Unionist Protests Promoting the Irish Language

If you want to make a name for yourself as the voice of unionism, you can join a political party, work hard to become a local councillor, work even harder on behalf of your constituents, win their trust and perhaps become an MLA. Eventually people might take notice of what you say. But this involves years of hard work. Is there a quicker way, one that involves less hard work?

Find an issue that divides people (the Americans call these ‘Wedge Issues’) and deliberately set out to upset and anger ‘the other side’. As the other side get angry, they will attack you and then your supporters will see you as the strong man of unionism. Tensions will rise and your community is likely to suffer as a result but you personally will gain status.

This pattern has been endemic within unionism over the years. In his younger days, Ian Paisley senior was a master at provoking unnecessary conflict for his personal advantage, including forcing the RUC to remove a tricolour from a shop window on the Falls Rd back in 1964 and provoking a riot.

In more recent years, we have had the incredibly stupid and counter-productive Drumcree Protests which helped make the reputations of some senior unionist politicians and now-dead paramilitaries. Then we had the Belfast City Hall flag protests which lead no-where (except court for a number of loyalist teenagers) but allowed some to gain prominence.

Today we have dual language signage in Belfast. Granted the BCC policy on street signs makes no sense and certainly is not an effort to widen support for the Irish language, but unionism had years to come up with alternative gestures across the province but made little effort to do so. Why are some unionists unable to learn lessons from the stupidity of Drumcree and the Flags Protests?

The procedures for arranging dual language signage at Belfast Grand Central were chaotic and wasteful of public money BUT at a travel hub visited by tourists having a few words in Irish should not upset anyone. (Putting up signs and then replacing them because you didn’t think through the issues should.) One of the reasons tourists visit other countries is to experience different cultures and languages. When there is major refurbishment of our airports at Belfast or Antrim, or our ferry terminals at Larne and Belfast, we should ready ourselves for the sight of Irish words like fir, mná etc.

Unionist Incentive to Learn Irish

Every teacher knows that learning a language involve hours of difficult work, it requires strong incentive to persist but Irish is thriving at the moment. What is the incentive?

I would argue that we unionists are part of the incentive. Every time one of our ambitious junior activists gets worked up about Irish signs the automatic reaction of most Irish nationalists must be to wind them up further and this requires all to learn a few words of Irish.

Unionism should learn to separate genuine worries from trivial irritations. We do need to take care that Irish is never used to discriminate against those with a British heritage in the workplace. Any suggestion that fluency in Irish would be made essential in teaching, the PSNI or in the civil service should be strongly opposed.

But in other areas there are sensible conciliatory gestures we could make that would harm no-one and would allow our unionist children to benefit from a greater understand the role of Irish in our place names. I made some suggestions on this via Slugger in past years, but with limited response from the unionist politicians. See here: https://www.sluggerotoole.com/2023/03/29/we-need-to-better-educate-people-on-the-irish-language-origins-of-many-of-our-town-names/?ht-comment-id=9355285