Eugene Daly looks at the factors that instigated the diminishment of our native tongue in Ireland.
The mortal wounds of Gaelic Ireland were inflicted at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, but the death agony was prolonged for all of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth and nineteenth in parts of the country.
The coming of the Anglo-Norman adventurers in the period 1169-1333 with their foreign language and their superior military might was to have a significant effect upon the fortunes of the Irish language, not because of any lasting damage they could inflict upon the Irish nation as a whole but because their persisting presence in the Pale meant that Ireland’s integrity as a country was compromised The descendants of the ‘Gall’, as the native Irish called the foreigners, may have become ‘Hibernians ipsis hiberniores’ (more Irish than the Irish themselves) but they represented a kind of colonial option which the Tudors and later dynasties were to take up. An edict of Henry VIII in 1542, after he had been proclaimed King of Ireland, made the first formal pronouncement about the Irish language since the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) had attempted to prevent the greater Gaelicisation of the English colony. It enacted that ‘ the King’s true subjects, inhabiting this land of Ireland…shall use and speak commonly the English tongue and language’.
It was during the reign of Elizabeth I that the power of the Anglo-Irish earldoms was effectively destroyed and, with the so-called Flight of the Earls in 1607, Ulster, the last outpost of Gaelic civilisation, was left virtually leaderless. The poets, who had attached themselves to the Old Irish Chieftains and then the Anglo-Irish lords, were conscious that a cataclysmic change had come upon their world. By 1704 the native Irish owned only 14 per cent of the land of their own country. Such poets as Dáibhí Ó Bruadai (1625-1698) and Aogán Ó Rathaille (1675-1729) have left bitter attacks on the ‘lowts’ (as it seemed to them) who replaced the old aristocracy, ‘who spread the grey wing upon every tide’ after Limerick. The Bardic Schools were closed and then, in turn, the Courts of Poetry, which succeeded them. One large body of material known as Filíocht na nDaoine (Poetry of the People) consisted of anonymous folksong and poetry, often of great beauty and far from primitive. Much of it took the form of love songs and it bridged the dark years and provided a portable literature for those who had no other.
The songs stopped; as Sir George Petrie (1789-1866), the archaeologist put it in one of the most chilling remarks about the Great Famine of the 1840’s; the people had forgotten how to sing. By then, too, the language had lost its intellectual position; it was no longer the speech of those with power, wealth or influence. As Maureen Wall puts it in her 1906 Thomas Davis lecture ‘The Decline of the Irish Language’: ‘The Irish language had been banished from parliament, from the courts of law, from town and country government, from the civil service and from the upper levels of commercial life’.
As Gerald O’Brien shows in his essay ‘The Strange Death of the Irish Language’, (1780-1800) published in 1989, the last two decades of the 18th century were crucial in the determination of whether the decline should be serious or virtually terminal. A combination of the following factors all but finished Irish as anything other than a ‘provincial patois’; the growth of urbanisation; improvements in communications and the exposure to outside influences of what had been closed and self-sufficient monoglot communities; increased bourgeois prosperity and consequent Anglicisation among some native speakers; the Catholic Church’s decision to opt for general Anglicisation with no provision for Irish in the new seminary in Maynooth (established in 1796); the attention of the antiquarians who wished to preserve Irish as a fascinating relic; the association of spoken Irish with ‘drunkenness, idleness and improvidence’, and a lack of respectability about having any knowledge of it; the need for access to English as the language of contracts and other legal documents; the apolitical nature of Irish society, which diminished the need for the solidarity of a shared and exclusive language; the requirement of English for a whole range of public sector employment and in the armed forces; and as the century turned, the implicit (specific in the case of Daniel O’Connell) suggestion of the country’s new political leaders that lack of English was somehow a bar to political and and material progress.
O’Connell used Irish when it suited him, but as he wrote to his friend, W.J. O’Neill Daunt, – ‘Therefore although the Irish language is connected with many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior quality of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish’. Yet at the height of O’Connell’s influence the population of Irish speakers was at least two million, about 30 per cent of the population. By then, with the system of National Schools (established 1831) where English was the only medium of education in place and the strong support for Anglicisation among parents, mostly for utilitarian motives meant that the Irish speaking population steadily diminished. The effects of the Great Famine and the mass emigration which followed, mostly from what had been mainly Irish-speaking areas, meant that by 1891, Irish speakers numbered no more than 680,000.
A group of supporters of O’Connell, who became known as ‘The Young Irishmen’ differed strongly with O’Connell about his attitude to the use of arms and to his attitude to the Irish language. The brightest star, Thomas Davis (1814-1845) wrote ‘to lose your native tongue and to learn that of an alien is the worse badge of conquest – it is the chain of the soul.
To have lost entirely the national language is death; the fetter has worn through’.
In a period of nine months (1934-40), Irish folklore collector, Séan Ó Cróinín, collected 1,500 manuscript pages from Séan Ó hAo (1861-1946), a fisherman who lived in the downland of Cregg, Glandore, near the shore of Trailong. The material collected covers a wide variety of subjects – accounts of fish and fishing, nets, boats, a detailed knowledge of the Cork coastline, many tales, long and short, sad and merry, ghost stories, historical events – a splendid account of old times in the barony (of Carbery). Most of what Séan Ó Cróinín collected was edited by his brother Donncha Ó Cróinín and published in 1985. Part 2 has yet to be published. In page 631, Séan Ó hAo refers to the Irish language and its decline and its decline: Nobody spoke any word except Irish. The well-off spoke it as well as the poor people. Religious education was learned through Irish in the churches and schools. That stopped about 40-odd years ago (c. 1900). The school masters and mistresses were ‘down’ on it (the Irish language) as well as the Church; the young priests and bishops had no Irish – why I don’t know. And since then Irish is going backwards. But the people who had Irish continued speaking it. At that time, people thought that Irish wouldn’t disappear. But it did and now they are trying to learn it again, and maybe they will. I hope they will learn it.
Séan Ó hAo mentions the places along the Cork coast where Irish was spoken and he also mentions some of the people he met and conversed with in Irish. He refers to the Kinsale area, Clonakilty, the coastal area between Clonakilty and the Galley Head. In the coastal townlands between Rosscarbery and Glandore the Irish language was vibrant. In the townlands of Ballinaclogh, Cregg – ‘dó dhinidis a ngnó gan focal Béarla, ach amháin Gaoluin an fado’ (they did their business without using a word of English, completely in Irish). Irish was spoken along the coast from Myross to Baltimore. There was little Irish in Baltimore or in Ballydehob or Schull. Irish was spoken of course on Cape Clear and Heir island. Hamit tells of a conversation he had with a man from the Ardfield area who said ‘Nil won mhaith inti…do bhí sé ag na seandaoine go liofa. Ba bheag a mahaitheas dóibhe é…ní bhfuaireadar éini aisti’ ‘(There is no good in it [Irish]). The old people could speak it fluently. Little the good it was for them – they got nothing out of it’. Hamit finished the story thus: ‘Tá an sail imitate chun lathaí’ (The world is gone to the dogs).
In the 19th century many people deliberately thrust Irish from them and embraced English. More and more people began to equate Irish with poverty, humiliation, insult and degradation and encouraged (in fact insisted) their children to speak English. English had become the language of officialdom, of emigration, of business, as the poet Michael Hartnett puts it… ‘finding English a necessary sin – the perfect language to sell pigs in’. The evictions, emigration and the general feeling of hopelessness accomplished what centuries of strife had failed to achieve.
To quote David Green: ‘In Ireland parents who knew little or no English were not content that their children should learn English at school – which, since the establishment of the national school system in 1831 was not too difficult to achieve since the children were forced to speak English in school where no Irish was taught. the parents went much further by insisting that they should not speak Irish at all. The system of ‘policing and flogging’ the children for speaking Irish was planned and carried out by the parents and schoolchildren working in co-operation.
Towards the end of the 19th century there was a new interest in Irish language and customs. This led to the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884) and Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League) in 1893. Branches of the Gaelic League were established all over the country. The founding members were Eoin Mac Neill, Fr Eugene O’Growney, Fr Michael Hickey, Pádraig O’Brien from Ballydehob, T. O’Neill Russell and, most prominently, Dubhglás de hÍde (Douglas Hyde). Hyde’s dream was of an Irish-speaking Ireland and that, in turn, meant that the whole movement should be based on the Gaeltacht and extended to the rest of the country. In August 1899 Hyde wrote: ‘In anglicising ourselves. we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim which we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality…Irish nationhood was like some holy sacrificial fire, and where we stood watching, O’Neill and Sarsfield and Emmet and Davis had watched before’. By 1904 there were almost 600 branches of the Gaelic League with a total membership of 50,000 people. The early league teachers were untrained voluntary workers but among them were a few who appreciated the need for effective teaching methods, for teaching aids, and most importantly qualified teachers. The number of timírí (organisers) and travelling teachers increased rapidly. Most of them were native speakers, but only a few were trained. It was decided to establish special schools to provide intensive training sources for the league’s teachers. Coláiste na Mumhan in Ballingeary, Co Cork was opened in July 1904, with five more colleges being established in the following two years.
Coláiste Chairbre (Carbery College) was established in 1910. It was housed in the Old Glandore National School. The first professors (ollamhs) were Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, Micheál Ó Cuileanain, both of Skibbereen, and Séan Ó Muirthile of Leap. Other local teachers in the Cólaiste included, at different times, Pádraig Ó Conaill of Myross, Gearóid Ó Suilleabhain of Skibbereen and Seamus O’Brien of Barley Hill, Rosscarbery. In addition to holding language classes they taught Irish, dance, history, folklore, music, place name lore and so on. They organised feiseanna, céilithe and aeraíochtaí (concerts, dances and open-air summer concerts.
Many of the leaders of the 1916 Rising were members of Conradh na Gaeilge. Pearse wrote in March 1914: ‘I have said again and again that when the Gaelic League was founded in 1893, the Irish revolution began’.
Peadar Ó hAnnrachain was undoubtedly the driving force behind the Gaelic League in the Skibbereen area. He acted as ‘timire’ in several counties, in Clare and Limerick and elsewhere. The Southern Star was the first newspaper to promote the Gaelic League. They published reports on Gaelic League activities – meetings, feiseanna and so on. After criticism by Ó hAnnrachain that their reports were written in English, the editor acquired new machinery so that the Gaelic script could be used for articles written in Irish. Ó hAnnrachain got immense support from Michael Ó Cuileannan, Principal of Skibbereen Boy’s National School. Ó Cuileannan spent his life collecting the béaloideas (folklore) of West Cork from the old people. Séan Ó hAo refers to Coláiste Chairbre in Glandore. He relates how the Parish Priest and some of the teachers approached him to tell stories or to sing some songs in the Coláiste. He said ‘Act do chuas a ‘trial orthu trí nú ceathair o uairibh, nú cúig…Thugadan go léir clubs le héisteacht dom. Thaitin mo chuid cainte leo’ (I went to them three or four times or five. They all listened to me and liked my stories.)
