Sinn Fein’s Irish language campaign was summed up best by the former first minister of Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster, who observed that, “If you feed the crocodile, it will keep coming back for more.” Since she made those comments, much of the province has been covered with expensive, politically divisive Gaelic signs, and, increasingly, they are erected in areas where residents object. The court system and many public bodies are now required to provide services in the language, which few people speak and no-one uses exclusively. And, even as I write, Stormont is holding a competition to appoint an “Irish language commissioner”, tasked with generating more costly and controversial demands.
When the then DUP leader intervened in the language debate, she was pilloried by the media, which accused her of dehumanising Irish nationalists and insulting Irish culture. In Northern Ireland in 2025, though, it is almost impossible to deny that she was right. Unfortunately, despite this tough message from Foster and her party, they repeatedly fed the crocodile. This included tacitly agreeing to an Irish language act, as part of the New Decade, New Approach deal of 2020, which ended one of Stormont’s periodic crises with a series of capitulations to Sinn Fein. The Identity and Language Act was passed at Westminster, but granted official status to Gaelic in Northern Ireland, among other measures. In response, the Irish language lobby only intensified its demands.
Belfast imposes dual language signage routinely where just 15 per cent of residents support it
The most prominent recent example involves Belfast’s Grand Central “transport hub” which was opened to public fanfare in October. Last month, Northern Ireland’s infrastructure minister, Liz Kimmins of Sinn Fein, announced that signage in the almost brand-new railway and bus station would be ripped down, to make way for dual-language signs featuring English and Gaelic. This work, and the task of adding Irish to electronic ticketing machines, would cost an estimated £150,000 (according to Kimmins).
The Grand Central decision, taken unilaterally by the Sinn Fein minister, could previously have been “called in” to a full meeting of the executive by the DUP. Under Northern Ireland’s power-sharing system, unionists or nationalists can in theory veto controversial policies, or “cross-cutting” issues that affect more than one department. Five years ago, though, the DUP supported a bill that curtailed these powers. As a result, the party has been forced to launch a legal challenge, to prove that the station signage is a contentious issue.
The long history of the Irish language being used as a cultural weapon against Britain should make that much obvious, even if you disregard the outrageous waste of replacing nearly new signs. The Gaelic revival of the 19th century rescued the language from near extinction, but it was powered by political demands for independence. Like other aspects of separatist culture, reinvented at that time, it was designed to portray Ireland and the “native” Irish as distinct from the rest of the UK. The messianic nationalist zealot, Patrick Pearse, who was a leading member of the Gaelic League, claimed that, “A country without a language is a country without a soul.”
More recently, many people in Northern Ireland associated Irish most closely with the Provisional IRA’s campaign of terrorism. The phrase, “Every word of Irish spoken is like another bullet being fired in the struggle for Irish freedom,” was attributed to Sinn Fein’s former director of publicity, Danny Morrison. In case this link was in danger of seeming outdated, the quotation was revived for the recent Kneecap film, which again set the language at the heart of a fight to “free” the island from those dastardly Brits (many of whom have been living there for at least 400 years).
The purpose of Sinn Fein’s Irish language activism remains largely the same. It aims to make Northern Ireland look and feel more like the Irish republic than the rest of the United Kingdom. It is supposed to imply that the English language and British culture are foreign imports, that should be viewed as a legacy of “colonialism”. And it is meant to provoke unionists, by imposing a language they see as bound up with anti-Britishness, in public spaces like railway stations, as well as the roads and streets on which they live.
There are some people, including pro-Union politicians, who argue that there is “nothing to fear from a language”. They say that Irish is simply part of Northern Ireland’s shared heritage and one of the languages of the United Kingdom. They point out that the Queen spoke Gaelic in an address in Dublin and it is used in the motto of the Royal Irish Regiment, a proud part of the British Army. This is all very well, and most unionists have no problem with Irish being spoken, written or taught. They object to the tongue being used to claim ownership of public spaces, demand ever greater quantities of taxpayers’ cash and demonise anyone who feels uncomfortable with its imposition.
The campaign for more Gaelic in public life is certainly not about communication. The SDLP MLA, Cara Hunter, a supposed nationalist moderate, claimed on social media recently that anyone who objected to expensive new signs was afflicted by a deep “coloniser mindset”. Irish separatists routinely depict unionists in Northern Ireland as a kind of invasive species, rather than people who simply support the prevailing political culture and language of these islands.
The irony is that few of the fiercest Gaelic culture warriors have bothered to learn Irish themselves. At Stormont, Sinn Fein representatives manage a few halting words, before returning to their more familiar medium of ungrammatical English. It is simply a performance. The real intent behind Irish language campaigning, and many other nationalist demands, was let slip by Gerry Adams, at a public meeting in Enniskillen, just ten years ago. “The point is to break these bastards (unionists),” he said in response to a question from the floor, “And what’s going to break them is equality. That is the Trojan Horse of the entire republican strategy.”
In that vein, Sinn Fein has for decades presented its demands in the language of rights, even when they are clearly intended to provoke and divide. Against that backdrop, republicans are determined to force Irish into every aspect of life in Northern Ireland, to show the “bastards” who are really in charge.
That process is now well on its way to success. Northern Ireland’s biggest city council, in Belfast, imposes dual language signage routinely on streets where just 15 per cent of residents are prepared to support the proposal, even when they are comfortably outnumbered by objectors. The DUP may yet fail to prevent Ulster’s biggest transport hub from being plastered with divisive, confusing signs, if its past failures on Irish are repeated. And the party’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, will soon sign off the appointment of a commissioner, almost certainly with a background of Gaelic activism, which will give campaigners’ demands the sheen of official endorsement. In Northern Ireland, the Irish language crocodile is already fat and bloated on taxpayers’ money, but its appetite shows no sign of being satisfied any time soon.
