Whither the Irish Language Act? Language policies in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

This paper examines language policies in Northern Ireland vis-à-vis the Irish language. Whilst the devolution of powers has benefitted Welsh and Scottish Gaelic through the creation of separate language acts dedicated to them, there is no such act for Irish. Taking this policy discrepancy as its point of departure, this paper investigates how the peace process brought about through the Good Friday Agreement (1998. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-belfast-agreement) and the St Andrews Agreement (2006. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/136651/st_andrews_agreement-2.pdf) has impacted Irish in Northern Ireland. The investigation rests upon an analysis of the language policy legislation using critical theory. The paper takes a domain-based approach and examines statutes pertaining to different policy domains including administration, media, law, and healthcare to assess how the status of Irish has changed in different policy domains as a result of the peace process in Northern Ireland. In terms of methodology, this paper adheres to historical-structural analysis (HSA) which views language policies as a mechanism of maintaining power and inequality in society to explore the historical and structural factors that underpin language policies related to Irish in Northern Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• Northern Ireland
• Irish
• language policy
• peace process
• critical theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Abhimanyu Sharma is currently working as an Assistant Professor in German linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He graduated with a PhD in linguistics from the University of Cambridge in 2019. His doctoral thesis was on a comparatively analysis of language policies of the EU and India.

Notes

1 This information was last updated in April 2020.

2 The total number of pupils used for calculating the percentage of Irish-medium pupils for 2019/20 does not include the following categories: numbers for pupils with special educational needs (6,134), educated offsite but not at school (54) and independent (608). The reason behind this exclusion is that the Department of Education’s report for 2019/20 does not offer a breakdown of numbers for these categories for pre-primary, primary and post-primary level (Department of Education, 2020).

3 Similar provisions can be found in Films (Definition of ‘British Film’) Order (2006) (Art. 4) and Cultural Test (Television Programmes) Regulations (2013) (Art.3 and 4).