John Dolan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Mar a dúirt an Seanadóir O'Reilly, is iontach an ócáid í seo. Tá áthas mór orm caint ar an ócáid thábhachtach seo. I sometimes have a sense of what is being said in Irish, but my confidence in speaking Irish is weak. Today, I publicly ask for the support of others to help me improve my Irish. I also want to ask others to be more conscious and appreciative of how we speak English in Ireland. I will come back to the question of Hiberno-English i gcúpla nóiméad. An Seanadóir Ó Céidigh said that Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh is a hero. I think he is also greatly loved throughout this land by young and old. People who do not have a word of Irish love to hear Mr. Ó Muircheartaigh weave between the Gaeilge and the Béarla. I think it says something about the fact that Irish, and the way we speak English in Ireland, is oral. It is an oral tradition. It has not been captured by the written word and the power of a written grammar in the same way that the English language and other languages have.

Compulsion or force is a very poor teacher. Our first President, Dubhghlas de hÍde, who has been mentioned, founded the Gaelic League. He referred the School Attendance Bill 1942 to the Supreme Court on the question of compulsory Irish. In 1943, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Gaelic League, he said that "a nation without a language is like a soldier without a weapon". If he had been from my native county of Tipperary rather than from County Roscommon, he might have said that a nation without a language is like a hurler without a hurley, but we will forgive him that one.Micheál went through very well in his presentation that our language and national games, through the work of the Gaelic League, the GAA and others, were vital in raising our spirit and self-confidence, which is an-tábhachtach ar fad, prior to achieving our freedom, and as part of being able to achieve our freedom. This sense of self is a missing ingredient in many of the former Soviet states, as I would see it. I have travelled to many of them in my work with regard to disability, and it is restricting their development. I have mentioned disability, and Micheál has been a great supporter of the National Council for the Blind of Ireland. He has supported my organisation with regard to our disability inclusion and equality campaigns and many others. I thank him so much for this.

As I travelled through other states in Europe with my work, I became aware that I needed to change how I speak. I cannot speak as I speak at home because if I do, no one will understand half of what I say. This is mostly about stripping back my Irish way of speaking English, of which I have not always been aware. We forget we speak English in an Irish way, with an idiom, a turn of phrase, vocabulary and grammar. The further west, south west and north west we go in this country the more we see this. The idea of a cumann Gaelach in the Oireachtas has been rightly mentioned, but let us also remember we have people in both Houses of the Oireachtas and otherwise, and I am thinking of some of the Kerry Members in particular, who speak English in a very Irish way. This is something we should not lose because it is part of not having been consumed by the empire.

I want to mention very briefly Professor Terence Dolan who was professor of old and middle English in UCD. He was the one back in the early 1980s who brought me alive to the idea of Hiberno-English and the way in which we speak and our grammar and turn of phrase, the way words have migrated from Irish into our English language and how words from English have migrated the other way. He said that a great thing about Hiberno-English is that it is a distillation of the Irish character. We often speak in code and people from rural areas can be very oblique. Over the centuries, Irish people have been oppressed and, therefore, they do not want other people to know what they might be thinking or saying. There are lots of influences. Towards the end of his contribution, Seanadóir Ó Céidigh asked cá bhfuilimid anois. From my perspective, two legs of the stool are strongly standing. These are sport and song and dance. We should not be without hope that we will bolster the third leg of the stool, which is to revive and bring back the Irish language. An important step in this is for us to be conscious of how we speak English. We speak it in a very Irish way and we should be proud of this and let it help us.