Agóid Chiúin / Silent Protest.

Roadend

marienbad wrote: »

You see Roadend, in the really big issues of personal choice the constitution is irrelevant ,be it language , family, marriage, abortion . People vote with their actions . And in the case of Irish that means never reading the thousands of documents in Irish provided by the state, never speaking a word of Irish in their daily lives, never tuning in to TG4 .

You can have it in the constitution all you want but right now everyone in this country can and does speak English . How many speak irish ? national language my arse !

Eh, despite your "musings" it is the national language, that is indisputable. Furthermore if you believe the constitution is "irrelevant" why don't you go out and do something outlawed by it and see how irrelevant it is then. I've never heard such a nonsense. Just because you don't agree with something in it does not make it irrelevant.

And if ever a survey was done asking the ''hard questions'' such as do you want x amount spent on Irish and not on health , education , whatever , you would find out what people really think. No fear of that though, can't upset the gravy train now can we.
Have you any figures on what is spent on Irish as opposed to health? When you do could you be a dear and let us all know.
If you honestly believe money is spent on Irish related issues is in someway to the detriment of health and education you are utterlty deluded. How about reforming the health system and mass culling the thousands of poitnless admin jobs which are the real drain on acutal health services. And you have the gumption to think that maintaing one of the last few vestiges of Irish culture is a gravy train? Don't make me laugh.

Today was the day of the silent protest , how many turned up ? 1000 ?
Silent alright .Says it all really ,
Oh but people vote by their actions, now they are wrong because they didn't join in your silent protest, aw poor diddums.
you could get more for save the whale/ give us more bus lanes/ give us less bus lanes, anything.

...

marienbad

Roadend wrote: »

...

You see Roadend , there is the real world and there is the aspirational world. In the aspirational world of constituions, man is everwhere born free , we lay claim to the whole island and we all speak Irish.

In the real worlds we get on with our lives and our jobs and where those 'aspirational' diktats work we apply them , where not we ignore them .
to wit, travel to england for abortion, make our own definition of the family, never speak or hear irish from one end of the week to the other'

And again ( like in all these discussions) you choose to mis-interpret what I said re the health service etc. I said if a proper survey were held whereby people were asked where the budget spend were to go you would get peoples real response to the importance of Irish. That does not preclude reforming health anyway. On the cost of irish I can only asume that at this stage we have spent billions on it and less people speak it now that when we started.

You call it ''one of the last vestiges of Irish culture'' , would would care to define that and the other ''vestiges'' that we have lost ?

On the silent march , I simply dont understand your point, this was your march .

Insect Overlord

marienbad wrote: »

On the cost of irish I can only asume that at this stage we have spent billions on it and less people speak it now that when we started.

Whatever about the rest of what you said, this part is totally wrong. There are fewer native Irish speakers (in the traditional sense) now than there were a century ago, yes. That's due to several causes, including a basic decline in Gaeltacht populations across the country. However, the number of people who can use the language functionally is much higher than it was previously. True fluency is still lacking on a large scale (a maximum of about 3% of the population would claim to be fluent, but it's probably closer to 2%) but general competency among the wider population has increased.

I'll echo what has been said about the many flaws in how the language is taught. Radical changes are needed across all levels of the education system to mend the years of damage done. (What's done in the media, etc is another thing altogether.) We should aspire to become a multilingual country.

I spent a few minutes chatting with a man in college yesterday morning. He spoke with a mixture of admiration, regret and horror; the former with regards to my love for Irish, the second with regards to how he never picked it up himself, and the latter with regards to his memories of how Irish used to be taught.

Generations were given lists of words to learn off by heart without any kind of context in how to use them. Rules to do with an séimiú and an síniú fada were literally beaten into young children, even at primary level. In more recent years, the points race has seen an emphasis placed rote learning of entire essays and passages for the Leaving Cert. There was an anecdote in another forum here yesterday about how a class learned off a "grá" themed answer for a poetry question, even though the best theme to write about would have been loneliness. None of them had enough Irish to write their own original answers about the best theme. That has to change.

I believe it can be changed, while keeping Irish as a compulsory subject.

dr.fuzzenstein

I believe that this is the best use of the Irish language I have ever come across:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTNBmFveq2U

Roadend

marienbad wrote: »

You see Roadend , there is the real world and there is the aspirational world. In the aspirational world of constituions, man is everwhere born free , we lay claim to the whole island and we all speak Irish.

In the real worlds we get on with our lives and our jobs and where those 'aspirational' diktats work we apply them , where not we ignore them .
to wit, travel to england for abortion, make our own definition of the family, never speak or hear irish from one end of the week to the other'

And again ( like in all these discussions) you choose to mis-interpret what I said re the health service etc. I said if a proper survey were held whereby people were asked where the budget spend were to go you would get peoples real response to the importance of Irish. That does not preclude reforming health anyway. On the cost of irish I can only asume that at this stage we have spent billions on it and less people speak it now that when we started.

You call it ''one of the last vestiges of Irish culture'' , would would care to define that and the other ''vestiges'' that we have lost ?

On the silent march , I simply dont understand your point, this was your march .

Ah now, here we have it, assumptions, along with the rest of your assumptions, they are baseless.

You also don't understand how irish is integral to our cultural heritage? and now its dying out? and you are in favour of it dying out?

On the silent march, there's a silent march for the banks, for church abuse victims, for something every six months.

marienbad

Roadend wrote: »

Ah now, here we have it, assumptions, along with the rest of your assumptions, they are baseless.

You also don't understand how irish is integral to our cultural heritage? and now its dying out? and you are in favour of it dying out?

On the silent march, there's a silent march for the banks, for church abuse victims, for something every six months.

How are my assumptions (if they are assumptions) baseless ?

what do you mean by cultural heritage , particularly as you say (knowing very little about me ) that I dont understand it ?

I am not in favour of Irish dying out and have never said anything remotely like that.

I still dont get what you are on about re the silent march - you are aware that it was a protest in favour of the language, yes ?