Seachtain na Gaeilge

The Centre for Celtic Studies and the Faculty of English hosted a seminar dedicated to Seachtain na Gaeilge on March 6th 2020. Seachtain na Gaeilge is an annual celebration of the Irish language that has been running since 1903 (http://wa.amu.edu.pl/wa/node/11475).
This year's event entitled Revitalising Minority Languages and Prior Ideological Clarification: The Case of Irish was opened by Dominic Berkeley, Second Secretary at the Embassy of Ireland and the Dean of the Faculty of English, Prof. Joanna Pawelczyk, and moderated by the head of the Centre for Celtic Studies as well as the PI of our project, Prof. Michael Hornsby.
The following speakers presented during this year's event:

• Dr. Sara Brennan (Université de Lorraine) on Reviving, rebranding, reconnecting: The mobilization of Irish in business in post-crisis urban Ireland;
• Dr. Cassie Smith-Christmas (NUI Galway) on Inclusive Ireland: Using and Learning Irish as a Family;
• Prof. Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin (NUI Galway) on The nature of ambition and nuance of success in Gaeltacht language planning, and 
• Dr. John Walsh (NUI Galway) Navigating language revitalisation and community development: The case of community radio in Irish.

What counts as a ‘successful’ language revitalisation or revival is hard to pin down. In the case of Irish, Ó Tuathaigh (2008: 31) describes the relatively long history of language planning in Ireland as a ‘relative failure of state policy to achieve its own declared objectives’ caused, in part, by ‘hypocrisy and bad faith’. The charge of ‘failure’ against the revitalisation of Irish can be taken up by other commentators, particularly in political contexts, in order to discredit the language movement, and a discourse (succinctly described by Dorian) emerges which positions Irish as having ‘decades of political and financial support from a national government, as Irish did after 1922’ resulting in ‘relatively modest gains [which] are seen more nearly as an indication of failure rather than as measures of success’ (Dorian 2012: 465). On the other hand, Romaine has noted that it is possible to view the current state of Irish in more positive terms and, in a moderately positive appraisal, considers the fact that, since as many as one in three people have some understanding of the language, ‘this means that the world in Irish will not be lost and the world can still be lived in Irish by those who choose to learn and use it. That is hardly failure’ (Romaine 2008: 24). Mac Murchaidh (2008: 222) further notes the need for ‘a fresh means of addressing the issues in a way which avoids the adversarial debates of the past. The cycle of claim and counter-claim will have to be broken is we are to make progress in exploring the most effective way of preserving and celebrating a key element of our rich culture heritage’. More recently, in an article in the Irish Times in August 2019, Fionntán de Brún argues that ‘[r]ather than focussing on the perceived failure of state-led language revival we need to embrace the value of a tradition of revivalism, one that has brought us an awareness of language and culture as constructs that are negotiable rather than fixed.’

See the photo gallery from the seminar