“This is an English-speaking business”
Cormac ó Bruic, a native of the Kerry Gaeltacht, has said that he was forbidden from speaking in Irish to the customers that visited the Flying Enterprise pub in Cork.
Cormac claims that for eight months, he was instructed by the owners that “this is an English-speaking business”.
Speaking on Raidio na Gaeltachta, he said: “Lots of customers would tell us that it was lovely to hear the language spoken, especially to hear young people using it in Cork. There were one or two who had Irish who’d come in and say a word or two in Irish and I’d answer in Irish, but then we’d revert to English. One day, one of the owners came behind the bar and told us that we weren’t allowed to speak Irish. The following day, again, the owner told me I wasn’t allowed to speak Irish in his pub He was shouting at me and banging on the table, because I stood up to him and told him I wasn’t going to stop. He told me then to go back to work, but I told him that I couldn’t.
Cormac is no longer working in the pub and the Flying Enterprise have released a statement this afternoon which says that the Irish language has nothing to do with his departure and that it’s a “HR matter”.
Our Official Statement in relation to recent comments made about The Flying Enterprise pic.twitter.com/U6jDfAr0HD
— theflyingenterprise (@theflyingenterp) September 9, 2016
Speaking with Raidio na Gaeltachta, pub owner Finbarr O’Shea said that the issue of language is similar to that of a dress code. He said that he wanted to keep English as the working language “because it’s a hospitality business”.
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