History was made at Stormont on May 13. In the imposing white edifice built to house what Northern Ireland’s first prime minister called the partitioned region’s “Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”, a speech was delivered entirely in Irish.
Headsets provided translation for Aisling Reilly, a legislator for the nationalist Sinn Féin party which in elections a week earlier had made the unprecedented leap over unionist parties to become Northern Ireland’s biggest force. She called it an “important day for language rights and equality” — a polarising statement given Northern Ireland’s history.
No matter that most people north and south of the border do not habitually speak Irish. Nor that Irish-speaking legislators will now be free to annoy their political adversaries by switching into what one critic on Twitter derided as a “hobby language”. Irish at Stormont is symptomatic of a language that is suddenly enjoying a cultural moment in the sun.