Bog Irish

 

Most recent Irish historiography has taken the loss of the Irish language in large areas of Ireland during the 19th century too much for granted, and has failed to examine the circumstances of this loss and its implications for our understanding of modern Irish society. One gets the impression, in reading many contemporary general works on Irish history, that most Irishmen and women somehow simply woke up on some unspecified morning between the Flight of the Earls in 1609 and the onset of the 18th century and decided to speak English instead of Irish--except, of course, for the Aran Islanders – and the death of the Irish language is commonly treated in the historiography as a minor and not very relevant occurrence, with few important implications for the development of Irish society, as though it were a mere change of wardrobe. The Great Famine is one of the few real landmarks in this vague landscape, in that it killed off the remnant Irish-speaking hordes in the West. Writings on pre-famine society should thus consequently include a perfunctory discussion of the existence of the Irish language, but such a discussion is no longer relevant in works dealing with post-famine society.

 

              These standard views often associate Irish in post-17th-century Ireland specifically with the west of Ireland and with the fecund, sweaty, picturesque masses toiling there in a primitive Celtic half-light  in an ignorance born of simple isolation from the modern world. English and modernity together, these views assume, flowed westwards from the areas closest to Dublin and the Irish Sea, but hadn't yet reached the distant western bogs, when the famine gave those remote Gaelic realm their death blow. Language use, whether English or Irish, was thus a simple function of distance from England or from Dublin, and Irish survived simply as one aspect of a stagnant, unchanging, primitive society, like a slug under a rock in the middle of a bog destined to wither when exposed to light.

 

The truth is rather different.  Much of the older generation in flat and fertile north county Meath, 30 miles from Dublin, was still Irish-speaking in 1890. Many older people in northeastern county Louth, 45 miles from Dublin, were still Irish-speaking in the early 20th century. At the same time, very remote areas like southwestern Mayo, and even Clare island in Mayo, were already English-speaking in the mid-19th century. Irish did not disappear in some mysterious overnight vague fashion, nor was its 19th-century existence associated simply with distance from the Irish Channel. It did not survive due to simple isolation or poverty. The process of language loss is very closely related to the profound changes that occurred Irish society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and an understanding of this process has much to add to our understanding of the genesis of contemporary Irish society. 

(To be continued)