by the only fluent Irish speaker on the team), the "translations" of so many state documents are wildly inaccurate because for many of the terms they deal in, there are no Irish words, the language is simply to out-of-date to have words for many modern financial terms (because no-one uses the language in the world of finance - and, tbh, why would they ever need to?).

Forcing the language on our students and state agencies is a gross misallocation of state resources that there is no justification for beyond the desires of some of the state's citizens.

a country's history is not part of their modern culture?? what an ignorant statement :rolleyes:

thebman

OhNoYouDidn't wrote: »

What percentage of the Irish population use algebra or calculus every day? Speak French? Read a map? Read a poem? Use first aid?

You are of course right at a higher level about the Irish Language policy, but not using direct skills learnt in school daily is not a reason to cease teaching it.

The point of teaching people maths is it leaves wide career choice open to them and are useful skills to have.

Teaching someone Irish lets them work in a few public sector jobs and private sector jobs where the state has ordered them to do translations.

There is little merit in making Irish compulsory. Of course the problem is some people think its part of our culture (those that refuse to acknowledge cultural evolution) and think it should be forced on anyone that is born in the country regardless of desire to learn it or usefulness to them in their lives.

That is the problem. The solution is obvious, make it optional. If it is as they say a thriving language, it should have no problems. French and German don't even in Ireland many choose them even though they aren't compulsory, why should Irish be any different (if your going to argue historical significance then I'm going to suggest we should learn about how people used to speak it in a history class, if your arguing culture, see cultural evolution)?

theredletter

donegalfella wrote: »

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First of all, having seen you complain, bitch and moan about Irish on various threads, I have come to the conclusion that you're all talk. I don't support Irish as a nationalistic endeavor, but I support the language for what it is - a language. I work with the language on a daily basis, putting my money where my mouth is. Maybe you should take a leaf out of my book and put some action behind your sentiments. I'll warn you, you probably won't get far as the language is protected under our constitution. Can I ask what you've done to act on your ideas?

Again, your ideology is as flawed as those who support the language but refuse to do anything about it. In the Leaving Cert I was FORCED to do a maths exam, which I hated. This was examined under the premise that I would need maths in my everyday life. How would line theories help me in my everyday life? Why can't we have another subject known as Everyday Maths so I can learn how to solve everyday mathematical problems? Language, just like maths, is a necessary tool. Irish is just one language in the world. I positively believe having a second language as compulsory is still necessary. Seeing as we're in Ireland, I think Irish would do. Saying that, any language would do.

Irish, and other language subjects, will bring forward future linguists who will be the ones maintaining communication in the EU and will teach you Chinese when that comes about...

Irish, in my opinion, should remain compulsory and should be split into a communicative and literature-based course. Communicative would look at every day use of language AND include literature (as literature is a part of culture). The communicative course would have set goals for each student, a language portfolio that would show their progress, multi-media methods, more emphasis on Gaeltacht trips. Literature would be like the applied maths, but would be slightly more difficult than paper 2 as it stands. No poems on the paper, focus on three/ four poets rather than one poem from each poet. Stair na Gaeilge would be an element, but more in terms of literary development than anything else.

75 years really isn't a long time. I think they know their policies aren't working and that's why so mu dongealfella ch work is being done on trying to fill the gaps.

neil_hosey

pat kennys a clown

neil_hosey

theredletter wrote: »

First of all, having seen you complain, bitch and moan about Irish on various threads, I have come to the conclusion that you're all talk. I don't support Irish as a nationalistic endeavor, but I support the language for what it is - a language. I work with the language on a daily basis, putting my money where my mouth is. Maybe you should take a leaf out of my book and put some action behind your sentiments. I'll warn you, you probably won't get far as the language is protected under our constitution. Can I ask what you've done to act on your ideas?

Again, your ideology is as flawed as those who support the language but refuse to do anything about it. In the Leaving Cert I was FORCED to do a maths exam, which I hated. This was examined under the premise that I would need maths in my everyday life. How would line theories help me in my everyday life? Why can't we have another subject known as Everyday Maths so I can learn how to solve everyday mathematical problems? Language, just like maths, is a necessary tool. Irish is just one language in the world. I positively believe having a second language as compulsory is still necessary. Seeing as we're in Ireland, I think Irish would do. Saying that, any language would do.

Irish, and other language subjects, will bring forward future linguists who will be the ones maintaining communication in the EU and will teach you Chinese when that comes about...

Irish, in my opinion, should remain compulsory and should be split into a communicative and literature-based course. Communicative would look at every day use of language AND include literature (as literature is a part of culture). The communicative course would have set goals for each student, a language portfolio that would show their progress, multi-media methods, more emphasis on Gaeltacht trips. Literature would be like the applied maths, but would be slightly more difficult than paper 2 as it stands. No poems on the paper, focus on three/ four poets rather than one poem from each poet. Stair na Gaeilge would be an element, but more in terms of literary development than anything else.

75 years really isn't a long time. I think they know their policies aren't working and that's why so mu dongealfella ch work is being done on trying to fill the gaps.

Agree completely..

if they split it in two and made the literature part optional i would be delighted and would be very confident in a proper revival of gaeilge.

shopaholic86

I for one was more able to hold a conversation as gaeilge when I was in Primary school rather than Secondary school. Much better teaching of the language and we learnt basic things that were important - verbs, words etc. In secondary school it was all about poems and stories. I lost my primary level by Junior cert ( probably didn't help that I had a mean Nun teaching me who wouldn't explain anything and wasn't too fond of non catholics). It should be thought more like French and Spanish - back to basics. Once a person has a good understanding of the basics anything after that is easier!