Babel Atha Cliath: The Languages of Dublin

On a visit to Paris, the great revolutionary, feminist, and social activist, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington went to see James Joyce who had been at University College Dublin with her brother, Eugene Sheehy, between 1898 and 1902. Joyce subjected Sheehy Skeffington to a relentless and seemingly endless interrogation on the minutiae of Dublin life until, in her brother's account of the conversation, "Half-dazed with his cascade of enquiries, she at length said to him":

"Mr. Joyce, you pretend to be a cosmopolitan, but how is it that all your thoughts are about Dublin, and almost everything that you have written deals with it and its inhabitants?"

For Sheehy Skeffington, Joyce's obsessively local concerns give lie to the myth of Joyce as the free-floating artificer, the disdainful dandy of exile, and Joyce's rejoinder would seem to confirm the literally heartfelt nature of his attachments. But the analogy between Calais and Dublin is significant in a way that artfully complicates the opposition between the cosmopolitan and the local in the Skeffington-Joyce exchange.

Over the last decade, Calais, like Dublin, has become an important point of entry and, tragically, exclusion for economic immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers arriving in a predominantly Anglophone world. Their arrival in the capital city of the Republic has so dramatically altered the linguistic terms of exchange that the Dublin-based Romanian journalist Anna Lebedeva, writing in 2001 in the immigrant paper metro éireann, could claim, "Walking around Dublin these days is like travelling the world. The streets echo the languages of the city's newly found diversity and one cannot stroll the span of the Ha'penny Bridge without bumping into a foreigner."² The changing linguistic geography of Dublin will help to shape Ireland's relationship not only to its language future but to its language past.

For much of the twentieth century, Ireland was primarily known as a country of substantial net outward migration rather than a site of marked inward migration. Ireland had the highest net emigration rate in the European Union in the 1980 s. By the year 2002, Ireland had the highest net immigration rate in the European Union. As Peter Clinch, Frank Convery, and Brendan Walsh put it in After the Celtic Tiger, "The national self-image has been transformed. Ireland has gone from being a country to get out of to a country to get into."³ In the six years between 1996 and 2002, more than a quarter of a million people came to live in Ireland and almost half of these were foreign nationals. The new immigrants were either Irish nationals returning from abroad, or economic migrants, political refugeees, and asylum-seekers. For example, work permits issued to European Union nationals increased from 5,750 in 1999 to 40,504 in 2002.⁴

Refugees and asylum-seekers, for their part, have accounted for around ten percent of net migration into Ireland since 1995.⁵ The arrival of refugees is not without precedent in Ireland after independence. In 1956, for example, 530 Hungarian refugees came to Ireland under a UN unilateral agreement. They were accommodated in a disused army camp outside Limerick and conditions were so bad that a number of refugees went on hunger strike. A large number of the refugees subsequently emigrated to Canada. In 1973, 120 Chilean refugees came to Ireland but many of these later returned home to Chile. In 1979, 212 Vietnamese refugees—the so-called "boat people"—were accorded refugee status and prior to the 1990s they represented the Republic of Ireland's largest refugee community with around 800 members. In 1985, twenty-six Iranians of the Baha'i faith were allowed to settle in Ireland and in 1992, Ireland accepted 770 Bosnian refugees made homeless by the conflict in the Balkans.

Thus, a dramatic change in Ireland's economic fortunes, along with ensuing labor shortages and a marked increase in the arrival of non-nationals seeking political asylum has had a significant impact on the ethnic and linguistic make-up of the Irish population. Although, there is as yet no comprehensive set of statistics on the...