Scríobh mé alt anocht faoin Gaeilge agus an gá tá ann chun ár bpáistí a thógáil sa teanga....
http://corcaighist.blogspot.com/2007/03/at-no-risk-if-he-speaks-it.html Call me extremist and whatever other words you can think of but truly I believe that if someone lives in Ireland, is Irish and is proud to be Irish then the Irish language should be a central part of their life. I believe that one cannot be Irish without speaking the language, without a grá for the tongue of the Gael.
If one is a parent and truly believes that they are Irish and have love for this country then they should raise their children through the language (or at the least bilingually). If they do not do this I personally doubt their real grá for this land, our heritage and our culture, a free independent nation for all Irish people.
Irish is our history, it is our past. Our stories, what make us who we are is contained in an oral tradition that is expressed through Irish. If you reject Irish for this foreign Norman/Saxon tongue called English you are rejecting yourself, rejecting who you are.
It never ceases to amaze me how we as a nation can sit back and just accept that our language is sick, that she is very very sick. Sit back at just accept that she is dying. She needs help and we ignore her. She is like an old granny whom most of us love (whom some of us hate), who is let die slowly in the corner, who takes no part in the affairs and events of the everyday....
If we are serious about Irish and Ireland's place as a sovereign nation we must realise that our ancestral tongue is sick, very sick, but that it is us now, us today, the Irish people that are to blame for her downfall. For over 80 years we have had an independent state but yet our language has been getting continuously weaker. It is the state and the Irish people themselves that have been the dominant force of Angloisation of this island.
It is unbelievable that we entrust the education system to keep our language alive, falsely believing that some teacher will instil a grá for the language in our children. Rubbish. Such is not possible if there is no place for Irish in the home.
Irish is like the telephone when it first became available. The cost to be one of the first to buy it was great and the benefit little but year by year more people bought telephones, the cost decreased and the benefit increased. Irish is like this. If we all brush up on our knowledge (learn or re-learn it for some), and use it in our everyday interactions over time Irish will be re-normalised in Irish society. The question: ‘Why speak Irish?’ will become: ‘Why not speak Irish?’ With each added speaker the benefit to speaking the language will increase. The issue is not either/or Irish or English but both/and Irish AND English, and why not Polish and French and Spanish as well? But the most important one is Irish. If we abandon and neglect Irish noone else can be blamed. It is our language. We can’t get anyone else to speak it for us!
Irish needs to be allowed breath in all areas of life, across all communities, to find a new life, a life again in all activities and events. If Irish is not give a place in the home, in the communities (and I mean a real living place as a spoken language, not some tokenistic historical artefact) then it will die and our past will go with it, and the Irish people and Ireland will die too, we will all fade away. For without a separate language in which and by which to express our Irishness and without that link to the past and without all that written and cultural evidence to our place as a separate nation we will get swallowed up by the big killer whale that is Anglo-American. Is that what you want?
Speak to your children in Irish. Use Irish in the home. It is the only way to protect the sovereignty of our nation and our people going forth into the future.
