Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

(#litres_trial_promo) Policies were developed to retrain teachers to take part in this educational enterprise; special courses were arranged for teachers to increase their knowledge of Irish; individuals whose mother tongue was Irish were encouraged to enter the teaching profession at the Irish-speaking preparatory colleges, even if they displayed few other pedagogic aptitudes. As Professor Corcoran had it: “From the national point of view, even mediocre quality in a boy or girl of fourteen years, if the Irish vernacular command is present, makes that prospective teacher highly valuable.”

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So, despite a government-appointed conference which reported in 1926 and expressed some doubts about fundamental aspects of the experiment, the major educational innovation of the 1920s was the effort to gaelicize the National Schools, thereby, it was hoped, achieving a revival of Irish as a vernacular language. By 1928 there were 1,240 schools in the country where the teaching of infants in the first two grades was entirely through Irish, 3,570 where teaching was through English and Irish, and only 373 where the teaching was through English alone.

Opposition to this Kulturkampf from those who were in essential sympathy with revivalism and its underlying ideology was not significant. Only a few voices were raised to suggest that this demand that children should shoulder most of the burden of language revival might prove counterproductive. Such opposition as there was, as we shall see, tended to originate, not in doubts about the feasibility of the programme nor indeed in deeply felt sympathy for the children actually participating in it, but in apprehensions of a more general kind that the policy might have a deleterious effect on Irish culture as a whole. Michael Tierney, professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, and member of the Dáil, who had served on the government’s commission appointed in 1925 charged with a study of the Gaeltacht (the Irish-speaking areas) sounded a warning in 1927. While believing that the efforts to revive the language presented “the greatest and most inspiring spectacle of our day,”

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The task of reviving a language…with no large neighbouring population which speaks even a distantly related dialect, and with one of the great world-languages to contend against, is one that has never been accomplished anywhere. Analogies with Flemish, Czech, or the Baltic languages are all misleading, because the problem in their cases has been rather that of restoring a peasant language to cultivated use than that of reviving one which the majority had ceased to speak. Still less has it proved possible to impose a language on a people as its ordinary speech by means of the schools alone.

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It was Osborn Bergin, Gaelic scholar and professor of early Irish at the same university, who somewhat wryly pointed out what was happening:

Today the people leave the problem to the Government, the Government leaves it to the Department of Education, the Department of Education to the teachers and the teachers to the school-children. Only the very young are unable to shift the burden to someone else’s shoulders, so perhaps they will learn to carry it, and save our faces. After all, infants, before the age of reason can do marvels with language, so they may not notice the weight.

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The decline in membership of the Gaelic League in the 1920s suggests that Bergin was correct in this cold-eyed analysis, for in 1924 there were 819 branches of the League in existence while by 1924 there were only 139. A sharp drop of this kind cannot be accounted for only in terms of the dislocation of the Civil War; it seems that many members of the League felt their work was at an end since the state could now be entrusted with the task they had hitherto adopted as their own. It may be indeed that a cultural movement of the kind the League had been, like a religion of the dispossessed, really thrives only under pressure and that the elevation of the language to semiofficial status in the state was a concealed disaster. It is worth noting that a body, Comhaltas Uladh, whose prime concern was the encouragement of the language in Ulster, was one of the few lively sections of the League in the late 1920s as it concerned itself with that part of the country where members of the Northern Ireland government ignored, when they were not openly hostile to, the language movement.

It should be made quite clear that most members of the Gaelic League and the many that gave their willing or tacit support to the government’s revival policy and strategy in the 1920s would have rejected the suggestion of imposition contained in Professor Tierney’s warning. To comprehend why this is so it is necessary to consider the ideological assumptions of the Gaelic League and of that cultural force known as the Irish Ireland movement which supported its aims in the first two decades of the century. For those assumptions had been made generally available through much effective propaganda and were influential in creating a cultural context in the 1920s in which the government’s Irish revival policy could be implemented with a significant measure of popular support and without any great sense of imposition.

The classic text in the Gaelic League’s ideological armoury was Douglas Hyde’s famous speech, delivered before the National Literary Society in Dublin on 25 November 1892, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.” In this Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, who became an enthusiastic worker for Gaelic revival, had identified an Irish cultural imperative, the need to “build up an Irish nation on Irish lines,” decrying a central ambivalence in Irish society, “imitating England and yet apparently hating it.” His appalled conviction in that lecture was that “within the last ninety years we have, with an unparalleled frivolity, deliberately thrown away our birthright and anglicized ourselves, ” so “ceasing to be Irish without becoming English.” Central to the structure of Hyde’s argument in his lecture is that the true, essential Irish reality is the Gaelic, the reality deriving from ancient Ireland, “the dim consciousness” of which “is one of those things which are at the back of Irish national sentiment.” An obvious rejoinder to such a view of late-nineteenth-century Ireland might have been that since the seventh century, a time he particularly venerated, frequent invasions have produced a composite civilization or indeed a mosaic. Hyde outlined, in anticipation of such an argument, the very powerful myth of Ireland’s assimilative capacities, a myth that has maintained its potency in Irish life to the present day. The passage where he expands on this popular myth is worth examining:

What we must endeavour to never forget is this, that the Ireland of today is the descendant of the Ireland of the seventh century, then the school of Europe and the torch of learning. It is true that North men made some minor settlements in it in the ninth and tenth centuries, it is true that the Normans made extensive settlements during the succeeding centuries, but none of these broke the continuity of the social life of the island. Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast issued forth in a generation or two fully Irishized, and more Hibernian than the Hibernians themselves, and even after the Cromwellian plantation the children of numbers of the English soldiers who settled in the south and midlands, were after forty years’ residence, and after marrying Irish wives, turned into good Irishmen, and unable to speak a word of English, while several Gaelic poets of the last century have, like Father English, the most unmistakably English names. In two points only was the continuity of the Irishism of Ireland damaged. First, in the north-east of Ulster, where the Gaelic race was expelled and the land planted with aliens, whom our dear mother Erin, assimilative as she is, has hitherto found it difficult to absorb, and the ownership of the land, eight-ninths of which belongs to people many of whom always lived, or live, abroad, and not half of whom Ireland can be said to have assimilated.

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We note here how major social changes in the distant past are themselves assimilated in a sentimental metaphor (“Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast”) but that the more recent complications of Irish history do not admit of such simple resolution. For Hyde cannot avoid recognizing that contemporary Irish experience demonstrates not the assimilative power of Irish reality but the degree to which Ireland has been assimilated by the English-speaking world. So he must implicitly condemn the class with which he, as a Protestant English-speaking descendant of the aliens, might most readily be associated, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, remaining untroubled later in his lecture that the contribution of Daniel O’Connell and St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth to the decline of Gaelic might be seen as tending to refute his theory about Ireland’s assimilative capacities.

Such thinking became the staple of Gaelic League propaganda and of the writings of that most energetic proponent of Irish Ireland, the pugnacious journalist and editor of the Leader newspaper, D. P. Moran, well into the 1930s. The true Ireland is Gaelic Ireland; Gaelic Ireland has extraordinary assimilative powers, and it must, as the receptive centre of Irish reality, receive English-speaking civilization, as it has developed in Ireland, into itself. Otherwise Ireland would lose her essence, cease to be, in any worthwhile sense. In his powerful polemic The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, Moran stated the case clearly: “The foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element that absorbs. On no other basis can an Irish nation be reared that would not topple over by the force of the very ridicule that it would beget.”

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There was, it is important to stress, a vigorously idealistic and humanistic aspect to much of the revivalist activity in the first three decades of the century. Certainly there were those who supported revival from motives of the crudest kind of racial chauvinism and many for whom the language was merely a nationalistic rallying cry, a way of stamping the new state with a distinctive imprint, but thinkers like Douglas Hyde, D. P. Moran, Eoin MacNeill, and in the 1920s, Daniel Corkery, the novelist, short story writer, and critic, all of whose writings were influential in arousing interest in the language and the civilization they thought it enshrined, had each a concerned awareness of the psychological distress suffered by countless individual Irish men and women because of colonial oppression. Irish people could not be themselves, they argued, could not express the vital life of their own country. They were mute in their own language, ignorant of the most appropriate, perhaps the only, vessel capable of bearing that life into the future. They languished as provincial Englishmen, aping metropolitan manners in a most vulgar fashion, or they were driven in frustration to the spiritual and emotional sterilities of permanent political agitation. D. P. Moran summed up Ireland’s cultural paucity in a trenchant sentence: “Ireland has invented nothing of importance during the century except the Dunlop tyre.”

(#litres_trial_promo) And even Moran, who one suspects wished for cultural revival mostly because it would underpin economic resurgence, was conscious of the individual enhancement possible in a cultural awakening:

When the people go back into their national traditions, get permeated by their own literature, create a drama, resurrect their customs, develop their industries; when they have a language to bind them together and a national personality to guard, the free and full development of every individual will in no wise endanger or weaken any political movement.

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Eoin MacNeill, equally sure why the national life should be fostered, was clear why he espoused the cause of national freedom. It was so that the Irish people might live their own lives in their own way:

For my own part, if Irish nationality were not to mean a distinctive Irish civilization, I would attach no very great value to Irish national independence. If I want personal liberty to myself, it is in order that I may be myself, may live my own life in my own way, not that I may live the second-hand, hand-me-down life of somebody else.…If I want national freedom for my people, it is in order that they may live in their own way a life which is their own, that they may preserve and develop their own nationality, their own distinctive species of civilization.

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Daniel Corkery too, at his most imaginatively ample, suggests that he shared Patrick Pearse’s grasp of the simple educational fact that integrated creative personalities cannot be fostered without a “creative and integrated community with a special and continuing experience of its own.”

(#litres_trial_promo) So his urgent concern in his polemical critical works The Hidden Ireland (1924) and Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) (which led him, as we shall see, to a narrow exclusivity of mind) to promote an Irish literature which would truly relate to a vital Irish world, has to be seen in part as an educationalist’s desire for books in the schools that would touch the quick of actual life:

What happens in the neighbourhood of an Irish boy’s home – the fair, the hurling match, the land grabbing, the priesting, the mission, the Mass – he never comes on in literature, that is, in such literature as he is told to respect and learn.

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The Irish Ireland movement at its best, therefore, was aware, in a mode of thought reminiscent of many nineteenth-century English and European Romantic social critics, of the creative possibilities for the individual in a healthy social environment. Independence of mind, integrity of personality, confident possession of identity, liberality of thought, and artistic self-expression were the fruits that could be expected from cultural regeneration of which linguistic revival was the neccessary catalyst.

Such idealism commended itself to many Irish men and women in the new state who felt it only right that Irish children should learn their ancestral language in the schools, encountering there “texts…which did not automatically reflect the fashions and clichés of the English-speaking world, but brought the pupils into contact with a world of ideas which was at once alien and, mysteriously, intimately their own.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The children in their Irish-speaking National Schools were not in a spiritual sense enduring any imposition. They were encountering the language of the essential Gaelic strand in Irish life, the language of the past, and their own language which would eventually, the most optimistic hoped, absorb English and the cultural life associated with it, as so much had been absorbed by Ireland down the centuries.

It might have been thought, therefore, that the government’s language policy would have been successful for it was pursued in a society where considerable numbers of people were ready to see in the policy no imposition but a rediscovery of a necessary past. And had the efforts to revive Irish in the 1920s been conducted primarily on the basis of the kinds of humanism which generated the original enthusiasm of the Gaelic League, together with a committed sense in the country as a whole of the need for genuine social as well as linguistic renewal, the policy might have met with real success. In such a context certain basic practical problems (the fact that there were several dialects of the language in the country and the Gaelic and Roman script were very different) might have been addressed with decisive energy. As it was, in the absence of a revolutionary social policy attending the efforts for linguistic revival and making it possible (for no language policy could have had much chance of success which did not tackle the depressed economic conditions of the Irish-speaking districts, and indeed of the slums of Dublin), conservative and authoritarian tendencies in the language movement quickly began to cloud the radical humanism which for many had been the most attractive aspect of its ideology. Instead of participating as one element in a general transformation of the social order, the revival movement soon came to be characterized by the reaction and dogmatism of the disappointed and despairing. For almost all that the revivalist had to encourage him or her as time went on was the language policy in the schools and a faith in the assimilative powers of Irish reality that contemporary social fact did little to confirm. Indeed, the linguistic profile of the country even in the 1920s suggested that rather than proving to be an assimilative centre of the Irish experience, Gaelic Ireland was being absorbed into the English-speaking world.

There were some signs, however, which suggested that revival might be possible. The fact, though, that revivalists had some superficial causes for optimism, in retrospect, makes the essential weakness in their position all the more poignant. The census of 1926 had revealed that a striking increase in the numbers of those who claimed a knowledge of Irish had recently taken place in Dublin County Borough and Dublin County (from 11,870 in 1911 to 23,712 in 1926 and from 5,873 in 1911 to 15,906 in 1926, respectively), but some reflection would have cast cold water on the optimism generated by such figures.

(#litres_trial_promo) Undoubtedly some of the rise was due to the fact that since independence school-children had been required to study Irish, and that before independence the language had been introduced into the secondary school curriculum; it was not wholly due to the direct efforts of the Gaelic League. And there was no guarantee that such people would continue to use Irish in their daily lives as adults.

Much more telling were the figures from north-western, western, and south-western areas of the country. These included the counties with the highest proportions of Irish-speakers (in Galway 47.4 percent of the population claimed to know Irish, in Mayo 36.8 percent, in Clare 30.3 percent, in Waterford – excluding the County Borough – 30.1 percent, in Cork – excluding the County Borough – 21.1 percent). Despite the high incidence in these counties of persons claiming knowledge of the language the figures in fact revealed a serious decline in the numbers of Irish speakers in those regions. In Galway for example, between 1911 and 1926 the numbers of such persons had declined from 98,523 to 80,238, in Cork from 77,205 to 60,616, in Mayo from 88,601 to 63,514, in Kerry from 60,719 to 49,262. Though some of these reductions were undoubtedly attributable to emigration of Irish-speaking persons, in itself a lamentable fact, it was probable that a real loss of the language was occurring in situ. Even in those districts which were designated fior-Gaeltacht areas by the Gaeltacht Commission, where 80 percent and over of the population claimed knowledge of Irish, the period 1911–26 showed a decrease from 149,677 claiming knowledge of the language to 130,074 – an actual loss of 19,603 or 13.1 percent. What is even more striking is that in those areas the Gaeltacht Commission designated breac-Gaeltacht, partly Irish-speaking (i.e., with 25–79 percent of the population claiming knowledge of Irish), the period 1911–26 saw a reduction of 47,094 persons claiming knowledge of the language, a loss of 28.7 percent. Such statistics suggest that what many witnesses told the commission was occurring: Irish-speaking parents were bringing up their children through the sole medium of English. The figures that the commission itself produced in its 1926 report revealed that in 1925 there were only 257,000 Irish-speakers altogether in the seven Irish-speaking and partly Irish-speaking areas identified by the commissioners. Of these, 110,000 resided in the partly Irish-speaking districts.

From the census figures, and the figures supplied in the Gaeltacht Commission report, it would have been difficult therefore to avoid the conclusion that English was making inroads and emigration effecting its slow attrition. While the effects of official language policy could be seen among schoolchildren and signs of Gaelic enthusiasm were evident among some well-educated adults in the English-speaking areas (when broken down by occupations the professional class boasted the largest percentage of Irish-speakers – 43.5 percent of this group claiming knowledge of the language), the protracted decline of the Gaeltacht had gone unchecked. That decline meant that overall in the years 1881–1926 the number of Irish-speaking persons in the country had dropped by 41 percent.

Eventually the fact that the ideology of the Gaelic League and the Irish Ireland movement flew in the face of social reality was to prove signally destructive of its best intentions. Committed to a view of Irish reality which was to become increasingly untenable, in a society where the population seemed unwilling to consider let alone to inaugurate a period of radical social change, the revivalists could do nothing but dogmatize and appeal for more stringent enforcement of linguistic sanctions. As they did so the popular appeal of the whole revival enterprise could not but lessen. Even in the 1920s there were signs that this unfortunate process was at work.

The language policy throughout the 1920s was often defended in the crudest possible terms. J. J. Walsh, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, informed a meeting in 1926: “There was no doubt that a country without a language was not a country at all. At best it was a province,” declaring roundly:

They were told that the teaching of Irish was compulsory, but the teaching of everything else in school-life was equally so. They knew that the majority of children learned because there was no alternative. Therefore the talk of ramming the subject down their throats was all nonsense…This country had for centuries been dosed with compulsory English to the entire exclusion of their native tongue, and the people who now complain of compulsory Irish were whole-hog backers of that English policy.

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D. P. Moran in his editorials in the Leader issued a repetitive barrage of dogmatic statement, which was echoed in periodicals such as Fáinne an Lae (The Dawning of the Day), and intensified by anti-Protestant bigotry, in the zealous pages of the Catholic Bulletin. That monthly periodical had been established in 1911 chiefly to warn the Catholic faithful of the dangers of immoral literature, but it quickly became dedicated to waging cultural and psychological war against the malign influence of Protestant Anglo-Ireland. Professor T. Corcoran was a frequent anonymous contributor. The direct, brutal tone of the following passage is characteristic of the journal’s literary style. Here the Bulletin in 1924 editorializes on a suggestion that modern Irish nationality is a synthesis:

The Irish nation is the Gaelic nation; its language and literature is the Gaelic language; its history is the history of the Gael. All other elements have no place in Irish national life, literature and tradition, save as far as they are assimilated into the very substance of Gaelic speech, life and thought. The Irish nation is not a racial synthesis at all; synthesis is not a vital process, and only what is vital is admissible in analogies bearing on the nature of the living Irish nation, speech, literature and tradition. We are not a national conglomerate, not a national patchwork specimen; the poetry or life of what Aodh de Blacam calls Belfast can only be Irish by being assimilated by Gaelic literature into Gaelic literature.

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The intemperance here is in part that of anti-Protestant bigotry (the Bulletin knew that the remnants of Protestant Anglo-Ireland would be offended by such Irish Ireland dogma) but it is also, one suspects, as so often in Irish Ireland propaganda, the fruit of frustration.

In the more thoughtful attempts of Irish Ireland’s writers to propose a genuinely Irish philosophy of national life one can hear conservative and authoritarian notes drowning the radical strains of their message as, in an increasingly hopeless linguistic situation, they sought to protect the language without any broad social vision of how this could be done. This revealed itself in two ways: in a tendency to venerate national life at the expense of individual expression and in a highly prescriptive sense of Irish identity. The work of Daniel Corkery in the 1920s and early 1930s supplies a fascinating example of how the humanistic ideals of Irish Ireland could be swamped by a conservative’s vision of the nation’s life in just the way I am suggesting.

Before the War of Independence Daniel Corkery had been a moderately well-known Irish novelist and short story writer who had espoused the cause of Gaelic revival with quiet conviction. His novel The Threshold of Quiet (1917) is a sensitive study of provincial frustration, concentrating on the dismal, unfulfilled lives of a group of young Corkmen. A gravely earnest reflection on the quiet desperation of lives lived without achievements of any major kind, it is a fine expression of his serious-minded, pedagogic cultural and social concern. The War of Independence and particularly the death of his close friend Terence MacSwiney, the mayor of Cork, after a long hunger strike, seems to have affected Corkery deeply, sharpening his didacticism and quickening his sense of national outrage and need. In the 1920s and early 1930s his writings became increasingly polemical and dogmatic as, from his position as professor of English at University College, Cork, he sought to direct the course of Irish writing and education into properly national channels. Corkery justified the rigour of his stance in the following terms:

In a country that for long has been afflicted with an ascendancy, an alien ascendancy at that, national movements are a necessity: they are an effort to attain to the normal. The vital-minded among the nation’s children answer to the impulse: they are quickest to become conscious of how far away everything has strayed from the natural and native. They search and search after that native standard that has been so long discarded: they dig and dig; and one may think of them as beginning every morning’s work with…“I invoke the land of Ireland.”

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One notes here how political history is allowed to justify a unity of national purpose which might interfere with individual perception and expression. A search for the “native standard” is necessary if the country is to become “normal.” So in the contortions of his cultural study of the dramatist John Synge, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (as the critic labours to discover why despite his origins in the alien Ascendancy Synge nevertheless manages to be a good dramatist), one finds the humanistic strain in Corkery’s thinking, his educationalist’s concern for enhancing individual experience, drowned by notes of a nationalist’s celebration of the nation’s will. In denying Anglo-Irish writers of the Literary Revival artistic membership of the Irish nation, he comments: