The Irish language was dying all through the west and south of the country in the early 20th century, but the process was not straightforward.
Usually there was a generation that, though they had been raised in Irish themselves (that is the only language their parents knew), learned English in school, then raised their own children in English.
It wasn’t that English was such a wonderfully attractive language. The incredible trauma of Famine killed mostly Irish-speaking people because they were poor and vulnerable or because they lived in remote places where help came late.
Social change had been underway since at least the late 18th century, and this intensified after the Napoleonic Wars ended and England no longer needed the grain from Ireland. Small farms (very small farms) produced grain more effectively than the large grazing farms did, and the fact had given “traditional” people likely to be Irish-speakers a place in the landlord-run agricultural system.
After the end of the War, landlords threw a lot of them off the farms, to make their way the best they could as hired laborers or beggars. The minority of more commercial-minded Irishmen kept their farms and did their best to disassociate themselves from the others. They spoke English, accumulated money, sent sons to Catholic seminary or to offices.
So by about 1880, the Irish language meant poverty, apparent ignorance and stupidity. It meant helplessness and trauma.
There were almost always families and individuals that lagged behind language shift, though, for various reasons. Maybe they were raised by their grandparents or were really poor or didn’t have easy access to school.
Parallel to language shift, rural Ireland was being depopulated. Most young people went to America or England both because there were jobs (i.e. food and a roof over your head there and because there were no longer many small farms or other ways of living in Ireland.
So some of the unlucky ones who were not able to get with English and all ended up alone as they got old. We would know nothing about them, except that a few people had started collecting folk tales and songs in the 1890s. and they eventually turned into the Irish Folklore Commission that in the 1930s was able to employ a handful of full-time collectors.
The old people who had lagged behind linguistic and social shift, now sometimes isolated and off by themselves, still remembered the old world and often jumped at the chance to tell these strange young people on bicycles the stories they remembered from when people got together at night in the houses to talk, song and dance and tell stories.
Padráig Ó Murchú was a younger son of his family in Gort Broc, Allihies, Beara peninsula (County Cork). His father died young and Patsy stayed home to take care of his mother who knew only Irish. She eventually died, but he stayed on in the old house.
Theirs was the only house left on the moorland shoulder of mountain, and there was no road to it. Patsy had a rough voice and assumed other people made fun of him.
“The house presented a dilapidated appearance, both outside and inside…There was an earthen floor. With an old-fashioned sear tpo the right and a table on the right , with an open hearth, with an iron hook hanging for the kettle, a small window on the right and on the left, with one chair…The cow and calf were sometimes tied in the kitchen, maybe when the roof of the cowhouse nearby was not rainproof.”
He went blind but stayed on. “He had great health. I never saw his feet dry. With his bad sight, he was always getting them wet on the mountain, But I don’t think I ever saw him with a cold.”
He was a very sociable person and eventually found a hut down in the village, and it’s there that collector Tadhg Ó Murchú from another peninsula met him in 1939, and eventually recorded many long folktales from him: more than 250 printed pages worth as printed in Gort Broc, edited by Máirtín Verling, self-published, 1986.
It is one of those great books, if you like old stories and Munster Irish (no translation.
Particularly interesting is the fact that Verling prints transcriptions of a few stories taken down at different times, It used to be that folklore collectors just got the “story” and that was that, but it turns out that storytellers varied the story according to circumstances. Maybe one day they were in a hurry or didn’t like the collector or knew the kind of thing a particular collector likes, or varied the telling in order to comment on some current matter.
Patsy sounds like he could be a difficult man sometimes, mostly because he lived so long alone, but meeting somebody toward the end of his life who cared about old things was a great joy. The book Gort Broc is also a great joy.
Away to north County Clare now, to Doolin, where Stiofán Ó hEalaoire lived.
Séamus Ó Duilearga, the collector, found him about 1930: “Is fear gan bhean gan chlann, gan bhó ná éile é, é ina chónaí leis féin I seana-bhotháinín súigh ar an gcnoc ar leataoibh ós na daoine. Leis féin is mó a bhíonn sé ag caint…
(He is a man without wife or children, without a cow or other stock, living alone in a little sooty house up on the side of the hill far from people. Mostly, he talks to himself…”) He was also almost blind.
“Johhny Carey and I trudged through the snow to Stiofáin Ó hEalaoire . His house a good way from the road. . He was in, for we could hear him moving about and talking to himself . He agreed readily to come, “raked: the fire, put out the hens and the cat, put on his coat and came along with us back to Carey’s. The night was full of stars, but out to sea, we could see the storm clouds massing over Aran, and the wind was hard and keen in our faces…When we arrived, we found Paitsín Ó flannagáin and some others, ,,,Tonight was a really exciting one – story following story…
“On 15th August, Stiofán came to see me and told me the finest tale I have ever heard before or since, and I write these lines 25 years later. This was Conal Gulban. It was not only an excellant version. But Stiofán showed himself as a really first-rate artist – a magnificent story in inimitable style. It took over two hours to tell and he spoke very fast.”
“I am privileged in knowing these Clare people, there last Irish speakers of Corca Morua. In a few years, they will be gone and the old world will have gone with them.”
Stiofán moved down to a relative’s in 1937 and died in 1944.
“Do chaitheas oíche fhada ina fhochair ag ceartú roinnt bheag nithe ina chuid seanchais agus scéalta…Is dóigh liom gur samhlaíodh dó ná casfaí lena chéile go brách sinn, gurb é an cúrsa deiridh é. Nuair d-éiríos chun imeachta agus chun slán a fhágaint aige, do bhéir sé barróg orm, agus d’fháisc sé lóimh dheas lena dhá láimh féin, do rith na deora faoina leicne agus do tháinig tocht ina scornaifg. Ní chúis náire dhom a admháil go rabhas féin ar an slí gcéanna. Do thuigeamair féin a chéile.
"I spent a long night together with him correcting a few things in his lore and stories (that an Duileárgach had written) I think he thought that we would not meet each other again., that this was the last time. )Delargy lived in Dublin.) When I got up to leave and tell him goodbye, he hugged me and pressed my right hand with his two hands, tears ran on his cheeks and he couldn’t speak. I am not ashamed to say that I was in the same way…”
An fear fein
All from Leabhar Stiofan Ui Ealaoire, D. O hOgain, editor, Comhairle Bhealoideas Eireann, 1981
Often today, people look at Irish as just a bunch or words. If the words are gone, well, it’s just language, and other things are much more important.
But that’s the thing: it was not just words. It was a world, a culture, and we are much the worse for losing it and moving so far into another world – world of screens, world of inattention, world of ignorance -- that we don’t know what we have lost.
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