Typocast 3

It is reported that Northern Ireland Unionists are put out at the prominence given to Martin McGuinness's leadership of the IRA on his tombstone.

But there is more significance to this.

Sinn Féin's politicisation of the Irish language in the North needs no recapping. The Good Friday Agreement envisaged a Language Act which the Unionists are still resisting and one can understand why. The Irish language in the North has been used in a most cynical way as a stick to beat them with. Nevertheless, as it is in the Agreement it should be implemented.

Sinn Féin's cynicism here is clear from a most cursory glance at one of their own emanations: the tweets of their leader Gerry Adams. Bugger a bit of attention has he paid over the years to getting his gratuitous use of Irish right. He is, in fact, a most serious dis-respecter of the language he is so happy to use to beat up the opposition.

I have had occasion to draw attention to this in the past. It is nothing new.

I can see four typos on the above gravestone - three in Irish and one in English. I found two of them myself and was so upset that I didn't notice the other two until my friend, Vivion Mulcahy, pointed them out to me. Vivion is a man who holds that, if you are going to do something, you should at least try and do it properly.

How these mistakes ended up on a gravestone, that one imagines was intended to be iconic and a place of future pilgrimage, is totally beyond me.

Unless, of course, the use of the language is really just a token and a silver bullet, and its purely provocative use rather than its content is what really counts.

A corrected version of the tombstone is shown below. Sinn Féin, and American papers, please copy.

Ruth Dudley Edwards has picked up this post in her column in the Belfast Telegraph

Related posts: Typocast, Typocast 2.