Gaeltacht

Gaeltacht, the name given to the Irish-speaking districts in Ireland. It is estimated that in 1851 there were such communities in perhaps twenty-three of the thirty-two counties of Ireland when the number of Irish-speakers in the country was about one and a half million. By 1891, though there were still nearly three-quarters of a million native Irish-speakers in the country, Irish was in full retreat to the Atlantic seaboard. While the Gaelic League sought to arrest and reverse the language change from Irish to English throughout the country, the extent and population of the Gaeltacht areas continued to decline. In 1925 the Irish Free State established a Commission which recommended making competence in Irish obligatory for all senior civil servants dealing with the people of the Gaeltacht, together with economic development (based on indigenous resources), improved educational opportunities, and the planned resettlement of Gaeltacht families. A small new Gaeltacht was ‘planted’ in Co. Meath in the 1930s and has survived. But the Gaeltacht has continued to contract since the 1920s. In 1972 the Gaeltacht was provided with its own radio station, Radio na Gaeltachta. Cooperative and community projects and renewed vitality in aspects of popular culture (notably sean-nós singing) may be seen as countersigns to the main story of decline. The 1980s and 1990s provided evidence of a new confidence in their indigenous culture and language among sections of Gaeltacht youth.

Irish name for the surviving Irish-speaking areas as well as for the Irish-speaking people taken as a whole. See also GAIDHEALTACHD.