Irish is by far the most beautiful language in the world. (More precisely, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, which are phonetically almost the same, are by far the most beautiful languages in the world, but I prefer Irish. Well, you get the point.) Listening to some sentences from the cassette tapes that come with the Gael-Linn Irish course which I have brings me to real ecstasy, a bliss bordering on orgasm. I'm not exaggerating here. It really does.
That's why my heart bleeds more than words can say from the knowledge that the Irish language as a medium of communication is essentially dead, with the number of native speakers under 100 thousand and the number of monolinguals near-zero. Which means that it's pointless to learn Irish, because the chances of meeting someone who speaks Irish but doesn't speak English are nonexistent.
Awareness of the fact that the English have destroyed such a divinely delightful language fills me with enormous grief and anger.
(Yes, I know, some people claim that Irish is not a dying language, because there are millions of people who have some knowledge of it. That argument is flawed. If you force all children to study Irish, then in a few decades you are bound to end up with a huge number of grown-ups who have "at least some degree" of Irish. What matters is that no one actually needs Irish, not even in Ireland, because one can just as easily get everything done in English.)
Why am I unable to rejoice Ireland's policy of making Irish an official language and a compulsory school subject?
That is because the overwhelming majority of Irish speakers today are native English speakers, and extremely few native English speakers are able to pronounce Irish correctly. (And if you are going to ask sneeringly if I, a native Estonian speaker, can do it better, then yes, absolutely, I can.) I doubt even one native English speaker out of 10 has a chance of mastering the contrast between "leabhar" and "leabhair" during his lifetime. The ghastly English accent has even made its way to language courses, which means that enthusiasts all over the world buy those audio courses and believe that's how Irish is actually supposed to sound. That's outrageous sacrilege.
As far as I am concerned, the real Irish language compared to the Irish language the way it's currently spoken by the L2 speakers in Ireland is like a delightful Oriental pavilion compared to a stinking latrine.
The extent of the Irish language's putrefaction is further illustrated by one weird fact – the Irish singers' Irish tends to be much worse than the Scottish singer's Gaelic. At the time of writing this, there is almost 60 thousand people (57,375 in Scotland and 2,170 in Canada) who claim to be able to speak Scottish Gaelic. The number of native speakers is unknown. The number of monolinguals was 477 in 1971, so it's pretty safe to say it's 0 today. By comparison, the number of native Irish speakers is estimated at 78,000 in Ireland plus nearly 20,000 in the USA and 2,000 in Australia. With the number of native Irish speakers far exceeding the number of native Gaelic speakers, it's astonishing that I haven't been able to find a single singer who sings in proper Irish. Gaelic has Donnie Munro who is obviously a native speaker and Karen Matheson who has a pretty decent pronunciation, although a far cry from Donnie Munro's. Yet, I have been reaching high and low and haven't been able to find an Irish singer whose pronunciation would be even close to Karen Matheson's. To name just one example out of many, Andrea Corr is a lovely woman who has an adorable voice, and "Buachaill Ón Éirne" is a beautiful, heartwarming song, but it doesn't change the sad fact that she just hasn't got a chance of pronouncing Irish right. Her English voice apparatus doesn't have it in it.
So, stressing one more time how much I love the Irish language and how my heart bleeds for the tragic destiny of the Irish people, I can't help feeling revolted when I hear Irish spoken with that dreadful English accent which seems to be the norm in Ireland today. That blasphemous abomination may have Irish vocabulary and grammar, but it has nothing in common with the magical, exquisite Irish language I adore.
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