The report that the Irish language is not only alive and well in Sydney is reason to be cheerful.
There is an angry man in the White House who is bombing indiscriminately and driving up the price of fuel and food, but on the eve of St Patrick’s Day, the wearing of the green is a reminder of the light that follows the darkest days.
The Irish Language School Sydney, or to give its Irish name, Scoil na Gaeilge Sydney, had 20 or 30 students two years ago; now it is teaching between 70 and 80.
We think this great cause for celebration. Irish was once crushed by a powerful regime and remains classified by UNESCO as “definitely endangered”.
Now the Herald’s Aidan Elwig Pollock reports, it is undergoing a renaissance, with more media for Millennials and Generation Z, including rap music and podcasts, being produced in Irish. It is now one of the fastest-growing languages on the learning app Duolingo. “It’s become cool in Ireland, and then, by extension, everywhere,” said Scoil na Gaeilge president Seán McLoughlin.
The English banned the Irish language in 1746 with the Act of Proscription. Subsequently, the Australian colonies, lumbered with many convicts from rural Ireland, just let time and English as the language of administration and education suppress the Irish tongue.
However, the deep divisions between Protestant and Catholic communities, largely mirroring Irish-British tensions, continued for years, resulting in the establishment of a separate education system for predominantly Irish Catholics and widespread employment discrimination. Remarking on Australian multiculturalism, a comedy writer noted with some truth that the differences between Sydney and Melbourne was that the cockney convicts stayed by Sydney harbour to become real estate agents while the Irish went to Melbourne to work as butlers and maids.
The great sectarian divide waxed and waned in Australia. There were arguments over conscription during World War I and school funding. But the marches that celebrated the Battle of the Boyne are on their deathbed, and the St Patrick’s Day marches with their floats, dancers, bands and ranks of Catholic school students faded into history. Then, in 1979, the Irish community in Sydney organised a St Patrick’s Day Festival, and it has evolved into one of the world’s largest, replete with a celebratory parade and party at The Rocks.
However, across the Irish Sea, tensions continue intermittently.
Social media was excited in 2017 when the Irish actor Cillian Murphy met Prince Harry and kept his hands in his pockets, reportedly a deliberate act of defiance against the British establishment. And last week, the retired politician and former leader of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, was sued in the British High Court for symbolic “vindicatory” damages of £1 each by injured men who allege he was culpable for three separate Irish Republican Army bombings.
Amid this Anglo-Irish division, it is somehow assuring that some in Sydney wish to speak the once unspeakable, an affirmation of what unites rather than divides.
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