Preserving Irish Identity: The Impact of Penal Laws and Colonialism

The penal laws, it was outlawed to speak Irish then. And obviously what happened was the England, the English invasion came from the east, and the east was where, you know, all the best land in Ireland was for growing crops. So what happened was they pushed all the Irish speakers or all the natives to the west of Ireland. It’s all very rocky and it’s very hard to grow crops and stuff. So the hail or the connect. And that’s why the Gaelic areas are all around the west, and that’s why the Irish language stayed alive there. So there is still, like, families and still areas of Ireland that speak Irish. So they had a good crack that, a good crack at getting rid of it and it obviously failed. Failed. So it’s because of these families in the west of Ireland, like, we have to thank them that we were ever given the opportunity to learn this language, to get involved with our culture that was driven to almost extinction. And like, there’s No. 1 on the to do list of colonialism is the way better people’s language, because it takes away their identity, it takes away their meaning, their connection to the land, connection to the place they come from. And then that’s, that’s a people that you can conquer, you can tax them, you can degrade them, make them feel like their language isn’t any use, it’s not the way forward, it’s not progressive and That’s. That’s probably the worst thing they’ve done to Irish people is to make them feel like that there is no value in Irish. It is not valuable in the global market or in capitalism. But hopefully that young people are seeing that there is an intrinsic value to the language and something that can’t be taken away from them.