Word: irishness
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After decades of exodus, the tide of Irish migration took a definitive turn in the late 1980s, when the Irish diaspora started to come home. Maebh Walsh was one of those who returned. The 49-year-old designer decided to move back to Dublin after years living in Arizona. Walsh says living abroad for so long caused her family to return "more aware of our background and our 'Irishness.' So when we came back in 1988 and had children, we wanted them to have our culture...
...Walsh, like more and more Irish parents, sends her children to a school where all the lessons are taught in Irish - Ireland's indigenous Celtic language. Over the past decade, gaelscoileanna, as the schools are called, have become one of the fastest-growing sectors in Irish education. And though they still only comprise 5% of Ireland's schools, their number has tripled since the early 1990s...
...explosion in gaelscoileanna is part of an Irish-language renaissance that's been building over the past twenty years. Centuries of colonization left Ireland with a severely depleted population of Irish speakers by the time it gained independence from Britain in 1922. For decades after, the language was ghettoized in remote, rural pockets of the country and weighed down by associations with poverty or sectarian extremism. Today, between 5 and 10% of the 4.2 million people living in Ireland speak Irish on a daily basis, and many of those are students who only speak it in school...
...tongue has some worried about a potentially new conflict: that the increasing number of gaelscoileanna will pit Ireland's constitutional vow to preserve its "native" language against the obligation as a modern country to integrate its increasing immigrant population. While Walsh and hundreds of thousands of other Irish were making their way home, other, newer migration paths were being cut from China, Nigeria, Poland and many other countries. Between the late 1980s and today, the percentage of foreign-born residents in Ireland grew from around 1% to almost 12%. "People choose gaelscoileanna for all kinds of reasons, but realistically...
...That disconnect, says Kavanagh, could engender a defacto segregation in the Irish school system - and a potentially unfair distribution of more resources to Irish schools. "These schools could unintentionally lead to a kind of white flight from English-language education," she says. At Kavanagh's English-speaking school, one of the most diverse in the country, 95% of the students are children of immigrants. At the nearest Irish-language school, only 5% of the student body is foreign-born...