Tadhg Evans

The future of the Irish language would be the source of much debate if that debate hadn’t already been decided in many people’s minds. Most seem to agree that the language is, at the very least, in serious jeopardy.

However, this viewpoint might actually be misplaced.

According to the 2011 Census results, 41.4% of respondents answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘can you speak Irish?’. That figure represents a total of over 1.77 million people living in Ireland.

The aforementioned figure is an increase from the 2006 mark of 40.8%, and the only census since 1961 that returned a higher figure was in 2002 (41.9%).

The figures from 1961 to 1991 were drawn from a question that was more precise, and included the option ‘can read but cannot speak Irish’. This may have been why the number of Irish speakers recorded was always lower prior to the 1996 census.

However, the pattern of increase still existed between 1961 and 1991 (rising by 4.2 points in those 30 years), with a decrease only recorded in one census in that time (in 1986, following 1981’s census).

There are no anomalies skewing these results in the direction of increase. Every single county has recorded an increase between 1961 and 2011. North Tipperary recorded the greatest increase, jumping from 24.7% of its inhabitants claiming they could speak Irish in 1961 to 47.1% in 2011.

Where the perception of the decline of Irish may arise from is the genuine decline of the language in Gaeltacht regions.

The smallest increases by far were recorded in Galway (a rise of 1.5%) and Donegal (a tiny 0.4%). Interestingly, these are also the two counties with the largest portion of its total area with Gaeltacht status. The next two lowest leaps were recorded in Mayo (an increase of 7.4%) and Kerry (10.7%), two counties that also have sizeable Gaeltacht regions. The table of information is here:

The boundaries of these regions have undergone no major change since 1967 (when Meath was assigned two Gaeltacht areas), and the status was orginially bestowed upon areas where more than 25% of inhabitants spoke the language on a daily basis.

1961 saw the first census recorded since Clare had been stripped of its Gaeltachts. Since then, a consistent pattern of decline has emerged in each Gaeltacht area, bar Meath’s, where an increase in the number of its inhabitants who can speak Irish has been recorded in every census since 1986. 61% of people in the Meath Gaeltachts profess an ability to speak Irish, an increase of nearly 5 points.

Every other Gaeltacht county saw its Gaeltachts decline in this regard between the period of 1961 and 2011. The Waterford Gaeltacht and Galway’s Gaeltachts both dropped by 17.3 points in that time frame. In 1961, 93.4% of the Waterford Gaeltacht’s inhabitants claimed that they could speak Irish. In 2011, that figure had dropped to 76.10%.

Excluding results pertaining to Meath’s Gaeltachts and the period of anamoly between 1991 and 1996, the other Gaeltacht regions in six other counties have been examined in 7 different censuses. Of the 42 results therefore recorded, only six showed an increase in Irish speakers from a Gaeltacht’s previous census, with the other 36 results noting a decrease. When the below graph is compared with the first graph, this highlights a remarkable pattern of decline in the number of Gaeltacht inhabitants who can speak Irish, something that goes wildly against a national trend of increase.

This next chart highlights each set of Gaeltachts’ general trends of decline over these last fifty years.

Since 1996, Censuses began recording more precise data pertaining to Irish language usage. This included a recording of the number of daily Irish speakers. Between 1996 and 2002, this figure only dropped by 0.1 points withing Gaeltacht regions, but has since tailed off considerably. In 1996, 39.1% of Gaeltacht inhabitants were speaking Irish on a daily basis. By 2011, that figure had dropped to 33.6%.

Again, as illustrated in the below graph, this goes against a general trend of increase in daily Irish speakers recorded at national level. Between 1996 and 2002, the percentage of daily Irish speakers in the Republic of Ireland dropped from 10.2% to 9.1%. Back-to-back increases have since been recorded, and in 2011 had jumped by 4.5 points since 2002.

Often, one of the reasons attributed to the decline of Irish in Gaeltacht regions is the perception that a high number of non-Irish nationals live in Gaeltacht areas. This is, at best, debatable. The following table, which excludes the cities of Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford from its figures to prevent information being skewed, provides some interesting information that fails to support this claim concretely. While counties like Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Kerry and particularly Cork are home to a large number of non-nationals in terms of sheer numbers, these numbers expressed as percentages of their population tell a different story.

In this regard, Kerry is the county containing Gaeltacht regions that scores highest, but with an unremarkable 10.77% of its population made up of non-nationals, it only ranks ninth overall. Meath, Cork and Mayo record similarly moderate figures, while Waterford, Donegal and Galway all rank in the bottom six nationally.

An even better statistic however is one that highlights the number of non-nationals within Gaeltacht regions themselves. When the county-by-county average is calculated excluding the urban areas mentioned two paragraphs ago, a national average of 10.07% is arrived at.

Certainly, there is a very high number of non-nationals within the Kerry Gaeltachts at 12.7%, and in Galway’s Gaeltachts at 11.7%. However, all other Gaeltachts are below the national average level. Waterford and Mayo’s Gaeltacht’s percentage of non-nationals is very low.

The number of non-nationals in the Republic as a whole jumped from 5.7% to 9.9% between 2002 and 2006, which coincided with a drop in the percentage of population who could speak Irish. But there is little evidence that this is a correlation. The national percentage of non-nationals increased again between 2006 and 2011, but the number of people who could speak Irish increased within that time frame. Also, despite that 6.2 point increase in non-nationals between 2002 and 2011, there was a 4.5 point increase in daily Irish speakers in that timeframe.

It’s hard to decipher what reason there is behind the decline in the traditional Irish speaking regions in the face of general improvement at national level. A report by the Department of Education and Skills into education in the Gaeltachts was scathing of the movement in teaching from Irish to English, and a lack of governance in terms of language policy in schools.

Whether there’s merit in their suggestions or not, the 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030 unveiled in December 2010 is faced with the difficult task of reversing decades of decline in the very areas where the language is most expected to flourish.