Support for an Irish Language Act comes against the background of a renaissance in Irish speaking and interest in the language over the last 30 years, writes John Gray

I was more than disappointed by your prejudiced editorial (The political parties must relearn the lost language of power-sharing, 16 February) in which you place the blame for the breakdown of talks to restore the Northern Ireland executive on Sinn Féin for seeking “to weaponise the language question”. All the weaponising has come from your own pen.

The compromise proposals on languages accepted by Sinn Féin came from the moderate Alliance party, and involved both an Irish Language Act and an Ulster Scots Act. You repeat scare stories about the presumed content of any Irish Language Act, referring “to fears that Irish may be made compulsory in schools, that a language qualification might become a job requirement, and that street signs would be made bilingual”. You do qualify this by accepting that these alarms “are not all well grounded”, though you insist that “bilingual road signs will take the issue into every street”. As Mary Lou McDonald, the new president of Sinn Féin, has clarified, none of this is true. In particular, street names would be a matter of local option.

Support for an Irish Language Act extends far beyond any Sinn Féin constituency, and comes from the SDLP and the Alliance party, and also embraces individual Unionists (albeit a small minority). It also comes against the background of a renaissance in Irish speaking and interest in the language over the last 30 years. Perhaps you could ask yourselves what rights should the Irish language have? The rights of Welsh and Scots Gaelic have been legislated for, and if we are to accept the DUP insistence that Northern Ireland is part of the UK, why should Irish be left in limbo?

As I write from Belfast the Irish tradition is inescapable. The name, like so many Ulster place names, derives from the Irish – Béal Feirste. It is a heritage that can be cherished by all rather than scorned.

John Gray

Belfast

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