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. There were some families in the town, he noted, whose ‘children needed meals in school as much as any children in Connemara’.43 In 1929, the Housing (Gaeltacht) Act introduced £80 building and £40 improvement grants as well as small outhouse grants for Irishspeaking areas.44 The supply of healthy, weather-proof dwellings for the people and suitable outbuildings for their livestock was a critical necessity. Nonetheless, the substitution of slate houses for thatched cabins in the congested areas did not alter the fact that without satisfactory land redistribution, the
.14 Following the loss of native sovereignty and the colonisation of Ireland, English had become increasingly identified with the domains of religion, government and commerce. Even before the Great Famine, Irish was being rapidly abandoned in Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) areas. The nineteenth century saw the penetration of the colonial market economy to the poorest and most remote areas of Ireland. Rural Irish-speakers encountered colonial power relations, the ideologies and practices of political economy and the English language as one package. Additionally, both the
Once held up as a 'poster child' for untrammeled capitalist globalisation, the Irish Republic has more recently come to represent a cautionary tale for those tempted to tread the same neoliberal path. The crash in the world economy had especially grave repercussions for Ireland, and a series of austerity measures has seen the country endure the most substantial 'adjustment' ever experienced in a developed society during peacetime. This book delineates the reactionary course that Ireland has followed since the ignominious demise of the Celtic Tiger. It argues that the forces of neoliberalism have employed the economic crisis they caused to advance policies that are in their own narrow interests, and that the host of regressive measures imposed since the onset of global recession has fundamentally restructured Irish society. The book discusses the mechanisms by which finance in Ireland sustains and reproduces itself, in particular how it was able to protect itself during the 2008 crisis. Property was at the centre of the second phase of the Celtic Tiger boom after US investment in manufacturing began to decline, leading to the Irish economic crash. The years since the onset of the recession in Ireland in 2008 have been characterised not by passivity and quietism but by extreme violence. In December 2009 as part of the first wave of austerity, the Community Development Project was informed that the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs proposed not to continue funding the project beyond the end of 2009.
Sexual images and innuendo have become commonplace in contemporary advertising; they often fail to register in any meaningful way with the audience. This book examines the essentially racist stereotypes through which Irish people have conventionally been regarded have been increasingly challenged and even displaced perhaps by a sequence of rather more complimentary perspectives. The various developments that are signified within the figure of the Celtic Tiger might be considered to have radically altered the field of political possibility in Ireland. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment. The Celtic Tiger shows that one can use the rhetoric about 'social solidarity' while actually implementing policies which increase class polarisation. The book discusses the current hegemonic construction of Ireland as an open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist-friendly society. The two central pieces of legislation which currently shape Irish immigration policy are the 1996 Refugee Act and the Immigration Bill of 1999. The book offers a critical examination of the realities of the Celtic Tiger for Irish women. Processes of nation state formation invariably invoke homogeneous narratives of ethnicity and national identity. To invoke a collective subject of contemporary Ireland rhetorically is to make such a strategic utopian political assumption. For the last few hundred years, the Gaeltacht has exemplified the crisis of Irish modernity. Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.
10 Maps, movements and migrants: reading Tim Robinson through Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta Jerry White In many ways, this basis of this essay is absurd. I am motivated here by a sense that Tim Robinson was somehow part of a movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s that has come to be known as Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta, or the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement. When I contacted him last year to ask about this, he responded with a characteristic combination of generosity and uncompromising seriousness. He told me that
was introduced ‘into Irish debate by Desmond Fennell’.156 Fennell was a Catholic intellectual, living in the Connemara Gaeltacht when the northern crisis began. He rapidly gained prominence for encouraging discussion with loyalists about a federal solution to the Irish question. During the early 1970s, he worked with both the Provisionals and the SDLP and was associated with a variant of the ‘two-nations’ idea.157 Fennell, however, rejected such a label, arguing instead that in Ireland there was ‘one nation and part of another’.158 By the mid 1970s, he was aligned
continued to reduce the population in these areas (called the Gaeltacht). Explaining the situation at the time, the Minister for the Gaeltacht said ‘no jobs, no people; no people, no Gaeltacht; no Gaeltacht, no language’.6 In recent decades there have been only about sixty thousand Irish speakers remaining in the Gaeltacht areas (and only about 35,000 have the opportunity to speak Irish on a daily basis).7 The connection between the Irish language and nation is primarily symbolic and has not been particularly beneficial for the native speakers. Does the Irish language
the scarcity of land. In south Connemara, experiments were undertaken to reclaim areas of blanket bog land in an effort to provide new holdings. In the mid 1920s the Land Commission acquired an area of 23,000 acres in the Cloosh Valley district for the construction of houses and the ‘planting’ of local tenants from the Gaeltacht areas. A sum of £8,000 was allocated for the construction of roads, reclamation works, drainage and fencing. Initially six families were installed on the land and each family was supplied with farming implements, seeds and instruction on how
to be a financial one: ‘parents will speak Irish to their children when Irish spells bread and butter, as English did in the past’.12 However, he acknowledged that this policy of supporting Gaeltacht districts would not reverse the use of English by most of the population. After independence the Irish language became a compulsory school subject. Since the expansion of secondary education from the late 1960s onwards most children have been taught Irish every day that they have spent at school for fourteen years but many have ended up neither fluent nor as habitual
statement that mirrored criticisms made much earlier in the century.24 It was not until 1930 that the School Meals (Gaeltacht) Act was implemented outside of Dublin.25 Likewise, milk provision continued to create contention.26 Despite improvements in quality, the price of delivered milk in Dublin rose from 3 d. per quart in 1914 to 7½ d. per quart in 1924, a significantly higher cost than customers in smaller cities such as Cork could expect to pay. Looking north of the border, official investigations revealed that milk in Belfast that had been cleansed, tested and