Give Irish its deserved legal status

The latest shift in the attack on the Irish language and the democratic rights of those who speak it has come with a demand for 'compulsory' Irish to be dropped in the legal profession.

In practice, the Irish language requirement for qualification as a barrister or a solicitor is pure fantasy, as very few lawyers in my experience are actually able to speak even rudimentary Irish, let alone do legal business in that language. But this hasn't stopped Henry Murdoch, writing in the Irish Times, from demanding that the language requirement be dropped so that – wait for it – lawyers can be free to love the language and cherish it! What sickening hypocrisy. The language can only be cherished if provision for its use is guaranteed. The real challenge is not to drop the feeble language provisions currently in place, but to bring the legal profession into line with the constitution and make a reality of the language requirement and language use.

For let's remember that under Article 8 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, Irish is the first official language of this state. And those who don't like this provision have a democratic remedy, a democratic, legal way of changing the law and constitution: they can organise to win support for changing the law through elections to Dáil Éireann.

But they don't do that. They just ignore the law and constitution. This is true subversion, but the ruling class is riddled with subversives of this kind.

This question reflects the sorry state of Irish nationalism in general, which is almost entirely defensive at the present time. But why should we be ashamed of what we are and of our cultural inheritance?

The resistance to learning Irish at school has nothing to with the imagined difficulties of the language (with reasonable application, any average person can acquire a second language with limited difficulty).

The resistance is connected to a cultural block, fuelled by hypocrisy and cúpla-focalism on the one hand, and by an inherited inferiority complex which assumes that everything English is automatically better.

Only using the language in public, official and legal life can alter the pull of that complex – and that will not be achieved by reducing the status of Irish, either through ending the teaching of it after Junior Cert, or by eliminating whatever half-hearted Irish-language requirements currently exist in the civil service and in the legal profession.

But the bigger issue is a more fundamental one. While Irish continues to be recognised by Bunreacht na hÉireann as the first official language, it is subversive not to give effect to that. But even if the Constitution ignored the language, there would still remain the democratic rights of those who speak the indigenous language of this country.

But even though the Official Languages Act is now law, it is still an uphill battle to get your rights if you're an Irish speaker. The Revenue Commissioners, for example, who are so perturbed by the cost of making documents and services available in Irish, have no trouble doing so in Polish. I have no objection to Polish speakers having their rights; but what about my rights in my own country?

Try speaking Irish outside the Gaeltacht at a garda roadblock. You'll be given the most thorough going-over you could wish for, and if there's anything out of order, you've had it.

Try speaking Irish to a judge. I did. I was involved some years ago in the campaign for an Irish-language television service, and as part of that campaign, along with thousands of others, I was refusing to buy a television licence.

Courteously, I tried to explain to the judge why I was refusing and what legal and constitutional basis I thought there was for my action.

It was all above my legal friend – who, don't forget, is required to pass an Irish-language qualification to practise either as a barrister or a solicitor. Glaring balefully at me, he bellowed out: "SIG SHEESE. KAYD PUNT."

I gathered he wanted me to sit down, but whether he was fining me £100 or offering me £100, he refused to make clear.

But why should an Irish-speaker have to fight such a battle every single time he or she has business with the State? Is this really what Irish freedom means? The freedom to be insulted by people with Gaelic ancestry talking down to you in plumy upper-class English accents?

At the end of the day, though, it's up to Irish-speakers not to accept this treatment, to be awkward and to demand rights: and if English-speakers don't like it, why don't they go and live in the land they love?

Meanwhile let's implement the Constitution and give Irish the status assigned to it by law.

Eoin Ó Murchú is the Eagraí Polaitíochta of RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta. He is writing here in a personal capacity