I wonder if I was there?. I’m not a Newport supporter, although I do have a soft spot for the dragons. I was just as anti-Caerdydd when it came to rugby in the pre-regional rugby old days - coming from near Pontypridd originally. We were certainly quite proud of our “House of Pain” title and we weren’t quiet or reserved when the old enemy came to town.
Hopefully the new and first ever WM secondary school in Newport will go ahead later this year - I know it’s been off and on, because of the flood risks, but that is a massive stride forward. If I had still been living in Newport, I wouldn’t have been able to put up a rational case to send my little one to a WM school. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to, but simply that it would make no logical sense to travel several miles each day, when we had two beautiful and well respected EM schools in walking distance, all within a leafy and lovely part of Newport, where the other kids on the street would be going. Everyone in that area was very content with the schools and talking about changing the medium of the schools would never have cropped up and if it had it wouldn’t have been very popular at all. Additional ones would be fine, but how would you justify it.
I loved Newport and there are many interesting and positive things about it. It is a now a city rather than a town, which did have a real buzz starting, before the financial collapse - that got severely rocked when the banks collapsed and the building work slowed, but I think it is coming back again. Another is that I rarely noticed any anti-Welsh language fever in the Newport area, quite the opposite. Another one again, is that I heard many people say that they thought other people in Wales didn’t regard them as being particularly Welsh, so perhaps while maybe they have no issues in knowing who they are and they don’t, they are possibly conscious of how their identity is viewed within modern Wales. I think for places like Newport it is very much – gently does it, allow things to develop from the push of the local people, who know their own minds and then be patient. On the negative side, they do seem to keep electing some really awful councillors – how the hell they got away with demolishing the chartist mural is beyond me.
Where I currently live has a relatively high number of Welsh speakers with all sorts of issues, but that’s a very different kettle of fish.
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I was really sad to hear about that. My brother lived in Newport in the 80s/90s so I spent quite a lot of time there then, and that mural was the only uplifting thing about the place at the time! (I hasten to add that I’ve heard that it’s really turned itself around since then…)
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I really love murals, and they can often brighten up otherwise dull areas.
Re: the decline (at least in the Gaeltacht) of Irish: it’s interesting. I used to spend a lot of time on the how-to-learn-any-language.com forum, and more recently moved to its “successor”, forum.language-learners.org, and in both places, while there was theoretical interest in the Celtic languages as a whole, by and large this was expressed through Irish rather than any of the others. I’m not sure why, but somehow Irish seems to be seen as more “exotic”.
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I doubt it Bach! I’m not exactly sure how long ago it was but I’d guess early 70s!! Definitely pre-Pro Rugby!! My step-mother swore by Casnewydd as a place to shop, so I went along and to a game after! I’m afraid I preferred the shops in Caerdydd as well as the rugby!!
It seems to have been working based on what you say. The ‘not really Welsh’ thing, I certainly heard and have mentioned on the Forum!
With that I totally agree. also:
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