An ice cream store in Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is offering a discount to encourage customers to speak Irish.
Conor Sweeney, the owner of Leamhain, said that the idea initially came from Baile Átha Cliath le Gaeilge, a government-run agency that helps to promote the use of Irish in small businesses in Dublin.
Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Sweeney said that his grandmother was an Irish teacher her whole life and wanted to promote the language more as an “ode” to her.
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Sweeney said that he is “pretty bad” at speaking Irish himself but speaks “cúpla focail.”
The owner of Leamhain, which is named after the River Laune in Kerry, wants to encourage people to use cúpla focail which he says is working.
“It’s amazing, we’ve had parents bring their small children in to practice, we’ve had a lot of tourists such as Americans, Swiss, Italians – all trying it out,” he said.
Sweeney said that people who haven’t spoken Irish since the leaving cert are ordering as Gaeilge.
He believes that the way Irish is taught in schools needs to be “reformulated.”
“If everyone spoke it better every single day, one sentence a week, 52 weeks a year every single year for your thirteen years you’re in school, everyone would be able to speak it. Maybe not fluently, but way more than they currently are,” he said.
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