Knowing our place: Irish in a global age

In a lecture delivered before the Cork National Society on 13 May 1892, William O'Brien MP warned his audience against substituting piety for politics on the question of language. "It was emigration," he argued, "that drove the Irish language out of fashion. Once the eyes of the Irish peasants were directed to a career in the golden English-speaking continents beyond the setting sun, their own instincts of self-preservation, even more than the exhortation of those responsible for the future, pointed to the English language as no less essential than a ship to sail in and passage ticket to enable them to embark on it, as a passport from their miserable surroundings to lands of plenty and independence beyond the billows." Although O'Brien's rhetoric cannot escape the dragnet of Victorian sentiment, he was enough of a politician to know that those who vote with their feet are as eloquent in their own way as those who gesticulate with their hands. Language may be discussed in texts, but it survives or perishes in contexts. What O'Brien suggested to his Cork audience is that to understand what happens to a language is to understand what is happening to a society and an economy and, even more importantly, what is happening "beyond the billows".

In reconfiguring Irish society and the economy for the 21st century there is much talk of the "knowledge society" and the "knowledge economy". Irish strategy in this area complements what is known as the Lisbon Agenda in which the stated policy aim of the European Union is to establish the foremost knowledge economy in the world by 2010. The debates around the topic as evidenced by both the contents of and reaction to the OECD report on the Irish higher education sector in 2004 have almost exclusively focused on science and technology and narrowly defined instrumentalist needs of the economy. Underlying the drive towards the knowledge economy and society is the argument that in an era of delocalisation Ireland has no future in low-cost manufacturing — witness Donegal textile-workers — and that fundamental changes in the mode of production in the developed world have profound consequences for the role of knowledge in globalised economies.

In the agricultural mode of development, for example, increasing surplus comes from expansion in the amount of labour or natural resources (such as land) available for the production process. New energy sources (steam, electricity) are the principal source of productivity in the industrial mode of development alongside the ability to distribute energy through appropriate circulation and production processes. As Christopher Freeman notes, "The contemporary change of paradigm may be seen as a shift from a technology based primarily on cheap inputs of energy to one predominantly based on cheap inputs of information derived from advances in microelectronic and telecommunications technology." Similarly, the sociologist Manuel Castells has described the economy that has emerged over the last two decades as informational and global. It is informational because the productivity and competitiveness of firms, regions and nations basically depend upon their ability to create, process and apply efficiently knowledge-based information.

Informationalism is directed towards technological development, in the form of the accumulation of knowledge and the move towards higher levels of complexity in information processing. The "informational society" is to be distinguished from the "information society" in that all human societies rely for their cohesion and indeed survival on the communication of relevant information to their members but "informational" refers to a particular way of organising the economy and society. The informational society is a specific form of social organisation where information generation, processing and transmission become the basic sources of productivity and power.

The informational society in its vernacular translation appears in public policy debate in Ireland as "the knowledge society". It is easy to be cynical about the notion of the knowledge society and to see it as merely another ploy by research scientists and the private sector to get their hands on public money. However, to do so not only ignores the very real change in the way in which the world does its business but also misses an opportunity to articulate a role for Irish in the new century in a way which could be immensely productive.

If we stay with the economy for a moment there is an important change to note in the type of goods increasingly produced in developed economies. The British theorists Scott Lash and John Urry have argued that the objects created in the post-industrial world are progressively emptied of their material content. The result is the proliferation of signs rather than material objects and these signs are of two types. They argue, for example, that goods have either a cognitive or informational content (post-industrial goods) or they have a primarily aesthetic content (postmodern goods). Informational goods are therefore any good whose value rests primarily on its information content as is the case with any type of software you care to mention. Examples of aesthetic goods are CDs of popular music, cinema, leisure and travel, magazines, videos and DVD and so on. These goods are goods with high added value and are typically the type of goods produced by economies which can no longer compete in low-cost manufacturing.

The importance of the aesthetic explains the prodigious rise in advertising budgets in the last three decades of the twentieth century and the strong emphasis on value-added design intensity in the production of clothes, shoes, cars, electronic goods, software and so on in late modernity. Thus, taking together the observations of Castells, Urry and Lash, it is clear that the cognitive and the aesthetic are the primary movers of economic development. Hence, the remit of the knowledge society is very broad in that many areas of human experience can be classed under the headings of the cognitive and the aesthetic. More specifically, it is obvious that in order for a knowledge society to function to its full potential, it must be able to draw on all the cognitive and aesthetic resources of that society. To this end, it would be tantamount to political, economic and cultural suicide to relinquish the very extensive and distinctive (because not existing elsewhere) cognitive and aesthetic resources available in Irish language and culture. For even the most aggressively philistine pragmatist, such an abandonment would represent a serious narrowing of the basis for any future knowledge society that might be constructed on the island. If the driver of the new economy is what has been thought about, imagined, and articulated in a society, then even the most basic instinct of "self preservation" will tell us that jettisoning two millennia of cognitive and aesthetic capital in the Irish language would be the ultimate sacrifice of political realism to the prejudice of impractical monolingualism.