Gaelige Nua

19th Mar 2004

Gaelige Nua: Taking The Pain out of Irish
Alan Ger

Now that the diddly-i has subsided, the parades have passed and the publicans have found space to stash away the extra cash from the mid week bonanza some of you may be philosophically assessing the concept of nationhood whilst others asses the concept of binge drinking and its consequences.

The hands of time wave goodbye to Old Irish

While Chinese might be the most spoken language in the world English is certainly the most popular. The demand for native English speakers in foreign countries especially in Asia is huge - for pilots the language of the skies is English, international business is conducted as Be·rla and of course pop songs have a much better chance of "making it" if they are in the Queen's tongue as we'll see at the Eurovision song contest in April.

This is dog handy for the likes of ourselves in Cork (we're so clever we picked it up naturally and didn't even need lessons) but now that we travel foreign so often and seeing that Cork is becoming more multicultural every day it would be great if we had another language in the back pocket for those "special occasions".

First of all if we're going to even think about making the native language popular again it needs to be turned into a language that doesn't take more than 40 years to learn. Most of you will have spent from the age of four until your late teens having the language forced down your gob by imposing Gealg'