Irish is Ugly
Let’s face it. Irish is ugly. It’s hard to read. It’s even harder to learn. But this wasn’t always so.
We Bastardized Our Own Language
Listen to Irish spoken aloud. The vowels roll, the consonants soften, the rhythm of it settles in your chest like a slow air. One of the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe. It sounds like a language that is loved.
Now look at it written down.
Gheobhaidh sibh. Dhéanfaidh. Bhfuil. That thicket of h’s after every second consonant, turning what should be a flowing script into something that looks like a cat walked across a keyboard. Modern written Irish is ugly. Not neglected-ugly, not rough-around-the-edges-ugly. Ugly in the way only a deliberate act of carelessness can produce. And it is entirely our own doing.
The Simplest Accent in Europe
Here is what we threw away.
The ponc séimhithe was a dot placed above a consonant. One dot. It did one job: soften the sound beneath. Ṡ instead of sh. Ċ instead of ch. Ḃ instead of bh. Nine consonants, one diacritic, no ambiguity.
Of all the accents in all the languages of Europe, this was the simplest. Not two dots, like the German umlaut. Not a háček, a cedilla, an ogonek. A dot. Smaller than a full stop. A child could understand it. A child did understand it, for centuries.
And we got rid of it.
The Price of Cheapness
In 1945, the Irish government published Litriú na Gaeilge, a spelling reform that replaced the dot with the letter h. The reform was expanded in 1947 and codified in 1958 as An Caighdeán Oifigiúil, the Official Standard.
The reason? Typewriters. English typewriters, imported from England, built for the English language. The keyboards had no key for a dot above a consonant, and we were too cheap to commission one.
Let that settle.
Article 8 of the Constitution declares Irish the first official language of the State. The first language. Bunreacht na hÉireann elevates it above English, grants it a near-sacred constitutional status. And at the first technological hurdle that language encountered, the State did not adapt the technology. Did not commission an Irish keyboard. Did not spend a single penny aligning the machinery with the language we claim to treasure.
Instead, we changed the language to fit the typewriter.
We chose the machine over the tongue. We chose cheapness over a morning’s research. If proof were ever needed that the constitutional status of Irish is ornamental, here it is. Nobody who loves their language changes it to suit a foreign typewriter. Nobody who loves their language throws half its accents in the bin and calls it progress.
The real reason? We didn’t care then. We don’t care now.
What the Rest of Europe Did
The comparison is damning.
France redesigned its entire keyboard layout to accommodate French accents. Germany reshaped QWERTY into QWERTZ and carved out dedicated keys for ä, ö, and ü. The Czechs displaced their entire number row to make room for háčeks. Poland, Hungary, the Nordic countries: every one of them looked at the tension between language and typewriter and concluded that the typewriter was the thing that needed to change.
The Germans got not one but two dots above their vowels. We couldn’t manage one.
Ireland alone looked at the same problem and decided the language should give way. And not for some fiendish diacritic. For a dot.
What We Actually Made Harder
Here is the grim comedy of it.
The reform was supposed to make Irish simpler. Easier to type, easier to learn, easier to print. Instead it made the single most common mutation in the language harder to read, harder to write, and harder to teach.
Lenition is everywhere in Irish. It is the first grammatical concept a learner meets after the basics. Every past tense verb. Every feminine noun after the article. Every noun after most prepositions. With the dot, lenition was visible at a glance: one mark above the consonant, move on. With the h, lenition became an insertion. Find the consonant, wedge a letter after it, accept that the word now looks like a different word entirely. Teach becomes theach. Cóta becomes chóta. Fear becomes fhear. The shape changes. The length changes. For the learner, every lenited word is a stranger.
With the dot? Ṫeaċ. Ċóta. Ḟear. Same shape. Same length. One visual cue. Done.
We took the simplest diacritic in European orthography and replaced it with one of the most disruptive transformations a spelling system can impose: the insertion of a letter into the body of a word. We did this to save the price of a typewriter key.
Lip Service to a Dying Language
We know what a language looks like when it is genuinely valued. Look at Wales.
Welsh is thriving. Welsh-medium schools are oversubscribed. Welsh appears naturally in public life, in media, in business. The Welsh Language Act requires public bodies to treat Welsh and English as equals. The result is a living language, spoken daily by over half a million people in a country a fraction of Ireland’s size.
And Irish? We put it in the Constitution. We make children sit through years of compulsory classes, taught badly, resented widely. We trot out the cúpla focal for the tourists and the Taoiseach’s speeches. We stick bilingual signs on motorways that nobody reads. And we cannot be bothered to give it the respect of its own accents, that were natural to written Irish for hundreds of years.
The truth, if we are honest, is that we have never treated Irish as a living language. We have treated it as a relic. Something to display under glass and reference in speeches but never use with any seriousness. The spelling reform of 1945 was not modernization. It was surrender dressed as pragmatism. We gave up the visual identity of the language because keeping it would have cost money.
The Typewriter Excuse Is Dead
In 2026, every argument for the reform has collapsed.
Unicode supports the ponc séimhithe natively. U+0307, combining dot above. To translate: every computer sold in the last twenty years can handle a dot over a consonant.
On a Mac, it is as simple as this: hold your finger on the letter, and a menu appears with the accented variants. That is all. (You must have your keyboard set to “Irish” in Settings.)
Some engineers in Cupertino, California, sat down one day and spent a little time thinking about how Irish might best be represented on a computer. How its accents might be input. How its orthography might be honoured.
That is more time than anyone in Ireland has spent on integrating our “first language” with technology.
(It is also possible on Linux and Windows, though unfortunately less straightforward.)
The typewriter has been obsolete for forty years. The excuse has been dead longer than it was alive. And still we cling to the h.
Make Irish Beautiful Again
I am not proposing we undo the grammatical standardization. An Caighdeán Oifigiúil serves a purpose. I am not proposing we restore silent letters, revert to pre-reform spellings, or revive Cló Gaelach as an everyday script.
I am proposing one thing: give the dot back.
Replace the post-1945 h with the ponc séimhithe it displaced. Modern spelling, modern grammar, modern Roman type, but with ṡ instead of sh, ċ instead of ch, ḃ instead of bh.
Gheobhaidh sibh becomes ġeoḃaiḋ siḃ. Five characters shorter. Cleaner. More beautiful. More distinctively Irish.
The tools exist. The technology is solved. It has been solved for decades. All that is missing is the will to stop paying lip service to a language we claim to love and start treating it as though it actually matters.
Ṫig linn é a ḋéanaṁ.