Irish: the Inside or Perhaps Outside Story

Donal O Ceilleachair, Cuil Ao, Cork, storyteller.

To most Irish people today, the Irish language is absolutely irrelevant; an irritation in school; a ghost in the garret; an embarrassment. It is not really a language at all--not like French, say--but a sort of jargon made up of odd bits of phrases and words and road signs and indecipherable names of state and semi-state bodies, all thrown together in a bowl. Irish is "heritage", of course, which we used to think we should care about, but didn't really, and certainly don't now, because heritage is irrelevant and dead.

A hundred years ago, most people over the age of, say, forty or fifty, in most of the west and a large part of the south, had grown up speaking Irish. The idea that Irish would someday soon be gone from those places must have seemed very strange. 

Two hundred years ago, almost everyone outside Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow, south Meath, parts of Laois and Offaly, north Tipperary, and far south Wexford spoke Irish as their only language--not counting, of course,  the descendants of 17th century and later English and Scots settlers, and social climbers. The idea that Ireland would one day an English-speaking nation would have seemed absolutely bizarre.

Does it matter? Things change. A person can ask for a loaf a bread in English just as well as Irish, or tell someone that they are beautiful.

But Irish was different--a voice from ancient Europe, a voice from outside the empire and from beyond the town walls. There's a very specific sensibility that was associated with the language--clear-eyed, precise and realistic, but also desperately alive to and in love with this passing world and all its creatures and colours and textures. It is (was?) language as poetry. (And what is poetry but a means to keep waking us from everyday slumber to this splendid terrible world?)  Irish was a complex breathtaking music, voice of at least 2500 years of human experience in the island of Ireland (and in the Highlands of Scotland, because the Highlanders were really just Irish with boats?).  In it, the deer still bell, tree leaves stir in the wind, the river sings.  Irish literature is the oldest in Europe outside of Greek and Latin, and so vast that one could take a lifetime to come to know it.

So what happened?

What we consider Europe was created by the Roman Empire, and by the Roman Catholic church that succeeded it; by the holy Roman Empire, the Normans, and all the rest. Most of the villages of France grew out of Roman estates. None of the native languages of France, Spain, Italy and Belgium, etc. survived. Society was completely remade over the centuries of Empire. In the medieval period, official Latin culture dominated, and though most villagers did not share the official version, they also did not have opportunity to write down their own literature, and their social forms could only go so far before the Church or the authorities called them to heel.  Over the centuries, people's lives were molded more and more into one likeness.

(Samuel Palmer, the great English visionary artist)

Ireland was never conquered by the Romans. The Vikings made a mess later, but they were eventually contained within the Dublin area. The Normans and English blew through the place and almost burned the whole house down, but by the early 16th century, they too were contained within a few areas. If it hadn't been for the expansion of the extremely efficient, manic and violent Tudor state, Ireland would probably eventually have worked itself back toward balance again.

But too many Englishmen had their eyes on Heaven or on profit or on military glory, and the Irish were conveniently accessible. After the wars of conquest ended in 1607 with the final defeat of the Northern kings, Ireland was remade into a profitable rationally-planned economy and society run by crowds of very serious people from over the water wielding complete power. The grandchildren of the men who had fought with the English against the Northern kings etc., rose up in 1641, and the rest of the century was bloody havoc that ended with the English in even more complete charge.

Lord Burghley

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, many Irish communities underwent a complete break with what had gone before. The interests of the new generally, but not always, English landlords demanded that they rearrange their properties in certain ways in order to 'improve' them and to make them profitable. Yet these were not simply properties; they were age-old communities as well. 

When the landlord broke up the 'baile', the hamlet from which kin-groups cooperatively farmed the surrounding open fields; when he turned it into a few large farms rented to whoever could squeeze the largest profit from the land; when he left the rest of the people to make their way however they could, usually as half-starved agricultural labourers; when the landlord did these things, he cut the feet from under Eire. The refugees from these thousands of broken communities were forced to find places for themselves in the new English-speaking system and landscape based on the agricultural estates. The old disappeared from around them. They found themselves strangers in their own land.

Irish was now a language without a foundation, language of a culture that had lost its native ground; a broken culture. 

Change came first in the fertile densely-colonized lands generally in the east. Landlords and their tenants--the big farmers who were deeply integrated into the colonial economy, producing meat, milk and butter, and to some extent, linen, and who, in the interests of respectability and social mobility, were shifting to English--they needed few labourers. Everyone else had to immigrate, mostly to America. 

There was then a huge wave of immigration following the Famine, as more and more people could not get access to land and to food. The Famine itself killed mostly Irish-speaking people who were now also the poor who depended completely on the potato. It was a devastating traumatic five-year-long hell that beside killing a lot of people, apparently destroyed many Irish communities' belief in the old way. The only answer that many of them saw was to leap onto the back of the colonial economy cart and fight like hell to make a place for themselves there. The alternative was terrible poverty, immigration or death. 

So the social structure that resulted in many areas was an unbalanced neurotic one; communities of people utterly focused on getting ahead and on respectability within the English colonial world; communities of survivors and of people who had watched their neighbors go under. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Irish was still the first language of most people over, say, forty, in the west and much of the south. The 1880s seem to have marked the turning point, as agricultural downturns sent a first wave of emigrants from poorer Irish-speaking places in the west to America. The growing confidence and local power of the 'big farmer' group almost everywhere in Ireland meant that their ways dominated, and their concern with respectability and profit left no room for old-fashioned things like Irish. The Church wanted as little to do with this language of the backward and the poor as it could. Children were required to go to school where English was the only language allowed and where they'd be beaten for speaking Irish. Newspapers were in English. Politics was in English. To survive, a person needed English.

The impetus for the counter-cultural movement of cultural renewal beginning in, say, the late 1890s came from Douglas Hyde and others who saw the language and its culture as the voice of humanity in Ireland, and as an antidote to the repressed, drab, empty life of modern Irish communities. Whether this vision might have changed Ireland for the better will never be known. It's easier to learn to shoot a gun and to shout slogans than it is to learn a culture, and physical force men soon gained the ascendancy. Though the state they created gave lip-service to Irish, very little changed. It was the big farmers and shopkeepers and priests and civil servants who ran things, and they still saw no use at all for this patois of the poor and remote.   

Actually, things did change in a few places, mostly in the far west of the Dingle peninsula, in Gweedore/Gorthahork and in parts of Conamara where there were large populations who didn't know much English. There, the provision of some official services in Irish and the limited economic benefits that followed being an Irish-speaking community, stabilized the linguistic situation.

Stiofain O hEalaoire, west Clare (Doolin) storyteller


In other places--west Cork, Rosses (Donegal), etc., etc., the processes of language shift to English that had already begun, continued. Old people spoke Irish to each other, and there were Irish road signs about the place, but within the houses and at meetings and so on, the language of commerce dominated. When the old people died, so did Irish. 

Today only a few very small communities still use Irish as their normal unmarked language; Tory Island and Magherroarty/Meenaclady/maybe Bealtaine and odd other bits of Gortahork and Gweedore in northwest Donegal; Inisheer Island and Screeb, Rosaveal, maybe Carraroe, in Conamara; plus the westernmost few houses in Corca Dhuibhne (Dingle Peninsula). (As regards Arainn: Inis Meain is apparently losing population quickly and brings in young mostly non-Irish-speaking families. Parts of "rural" Inis Mor may still be Irish-speaking.)

There are other areas where there are networks of families who speak Irish in the house and to each other: An Rinn (Waterford); Cuil Ao (West Cork), and in parts of the Conamara and northwest Donegal (maybe Teelin in the southwest?) and west Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltachts.

On the other hand, there may be almost no native speakers left in the Ivreagh (Kerry) peninsula: Ballingeary, Ballyvourney, Clondrohid, Killnamartra (west Cork); Cape Clear (Cork); Seana-Phobal (Waterford); East Galway; most of north Conamara;  the contiguous Corr na Mona and Tourmakeady area; southwest Donegal; Fanad and Rosguil, (north Donegal.) In fact, there is hardly anyone who can speak Irish left anywhere in Mayo except the Kilgalligan peninsula and the bottom of the Mullet peninsula, but they usually do not speak it. Central Donegal is going fast.

There are some Irish speakers in the North, most of whose parents learned it, if they did not learn it themselves. There are Irish-speaking networks in Belfast and Derry city. There are two or three rural areas that are making a strong effort to re-establish Irish as an ordinary spoken language: Creggan etc. in far south Armagh; Carntogher, a small area in mid county Derry; part of Tyrone south of the Sperrins. (These are all areas in which Irish was still spoken as a native language by some old people in the first half of the 20th century.)

Gweedore, 19th century

The official Gaeltacht (map above) is much bigger than the actual area where Irish is a normal language, of course, and until the 1970s, northwest and also central Donegal (Fintown, at any rate and na Cruacha); 6 parishes in the west of the Dingle peninsula; Conamara west of Spiddle to Carna; Arainn; and the Kilgalligan peninsula (Mayo) were solidly Irish-speaking in reality. But another linguistic shift happened in the 1970s, particularly in Conamara, Dingle and Gweedore etc., when government-subsidized foreign factories were established in order to stop the flow of emigration that was draining the poor Gaeltacht regions. Factory management was English-speaking, and the whole factory environment was. This new life was an English-speaking one, and encouraged a shift to English that television and closer integration into national life were already causing.

Momentary prosperity did, thus, keep Gaeltacht people at home, but it also very often taught them that they could finally stop being second-class citizens, if they started speaking English. Or if they were cursed until death with Irish, then their children might escape the curse, if they were raised in English instead of in Irish. 

Free secondary education and growing sophistication provided the basis for another development--the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, which galvanized young Irish speakers in Conamara and the west of the Dingle peninsula to demand that the government stop treating them as zoo exhibits for tourists, and give them some measure of local government. Radio na Gaeltachta began as a pirate radio station. 

These actions turned out to be a last gasp of the Irish-communities. The government reacted to their demands in a characteristic way,  accepting the demands in principle, and then, after years of study and committees, only offering a few small crumbs. Almost nothing changed as a result, except that more and more parents had begun speaking English to their children in the meantime. 

(Irish governments have all along been very good at producing great insightful detailed plans every fifteen years or so of how to support current Irish-speaking communities. Then the plans are forgotten and never implemented. When there are only two native Irish-speakers left in Ireland, there will doubtless be another detailed weighty government plan on how to save the language.)

Other things have happened. Increasing prosperity in the 1990s and first years of the new century were the foundation for a renewal of interest in the language; a renewal that built on the activities of a very creative small group of slightly earlier poets, musicians and writers in Irish whose work expressed a vital exhilarating "Irishness" that had nothing to do with the official repressed version. 

As a result, more parents demanded an opportunity for their children to learn and use the language in primary schools whose working language was Irish. (Private primary schools are rare in Ireland, so the demand involved pressuring the unwilling government.) These Gaelscoileanna are now common, and though a percent of the parents are mainly interested in the good student/teacher ratios in Gaelscoileanna, in the individual attention their children receive there and in the general advantages of early bilingualism, some do want their children to learn and use Irish.

TG4, the Irish language television, does broadcast many programs in Irish and often plays a very creative role in the media. Radio na Gaeltachta continues. Irish is visible and audible in some parts of the country in ways that it was not twenty years ago--remarkably so. Yet though the revival is broad, it is not very deep. There are probably not that many people who have learned Irish well and actually use it in the home or as their main language. 

A hundred years ago, over 50% of the people in many parts of the west and south spoke Irish. Today 2% of the population using Irish daily in a place is a triumph. (See Small Area figures for recent censuses.) And as experiences in Wales and Brittany show, children can use a language all day long in school, yet never learn it effectively or integrate it into themselves. Too often, Irish is still a bit of a thing used so that other people won't understand, or for unimportant things. It is an addendum on Anglo life.

So is there hope?

It's difficult to imagine Irish language continuing when there are no communities that use it, and when the people who know it speak English in most of the domains of their life; when it does not express values or meanings other than those that mainstream Anglo life already enunciates more fully and attractively--when there is no need for it. 

After all, a language is part of a culture and expresses that culture. If the culture disappears, the language survives only on life support, at the mercy of fashion and of this year's budget.

And yet, and yet....

Elena, a Rion,                                                           Elena, Queen,

tabhair duinn do laimhin tais                                    give us your soft hand,

abair nach lomchaite leat                                          tell us our frenetic poems   

ar vearsai fraoch.                                                      aren't worm or moth-eaten.

Abair nach ideal aoldaite                                          Say it's not some clapped-out ideal                                     

do bheal a phogadh,                                                  For us to want to kiss your mouth,   

lui led thaobh.                                                           lie down beside you.

   poem by Michael Davitt, translation by Paul Muldoon.