Returning home, a Dubliner abroad reconnects with the Irish language

After 12 years in London, I came back to Dublin in 2023. During those 12 years, the rudimentary grasp I’d had on the Irish language had mostly slipped away. Living in England, Irish was out of sight and out of mind. Walking the streets of Dublin, though, I found that my second language was unavoidable.

I had grown up with bilingual street signs on every street corner. But in the years since I’d left Ireland, amendments to the Official Languages Act ensured that Irish was more visible in the fabric of the street than ever before. Public bodies by law are obliged to communicate bilingually, and so ads on the sides of buses tell me, in Irish, that a new reality show is coming to TV screens soon, or that the bus service is looking to employ more drivers. Even the dark teal tourist signposts split themselves in two: from Storás Guinness (the Guinness Storehouse) to Coláiste na Tríonóide (Trinity College Dublin). If you were going on the basis of the public realm alone, an outsider might assume that Irish and English had the same weight in every regard of city life here. Social media and the arts further the case, too, with Irish-language films like An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl, 2022) and acts like Kneecap breathing new energy into the state of affairs.