Tanya Sweeney: The backlash to Ivan Yates’ comment about Irish was weird — Is being indifferent to our language really so bad?

And then there are those who aren’t overly fussed on it. They found it a laborious chore, not to mention a difficult language to learn, during their school years, and they aren’t especially bothered with it now.

I would probably count myself as a member of the latter camp, although it wasn’t until this week that I thought that being not particularly fussed one way or the other with the cúpla focal was in any way problematic.

Yet according to one pocket of the internet, a comment by Ivan Yates said was tantamount to a treasonable, traitorous offence.

Earlier this week on The Six O’Clock Show, a nightly chat show on Virgin Media One, broadcaster Ivan Yates was asked if he was a fan of the Irish language. Yates, for his part, said he “couldn’t be arsed” with it; an admission that prompted host Brian Dowling to jump out of his seat and shake hands with Yates in agreement. “All this money we put into it, and there’s only 16,000 people in the country speaking it now,” Yates said. (In the 2022 census, around 1.83 million people said they could speak Irish.)

Now, I would have considered this — and Dowling’s endorsement — a fairly innocuous take, and one likely held by several Irish people. Even Gaeilgeoir Sile Seoige, also a guest on The Six O’Clock Show segment, noted that she “genuinely didn’t think about it”.

Despite the best efforts of several state agencies, many of us have a relationship with the language that ended pretty much after school. I can’t be the only one who recalls the challenge of the Leaving Cert Irish exams. The sheer drudgery of Peig. The curious feeling of, ‘Why am I not better at this language, given I’ve learned it since I was four years old?’ How, back then, it felt less like a living, vibrant language and more like an exam subject we were bound by duty to, and one we just couldn’t wait to get out of the way.

And yet the online backlash that Yates and Dowling faced in light of the moment seemed pretty ear-shattering. Virgin Media Television deleted the clip from social media but the comments found their way online regardless. Words like ‘disrespectful’, ‘astounding ignorance’ and ‘disappointing’ were bandied about. “How colonised can you be?” asked one X poster. “Can you imagine any other minority group being treated with such open disdain?”

Now, the ‘handshake’ moment might well be perceived as a confected, performative disdain for the Irish language in the heat of the moment. And I do know that X isn’t exactly the place to be taking the pulse of an entire nation’s sentiment on any one subject.

But the opprobrium that Yates and Dowling faced is a new one on me. Is having a disdain for, or even an indifference to, the Irish language really as ‘disrespectful’ as social media would have you think?

After the airing of The Six O’Clock Show, Yates called for an ‘adult conversation’ about the level of resources allocated to the Irish language.

“I think it’s worthy of a national debate and not one that’s left to zealots — the people and organisations who get defensive about Irish every time this is brought up,” Yates told The Journal.

As much as I defend anyone’s right to feel protective and militant over the ongoing health of our national language, I’ll also defend any Irish person’s right to not give two monkeys over it, either.

Most of us find ourselves somewhere in the middle; possibly wishing we were better at speaking Irish, but not likely to do anything about it. And yet, the cúpla focail has benefits merely beyond keeping our native language alive: speaking to Geek Ireland, actress Dakota Johnson recently admitted that her co-star Paul Mescal’s Irish language skills “blew her mind”.

Impressing Hollywood actors isn’t exactly a motivation for most of us to brush up on Irish, but there are probably worse places to start.