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

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.

      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.”¹⁵

      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.”¹⁶ 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.¹⁷

      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,