The governance of Irish in the neoliberal age: The retreat of the state under the guise of empowerment

In 2020, the Irish state was half-way through its 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030 which aims to increase the number of daily speakers from 83,000 to 250,000 and promises a range of additional institutional supports for the language (Government of Ireland, 2010). Ominously, the Strategy was published in the same week that the government signed a `bailout programme with international borrowers following the calamitous banking collapse and subsequent economic crisis. A decade later, while aspects of the Strategy have been implemented, there is little confidence that its ambitious aims can be achieved and Irish remains marginal in the work of government. This chapter seeks to explain why this is the case, by analysing the retreat of the Irish government from language planning and the intersection of this with national and international trends in political economy. Section 2 provides a map of the current architecture of language policy governance, which illustrates how the role of Irish plays out in the work of government departments, regulators, promotional agencies, civil society organisations and language activists. The following two sections seek to identify internal and external factors that have contributed to that retreat, in order better to explain the historical trajectory of language policy. Focusing on internal factors, section 3 considers the influence of the states approach to governance, its political culture, language policy and the role of individual civil servants in its execution. Section 4 assesses the impact on Ireland of more recent international trends such as the changing nature of governance and the ongoing reconfiguration of relationships between state, society and market.