LINDA ERVINE: ‘The Irish language is an important part of Protestant heritage’
Linda Ervine has unquestionable loyalist, unionist and Protestant credentials.
Her former brother-in-law David Ervine, a former member of the UVF and arguably the most charismatic leader in the PUP’s history who helped broker the Good Friday Agreement, made a profound impression on her, and her second husband Brian, also led the ultra loyalist party.
Yet she was this year awarded an MBE by Her Majesty the Queen for services to the Irish language, and today runs the Irish language project Turas at the Skainos Centre on the Newtownards Road, which offers classes to all levels from beginner to advanced (packed out classes whose popularity shows no signs of waning). She has almost single-handedly untapped a little talked about interest among the Protestant community to learn Gaelic, which is so often dubbed a republican interest, used, much to her dismay, as a political football by Sinn Fein and opposed by the DUP and others as an affront to respect for British culture in this divided terrain. This is certainly not how Linda sees it, and she points out how many young men who identified as British while serving in the First World War were also identified in the census at that time as Irish speakers.
In 1833, notes Linda, the Presbyterian General Assembly termed the Irish language ‘our sweet and memorable mother tongue’. Ten years later they made it a requirement for all of their trainee ministers to have a knowledge of the language because so many of their congregations couldn’t speak English.
When she first asked her friend, the daughter of a loyalist paramilitary, to take beginner Irish classes with her, the friend rolled her eyes. Protestants learning Irish, really? But Linda went back to the census and found that her friend’s great great grandmother, a Church of Ireland attendee who lived on the Shankill Road in 1901, also identified as an Irish speaker, and after that the two of them headed off to their first class, an introduction to Irish and Ulster Scots at the East Belfast Mission, arm in arm. Then she moved on to a beginners class at An Droichead on the Ormeau Road, and fell in love with a language she regards as “complex, beautiful, and an undeniable part of our shared history”.
https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/p...important-part-of-protestant-heritage-3320839
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well worth pursuing as most of our European countrymen view is as still unde contract of the bishops