Smash hit

Theoretically, having as many people as possible speak the same language should be welcomed. Like the euro, it’s so handy. You’d think we’d be relieved of the burden of having to learn and translate other languages into one we can understand.

The problem is that in the 19th century, when colonialism was in full swing, people became more conscious of their nationality. When the colonists arrived, language was one of the first targets. Hating the invader’s language and clinging to your own became a weapon of resistance.

The link between invasion and the annihilation of language was forged and this negative connotation is what prevents us from letting go. The fact that people and language can move in both a peaceful and highly productive manner has been lost.

Letting go of Irish doesn’t mean letting go of being Irish. Language is a marker of nationality, but not the most important one. It’s always difficult to define what binds the people who live within geographical borders. Even on this island the fact that some can speak Irish fluently and others can’t doesn’t make one citizen more or less Irish than the other. How could it when you consider the millions of descendants of our emigrants all over the world who consider themselves Irish even though they’ve never set foot on this island.

If geographical location, never mind language, fails to adequately define what “being Irish” is, then what does? The ties that bond a people are a common set of reference points that encompass literature, history, landscape, religion, geography and, yes, language.

Someone who has nurtured a family connection with Ireland will share these reference points and that is what gives us a sense of recognition, which is always so warming and familiar when you travel abroad. But nurturing this sense of nationality is not entirely benign.

France is an amazing country that has erected admirable cultural barriers to protect its language and its way of life. It deeply resents and fights the introduction of English words and phrases into official language use, “le weekend” being the classic example.

So sensitive is the issue that Jacques Chirac, the French president, led a French walkout from the opening session of the European Union’s annual spring summit last year when a fellow Frenchman, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the head of Unice, the European employers’ group, abandoned his mother tongue on the grounds that English is “the language of business”. Chirac may have made his point, but everyone else thought he was just being silly.

Nationality is grand when we’re celebrating St. Patrick’s Day or reciting epic poems depicting heroes of the past, but when it demands that resources be spent in the pointless translation of documents, adding unnecessary complexity to road signs and costing us enormous expense in time and money in the education system, you have to ask yourself why we bother.

If English as a language has won the battle of natural selection, that doesn’t mean the English as a people have won. That’s the notion we have to get out of our heads if we are to debate this issue with any rationality.