Low use of Irish in Irish courts

According to the Irish Language Commissioner in the Irish Republic, Sean O Cuirreain, some 71 languages were used in Irish courts last year but Irish did not even make the top 10!

The official figures provided by the Courts Service showed that the total bill for translation in more than 70 languages was in the region of 2 million euro but the cost of interpreting in Irish was less than 2,000 euro in 2006 and fell again in 2007 to 1,012 euro.

'These figures speak for themselves,' said Mr O Cuirreain.  'In some cases interpretation is not required where the judge and other participants are fluent in Irish but the percentage of such cases in negligible on an annual basis and in a national context.'

Altogether more than 10,000 requests were made to the Courts Service for interpreters for the 71 different languages but only a handful of these were for Irish.  Polish topped the list, while interpreters for Romanian, Lithuanian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Latvian, Portuguese, French, Czech and Arabic were also requested.

The Irish Language Commissioner is to start a campaign to advise Irish speakers of their statutory rights and to counteract any perception of 'compulsory English' in legal affairs.  It will be interesting to see what difference this makes to the figures for the use of Irish in the courts in the Republic.

[Irish Times  28 October 2009]

New hockey pitch for Belfast Royal Academy

This afternoon I opened a new synthetic hockey pitch for Belfast Royal Academy at their grounds at Roughfort Road, Mallusk.  The construction of the pitch was co-funded by DCAL through Sport NI who contributed £245,000 towards the project.

Nelson McCausland, Dominic Walsh (Sport NI chair) and two hockey players

The project provides the north Belfast school with the latest facilities accredited by the Federation of International Hockey and is one of many projects, across Northern Ireland, to improve our sports infrastructure.  Our priorities for sport are about places, participation and performance:

1. Places - the provision of better facilities, or places for sport

2. Participation - better facilities will encourage more participation

3. Performance - better facilities will assist our athletes to improve their performance and reach their utmost potential

As a former pupil of the school it was particularly good to open the new facility and I was joined at the opening by the chairman of Sport NI, Dominic Walsh, another former pupil, and headmaster Moore Dickson.

Ulster athlete's double gold for Britain

Ulster-born athlete Wendy Houvenaghel, who comes from Upperlands in county Londonderry, struck gold twice at the weekend in the UCI Track Cycling World Cup in Manchester.  She won gold in the individual pursuit and was also in the winning team in the team pursuit.

Wendy, whose maiden name was McClean and who was educated at Rainey Endowed School in Magherafelt, won a silver medal in the individual pursuit at the Olympic Games in Beijing and she is preparing for the 2012 Olympics in London.  However her ambition of winning a gold medal in the individual event could be thwarted by proposed changes to the Olympic schedule which would remove the individual pursuit altogether.

We will have to wait to see how the situation is sorted out but in the meantime Wendy is clearly the best in the world after winning her World Cup gold. 

UTV’s golden anniversary

This year is the 50th anniversary of Ulster Television. The station began broadcasting on 31 October 1959 and its first managing director was William MacQuitty, who was born in Belfast in 1905 and was the son of the managing director of the Belfast Telegraph.

MacQuitty was also a film producer and the year before the launch of Ulster Television he had produced the film A Night to Remember, the first film to tell the authentic story of the sinking of the Titanic.

MacQuitty had a special interest in that story because, as a young boy, he had seen the great ship being launched in Belfast. On 31 May 1911, two weeks after his sixth birthday,he was taken by his father to see the launch of the great ship and in 1991, in his autobiography A Life to Remember he recorded his memories of that day.

Slowly gathering speed, the Titanic moved smoothly down the ways, and a minute later was plunging into the water and raising a huge wave. I felt a great lump in my throat and an enormous pride in being an Ulsterman.

The building of the Titanic, which we will commemorate in 21012, was a demonstration of the industrial might of the city of Belfast and the province of Ulster at the start of the 20th century.  Belfast was truly a titanic city.

Alexander Peden - Prophet and Covenanter

Ullans Press, the publishing arm of the Ulster-Scots Language Society, has just published a 108 page book entitled Some Remarkable Passages of the Life and Death of Alexander Peden, Prophet and Covenanter, in Scotland and Ulster.  It is a reprint of the 1755 Belfast edition and has a new foreword, a biogrpahy of Peden, a selection of historical poems, and several other articles, as well as 26 photographs and illustrations.

Alexander Peden (1626-1686) was born in Ayrshire and educated at the University of Glasgow.  He was ordained in Galloway in 1660 but he was removed from his parish in 1663.  For the next ten years Peden was an itinerant preacher and spent some of his time in Ulster.

He was arrested in 1673, while holding a conventicle near Ballantrae in Ayrshire, and condemned to four years imprisonment.  After 18 months in prison he was sentenced to banishment to America and was put on a ship but the captain allowed him to leave and he escaped north to Scotland.  His remaining years were spent partly in Scotland and partly in Ulster and towards the end of his life he lived in a cave on the River Lugar, near his birthplace and his brother's farm in Auchinleck.  There he died in 1686, worn out by hardship and privation.

Alexander Peden was buried in Auchinleck churchyard but six weeks later his body was exhumed by government troops, who planned to hang his corpse from the gallows in Cumnock. However William Crichton, 2nd Earl of Dumfries objected to the hanging and instead the troops buried the corpse at the foot of the gallows.

The back cover of the reprint says this about Peden:

Alexander Peden - the man whose prophecies enthralled the rebels of 1798, who lived the life of a fugitive on the Glenwhirry moors, and whose memory is perpetuated by a faithful band of Covenanters who still gather at the Mistyburn in his memory.  In the era of the 'chapmen', the door-to-door pedlars who sold cheap and popular literature, Alexnader Peden fascinated readers in Scotland, Ulster and America for centuries after his death.  This reprint of the 1755 Belfast edition contains many stories of Peden's life in Ulster, and gives Peden his rightful place as one of the most important figures in Ulster-Scots history. 

The book costs £6.99 and is available from the Ulster-Scots Language Society, either online or from their office.  The book is almost entirely in English but the historical poems are in light Scots.

Ulster hymnwriters (3)

This morning was the first day of a missionary convention in the church I attend and we sang one of the great missionary hymns - Go ye into all the world.  I am sure that everyone was familiar with the words of the hymn but probably very few would have known that the author James McGranahan was the grandson of Ulster-Scots emigrants.

James McGranahan was born near Adamsville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania, on 4 July 1840, and he was the son of George McGranahan and his wife Jane Blair, both of whom were the children of Ulster-Scots emigrants.

His paternal grandfather, John McGranahan, was born in Ulster in 1757 and emigrated as a young man from Belfast to America before the American Revolution.  John McGranahan married Nellie Smith, who was born in Ulster in 1761 and they were the parents of George McGranahan.

George McGranahan, the youngest son of the Ulster emigrants, married Jane Blair, who was the daughter of Ulster emigrants. Her parents were Henry Blair and Jane McMaster, who were both Ulster-Scots emigrants, and they were married in Pennsylvania in 1798.

James grew up on the family farm and his father intended that he should take over the farm but his musical talent was recognised early in life.  It was thought that he would pursue a career on the operatic stage but his friend Philip P Bliss, the hymn writer, urged him to devote his talent to evangelism and in 1876 he succeeded Bliss as the song-leader with the evangelist Major D W Whittle.

Whittle and McGranahan made an evangelistic tour of the British Isles in 1880 and one of the places they visited was Belfast, from where McGranahan’s grandfather had emigrated in the 18th century.

James McGranhan wrote the music for many popular gospel hymns such as Neath the banner of the cross, There shall be showers of blessing, Christ liveth in me, and None but Christ can satisfy and these included many hymns that had been written by Major Whittle.  In most cases McGranahan composed only the music but he did write the words of several popular hymns such as Go ye into all the world.

Far, far away, in heathen darkness dwelling,
Millions of souls forever may be lost;
Who, who will go, salvation’s story telling,
Looking to Jesus, heeding not the cost?

Refrain:
“All pow’r is given unto Me,
All pow’r is given unto Me,
Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel,
And lo, I am with you always.”

McGranahan was also a pioneer in the use of the male choir in gospel song. He was the first person to publish a book of gospel songs exclusively for male voices and through his innovation the male choir and male quartet became a feature of evangelism.

James McGranahan died on 9 July 1907 and went home to meet the Saviour whom he had served so faithfully.

An old Ulster Sabbath

As I was reading A Salute from the Banderol - the sected writings of Sam Hanna Bell, I came across this description of an Ulster Sabbath back in the middle of the 20th century.  It was part of the script for This is Northern Ireland: An Ulster Journey, which was broadcast on the Northern Ireland Home Service in 1949 to mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of bradcasting in Ulster.

But in every Ulster village a stone finger points to the Sabbath, and under the quick of each finger hang bells.  They ring out, not so much calling the people to church as as acknowledging their presence, for we are a dogmatic churchgoing people, knowing not only why we go to our place of worship but why we don't go to that of our neighbours, though it may be only the thickness of a page of Indian paper that divides us.

There are other and graver differences than that, of course, where a man's persuasion is the weft on which he warps his loyalties.  But for those you lay up the Bible and take down the history book.

So, on Sunday morning, city pavements ring to the hurried chatter of heels, and across the Province, quiet roads groiw populous with country folk travelling to church, chapel and meeting-house.

Several things struck me about this short extract.  First of all it certainly reminds us that sixty years later Ulster is a much more secular society and church attendance has diminished from those days when it was the norm for most families.

However I was also struck by the reference to 'church, chapel and meeting-house'.  The 'church' is a reference to the Chruch of Ireland, the chapel to the Roman Catholic Church and the 'meeting-house' to the Presbyterians.  Of course there are Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists and Pentercostals but the three main historic traditions, dating back to the 17th century, are Church of Ireland, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian.

Those three religious traditions reflect the three historic cultural tradtions that shaped modern Ulster and are a reminder that a two-traditions model of Ulster is a flawed and failed model.

I see that Mark Thompson, the former chair of the Ulster-Scots Agency, has been pursuing that point on his blog and you might want to see what he has to say.