Development The earliest known references to signing in Ireland come from the 18th century. According to
Ethnologue, the language has influence from both
French Sign Language (LSF) and
British Sign Language (BSL), as well as from
signed French and
signed English, BSL having been introduced in Dublin in 1816.
Global reach ISL was brought by
Catholic missionaries to
Australia, and to Scotland and England, with remnants of ISL still visible in some variants of BSL, especially in
Glasgow, and with some elderly
Auslan Catholics still using ISL today. In South Africa, the Dominican nuns who established Catholic Schools saw a need for a school for the deaf, but due to resource constraints were not in a position to do this immediately. Instead, they wrote back to their Mother House in Cabra requesting an experienced teacher of the deaf. A deaf teacher, Bridget Lynne, responded. Remnants of gendered generational Irish Sign Language are thought to still be visible in some dialects of South African Sign Language, which can probably be traced back to Lynne.
19th century The first school for deaf children in Ireland, the
Claremont Institution, was established in 1816 by
Dr. Charles Orpen. According to admission documents between 1816 and 1822, about half of the students admitted already knew some form of signing. Conama and Leonard suggest that this points to evidence of an older, undocumented form of ISL. The Claremont Institution was a
Protestant institution and given that Ireland was a
part of the United Kingdom, it is no surprise that BSL (or some version of
signed English based in BSL) was used for teaching and learning (Pollard 2006). St. Mary's School for Deaf Girls sent two teachers and two students to
Caen in France for 6 months; the students there likely learned
LSF, which likely influenced ISL when the students returned to Ireland. McDonnell (1979) reports that the Irish institutions –
Catholic and Protestant – did not teach the children to speak, and that it was not until 1887 that Claremont changed from a manual to an
oral approach. For the Catholic schools, the shift to oralism came later: St. Mary's School for Deaf Girls moved to an oral approach in 1946 and St. Joseph's School for Deaf Boys shifted to oralism in 1956, though this did not become formal state policy until 1972. Sign language use was seriously suppressed and religion was used to further stigmatise the language (e.g. children were encouraged to give up signing for
Lent and sent to
confession if caught signing). The fact that the Catholic schools are segregated on the basis of gender led to the development of a gendered-generational variant of Irish Sign Language that is still evident (albeit to a lesser degree) today.
20th century In September 1992, coinciding with Deaf Awareness Week,
RTÉ introduced a nightly news bulletin,
News for the Deaf, signed by a Deaf person at the end of
RTÉ News. ==Oireachtas bill==