I have friends who, when their day job is done, turn into musicians, photographers, sportsmen, readers, art collectors and historians. Their cultural activity enriches their lives, and mine since I pick up plenty of interesting knowledge from them.

But wouldn’t it be nonsensical if any of them decided their cultural interest was so fundamentally important that everyone in the state must take it up as well? Playing the piano is a good thing, but forcing it on the entire population would be silly. If the people still couldn’t play despite the best efforts of the authorities, all the effort would have been pointless. Also, if everyone hated the piano as a result it would be counterproductive.

So why on earth do we persist with the compulsion to learn Irish? Why does the gaelgoiri get alternately defensive and aggressive when anyone points out how utterly futile is the state insistence that Irish be maintained as an official language? It’s not working and we all know it’s not working.

People who have a love of the Irish language will seek it out and nurture it. I take my hat off to them, but that doesn’t mean the state should force the language on the entire population regardless of the cost.

The expense in cash terms can be seen when official documents like county development plans have to be translated, even if nobody wants them in the first official language.

Force-feeding Irish in our education system is another huge cost in time and money, and at the end of the process significant numbers of people can only manage a cupla focal.

We should have called time on this charade long ago, but whenever a proposal is made to eliminate the compulsion to learn Irish, the cries of cultural treason can be heard from Connemara to Dublin 4. The entirely reasonable act of questioning the continued maintenance of the Irish language on its state-sponsored life-support machine is smothered by accusations of cultural cleansing.

For some people, official acceptance that the Irish language is a marginal pursuit instead of a core practice is akin to identity theft. Take away my language, they cry, and you take away my sense of Irishness.

The notion that language equals nationality and therefore personal identity is foolish. Condemning a language is not the same thing as condemning identity. Language did not evolve in order to confer identity, its purpose is far more utilitarian.

Language was the great evolutionary leap for humans. Apart from the massive changes required in our brains, our bodies had to develop voice boxes as well as changes in our chest and diaphragm to allow us to speak. We aren’t just clever, better-looking chimps.

The ability to speak a language, with all its grammatical complexities, is an innate part of our humanity. People everywhere on this planet speak languages of relatively equal complexity.

The purpose of language is straightforward, allowing us to communicate with one another. Languages develop in isolation, but once people move around the language spreads.

When they are spoken by small groups of people, in evolutionary terms they have outlived their usefulness and get subsumed by others and die. A marginal language becomes a cultural appendix.