Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
There’s a saying on the Isle of Man, “Cha jean oo cosney ping lesh y Ghailick”, which roughly translates as “You won’t make a penny with Manx”. This perfectly illustrates how every minority language struggles to financially justify its existence. It’s hard enough to make a living as a writer […]
“Is it hard to see death when it is disguised and tricked out in the surface trappings of life?” John Healy, Death of an Irish Town. If most Irish people think of the country’s Irish-speaking regions in Cos. Donegal, Galway and Kerry at all, they largely think of them in […]
■Tomás Mac Síomóin, The Gael Becomes Irish: An Unfinished Odyssey (Nuascéalta, 2020) It is difficult to imagine a deeper enslavement of a subject people than to deprive them of their language. Such a condition has a deep psychological effect, which causes the abnormal to seem normal. There is a pretence […]