Generating confidence

To give people the confidence to settle in the town and raise their children as Irish-speakers, without a full command of English, they must have absolutely unbreakable legal guarantees backed by the state. These should be incorporated into the covenant. If any of these guarantee are not met, the state must be legally bound to provide specified compensation. The guarantees should cover three areas:

• The success of the town itself as a thriving Irish-speaking community
• The position of Irish in Irish society outside the town
• The ability of their children to make their way in the world outside Ireland without English

The Town

As far as the town itself is concerned, achievable targets must be set to be met by specified dates (after 5 years, 10 years, 15 years etc.). These should be things such as total population size, numbers of adults resident for more than five years (some people might live there for a few years, but then move on), the number of children over three years of age, the number of jobs in different categories of employment, the average salary, the facilities in the town & so on. The larger the population, the better the jobs and facilities, the easier it would be to attract people to the town & to keep its young people.

The numbers of people who might eventually want to live in such a community is difficult to judge from opinion surveys alone. In 1993 19% of those asked by Ó Riagáin & Ó Gliasáin said "I am committed to using as much Irish as I can". 9% said that in a fully bilingual Ireland, they would speak only Irish. 4% said they actually listened to Radió na Gaeltachta daily or a few times a week. If the town eventually contained 3% of the population, that would be around 100,000 people. To put this in context, Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, has 100,000 inhabitants; Galway city, which Hindley says has a tremendous anglicising influence on the surrounding area, had around 47,000 inhabitants when he was writing; and the Faeroe Islands, which have their own language, have just 45,728 people.

Irish society & the State

There must be guarantees against adverse changes in the Constitution, laws or administrative practises of the state. Irish-speakers must be able to conduct their business with the state & utilities in Irish, and that service must not be inferior to that provided in English in any way. Guarantees about the place of Irish in Ireland must also include the percentage of children: attending Irish-medium schools; passing higher-level qualifications in Irish; and achieving basic competence in Irish.

This will require the re-imposition of requirements for fluency in Irish on parts of the public service. It would obviously be difficult for those based in the new town to communicate with the rest of the public service in Irish unless those based outside the town were reasonably fluent. This should be linked to a requirement for TDs to be fluent in Irish. Tests of this sort are common in countries such as Belgium where language is an issue. The exclusion of politicians from such requirements was, in the past, one of the criticisms which was levelled against it. Both of these measures should enjoy considerable public support. The 1993 survey by the Linguistics Institute of Ireland found that:

TDs will obviously not vote through language requirements which will disqualify themselves. The legislation should be timed to come into force approximately 15 years after it is passed. It should be framed so that nominations of people standing for Dáil elections would not be valid unless the nominee passed tests to establish their written & verbal fluency in Irish, or unless the person had previously held a Dáil seat. I consider that this is politically feasible because all those voting on the legislation would automatically be exempt, as would those who had lost Dáil seats but were hoping to get re-elected, and all those expecting to win a seat within the next 15 years. This exempts more or less all ambitious politicians with any degree of influence, and ensures that they would have no reason to oppose it.

The rest of the world

In many parts of the world, it is not uncommon for people to be fluent in three or four languages, and to be able to get by in another half dozen. In order to make their way in the world outside Ireland without English, children raised in the town should be educated to be completely fluent in at least one major EU language, such as French, German or Castillian Spanish. Teaching them to be fluent in several languages would be better. The EU currently recommends that when people complete their education and training, they should be fluent in at least three EU languages besides their own.

Finally

Previous attempts to create Irish-speaking towns have failed because they have received no support from the state or have not been properly planned and implemented. (The attempt to create a Meath Gaeltacht was primarily aimed at creating an Irish-speaking farming community. Hindley is quite convincing on why this never stood a chance. Among other things, many of the "Irish-speakers" who were relocated are suspected of not being people who normally spoke Irish). The support of the state is absolutely essential for the success of this scheme.