Jailtacht: the Irish Language and the Conflict in Northern Ireland

Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland: from neglect to re-branding

“…virtue of its minority status, its association with a community challenging the powers that be or as a result of a refusal to recognise any intrinsic worth as a distinct culture. 14 According to this reading, neglect is structured by the imperial centre and applied to a periphery in an attempt to accelerate the latter's anglicisation. The systematic downgrading of the language and the culture it embodies involves issues of prestige which encourage users to abandon the language in preference for the langue dominante.…”

“…Aodán Mac Póilin identifies the more explicitly political orientation adopted by Gaelic League at its AGM in 1915 as the key factor in the language movement losing what support it had within the unionist community 13 . Whereas the language was to filter into the ethos of the new state in the South as one of the foundation stones of the new status quo, the linking up of language with a radical political agenda re-surfaces among the republican prisoners in the North at the time of the hunger strikes 14 , a phenomenon that was to feed into Sinn Féin's increasingly relaxed incorporation of the language as part of the broader political and cultural struggle of the modern republican movement 15 . In contrast, Ulster-Scots language and culture have not had the same ongoing, historical relationship within unionism.…”