Attitudes to English in Irish Republic if Irish remains dominant

[Abdominalz]

Have Irish history from the 18th century to 1922 be exactly the same except for the fact that Irish remains the dominant language of Catholic Ireland, but with Ulster Protestants largely English speaking.
Why would the republic's attitude to English be from 1922 to the present day? Would they try to minimise its use and abolish/reduce the teaching of it in state schools like Georgia and the Baltic States have done to Russian after their independence?

I personally see De Valera being very ideological and aswell as making sure all state schools teach through Irish, he might make German the first foreign language in state schools. Then I say pragmatism taking over later in the century and English being taught again in schools as the main foreign language. However I can imagine the Irish having a reputation of refusing to speak English and not speaking it.

 

[TxCoatl1970]

Gaelic hasn't been dominant in Eire for the last 1000 years, and for many, the required Gaelic is seen as a silly imposition by sentimental politicians, not a clamored-for groundswell of folks rediscovering their culture.

The folks that preserved Irish were Westies that had a reputation among the Irish for being inbred, insular hicks or academic anoraks studying what fragments of poetry that got written down roughly 1300 at the latest.

How sexy is that?

Study an all-but-dead language or s/t that allows you to work and live comfortably in the modern world?

You're supposing that the Irish go autarkic a la DPRK and not allow Irish go anywhere else, like the US or the UK for work, which was a vital poltiical and economic safety valve for the Irish republic IOTL, otherwise Dev & Co have a civil war going on long into the 1930's.

FWIW I'm NOT a Dev fan, but I doubt he'd pull a Pol Pot Year Zero plot.

Seriously though, you'd have to purge/re-educate 90-95% of the population speaking English, which would gut the country. You could do it in a couple of generations I suppose, but it'd have to be in total isolation, which would be tough to do.

There was enough static IOTL about Irish going abroad and "selling out". Expats weren't treated well.
Irish that fought for the Brits in WWII were treated shabbily, they did go and fight for "the Enemy" as well as the emigres that went to the US.
Families held wakes for them b/c they were effectively dead to them.
That wasn't always the case.

 

[onlycuteusernames]

Regarding the first reply, Gaelic was definitely dominant in Ireland for more than half of the centuries from 1000 to 2000, however you might want to define "dominance"... English came to occupy a place of greater importance really only in the seventeenth century, and even then, it wasn't until mandatory state education was introduced in 1831 - and also the Great Hunger - that there was a serious demographic push towards an entirely, universally English-speaking Ireland.

That said, there's no way to have "Irish history from the 18th century to 1922 be exactly the same except for the fact that Irish remains the dominant language of Catholic Ireland, but with Ulster Protestants largely English speaking." I mean, an important part of British colonial policy in Ireland was to get the Irish to lose their language, to integrate into an English cultural ethos, to learn their own religion in English (thus Catholic clergy were made to learn English, not Irish), and so on and so forth. Also, it's worth noting that the first Irish revival efforts happened in Belfast in the 1790s, which, at that time, was even more Protestant than it is today...

To have Catholic Ireland still largely speaking Irish is to change Irish history in a major way. You would need Catholic-Irish economic autonomy, or a drastically lower Catholic-Irish population (probably living in poverty, in marginal areas of the country), or - most ASB of all, I am certain - a population that speaks Irish all the time, but is largely fluent in English, yet doesn't express nationalist or separatist sentiment and remains contented as a subordinate population in the empire.

All that said, if Catholic Ireland was mostly Irish-speaking, I suppose de Valera might do precisely what you said about German, and perhaps also advocate for French. Why not? And yeah, presuming this timeline follows the trend of this one, well, probably English would be a thing at some point again in the future. But thanks to the ASB magic, the Irish language would probably not be lost, anymore than Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, or Finland have lost their languages.

More interesting question: how could an Irish-language revival happen post-1922?