Ivan Yates – The Quintessential Seóinín And Hypocrite
In a recent cringeworthy segment on Virgin Media’s The Six O’Clock Show, broadcaster and former Fine Gael TD, Ivan Yates, made his hatred of the Irish language known.
This loathing of the Irish language has been a constant feature of Yates’ career and is evidently a deeply held belief, not just something said to court controversy, as some might claim.
But what else should we come to expect from a Blueshirt who served under the arch-Seóinín John Bruton?
Bruton, who died earlier this month aged 76, is memorable for his many ‘contributions’ towards Seóinínism, the most memorable of which being the time he wept like a sycophantic infant during a state dinner held for Britain’s Charles Windsor in Dublin in 1997.
In The Six O’Clock Show segment itself, Yates criticised the money being spent on the language and said “he couldn’t be arsed” with it. Síle Seoighe, who was sat next to him, was then forced to defend her native language on air as both Yates and show host Brian Dowling combined to mock and undermine it.
At one point Dowling got up off his seat to shake Yates’ hand in agreement. This gesture was disappointing from Dowling, himself being a member of the minority LGBT community, as well as being the husband of someone who is multilingual; his denigration of the language was bizarre at best and ignorant at worst.
As with many anti-Gaeilge crusaders in their arguments against the language, Yates plucked his figures from the air, claiming that only “16,000 speak it naturally”. On the contrary, nearly five times that number speak it on a daily basis outside of the education system within the Twenty-Six Counties - some 72,000 people in all. When that figure is added to those who speak it within the education system itself, both in the Six Counties and the Twenty-Six Counties, around 670,000 (or 1 in 10) of the population speak the language on a daily basis.
But, it is a waste of time arguing these facts with Seóiníní like Ivan Yates. Regardless of whether one million or two million people still spoke Irish, Yates would attack it. It is not the number of people speaking Irish that irks Yates, it is the fact that it is not a hegemonic language (of capitalism, politics and popular culture), but a minority one.
In a follow up to his ‘contribution’ on The Six O’Clock Show, Yates doubled down on his position, citing the money ‘wasted’ on Gaeilge as perhaps being ‘better spent’ on health or education. This coming from a man who, over two decades ago, retired from the Leinster House gravy train in his early forties and has been milking the taxpayer for a mere €74,836 per-annum ever since.
In that time Yates engaged in multiple failed business ventures from which he dodged the Twenty-Six County state’s bankruptcy process. Yates fled to Wales following the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent collapse of his bookmaking business to avail of a more lenient bankruptcy process.
Are we really to believe that Ivan Yates cares about the health of the state’s exchequer?
Beyond the eye-popping hypocrisy of Yates, is a person who subscribes to the ideology of British imperial utilitarian philosophers of the nineteenth century like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. These philosophers argued that minority languages and cultures would naturally ‘give way’ to ‘superior’ (i.e. British) ones; with their writing couched in racialised and supremacist thinking, wrapped in the facade of the ‘rational’ economic thinking of the day.
Taking this into account, it is apparent that Yates’ arguments are really just racialised anti-Irish ones with a veneer of modern neo-liberal speak about ‘sensible state budgeting’.
Like his imperialist British philosophical forebears, Yates believes that anything native must be derided and anything British, and by extension Anglophone, must be elevated.
Decolonial thinker Albert Memmi, writing on the colonial inferiority complexes he witnessed in North Africa, observed that:
“The crushing of the colonised is included among the colonisers values. As soon as the colonised adopts these values, he similarly adopts his own condemnation. In order to free himself, at least so he believes, he agrees to destroy himself.”
We see in Yates and Dowling’s hatred for their own language and culture their real-time destruction of themselves as Irish people. Beyond the degrading nature of such displays, efforts by a vocal minority, including Yates, Ciara Kelly and the rest of the contrarian cohort in Newstalk, along with several other washed up journalists like Ian O’Doherty, to denigrate Gaeilge must be challenged.
While some in the Irish-language community are right to argue that the central focus for the revival of the language should be concentrated on grassroots communal efforts and daily speakers, free rein should not be given to anti-Gaeilge Seóiníní to spread their toxic discourse.
History shows us the danger of allowing such anti-Gaeilge views to gain traction. In the late 1960s, the last time a vocal anti-Irish language lobby group gained traction, this being the so-called Language Freedom Movement, Irish was marginalised from the civil service. Only by mounting a grassroots campaign which vigorously challenged the anti-Gaeilge discourse of subsequent decades, which was also masked in ‘concerns over expenditure’, was the campaign to establish TnaG (now TG4) in 1996 successful.
The bulk of our efforts towards properly reviving the language must be directed at grassroots decolonisation, a ‘street by street’, ‘community by community’ approach, but Seóiníní like Yates need to be actively challenged anytime they feel the need to utter their anti-Gaeilge vitriol .
A lack of speakers with some competence in the language emerging from schools, whatever the current flaws of the system, would make the grassroots task of communal decolonisation all the more challenging.
More resources need to be put into the teaching of Irish in English-medium schools, with the progressive phasing in of the teaching of some subjects through Irish. In combination with this, a critical mass of gaelscoileanna should be built up to provide a real foothold of competency in the language for hundreds of thousands of people across the state.
Republicans must also become involved in these decolonisation efforts in the here and now, rather than adopting a ‘Gaeilge must wait’ position. The decolonial process is integral to achieving the establishment of the republic of the 1916 Proclamation and 1919 Democratic Programme to which we all aspire.