The Protestants at war with Irish language ‘evangelism’

Mark Wallace, the owner of the Rex Bar in Belfast’s Shankill Road, knows just two phrases in Irish. The first is “Shankill” – which comes from the word Seanchille, or “the old church”. The second translates roughly as: “Not a f------ clue”.

Yet here in this Protestant stronghold, where street corners are still adorned with Loyalist murals, even that tiny smattering is considered more than enough. So there is little appetite for Belfast city council’s newly adopted policy to promote the Irish language in public life – the most controversial part of which has seen dual translations rolled out on street signs.

“I can’t imagine the signs around here on the Shankill Road having dual-language, no – they’d be torn down by the following day,” says Wallace, whose bar was the scene of a shootout between rival Loyalist paramilitary factions in 2000. “This isn’t even about promoting the Irish language – it’s about mischief, using it as a weapon.”

Rubber-stamped in October, the dual-language policy is backed by Sinn Féin and other parties in the council’s Nationalist bloc, overriding objections from Unionists.

Costing nearly £2m, it promotes bilingual signage in public buildings, translations of official documents, and dual language council uniforms and vehicles. In November, Northern Ireland also appointed its first Irish language commissioner, tasked with promoting the language across more than 100 public bodies.

Sinn Féin, for its part, has hailed the new council policy as a “historic milestone” for a language that was long officially marginalised, and which they claim can now be a shared tongue for a long-divided city. They point to a growing interest in learning Irish across Northern Ireland – mainly from Catholics but also from some Protestants.

However, far from regarding the policy as a cultural olive branch, some Protestants detect a continuation of the nationalist “struggle” by linguistic means. In a land where territory has long been marked by murals, flags and kerbstones daubed in national colours, they see the rollout of Irish signs as a “greening” of Ulster by nationalists.

“I have no interest in learning Irish – I think it’s just part of a drip-drip progress towards a united Ireland,” said Liz Brown, a resident of north Belfast’s mainly Protestant Shore Road area, who was visiting the Shankill with her husband, Bobby. “The green is rolling down Cave Hill [a famous promontory overlooking Belfast] to the docks.”

True, even on the Shankill, which is still separated by a peace wall from the nearby Catholic stronghold of Falls Road, the Troubles can feel like a fading memory.

Today, it attracts groups of foreign tourists, and while a pint in the Rex might not be for the faint-hearted, one street mural welcomes visitors in every language under the sun.

But although there is “Bienvenido”, “Willkommen” and even “欢迎”, there is still no Irish “Fáilte”. And unionists, who lost their century-long control of Belfast City Hall in the late 1990s, argue that installing Irish language signs in or near sectarian fault lines risks creating unnecessary flashpoints. They point out that during the Troubles, Sinn Féin’s cultural officers actively promoted Irish, saying: “Every phrase you learn is a bullet in the freedom struggle.”

Sammy Morrison of the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), a hard-line party now allied to Reform UK, says: “Nationalists compare this to dual-language signs in Wales, but that ignores Irish’s association with one particular community.”

Dual-language street signs were first permitted in Northern Ireland at the start of the peace process in the mid-1990s, but initially required a two-thirds majority of residents for approval, limiting their roll-out to mainly Catholic neighbourhoods.

Belfast city council’s new policy is particularly contentious because it reduces the necessary approval threshold for a street having bilingual signs to just 15 per cent of residents.

It comes on the back of the 2022 Identity and Language Act, which gave Irish official status in the public sector and overturned a ban on its use in court that had been in place since 1737. A century ago, Catholic children were still beaten for speaking Irish in school, with teachers viewing it as a backward tongue.

While nearly 40 per cent of southern Ireland’s people now have some command of Irish, in Northern Ireland that figure is only around 12 per cent, with less than 3 per cent speaking it regularly. Its popularity among the young has been boosted by Kneecap, the controversial Belfast rap trio, who sing mainly in Irish.

Morrison takes exception to the notion of Kneecap as cultural ambassadors for Irish. While their stage act – including balaclava headgear and songs like Get Your Brits Out – is supposed to be satirical, he says anyone with direct experience of the Troubles is unlikely to find it funny.

“Kneecap are hardly the way to evangelise a shared Irish cultural heritage – it simply reinforces Unionist impressions that the language promotes violence,” he says. “I’m not against anyone learning Irish as a cultural expression, but I fear the long-term vision is to make us feel alien in our own land.”

The promotion of Irish does have some unlikely Protestant backers, however. Among them is Linda Ervine, whose late brother-in-law, David Ervine, a former member of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, became a key Loyalist player in the peace process. In 2012, she founded Turas, an Irish language institute that now teaches around 800 people a year, including some Protestants.

“There’s a minority of Protestants who want to learn it, just as there’s a minority who are very hostile towards it,” says Ervine, who fell in love with the language after a taster course at a cross-community women’s group.

“Learning Irish opens up our own environment to us, as most of our place names are themselves Anglicised versions of Irish names. Growing up, I didn’t know, for example, that Belfast is Béal Feirste, or ‘mouth of the sand-bank ford’. Once I’d learnt it, I felt like I’d had a paper bag over my head before, as I had no idea of what so many of our place names meant.

“A lot of things in Northern Ireland have been abused for political purposes, and the Irish language has been a victim of that.”

Nonetheless, in the era of cancel culture and statue-toppling, it is perhaps little surprise that more than 300 dual-language signs have reportedly been vandalised over the past five years. Unionists have called it “the most predictable crime in Northern Ireland”.

In October, a sign in Belfast’s upmarket Shandon Park neighbourhood was destroyed with an angle-grinder within 24 hours of going up. It has since been replaced, but when The Telegraph visited in early December, it had already been daubed with Union Flag stickers.

“This is a quiet area, and most people don’t really care about Irish language signs either way,” says one Shandon Park resident. “But they are a bit worried if it’s going to bring trouble.”

He adds that residents are unhappy with the new consent procedure for dual-language signs, which can be triggered by a request from just a single resident. A neighbourhood poll is then held, and the results are referred to the council’s People and Communities Committee for a final say.

However, as long as 15 per cent of those polled want the sign, the committee is not obliged to heed any majority against. In Shandon Park, for example, only 17 per cent of residents polled were in favour of the sign, while 49 per cent were against.

The disquiet in leafy Shandon Park, however, is nothing compared with the anger sparked over dual-language signs in areas badly scarred by the Troubles.

In the mainly Protestant village of Coagh, 40 miles west of Belfast in Mid Ulster, a dual-language nameplate marking the Ballinderry Bridge Road has been dubbed “Ulster’s most vandalised sign”. Locals say that since it went up four years ago, it has been spray-painted repeatedly, burnt and even uprooted with a chain attached to a truck.

The sign marks the village’s main junction, where in 1989, an IRA hit squad shot dead local man Leslie Dallas, 39, outside his garage, along with two elderly friends, Ernie Rankin and Austin Nelson. Locals claim that as the hit squad fled, they shouted “Tiocfaidh ár lá” (Our time will come), a republican war cry.

“The sign just popped up out of nowhere, and it has reopened a lot of wounds for people here, especially given that Irish was shouted as the victims died,” says Timothy Hagan, a resident and TUV member.

“It has been vandalised nearly 50 times, although the council just keeps coming back to repair it.”

Currently in freshly poured concrete, the sign was in the news again last month when a local man spray-painted it, allegedly as council workmen were trying to clean it. He was later arrested, making him the first person in the province to face such action – although possibly not the last. Reports claim that Loyalist hardliners are mounting an organised sabotage campaign.

The sign was erected in Coagh because it is on a road linking nearby towns in what is otherwise a largely nationalist area – as a result, the consultation was done with households in the road rather than in Coagh itself.

John McNamee, a Mid Ulster Sinn Féin councillor, insists it is not there to “intimidate”.

“People living on the road want it, and they aren’t to blame for what happened in the past,” he says. “At the end of the day, this is criminal damage to council property, and Unionist politicians should call it out. Protestants are embracing Irish now too, saying – quite rightly – that it’s their language as much as anyone else’s.”

For some Unionists such as Morrison, that is not a reassuring comment. They fear that Irish’s growing popularity may be used to help justify a referendum on reunification, which Mary Lou McDonald, Ireland’s Sinn Féin president, has called for by 2030. She points to the province’s changing demographics: the 2021 census showed a Catholic majority of 45.7 per cent for the first time, compared with 43.5 per cent Protestants.

Ervine’s view, though, is that the Irish language may yet prove able to bring communities together, rather than risk driving them further apart.

“The only people really saying Irish is the enemy’s language now are Unionist politicians – to me, they’re just reinforcing republican propaganda,” she says. “I now have my own mantra about Irish – it’s that every word spoken isn’t a bullet, but another brick in the bridge that unites.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]