Berkley Center

During my first couple of weeks in Galway, Ireland, my friends in other countries would dismiss any difficulty in my study abroad experience by saying, “Oh, well you have it easy…the main language in Ireland is English.” I, too, arrived in Galway thinking that having English as the main language would break down one more barrier and make studying abroad a little bit easier. I naively forgot that the original language of Ireland is Irish (also known as Gaeilge or Irish Gaelic, which is different from Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic). The only reason that the Irish even speak English is because of centuries of British rule. While the British did infiltrate all of Ireland, the British put most of their resources in Dublin, and thus Galway, in the west, maintains less upper-class British influence.

But how do centuries of British rule relate to me naively thinking that Ireland would be predominantly English-speaking? Essentially, I was not prepared to be confronted with the Irish language in my daily life. For example, the National University of Ireland–Galway (NUIG) prides itself on being a bilingual campus, supporting both English and Irish. Among other things, this means that the university has bilingual signs for all of the buildings. But when trying to figure out where my classes were, I had to pull up Google Translate, something I did not think I would need in Ireland. I plugged in phrases such as Áras Uí Chathail, which is where I had a “Weather and Climate” lecture, or Áras na Mac Léinn, which is where I picked up my student ID card. As expected, Google Translate was nothing but unhelpful, and it took me the better part of September to locate my classes in this completely foreign language.

Even though the signs on the NUIG campus are in Irish, NUIG has taken recent actions that undermine the university’s commitment to the Irish language, showing how, even on a bilingual campus, the Irish language is in jeopardy. Last month, the university closed Caifé na Gaeilge, a cafe on NUIG’s campus whose services were available in Irish. Infuriated by this action, NUIG students gathered to protest the cafe’s closing. When walking through campus, I stumbled across this protest and realized there is tension between the students and the university about what it means to protect the Irish language. While the protest was in direct response to the closing of the cafe, it seemed as though the cafe’s closing was symbolic of a larger movement away from the Irish language, both at NUIG and nationally. As mentioned in the Student Independent Newspaper, the NUIG student newspaper, “this is more than a question of just tea and coffee; this is a question of language rights and of social spaces for Irish speakers,” said John Walsh, senior Irish lecturer at NUIG. Essentially, NUIG says that it wants to protect the Irish language, but closing Caifé na Gaeilge concerned many students about NUIG’s commitment to this sentiment.

The fight to hold onto the Irish language is, at its core, a fight to protect Irishness. However, the fight to protect Irishness is not a new battle. For example, in my “Exploring Irish Threatre” class, we read an Irish play called Translations by Brian Friel. Translations is set in a Donegal village in the nineteenth century. It highlights the intensity with which the English transformed the landscape of Irish language and Irish topography. In the play, British soldiers used Irish citizens to help translate maps from Irish to English, completely anglicizing the entire land. Consequently, the stories behind the Irish nomenclature were destroyed, despite the Irish citizens’ desire to protect their history. Once the names were changed, the remembrance of these stories required extra labor that only a voluntary interest would support, showing the deterioration of Irishness.

While Translations was set in the early nineteenth century, its sentiments are still relevant. Just as the Irish characters in Translations wanted to protect the Irish language and Irishness, so do the students at NUIG. Unfortunately, the Irish language is becoming less of a national priority, and this is seen on the NUIG campus through the closing of Caifé na Gaeilge, despite NUIG’s designation as a bilingual campus. Before attending NUIG, I did not grasp the importance of the Irish language as a facet of the Irish identity. After studying at NUIG, however, I realized that the fight to protect Irish language and Irishness is almost inherent to the Irish identity itself.