THE first words that greet a visitor arriving at Dublin’s airport are likely to be unfamiliar: Slí Amach. Underneath is the English: Exit. The message and the meta-message are both clear: that is the way out, and this is a country that spoke Irish, one of a handful of surviving Celtic languages, long before the arrival of English.

Johnson’s last column looked at the expansive multilingual policy of the European Union, which allows any member state’s official language to be an EU language. This means 24 official languages. Despite the cost, this is sensible, given that no country wants to participate in any organisation that impinges on sovereignty as heavily as the EU does without being able to use its own language when making the rules.

But Irish poses the sternest test of that principle. Monolingual Hungarians or Portuguese should be able to follow EU decision-making in their own language. So should Germans or Spaniards who aren’t comfortable in English, or simply prefer the ease of their own language.

But Irish became an EU language only in 2007, 34 years after Ireland joined the (then) European Economic Community. Just 1.8% of the population speaks Irish daily outside of the education system, mostly in the Gaeltacht regions, those small, mainly western pockets of the country where Irish is the main community language (see map). The only monolinguals are small children in Irish-speaking families who have not yet begun school. English, of course, dominates the rest. More.

See: The Economist

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