Ben Lowry: We are told that we must have the Irish language everywhere yet very few nationalists speak it

It was one those fraught medical appointment visits that can happen with an elderly person – his mobility was so limited that I left him at the Falls Road entrance before parking the car in a queue at the other side of the RVH complex, then returning to get him. We had to get a lift to one of the higher levels of the hospital, in one of the older buildings, and there were so many confusing signs that we ended up getting a lift that took us up to an upper level, before realising that we needed a parallel lift nearby.

There are so many different departments in the RVH that it has a blizzard of signs, and it is easy to get confused.

And here I make a prediction. One day, perhaps a decade or three away, there will be a demand to duplicate all those signs in Irish. It won’t matter that it causes more confusion. It certainly won’t matter that no-one will actually need it – literally no-one, in that there is not a person in Northern Ireland who can only understand Gaelic.

What matters is a demand for equality. This demand is only in its infancy in NI, but was apparent when the opening of Belfast’s new grand central station led not only to immediate demands for Irish signage but, already, protests.

The push for equal treatment of Irish and English has been slowly working its way through the Republic of Ireland, where there is a stark discrepancy between the number of people who actually speak the language and the attempts to give it primacy. Irish was given working status in the EU in 2007 but a shortage of translation staff meant that only some material was translated.

When some of us argued against an Irish language act we were called bigots. But there was a softer, gentler type of critic who scoffed at our paranoia. It was a harmless plan, we were told, indeed Scotland and Wales showed that it was a British thing to have Gaelic legislative support.

Yet in no time radical Irish language policies have been gaining traction across Northern Ireland. Last year I wrote about Belfast city council’s extremist and divisive street sign policy (click here to read that article). If a mere 15% of residents in a street request dual Irish-English signage, they get it.

The Alliance Party supported this disgraceful approach, although expressing concern at cost. But the policy has panned out as you would expect: there are now applications for signs in every part of the city.

As I said on Nolan Live on Wednesday night on BBC One (click here to watch the programme), it is all about plastering Irish all over Northern Ireland, including – and, for republicans, especially – in places where it is not wanted.

The hypocrisy is striking. If Irish nationalism has made one thing clear over the decades it is that it is allergic to the merest whiff of triumphalism. If, say, British or military or Orange symbolism was imposed by an authority or official body in so much as a small number of nationalist areas there would be uproar. But it was to happen across NI, equality and rights activists would intervene, as would Dublin and Irish America.

This week the broadcaster Andrew Marr drew applause at a debate in Scotland when he said that he found it “offensive” to see Gaelic signs in parts of that country where there are no Gaelic speakers. “Why does Haymarket have to have the Gaelic for Haymarket under it?” he asked, referring to Edinburgh’s station of that name, which has signs with its translation ‘Margadh an Fheoir’. “It’s ridiculous,” he said.

Regrettably, Mr Marr has issued a grovelling apology for his fair comments.

[Marr also criticised “the Scottish nationalist view that if you’re Scottish, you’re a better person; because you’re Scottish you’re more innately liberal; because you’re Scottish you’re more progressive”. I could write a whole column on the Irish variant of that, and indeed I did write one about the Irish equivalent of the Scottish “exceptionalism” that Marr attacked – click here to read it: ‘Irish exceptionalism means that it can be so unfriendly towards Israel,’ Oct 21 2023]

Scotland’s last census found that 1.1% of Scots speak Gaelic. Our own found that 0.3% of people in NI have Gaelic as their main language, 3,9% can read, speak, write it, and 12.4% have some understanding.

If the 40% of Northern Ireland voters who support nationalist parties spoke Gaelic as their first language then there would of course be a case for Canadian-style bilingual policy here. But in fact 70% of nationalists here don’t speak a word of Irish.

And even if all of the 3.9% of people who have a good understanding of Irish are nationalists (we keep being told they are not just nationalists) then that only represents 10% of them. Thus 90% of nationalists lack such an understanding.

Yet the demands are proliferating even before an Irish language commissioner is appointed. The infrastructure minister wants to trial directional road signage in Irish (ie the key, distinctive UK road signage you see across NI).

This is one of the things that moderate advocates of an Irish language act told us would not happen under such legislation, yet it is already being trialled independent of the act.

After Sinn Fein brought down Stormont in 2017 its non negotiable ransom demand for an Irish language act was of course ultimately paid. But we were told it was milder than a more militant ‘rights-based’ act.

Wait until you see. In time vast amounts of UK taxpayer cash will be used in the courts to try to force Gaelic expansion, so that NI is made to feel indistinguishable from the Republic.

The principle of consent should have meant that we have a right to be different from that jurisdiction. But we won’t.

Now an Irish language school is being pushed in a unionist part of east Belfast. Irish schools are one of the most culturally separate parts of the education system. Republicans used children from them in protest after protest for an Irish act.

Barely anyone dares question this planned school. Supporters of integrated education are backing a form of schooling that will only increase division at a time when much larger schools are having to close. Even unionists are welcoming it.

Irish signage and schooling is on the march. But if the language is so important to nationalists, why have so few learnt it?

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor