Casfaimid le baill den phobal dílseach i mBéal Feirste atá ag foghlaim agus ag glacadh go fonnmhar leis an nGaeilge. Click "Show more" below for ++ eolas / info ! Changing attitudes and changing times in Belfast as Ar Fud na Tíre meets members of the Loyalist community embracing and learning the Irish language. In East Belfast we meet Linda Ervine and others from the Loyalist community who are breaking the mould and taking up Irish classes. The classes are held in a community centre on the Lower Newtownards Road which is bedecked with Union Jack flags. Al Jazeera: Protestants go for Gaelic in Northern Ireland April 2014 "Seomra ranga" -- "classroom", in Ireland's indigenous language -- reads a cardboard sign tacked onto a door. A little further down the hall, a leabharlann is filled with books. It is a very Irish scene, but in a very unlikely place: East Belfast Mission on Newtownards Road. The Turas Centre in the East Belfast Mission -- turas means "journey" in Irish Gaelic -- hosts 10 Irish-language classes a week. About 90% of those filing in and out of the seomra ranga and reading textbooks in the leabharlann are Protestant. "The Irish language is part of our culture. It belongs to everyone," said Linda Ervine, an Irish language development officer at the East Belfast Mission. Ervine is the closest East Belfast comes to royalty: loyalist leader David Ervine was her brother-in-law; her husband, Brian, is like his late brother David, a former leader of the Progressive Unionist Party. From the ancient Gaelic-speaking kingdom Linda Ervine's soft voice and gentle manner bely a formidable passion for the Irish language -- and for why Northern Ireland's Protestant community should take it up. "There is every reason why Protestants should be learning Irish," she said. "95% of our place names come from Gaelic... We are using words in our language every day that come from the Gaelic language. We are steeped in it." On a nearby wall hangs a map of Britain and Ireland turned on its side, showing the ancient Gaelic-speaking kingdom of Dalriada, which spread across the north coast of Ireland and the western isles of Scotland in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Most Gaelic speakers in Scotland are Protestant, and when they came to Ireland during the Plantations, they brought their language with them, Ervine explained. Ervine's own turas to Irish began three years ago, when the women's group she was part of at the East Belfast Mission took a starter course in the language. She was bitten by the bug and soon enrolled in an intensive course at an Irish centre in a nearby nationalist area. Since then, Ervine has been travelling across Northern Ireland giving presentations and talks about the history of Protestantism and the Irish language. "We discovered that in the 1901 and 1911 census, people listed themselves as having Irish here in East Belfast," she said. Ervine is not the first figure from a loyalist background to shine a light on the Irish aspect of Ulster Protestant identity. In the early 1990s, not far from where the Turas Centre sits today, the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force -- responsible for hundreds of killings during the 30-year-long "Troubles" -- painted a mural on Newtownards Road celebrating the Irish mythological hero Cuchulainn as a defender of Ulster. The Red Hand Commando, a splinter group of the Ulster Volunteer Force, had "Lamh Dearg Abú" (Victory to the Red Hand) as its motto. .. Ervine argued that Northern Ireland's rich linguistic diversity should be cherished as an opportunity to bring people together, not push them apart. "As people in Northern Ireland, when we open our mouths we speak beautiful constructions of English, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic. We are using all those words, all that syntax, because we as a people bring all that together," Ervine said. "I am trying to show people that you can't divide people into these boxes. You can't say just because someone is Catholic they should speak Gaelic, or because they are a Protestant they should speak Ulster Scots. It just doesn't work like that." Source: Al Jazeera Ar Fud na Tíre,5, Á chur i láthair ag Eibhlín Ní Choistealbha. . Presented by Eibhlín Ní Choistealbha. An nasc seo: http://youtu.be/fs5fqq2YumA 316134948 http://www.TG4.ie

• published: 01 May 2014
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