Sunday 29 March 2009

Belmullet to be painted out of the Gaeltacht?

As regular readers will know, I am regularly accused by my detractors – who seem fatally attracted to the blog - of being “unpatriotic”. Funniest of all, I have even been charged with “continuing the work of Cromwell”. And all because I question the daily nonsense that goes on, and passes for normality, in the country of my birth.

As it happens, I firmly believe that patriotism is one of the basest “isms” of all, and anything to discourage it should be lauded. Probably the best way of seeing this clearly is to look at patriotic jingoism in other countries. Small-minded? Repulsive? Exclusive? Myopic? Well, it is exactly the same here, obscured by the "can't see the wood for the trees" effect.

One domestic manifestation of this can be seen in the picture above. It’s a road sign, clearly, that some half-wit has gone to the trouble of painting out an English placename on. Yes, a placename we all use and know - one in the mother tongue of our country. A placename in the language of Joyce, Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Beckett and the like - not that of Peig.

The really worrying thing about this, however, is that according to the person who supplied the photo, this is not the work of a lone right-wing Gaelgoir with hatred of the Brits and their "800 years of oppression" burning in his heart – but the work of Mayo County Council!

I had thought that English language placenames were only forbidden in the State-funded Gaeltacht proper, but it seems that Mayo County Council are really getting into the spirit of things here, by obscuring the word “Belmullet” - sorry, "Beal an Mhuirthead" - on road signage outside that fund-draining region.

Interestingly, a piece last year in the Mayo News reported that the very same Belmullet was in danger of falling off the Gaeltacht funding bandwagon, due to a shortage of real Gaelic speakers. A study commissioned by the Government in 2004, entitled ‘A Comprehensive Linguistic Study of the Use of Irish in the Gaeltacht’, proposed adapting new criteria to calculate the number of Gaelic speakers, in order to decide if Gaeltacht regions can continue to qualify for taxpayers’ funding.

GMIT Maths lecturer and Connemara-based Gaeltacht expert Donncha Ó hEallaithe (Mayo News' description) is quoted in the report as saying that “the Irish language in Mayo is not yet dead but it is very close to it and they can basically say good-bye to it if something is not done to encourage people to speak it and use it as a community language. There is no point in people pretending they are a Gaeltacht community just for the sake of it. They are only fooling themselves if they think that they live in an Irish-speaking area just because they happen to live inside a boundary which was drawn up 40 years ago…… at the end of the day, it will be a ministerial decision whether we are taken out of the Gaeltacht. However, Minister Ó Cuív has often told us that if there is an effort to speak and promote Irish, we will continue to remain in the Gaeltacht, and the effort to promote Irish in Erris and Achill is clear to see. Nobody will benefit from a community losing its Gaeltacht status, and the only people who would be happy would be the far-right Irish speakers”.

Then again, this blog has often highlighted the gap between official perception and on-the-ground reality. So let’s just keep spending money on a fallacy so many in officialdom are eager to have us believe, at a time we cannot afford to do so.

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8 comments:

Ella said...

Hi GM, I hope you don't choke on your cornflakes there over my ponderings but one has to ask whether Mayo Council managed to secure a grant for the paint to blot out "Belmullet". Grants are handed out for all sorts of things related to the Irish language.

Mór Rígan said...

Here in Kerry, locals spray painted "Dingle" back on the signs after
the council blotted them out!

Stan said...

Here is "Spiddal" disappearing from a sign in Galway city.

(I don't think Dave had anything to do with it.)

Netgeek said...

Just for the record the sign in the picture is not an isolated example. All (or as many as Ive come across) signs in Mayo for Belmullet have been subject to this legally sanctioned vandalism.

Also for the record I did pay a visit to Belmullet onetime and out of the conversations I overheard or was a party to and signage/notices (other than those produced by state agencies) I witnessed there wasnt a single solitary word in Gaelic/Irish. Admittedly I was only there for two hours and there were a lot of tourists about but still..........

The Gombeen Man said...

It's amazing that there's someone from the Council, funded by public money, going around with a bucket of green paint (or white, as Stan's post shows) blotting out information on our roadsigns. Mind-boggling.

It's all top-down, Official Ireland nonsense.

Anonymous said...

Just to let you know- Mayo County Council were forced to paint out Belmullet on all road signs by government- Eamonn O'Cuiv is the man to blame. Same in other counties where towns are in the Gaeltacht.

Anonymous said...

THE CROCODILE TEARS SHED AGAINST THE RE-ESTABLISHING OF THE GAELIC NAMES ARE ALL THE MORE HYPOCRITICAL GIVEN THAT NOT ONE OF THEM GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF IRISH SPEAKERS IN MONOLINGUAL ENGLISH SPEAKING IRELAND - STAND IN THE SHOES OF AN IRISH SPEAKING CHILD FOR A DAY IN THIS "BILINGUAL" STATE, DEFEND THAT CHILD'S RIGHT TO SPEAK HER/HIS LANGUAGE AND THEN I MIGHT HAVE SYMPATHY FOR YOUR WHINING PAROLES.....WHERE ARE THE BILINGUAL SIGNS IN 'PRIVATE IRELAND', BY THESE GREAT IRISH CITIZENS, WHERE IS THE SPACE ALLOWED FOR THEIR FELLOW CITIZENS ?

The Gombeen Man said...

Where are the bilingual signs?

Everywhere throughout the country, apart from the Gaeltacht, that is. Rights?