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One result of independence was that the State policies in favour of Irish helped to stabilise the Irish language in strong Gaeltacht areas. Urris was not in that league. The Irish heard in Inishowen today is that of people from Gaeltacht areas or of people who acquired it. It may be scattered but it is alive. There was only a twenty year difference between Urris and the rest of the parish as regards the language shift but people there were made feel "backward" because of their retaining Irish longer. The mockers were more to be pitied than the mocked. They were both victims of self-denigration. When a community abandons one language for another, the next generation feels compelled to decry the older culture in order to reassure itself about the decision. Following generations, however, can afford the luxury of a reappraisal. Conclusion There are two lessons to be learned from the decline
of the Irish language in Inishowen. Firstly, it was the abandonment
of Irish in the public arena that hastened its demise as a home language.
Secondly we should put the blame on our own people and stop trying
to externalise it. The language shift impoverished people and ruptured
emotional links. The lore that Cosslett collected from Peigí
Ní Shearcaigh helps us to span that discontinuity. The dream
I share with Cosslett is to see the people of Inishowen recuperating
their Irish-language heritage and expressing it again in song, in
drama, in the spoken and in the written word. |
It
is easy to blame the Famine for the major shift to English in Irish-speaking
areas but there was a big decline in Irish in the 1820-1850 period
as a result of the schools, economic relationships with Britain and
a shift of interest from continental Europe to America. The language
change in Urris came late in the century .Perhaps the heavy emigration
of the 1860s was the final twist of the screw. English was the language
of State, commerce, education and Church, not only in their parents
time but in that of their grandparents. When a new church was consecrated
in Urris, in 1889, not a word of Irish was used although it was the
first language of a majority of the adult population. That event must
have confirmed to parents that they were right to cease speaking Irish
to the young.
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