This path was created by Emily Bengtson.
Education
Furthermore, during the 19th century, so many people were emigrating to America that parents didn’t bother to teach their children Irish as it would not be useful to them. There was also a little bit of shame associated with the language, as it was mostly spoken by the poorest of the poor. Since the English viewed Irishness as subhuman much in the same way white Americans viewed the slaves, anything Irish was looked down upon.
Today, Ireland is trying to preserve the language by making it a required subject in school and directing government funding towards all-Irish education. The last few years has seen an increase in the number of naíonraí, or Irish preschools. “Irish was made a compulsory subject for the Intermediate Exams in 1928 and for the Leaving Certificate in 1934” (Darmondy & Daly 16). The Leaving Cert is the equivalent of a kind of standardized test that students have to pass to graduate secondary school.
But they’re running into the same problem - Irish has been a minority language for so long that there’s almost no media in Irish and no real reason to use it. And even students who go through the school program spend a lot of time memorizing and reciting poems and not necessarily understanding what they’re saying or having conversations in Irish. And once they pass their Leaving Cert, they don’t really use it. When I asked my Irish speaking friends for help studying for my exam or would try to have simple conversations to practice with them, sometimes I knew more Irish than they did - only because it was fresh in my mind.
However, programs like Coláiste Lurgan are doing their best to combat that and make Irish popular and more widely used.
Works Cited
Darmody, Merike, and Tania Daly. Attitudes towards the Irish Language on the Island of Ireland. Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 2015. Print.
