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

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.¹⁸

      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.”¹⁹ 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.²⁰

      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.”²¹ 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.²² 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.

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