This article concentrates on the role of language in the political horse-trading that characterised the final stages of the Northern Ireland peace process. Much has necessarily been left unsaid. My excuse for producing an account in primary colours is that while the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a political settlement, is itself full of ambiguity – sometimes involving a creative fudge, sometimes bordering on the incoherent – debates among our politicians around cultural issues tend to be simplistic, reductive and polarised. My own work, which involves promoting the Irish language on a cross-community basis in Northern Ireland, has made me aware that, among the general public, positions on the language issue can be complex, nuanced, contradictory and ambivalent, but to deal with such complexity adequately would require a much longer work and an entirely different approach.

I will begin by establishing the context of this theme, or, rather, by establishing a number of contexts – political, historical, ideological and linguistic. The main focus will be on the issue of the Irish language, around which most of the political controversy originated, with some references to Ulster Scots, which did not become a political issue until very recently.

A little background will first be necessary. Northern Ireland is currently working its way out of a long conflict best described as a low-intensity war. The core issue in the conflict is Northern Ireland's constitutional status: on one side are those with a British political identity, unionists, who wish to remain within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; on the other are those with an Irish political identity, nationalists, who wish to break the union with the UK and join (they would say rejoin) the southern state in a united Ireland. The society is also sharply divided along religious lines, and there is a high – if diminishing – correlation between political and religious identity, nationalists tending to be Catholic, and unionists tending to be Protestant. The conflation of political and religious identities is reflected in an official designation which is not replicated anywhere else in the United Kingdom, that of ‘perceived Catholic’ and ‘perceived Protestant’.