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

which would emphasize the language; school inspectors were required to study Irish, and no further appointments were offered to individuals who lacked proficiency in Irish; Irish was made compulsory for scholarships in the Intermediate and Leaving Certificates in the secondary schools; and financial and other encouragements were offered to schools and individuals alike to use Irish more frequently. But it was in the primary or National Schools that the linguistic policy was prosecuted most vigorously. In its initial stages this linguistic effort was presided over by Professor Eoin MacNeill, whose commitment to education as a means to revive Irish civilization (which for him included the Irish language) was made clear in a series of articles published while he was Minister for Education, in the Irish Statesman in 1925. There he asserted:

      Nationality, in the best sense, is the form and kind of civilization developed by a particular people and distinctive of that people. So understood, nationality needs no apologist…I believe in the capacity of the Irish people, if they clear their minds, for building up an Irish civilization. I hold that the chief function of an Irish State and of an Irish Government is to subserve that work. I hold that the principal duty of an Irish Government in its educational policy is to subserve that work. I am willing to discuss how this can best be done, but not discuss how it can be done without.⁵

      The National School teachers were enlisted in this crusade, their role to clear the minds of the nation’s children through intense exposure to the Irish language.

      Eoin MacNeill himself had a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of language to society than many others who supported revival, and he well understood that to depend on the schools alone to revive Irish would be unwise. But it was his ironic fate, busy as he was with other matters of state, to preside over the legislative steps that made such a dependence possible. In the absence of any coherent social and economic policy, particularly in relation to the Irish-speaking districts that remained, this dependence was, as events were to prove, almost entirely misguided. The schools alone could not perform a linguistic miracle while the social order was undisturbed by any revolutionary energies.

      Theoretical justification for this linguistic onslaught on the schools was supplied by the very influential professor of education at University College, Dublin, Father T. Corcoran, SJ. His claim to eminence in historical studies was work on the hedge schools of penal times (when education for Catholics was offered in barns and even out-of-doors by many dedicated spirits) and on the apparently baneful influence on the Irish language of the British-imposed National School system of the nineteenth century. It was his simplistic belief that what the National Schools had wrongfully done, they could now undo. He was certain that the National Board of Education had been “fatal to the national use of vernacular Irish”⁶ as he sought to ‘reverse a change that was made fully practicable only by the prolonged misuse of the schools.”⁷ In 1920 the Irish National Teachers’ Organization (INTO) at its annual congress, conscious that the Gaelic League had already set out a series of proposals for the gaelicization of the National Schools, responded by establishing a conference to consider its own position. Professor Corcoran, “while declining to act as a member…intimated that it would have at its disposal the benefit of his advice and experience.”⁸ He was available therefore as a consultant to the congress when it suggested in 1921 that all singing in the National Schools should be in Irish, that instruction in history and geography, which were taught from the third standard onward, should be through Irish, and that one hour a day should be spent in direct language acquisition. Such draconian measures meant that other subjects had to be eliminated from the programme. So, in Irish National Schools, drawing, elementary science, hygiene, nature study, and most domestic studies were dispensed with in favour of the language. Furthermore it was proposed that all teaching in the first two, or infant grades, should be in Irish. The new programme was accepted and set in motion in April 1922.

      Patrick Pearse, in a famous phrase, had once castigated the imposition of an educational programme on children by an external authority as “the murder machine.” Professor Corcoran was disinclined to see any analogy in the policies he encouraged. He was persuaded that because non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States could be taught English in grade schools, although it was not the language of the home, so in Ireland children from English-speaking homes could receive instruction in all subjects in Irish at school. The obvious point that European immigrants’ children in the United States were being introduced to the language of the wider community while in Ireland children certainly were not, apparently did not weigh with him. Nor indeed, one imagines, did the fact that children might endure some emotional and mental distress in their efforts to cope with the linguistic obstacle course he was setting them, for his vision of the educational experience had little room for such concepts as pleasure or the joy of learning. His dismal creed was formulated in dispiriting terms: “All true education must progressively combine effort with mere interest: it is the effort that enobles and makes worthily human.”⁹ 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.”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,