Foras na Gaeilge, the all-island Irish-language promotion body set up after the Belfast Agreement, has driven the growth of the language in Northern Ireland, according to a new report.
The language body has worked hard “to challenge the perception that the Irish language is aligned only with one side of the community in Northern Ireland”, according to the Centre for Cross-Border Co-Operation.
The lack of official recognition for the language in Northern Ireland until the creation of Foras na Gaeilge led to the language there being developed by grassroots speakers and activists.
Today, however, the grassroots-led “intensive” approach is seen as best practice: “The South are learning from what’s happened in the North. There’s certainly a lot of co-operation North/South in that way,” a Foras official told researchers.
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Similarly, many of the legislative changes that have happened in Northern Ireland in the last 25 years have been spurred by models taken from the Republic, such as the appointment of an Irish language commissioner.
The report by the Armagh-based Centre for Cross-Border Co-Operation – previously known as the Centre for Cross-Border Studies – examines the operation of all of the cross-Border bodies set up by the Belfast Agreement.
The “expectation across much of the Irish-language community” had been that the Northern headquarters of Foras na Gaelige would be located in west Belfast because of the role played by Irish-language activists from there.
However, the decision to locate it instead in Queen Street in the city centre was “an important signal” that the language is open to everyone, not just those from a nationalist background.
In particular, the funding of language programmes in traditionally Protestants parts of Belfast “appears to have resulted in some changes in perception regarding ownership” of the language, the report found.
A majority of the community work funded by Foras, which was set up at the same time as the Ulster Scots Agency, takes place in Northern Ireland’s most economically-deprived neighbourhoods .
Thirteen of the 20 Scéim Forbartha Líonraí Gaelige programmes supported by Foras are in the top 25 most deprived areas, and five of them are in the top 10, according to the report.
The impact of Foras’s work can be measured in “the societal shifts” that have taken place towards the Irish language across the island. Two-thirds of people in the Republic are now positive about the language, with 45 per cent saying the same in Northern Ireland.
The language body has made “significant progress” over the last 25 years to “professionalise and normalise” the Irish-language sector, especially by the creation of a terminology committee to decide on changes to the language.
“We ratify 3,000 to 4,000 terms a year and language development has been transformed,” one Foras na Gaeilge staff member told the centre, adding that such work is “crucial” for the language’s development.
The New Concise English-Irish Dictionary was published in 2020 and is being constantly updated, while work on developing the Irish language’s first Irish-Irish dictionary is under way.
“There has been no dictionary for people in the Gaeltacht for whom Irish is their first language. We’ve transformed the whole realm, and that in turn has transformed how the Irish language is taught,” a Foras staff member told researchers.
The online dictionary www.focloir.ie, created by Foras, is 12 years old and “increasingly when you put a search into any search engine the reference to our dictionary will come up”, the official said.
Funding from Foras helped to support the creation of an Irish service on the language app Duolingo, which has been “particularly important for young people” given “the increasing ubiquity of smartphones”.
Ninety books in Irish are published annually by Foras, with staff arguing that “the standard of reading material available to Irish speakers has been transformed over the past 25 years”.
