This State's current economic "success" is expediting the decline of the Irish language, an English linguistic expert has said.
Within a generation, Irish will be a "general" second language, but under increasing threat of survival due to globalisation, Mr Reg Hindley, senior lecturer in European Studies at the University of Bradford, said in Galway this week.
By then, several more Gaeltacht areas will have disappeared, including Ring in Co Waterford, he predicted.
Mr Hindley - best known here as author of the controversial book The Death of the Irish Language, published a decade ago - was speaking at a public meeting in Barna, Co Galway, hosted by Conradh na Gaeilge and Udaras na Gaeltachta. He said Gaeltacht areas had no choice when it came to opting for wealth and prosperity at the expense of the language.
"I witnessed the effects of tuberculosis and grinding poverty in some of these areas in the 1950s, and who could expect people to hold on to the mother tongue at all costs in such circumstances?" he told The Irish Times.
Mr Hindley paid tribute to the language movement for keeping Irish alive at all, and welcomed the general interest in the language outside Gaeltacht areas as reflected in gaelscoileanna.
He said it was a fallacy to suggest that the State had invested heavily in the language's survival. The State attitude was best reflected in its use in Dail Eireann, he said.
Mr Hindley was critical of current methods for monitoring language use, with inflated figures being a consequence of the sort of questions incorporated in census surveys.
"Gaeltacht monitoring must be multi-faceted, mixing so-called objective statistical surveying by census methods with detailed inspection of children and schools," he said, adding that spot checks on the "language of play" among children would give a more accurate overall picture.
In his lecture, the academic noted that Udaras na Gaeltachta appeared to "keep its monitoring to itself", but added that he did not see how linguistic checks could be conducted in business enterprises without "police state" surveillance.
He recalled that nine years ago he had queried the industrial location policy of the authority, having calculated that in 1985 between 47 and 58 per cent of Udaras-owned or -assisted enterprises were based in areas where little or no Irish was used every day.
"Better targeting for the future seems more practicable than trying to remedy past mistakes, but the conflict between standard industrial location principles and a socio-political desire to encourage location in the Gaeltacht is hard to miss," he said.
"The Gaeltacht has too often survived because it was the last place where industry would want to locate."
The first public Internet kiosk was opened yesterday on the Aran islands by Circle Network, a company installing Internet kiosks throughout the State.
