Monday 16 July 2007

An Ghaeltacht

...de la Globe & Mail:

"Ahead of me lies the Gaeltacht, the celebrated region of western Ireland where the last 20,000 diehard speakers of Gaelic live. It was a poor land once and is a poor land still. Just before the Potato Famine, 160 years ago, four million Irish spoke Gaelic, a poetic language that far predates English. Life was harsh and families large. With the men and older boys often away in the coal mines and factories of industrializing Britain, it was the women who tended the blighted potato fields and fought the landlords' agents."

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