Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”¹⁰

      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,”¹¹ he counseled with exacting realism:

      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.¹²

      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.¹³

      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.¹⁴

      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.

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