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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.²³

      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.²⁴

      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.”²⁵

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