I appreciate that the progress to which Senator Healy refers is taking place and that the changes which he mentioned, and which are very important, have actually occurred. I think that Senator Colonel Moore came nearer to the heart of the matter when he said that the very great work that has been done up to the present has been largely propagandist work, and that it is only now we are coming to the real difficulties of the problem of preserving and restoring the national language.
Now, while all the change that Senator Healy mentions has taken place during the period that he referred to, I think it is undoubted also that during that period the strength of the Irish language, taking the country as a whole, has fallen very seriously indeed. The census figures alone show that, and the decay in the Gaeltacht and in the Breac-Ghaeltacht has not been compensated for by the progress that has been made in Dublin and elsewhere. My belief is that, unless we look upon what has been done as a stepping stone to enable us to do more, the loss that has taken place, and must continue to take place for some time, cannot be made up. I am quite clear that the Irish language can be saved, but if we were to just go on as we have been going, not taking advantage of the opportunities that inventions like the pictures and broadcasting give us, and if we were to fail also to face up to the new difficulties that these things create, then I believe that the movement would ultimately fail. It would be quite possible to have a good deal of progress in the schools, to have a good smattering of Irish acquired by almost everyone in the country, and still have the language fade out as, at one time, Latin faded out in the countries where it was still the language of education. I think that it is absolutely necessary to use all the means at our disposal to do the work we have undertaken. As I have already said, these mechanical inventions create new difficulties and new necessities, and if we do not use them then they will be used against us.
Senator Healy talked about the difficulty of teaching Irish through broadcasting. In my opinion no attempt should be made to teach Irish through broadcasting. If I had my way there would be no such thing as an Irish lesson broadcast, but what I would like to do is to give lectures, songs and plays to the people in Irish through broadcasting. I think that is the proper way to use it; to get stuff that will be of interest, and not too much of it. I do not want to annoy unduly people in the community who have not Irish because, after all, it is only on their support or with their acquiescence that the language movement can go ahead. But I think we ought to give to the people who have Irish a fair quantity of interesting matter. I believe that the director of broadcasting appreciates the need for this. There will be all sorts of difficulties and I think that the appointment of a commission on which there were a number of interested people who would examine all those difficulties, who would be able to make many more suggestions than have been made here, would be a help to him. For instance, I can conceive it as quite possible that if there was no commission to support him the new director might find difficulties on the question of finance. It would be a natural enough thing that he should experience those difficulties, and if the question of the expenditure that was necessary was thrashed out by the members of the commission his task would be made very much easier.
The Minister for Lands, when speaking here on the motion, adverted somewhat to this question of cost. I appreciate that you cannot just now, or in fact at any time, lightly rush into considerable expenditure. Personally, I have always been in favour of doing what was necessary to be done for Irish at the least possible cost so as to give no ground for justifiable complaint by those who were not interested. I should like to say that I do not agree with Senator Comyn that great sums have been spent on Irish. There has been a certain amount of expenditure, but I do not think that that expenditure can be described as the expenditure of great sums. There has been a great deal of effort on the part of the teachers. For the ordinary salaries they receive, they are required to make considerable efforts in teaching Irish in the schools and unless you segregate the amount of time which they spend teaching Irish, and calculate what that is worth, you cannot say that great sums have been spent in teaching Irish. If one did proceed to do that, then one could say that considerably more time, and consequently money, had been spent restoring and preserving English.
Senator Connolly raised the question of cost. I do not think that there is any use expecting the present Director of Broadcasting to give us satisfactory Irish programmes if he can only spend £500 or more a year on them. I may be wrong in my estimate, but I have been thinking over the matter since Senator Connolly put the question. My own belief is that the director would need to spend about £7,000 a year to get a satisfactory Irish programme week after week, and to do the work we have been talking about here. I do not believe, however, that that would be any burthen to the Exchequer, because the income of the broadcasting station has been rising. I believe if we do what I have suggested it will rise more rapidly. It seems to me that what keeps the income of the service low is that there is a considerable amount of evasion. One of the reasons why I believe the evasion has been so widespread is that people have felt that they were not getting value from the station here: that they were getting nothing, practically, that they would not get from stations on the other side. Considering the amount of money that is being spent on sending children to the Gaeltacht, as well as on visits by grown-ups to it, I believe myself that suitable programmes in Irish would be appreciated by very considerable numbers of people, and that they would create an atmosphere that would lessen, to some extent, the evasion. Apart from that, I believe that a broadcast for schools would lead to the installation of reception sets in many homes where they do not exist at the moment, owing to the influence of the children. If £7,000 a year were spent on Gaelic programmes I do not think that the Exchequer would be out anything. I have already mentioned that the thing is full of difficulties. I am still arguing that it is not good enough to leave it to the new director. There are a hundred things that have to be thought of. Take the question I have mentioned already of songs. Songs are broadcast from the English stations. They have songs galore to choose from, and new songs are being written constantly. There is no difficulty in the matter of choice. The trouble here has been that we are simply ringing the changes on old songs, and I think it is absolutely necessary that the station here, in the matter of Irish songs, should go beyond what the station in Great Britain does that it should deliberately set out to get new songs.
Somebody may say that you cannot order songs in the way you can order a pair of boots, and that nothing can be done in that matter. I was personally struck by this that, after I spoke here on the motion I got a letter from a young man who had written a number of songs in Irish. One of them was a marching song in Irish for Mr. Aiken's new Volunteer Force. He had written songs in Irish and he was trying to get musicians here to set tunes to them. The words of the songs seemed to me to be perfectly good and suitable for the purpose. Here, at least, was one man who had the idea of producing what we have a need for —new songs in Irish. I believe that if the Station welcomed such things and paid a reasonable price for them, by way of encouragement and maintenance, they could get them.
There may be a dozen ways in which a problem of this kind could be tackled that one individual would not think of. They would only arise out of a considerable amount of examination. Plays and lectures and so on present problems of very considerable difficulty. I believe that nothing can be done here to improve broadcasting, so far as Irish is concerned, by sitting down and waiting for offers from people who wish to be engaged. We have got to go out and look for talent, and in a variety of ways to encourage people to write, to study and prepare. Otherwise we will only have the sort of programmes in Irish which we have been having up to the present, programmes which are so dreary, so uninteresting and so undistinguished that they will do no good at all for the language, and will only be listened to by persons who may be preparing for an examination or something like that. I do not believe that there is any good in thinking that the Irish language can live as a penitential language. It can only live if people do the things in which they have a pleasureable interest.
I think that even more important than the question of broadcasting or an extra supply of books is the need for a weekly publication such as I referred to in my opening statement, because there are many people who will not read books and at present, except in a very small and specialised form, there is nothing from week to week that the person who knows Irish can get to read. I believe that if the Irish language is to prosper, if the books that are to be published are to be properly reviewed and to have interest aroused in them, to have an atmosphere for their reception prepared, there must be some sort of a big weekly publication in Irish of general interest. It might be put in charge of the Department of Education or of some governmental commission outside.
Senator O Máille referred to the question of terminology for dealing with modern matters in Irish. I think the development of Irish went on a little longer than Senator Comyn said, but at a certain point the development of the Irish language stopped. It became a sort of country farmer's and fisherman's language. It ceased to be the language of people who were interested in matters of art or intellect or literature or of any sort of urban occupation even. Then, of course, it has not a modern terminology except in so far as that was developed by the Gaelic League. I think that modern terminology can only be developed and put into use by some sort of weekly publication that will deal with everything. On the last day that the motion was discussed here I jotted down a list of the things on which we might have articles in Irish. It included sport, racing, football, golf, swimming, fishing, contract bridge, chess, articles on motor gadgets, wireless apparatus, television, photography, film news; articles on gardening, financial news, hints to investors and then, of course, ordinary news such as murders, court trials, breach of promise cases, and so on. I remember that when I visited Aberystwyth I bought a newspaper published in the Welsh language. I read reports in it of all the day's news. If we could ever have anything like that newspaper in Irish it would be a very good thing for the Irish language. For instance, there was a splendid double murder, beginning with adultery and ending up with suicide. That paper gave all the local news in the Welsh language.