2-Nov-96

DUBLIN --THOSE Irish people on both sides of the island's border who want to preserve and even fortify their indigenous Gaelic language won a boost this week when a new terrestrial television channel called Teilifis na Gaeilge (meaning quite simply 'Irish TV') began to beam across the land. To begin with the programmes will go out for four hours or so a day. Will this help resuscitate a language all Irishmen spoke a millennium ago?

Nobody is sure how many and to what extent Irish people speak their own language. A recent census shows that more than 1m of them in a population of 3.7m modestly claim 'some proficiency' in the old tongue while market researchers for the new channel reckon that about 500,000 are 'fluent in Irish or interested in watching programmes in Irish'. Other investigators however are less Gaelic-cheery. Two years
ago a National Survey on Languages found that only5% of Irish people 'frequently used' Irish; a paltry 2% called it their 'native tongue'. More than half of Irish households now have satellite or cable TV-none of them beaming programmes in Irish. For all the republic's resistance to the old oppressor's cultural heritage the Irish relate to each other in English; and English has entirely ruled the air-waves.

Until now Irish enthusiasts have had to rely for Irish-language programmes on Ireland's two overwhelmingly Anglophone national channels. Very occasionally BBC Northern Ireland goes out in Irish too.
But the new channel will broadcast a wider range of fare-from home-grown soap operas to current affairs and even European football matches with breathless commentary-in Irish.

More important the channel is definitely not aimed at small pockets of native speakers in rural Gaelic-speaking outposts but at urban and well-educated types. For in Ireland's big cities such as Dublin, Cork and even in Belfast a growing number of middle-class people want their children to be taught in Irish. This autumn the education ministry in Dublin gave the go-ahead for a dozen new all-Irish primary schools.

Ireland's constitution still deems Irish the 'first official language'. Once you had to know it to get into the civil service. Street signs and public documents must all be in Irish as well as English. True even in parliament it is a rare speaker who declaims in the island's ancient way. Yet all over Europe people and languages that have in the past been overawed by bigger neighbours or conquerors are striving to preserve their heritage. Irish is unlikely to beat back English. But survive-perhaps even revive-it will.