OPINION: Could Manchán save the Irish language?

The climax of the new Bob Dylan biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown’, centres on folk music’s hero ‘going electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival on Rhode Island. Dylan is challenging convention. It’s his way versus what has always been, or so it appears. It’s old versus new. To some it’s right versus wrong, either/or. To those with ears it was both/and.
Some months back, online news website The Journal quoted the General Secretary of Conradh na Gaeilge, Julian de Spáinn, as stating: “The teaching of the Irish language in the education system is at ‘crisis point’ and must be overhauled ‘urgently’ in order to encourage more students to study the subject in school.”
Last year, 22.5 percent (13,695) of the 60,839 who sat the Leaving Cert did not sit an Irish exam. The percentage was up from 20.4 percent the previous year. Irish is mandatory at second level, yet exemptions may be sought.
“According to the Department of Education, exemptions are granted on the grounds of a student having been educated outside of Ireland for a certain period of time, having significant literacy difficulty or having other additional needs. The decision to exempt a student is made by the principal of the school following discussion with a student’s parents or guardians, the class teacher, special education teachers and the student themselves,” reported The Journal’s Jane Moore.
While exemptions may be applied for, many students choose not to apply for them and simply opt not to sit the Irish exam. This puts even more pressure on a subject that has been at the centre of much controversy in the Irish secondary-education system.
Conradh na Gaeilge’s General Secretary believes that the language risks becoming an optional subject if more students continue to opt out of learning it, as recent trends suggest will happen. “It’s not a surprise for us,” de Spáinn said when commenting on this worsening picture. “The numbers [not sitting Irish] have been increasing over the last number of years.”
The vast majority of people who have ever studied Irish at any level will agree with his assessment of the situation and his suggested way forward: “We’re not in a good place in the schooling system, whereas outside of school, obviously, there’s huge interest in [the] language… We need to change the way Irish is taught throughout the system, from preschool the whole way through to third level. We need a flexible system that caters to students’ needs and to their abilities.”
Conradh na Gaeilge, a cultural and social organisation that promotes the Irish language, has consistently called for a change in Irish teaching methodology. Its preferred method is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which has been adopted in Wales.
This method focuses on a skills-based approach. It has been defined as ‘an international standard for describing language ability. It organises language proficiency on a six-point scale, from A1 for beginners to C2 for those who have mastered a language’. 
According to de Spáinn, “A student who has a learning disability with writing the language, instead of excluding them from learning Irish, surely we should be able to include them and have a Leaving Cert for them that would be based on oral Irish only.” He has similar proposals for those coming late into the system.
While language is one issue, the environment is another. Yet both Irish and the environment are intrinsically linked through our placenames. Fields, forests, mountains, rivers, lakes and our local ‘homeplaces’ are all immersed in the Irish language, which gave them their names. They form our sense of place, áit dhúchais. The Irish language runs through our veins to give meaning to the world around us.
Professor Michael Cronin from TCD, whose ‘An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht’ (‘Irish and Ecology’) is a fine book, says: “Without the Irish language there is no hope of addressing the fundamental threat of irreversible environmental damage. If we have no access to the accumulated environmental wisdom of two millennia, then there can be no sustainable future for the inhabitants of the island. Irish has been an inextricable part of our past. It now needs to be the cornerstone of our future.”
Imagine if we let Manchán Magan loose as an Irish-language curriculum ambassador. One of his books, ‘32 Words for Field – Lost Words of the Irish Landscape’, is packed with fascinating insights, brimful of enthusiasm and a joy to read. Irish needs this ‘aliveness’ to become a living language. Magan could be the Bob Dylan of the Irish-language movement. Támuid ag súil le Dia.