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The Irish Language
Article 8 of the Constitution makes the following affirmation: 1. The Irish language as the national language is the first official language. 2. The English language is recognised as a second official language.


Old Irish, Ireland's vernacular when the historical period begins in the sixth century of our era, is the earliest variant of the Celtic languages, and indeed the earliest of European vernaculars north of the Alps, in which extensive writings are extant.

The Norse settlements (AD 800 onwards) and the Anglo-Norman colonisation (AD 1169 onwards) introduced periods of new language diversity into Ireland, but Irish remained dominant and other speech communities were gradually assimilated. In the early sixteenth century, almost all of the population was Irish-speaking. The main towns, however, prescribed English for the formal conduct of administrative and legal business.

The events of the later sixteenth century and of the seventeenth century for the first time undermined the status of Irish as a major language. The Tudor and Stuart conquests and plantations (1534-1610), the Cromwellian settlement (1654), and the Williamite war (1689-91) followed by the enactment of the Penal Laws (1695), had the cumulative effect of eliminating the Irish-speaking ruling classes and of destroying their cultural institutions. They were replaced by a new ruling class, or Ascendancy, whose language was English, and thereafter English was the sole language of government and public institutions.

Irish continued as the language of the greater part of the rural population and, for a time, of the servant classes in towns. From the middle of the eighteenth century, as the Penal Laws were relaxed and a greater social and economic mobility became possible for the native Irish, the more prosperous of the Irish-speaking community began to conform to the prevailing middle-class ethos by adopting English. Irish thus began to be associated with poverty and economic deprivation. This tendency increased after the Act of Union in 1800. Because of the rapid growth of the rural population, the actual number of Irish speakers increased substantially during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1835 their number was estimated at four million. This number consisted almost entirely of an impoverished rural population which was decimated by the Great Famine and by resultant mass emigration.

By 1891, the number of Irish speakers had been reduced to 680,000 and, according to that year's census of population, Irish speakers under the age of ten represented no more than 3.5% of their age-group. When the position began to stabilise early in the twentieth century, Irish remained as a community language only in small discontinuous regions, mainly around the western seaboard. These regions are collectively called the Gaeltacht. In the 1991 census, the population of the officially-defined Gaeltacht aged three years and over was 79,563, of whom 56,469 or 71% were returned as Irish-speaking. The number of Irish speakers is a decreasing proportion of the total because, for a variety of complex reasons, some of the population of the Gaeltacht continue to shift to English, and because new English-speaking households are settling there. On the other hand, there are many Irish-speaking individuals and families throughout the rest of the country, particularly in Dublin. The latest figures available show that 35% of adults claim to have a knowledge of the language.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy had begun to develop an academic interest in the Irish language and its literature. Academic interest later merged with a concern for the survival of spoken Irish as its decline became increasingly evident. Language-related activity grew throughout the nineteenth century and, following the establishment in 1893 of the Gaelic League, or in Irish Conradh na Gaeilge, the objective of maintaining and extending the use of Irish as a vernacular fused with the renewed separatist movement which culminated in the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.

The State has made various provisions for the maintenance and promotion of the language. Irish is an obligatory subject at primary and second level schools. The Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht has responsibility for promoting the cultural, social, and economic welfare of the Gaeltacht, and more generally for encouraging the use of Irish as a vernacular. The Department has two statutory boards under its aegis: �dar�s na Gaeltachta 'Gaeltacht Authority', some of whose members are elected by the people of the Gaeltacht, is a development authority for Gaeltacht areas; Bord na Gaeilge 'Irish-language board' has responsibility for the promotion of Irish as a vernacular throughout the country. An increasing number of new schools offer tuition exclusively through the medium of the Irish language. These schools are called Gaelscoileanna (or all-Irish schools). There is a national radio service (Raidio na Gaeltachta) and a new Irish language television service (Telifis na Gaeilge) came on air in October 1996.

Main source of information: Department of Foreign Affairs