If you grew up in the 1990s or 2000s, you may have heard the term ‘dead language’ used when talking about Irish.

While Irish speakers have always existed, they became harder to find in the 20th century as the language seemed increasingly more irrelevant in the modern world.

If Irish wasn’t fully dead, it was certainly on life support.

But in recent years Irish is enjoying a boom in both the north and south of Ireland, particularly among young people.

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While some in the DUP try to paint Irish as threatening or a weapon in a culture war, for many young people learning the language has become liberating.

The younger generation’s respect for Irish was exemplified when, last week, Queen’s University Students’ Union voted overwhelmingly to reinstate bilingual signage.

The result backed up a recent survey on behalf of Údarás na Gaeltachta, which showed that interest in learning Irish is highest among adults aged under 35, with women particularly enthusiastic.

I myself am a testament to these findings, having first felt the urge to learn Irish two years ago when I was living away from home in Toronto.

By the time I moved back to Belfast, ready to take classes, I arrived in a city filled with dual-language signs, soundtracked by Kneecap, and with young social media Gaels acting as ambassadors for a language that feels alive again in three-minute videos that reach far beyond our small island.

Indeed Ireland’s size has never prevented it from having huge cultural impact across the globe and an understanding of Gaeilge is the key to unlocking the secret of our success in exporting music, art, and storytelling.

An ancient language that is poetic and beautiful allows for deeper self-expression in a world where thoughts and feeling are often watered down to soulless captions and tweets.

On TikTok, my page is flooded with young Irish-language creators speaking in, and teaching, Irish with passion and reverence for every word.

For these Gaels, rote learning is less important than connecting to the language as a form of enhanced prose you can use every day.

They will tell you how Irish emotions are ‘on you’: ‘Ta brón orm’, literally meaning ‘sadness is on me’, suggests it is a temporary state that will pass.

They will gleefully share that a bat can be called ‘sciathán leathair’, which translates to ‘leather wing’. The poetry writes itself.

Their enthusiasm for showing Irish at its most elegant exemplifies the emotional bond they’ve formed with the language and how reclaiming this part of the past is an important element of their modern identity.

The reasons for this recent boom run deeper than Ireland’s ever-rising cultural capital.

It is not just what we could call the ‘Kneecap affect,’ although their music has certainly given Irish a ‘cool factor’ that isn’t in any school textbook.

For those who learnt Irish in dark classrooms, advocacy for the language from younger Millennials and Gen Zs may seem perplexing.

But while they have both grown up with the world at their fingertips, they have also endured isolation and emerged from a pandemic into a world where war and genocide dominate the news.

This ever-connected world is darker still for women, who can find simply going online to be an act of self-harm, as Manosphere influencers and right-wing pundits try to take over social media.

Of course the Irish language boom cannot be allowed to happen in the north of Ireland without controversy.

Here, speaking Irish can be considered a political act, rather than celebrated as an educational endeavour.

But this generation of ‘ceasefire babies’ aren’t deterred by those seeking to keep the language suppressed.

They know that making it modern, through sharing words or phrases that will resonate with the young, is an act of quiet resistance and personal enrichment.

Instead of wielding Gaeilge like a weapon, they use it as a paintbrush to bring colour and vibrancy to every sentence they speak.

The survival of the Irish language will not come through enforced learning in schools but younger generations cultivating an interest and using their passion to pass it on.

The joy they’ve found within a language more ancient than English helps centre them in a society that is fast-paced and ever-changing, where the threat of AI looms as large as that of war or fascism.

Bringing Irish into the modern world has allowed young Gaels not to simply raise it from its deathbed, but to let it breathe new life into a country so often choked by the weight of its own history.

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