What Are They Talking About?

Anyone still caught in the spell of the disgraceful carve-up of Northern Ireland need look no further than this week's news that, as part of the deal around the devolution of Policing and Justice, not only is a further £12 million over four years to be spent on broadcasting in Irish, but five million pounds has been allocated to initiate broadcasting in Ulster-Scots.

Irish doesn't really need this money. Like social democracy and like serious Catholicism, it does a lot better in the United Kingdom than in the Irish Republic. A film in it, made and set in Northern Ireland, was even in contention for an Oscar not long ago. These are hard times, and public funding that may be appropriate in fatter years cannot really be justified in leaner ones. Irish is in no danger of dying out in Northern Ireland without this largesse. Quite the contrary, in fact.

But Ulster-Scots does not exist. There is no such language. Its own name for itself, Ullans, is a self-confessed neologism and acronym. The overwhelming dialect of Northern Ireland is Mid-Ulster English, the written form of which is, of course, British Standard English. Ulster-Scots is nothing more than a phonetic transcription of badly spoken English, leading to advertisements for an Equalities Officer dubbed an "Eeksy-Peeksy Heid Yin", "eeksy-peeksy" apparently meaning "equitable". Who paid both for this advertisement and for that "heid yin"? Take a wild guess. English liberals can be guilt-tripped into paying for absolutely anything. There are even people who claim, for this fund-garnering purpose, that Ulster-Scots is a more British language than English!

Well, Irish would certainly be a more British language than Ulster-Scots, even if such a thing really existed. Against the extreme hostility of Nationalists, Irish was saved by the efforts of Anglo-Irish aristocrats and Protestant clergymen. None of Sinn Fein's five Ministers at Stormont will answer letters in it to this day. But their network of publicly funded schools using it, as a rival to the Catholic school system and of a piece with their precedent-setting banishment from schools of the Protestant clergy such as saved the Irish language in the past, is their finger in the honey pot. Needless to say, the other side's finger is right alongside, dipping in for "Eeksy-Peeksy Heid Yins", and now even for broadcasting. In a language that does not exist.