I came under a bit of criticism when I raised my doubts about the Irish language some time ago.
I had previously mentioned
the debacle surrounding Dingle / An Daingean, but nobody spotted it, or maybe they ignored my comments 🙂
In either case Brian Greene is obviously not impressed with this attempt at forcing the language on people.
The way I see it, the decision has been made to name Gaeltacht places in Irish and all Gaeltacht areas should therefore abide by that. Some Dingle folk doesn’t accept that yet they still want the money which Gaeltacht status brings. Easy solution, leave the Gaeltacht, prevent 5-6 tourists getting lost thereby securing their valuable tourist money. 🙂
Many Gaeltacht people support O’Cuiv’s initiative, including many Dinglers
What ever happened to the good old dual naming policy on towns/village signs? Lots of villages at my parents place (non Gaeltacht – back-end of beyond in rural Roscommon) have large English with smaller Irish names underneath (sometimes in brackets) – and some are still in miles rather kilometers. Why couldn’t they do the same in this case but have the Irish in large lettering and the English in smaller bracketed form? In the end its still that small minded tribe of anti-“Black and Tan”-mentality looking for recognition of their long-forgotten agenda and little else. At the rate immigration is going in Limerick, a lot of signs for things around here should be posted in Polish or Slovak rather than English, but that is another topic.
The dual system would make most sense alright, but sense has always been in short supply on our wee isle.
I’m not sure it’s the *anti-”Black and Tan”-mentality*, perhaps more to do with misguided* protection of the language.
*I say misguided but I actually support the move to a certain degree.
The dual system is the only logical way to handle it. Foreign tourists rely on maps that refer to Dingle. Until such time as ALL those maps have been updated it would be silly to remove reference to Dingle on signage.
I agree, but the evil maca would love to see a few lost tourists pottering about scratching their heads. If I met a few i’d send them all to Daingean in Offaly. 🙂
Oh, you can’t criticise Irish! It’s blasphemous, you know. Never mind that an ever-shrinking section of the population can SPEAK it…
And yes, if they start forcing this, it will be disasterous.