THE HISTORY OF IRISH AS A SPOKEN LANGUAGE
We must now follow the fortunes of the Irish language as a spoken
tongue, "questo linguaggio difficile e davvero stupendo," as Ascoli
calls it,[1] which after imposing itself upon both Dane and Norman,
was brought face to face as early as the fourteenth century with its
great competitor English, before which, despite its early victory in
the contest, it has at last nearly but not quite gone down, after an
unremitting struggle of nearly five centuries.
As early as the year 1360, the English appear to have taken the alarm
at the inroads which the Irish language--at that time a much more
highly-cultured form of speech than their own--had made upon the
colonists, and we find King Edward issuing orders to the Sheriff of the
Cross and Seneschal of the Liberty of Kilkenny in these terms[2]--
"As many of the English nation in the Marches and elsewhere have
again become like Irishmen, and refuse to obey our laws and customs,
and hold parliaments after the Irish fashion, and learn to speak the
Irish tongue, and send their children among the Irish to be nursed and
taught the Irish tongue, so that the people of English race have for
the greater part become Irish; now we order (1) that no Englishman of
any state or condition shall ... [under forfeiture of life, limbs, and
everything else] follow these Irish customs, laws, and parliaments;
(2) that any one of English race shall forfeit English liberty, if
after the next feast of St. John the Baptist he shall speak Irish with
other Englishmen and meantime _every Englishman must learn English_
and must not have his children at nurse amongst the Irish."
In 1367, the last year of the administration of the Duke of Clarence,
third son of Edward III, a parliament held at Kilkenny passed the
famous act that inter-marriage with the Irish should be punished as
high treason, and that any man of English race using the Irish language
should forfeit all his land and tenements to the Crown, and forbidding
also the entertainment of bards, ministrels, and rhymers.
These first attacks upon the language cannot possibly have produced
much effect, for we find the English power within a hundred years after
their passing, reduced to the lowest point, and there was scarcely
an English or Norman noble in Ireland who had not adopted an Irish
name, Irish speech, and Irish manners. The De Bourgo had became Mac
William, and minor branches of the same stem had become Mac Philpins,
Mac Gibbons, and Mac Raymonds; the Birminghams had became Mac Feóiris,
the Stauntons Mac Aveeleys, the Nangles Mac Costellos, the Prendergasts
Mac Maurices, the De Courcys Mac Patricks, the Bissetts of Antrim Mac
Keons, etc.
A hundred years after the Statute of Kilkenny, the English, driven back
into the Pale, which then consisted of less than four counties, passed
a law in 1465, enjoining all men of Irish names within the Pale to
take an English name, "of one towne as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne,
Corke, Kinsale; or colour as White, Black, Brown; or art or science as
Cooke, Butler," and he and his issue were ordered to use these names
or forfeit all their goods. This, however, the parliament was unable
to carry through, none of the great Irish names within or alongside
the Pale, Mac Murroughs, O'Tooles, O'Byrnes, O'Mores, O'Ryans, O'Conor
Falys, O'Kellys, etc., seem to have been in the least influenced by it.
Next an attempt was made to maintain English in at least the seaports
and borough towns, for we find an enactment of the year 1492-93 amongst
the Archives of the Urbs Intacta, commanding that in Waterford, "no
manner of man, freeman or foreign, of the city or suburb's dwellers,
shall emplead nor defend in Irish tongue against any man in the court,
but all they that any matters shall have in court to be administered,
shall have a man that can speak English to declare his matter, except
one party be of the country [_i.e._, of Irish race] then every such
dweller shall be at liberty to speak Irish."[3] Galway followed suit
in 1520, and enacted that "no Irish judge or lawyer shall plead in no
man's cause nor matter within this our court, for it agreeth not with
the king's laws."[4]
How far these petty attempts were successful may be judged from the
fact that Captain Ap Harry, a Welsh officer, describing in October,
1535, Lord Butler's march for the recovery of Dungarvan Castle, says,
"We were met by his lordship's brother-in-law, Gerald Mac Shane,
(Fitzgerald) Lord of the Decies, who, though a very strong man in his
country, could speak never a word of English, but made the troops good
cheer after the gentilest fashion that could be. All this journey from
Dungarvan forth there is none alive that can remember that English
man of war was ever in these parts." Still more striking is the
statement that in the Dublin parliament of 1541, all the peers except
Mac Gillapatric were of Norman or English descent, and yet not one
except the Earl of Ormond could understand English.[5] A letter to
the English Privy Council, written in 1569, by Dominicke Linche, of
Galway, confirms this. "Even they of the best houses," he writes, "the
brothers of the Erle of Clanrickarde, yea and one of his uncles, and
he a bysshop, can neither speak nor understand in manner any thinge of
their Prince's language, which language by the old Statutes of Galway,
every man ought to learn and must speak before he can be admitted to
any office within the Corporation."[6]
Nor had the extirpating policy succeeded even in the Pale, for we read
in the State Papers that in the county of Kildare in 1534, "there
is not one husbandman in effect that speaketh English nor useth any
English sort nor manner, and their gentlemen be after the same sort."[7]
The great Earl of Kildare had nearly as many volumes of Irish as he had
of English in his library. A catalogue of his books was drawn up in
1518. Amongst the Irish manuscripts were St. Berachán's book,[8] the
Speech of Oyncheaghis (?) Cuchuland's Acts, the History of Clone Lyre,
etc. Murchadh O'Brien, king of Thomond, promised Henry VIII. as early
as 1547, when in London, that he and his heirs should use the English
habit and manner, and to their knowledge the English language, and to
their power bring up their children in the same.[9] And indeed that
family seems to have been always the greatest prop of the English power
in the South of Ireland. Thomas Moore, settling in Ireland in 1575, got
his lands in King's County on the condition that his sons and servants
"should use for the most the English tongue, habit, and government,"
and make no appeals to the Brehon law. Three years after this, in 1578,
we find Lord Chancellor Gerard affirming that all the English, and the
most part with delight, _even in Dublin_ speak Irish, and greatly are
spotted in manners, habit, and conditions with Irish stains.[10]
In the Vatican Library my friend Father Hogan found a MS. of about the
year 1580 with a memorandum concerning certain Franciscan friars, three
of whom spoke Irish only, including the Provincial who _preached all
over Ireland_, five more knew Irish better than English, while five
are entered as knowing English better than Irish, none are entered as
knowing English only.
In 1585 the Irish chieftains of Hy Many, the O'Kellys country, agreed
that "Teige mac William O'Kelly and Conor Oge O'Kelly shall henceforth
behave themselves like good subjects and shall bring up their children
after the English fashions and in the use of the English tongue."[11]
Of course such enforced promises had no effect. We find in the State
Papers that at St. Douay in 1600 were sixty young gentlemen, eldest
sons of the principal gentlemen of the Pale, and that they all spoke
Irish.[12]
In 1608 it was found that the superior of the Irish Jesuits, apparently
a Pales-man, Father Christopher Holywood of Artane, near Dublin, could
speak no Irish, and a document was sent at once to the General of the
Jesuits, pointing out how this destroyed his usefulness in the Irish
mission. Care was taken that the same mistake should not be made in
appointing his successor, Robert Nugent.[13]
In 1609 we find Richard Conway, a Jesuit, writing that the English in
Ireland took care that all [their own] children are taught English and
chastise them if they speak their own native tongue[14] (_sic_). Five
or six years later Father Stephen White writes, "Scarcely one in a
thousand of the old Irish know even three words of any tongue except
Irish, the modern Irish learn to speak Irish and English."[15]
Nevertheless the cause of the English language cannot have much
progressed during the next fifty years, for we find in 1657 a petition
presented to the Municipal Council of Dublin to the effect that
"whereas by the laws all persons ought to speak and use the English
tongue and habit,--contrary whereunto and in open contempt thereof,
there is Irish commonly and usually spoken and the Irish habit worn not
only in the streets and by such as live in the country and come to this
city on market days, but also by and in several families in this city,
to the scandalising of the inhabitants and magistrates of this city.
And whereas there is much of swearing and cursing used and practised
(as in the English tongue too much, so also in the Irish tongue)," etc.
Irish, indeed, seems to have been the commonest language in Dublin at
this time. James Howel in a letter written August 9, in 1630, says:
"Some curious in the comparisons of tongues, say Irish is a dialect of
the ancient British, and the learnedest of that nation in a private
discourse I happened to have with him seemed to incline to this
opinion, but I can assure your Lordship I found a great multitude of
their radical words the same with the Welsh, both for sense and sound.
The tone also of both nations is consonant, for when I first walked up
and down the Dublin markets methought I was in Wales when I listened
to their speech. I found the Irish tone a little more querulous and
whining than the British, which I conjecture proceeded from their
often being subjugated by the English."
During the Cromwellian wars most of the members of the Confederation
of Kilkenny who took the side of the Nuncio Rinuccini knew little if
anything of the English language, "qui," says Rinuccini in his MSS.,
"boni publici zelo flagrarent, plerique linguam quidem Ibernicam
quia vernaculam, bene, sed Anglicam male vel nullo modo callerent."
When an order was issued by the Supreme Council for the new oath of
association to be translated from English into Irish by each bishop
for his diocese, it was found upon inquiry that some of the bishops
did not understand a word of English. The Nuncio appears to have been
very much impressed by the sweetness of the Irish language, but he
had not leisure to devote himself to the study of it. Some of the
Italian members of his household, however, became complete masters of
it. Numbers of the poor people who had been plundered by the soldiery
came to complain to him of their losses, and he notes in his diary
that their wail and lamentation in Irish was far more plaintive and
expressive than any music of the great masters which he had ever heard
among the more favoured nations of the Continent.[16]
Irish was at this time the usual "vehicle of business and of
negociation with the natives, even amongst the learned," as we see in
Carte's life of the Duke of Ormond, who was born in England in 1607 and
educated as a Protestant by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
"The Duke," says Carte, "when about twenty or twenty-four years of age
learned the Irish language by conversing with such Irish gentlemen as
spoke it in London; he understood it perfectly well and could express
himself well enough in familiar conversation, but considered himself
not so well qualified as to discourse about serious matters; he
afterwards on many occasions found himself at a great loss, as he had
to negociate business of national importance with gentlemen who were
far less intelligent in the English language than he was in the Irish.
On such occasions he would use the same methods which he took with
the titular bishop of Clogher, the great favourite of Owen O'Neil,
and successor to that general in the command of the Ulster forces.
This bishop he brought over to the king's interest, and gained his
entire confidence by a conversation carried on between both parties in
private. The Duke always spoke in English and the bishop in Irish, as
neither understood the language of the other so as to venture upon
communicating his sentiments in it with any degree of accuracy or
precision."[17]
The Irish themselves never neglected literature, and whenever their
political star was in the ascendant the fortunes of their bards and
learned men rose with it. Thus we find Rory O'More, the close friend
of Owen Roe O'Neill, and the chief of the O'Mores of Leix, engaged
in 1642 in an attempt to re-establish Irish schools and learning,
and writing on the 20th of September, 1642, to Father Hugh de Bourgo
at Brussels, "If we may, before Flan Mac Egan dies, we will see an
Irish school opened, and therefore would wish heartily that these
learned and religious fathers in Louvain would come over in haste with
their monuments (?) and an Irish and Latin press." The Mac Egan here
alluded to was the eminent Brehon and Irish antiquarian who lived
at Bally-mac-Egan in the county Tipperary in Lower Ormond, whose
imprimatur was considered so valuable that the Four Masters procured
for their work his written approbation.[18] Seven years after this
letter, the town of Wexford, from which O'More wrote in the interests
of humanity and learning, sank in fire and ruin and its inhabitants
both men and women were put to the sword in one universal massacre.
There were in the year 1650, forty-seven Jesuit priests in Ireland,
according to a memorandum given me by Father Hogan, S.J., of these
two--one from Meath the other from Kerry--spoke Irish only: and four
from Dublin, all of course of English extraction, spoke English only,
while the remaining forty-one spoke both languages. Seven of these
bi-linguists were from Dublin and ten from Meath.
These instances show that Irish was the usual spoken language of the
country, even in Dublin, but there are indications that the ardour
with which it had been cultivated and the respect with which its
professors had been regarded was dying out. Even as early as 1627 we
find one Connla Mac Echagan of West Meath, translating the "Annals of
Clonmacnois" into English,[19] and in his dedication to his friend and
kinsman Torlogh Mac Cochlan, lord of Delvin, he says that formerly many
septs lived in Ireland whose profession it was to chronicle and keep
in memory the state of the kingdom, but, he adds, "now as they cannot
enjoy that respect and gain by their profession, as heretofore they
and their ancestors received, they set nought by the said knowledge,
neglect their books, and choose rather to put their children to
learn English than their own native language, insomuch that some of
them suffer tailors to cut the leaves of the said books (which their
ancestors held in great account) and sew them in long pieces to make
their measures of, [so] that the posterities are like to fall into more
ignorance of many things which happened before their time."
A little later, in 1639, Father Stapleton, in his "Doctrina
Christiana," published in Irish and Latin--the first Irish book ever
printed in Roman characters--throws the blame for the neglect of Irish
literature first upon the Irish antiquarians "who have placed it
under difficulties and hard words,[20] writing it in mysterious ways,
and in dark difficult language," and secondly upon the upper classes
"who bring their native natural language (which is powerful, perfect,
honourable, learned, and sharply-exact in itself) into contempt and
disrespect, and spend their time cultivating and learning other foreign
tongues."[21]
Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh, in his book printed at Louvain in
1632, says that Irish is the language of the whole of Hibernia, but
there were some differences of pronunciation in the various provinces,
and between the learned and the common people, the universal opinion
being that the people of Connacht spoke it best, they having both power
of expression and propriety of phrase, while the men of Munster had the
power of expression without the propriety, and the people of Ulster the
propriety without the power of expression. The people of Leinster were
considered deficient in both.[22]
O'Molloy in his "Lochrann na gCreidmheach," published in 1675, says
that "no language is well understood by the common people of the island
except Irish alone."[23] The students of the Irish College at Rome were
at this time bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish book was to be
read in the refectory during dinner and supper,[24] and all candidates
for the priesthood were directed by the Synod of Tuam, in 1660, to
learn to read and write Irish well.
Sir William Petty, writing in 1672, has an interesting passage on the
people of Wexford and of Fingal: "The language of Ireland is like that
of the North of Scotland, in many things like the Welsh and Manques,
but in Ireland the Fingallians" [the dwellers along the coast some
miles north of Dublin] "speak neither English, Irish, nor Welsh, and
the people about Wexford, though they speak in a language differing
from English, Welsh, and Irish, yet it is not the same with that of
the Fingallians near Dublin. Both these sorts of people are honest and
laborious members of the kingdom." Petty's strictures upon the Irish
language, of which he was utterly ignorant, and which he ludicrously
asserts "to have few words," need not here be noticed. He appears to
show, however, that the Irish had already begun to borrow some words
from English, and expressed many of the "names of artificial things"
in "the language of their conquerors by altering the termination and
language only."
* * * * *
It need hardly be said that once the English Government got the upper
hand in the seventeenth century, and placed bishops and clergy of
its own in the sees and dioceses throughout Ireland, they made it
a kind of understood bargain with their nominees that they should
have no dealings and make no terms with the national Irish language.
Bedell, who was an Englishman and had been created an Irish bishop,
neglected this unwritten compact far enough to learn Irish himself and
to translate, with the help of a couple of Irishmen, the Bible into
Irish, and he also circulated a catechism in English and Irish amongst
the natives. He reaped his reward in the undying gratitude of the
Irish and the equally bitter animosity of his own colleagues. Ussher,
then primate, in answer to a pathetic letter of Bedell's asking what
were the charges against him, said in his reply, "the course which
you took with the Papists was generally cried out against, neither do
I remember in all my life that anything was done here by any of us,
at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense, or by
which the adversaries were more confirmed in their superstitions and
idolatry, whereas I wish you had advised with your brethren before
you would aventure to pull down that which they have been so long a
building,"[25] meaning the discrediting and destruction of the Irish
language. The Irish, however, did not forget the efforts Bedell had
made in behalf of their tongue, for, having taken him prisoner in the
war of 1648, they treated him with every courtesy in their power, and
when he died their troops fired a volley over his grave, crying out,
_Requiescat ultimus Anglorum_, while a priest who was present was heard
to exclaim with fervour, "_Sit anima mea cum Bedelo_."
Indeed, the attitude adopted by the Government and the bishops who were
its loyal henchmen, placed the defenders of the Established Church in a
very awkward and embarrassing position. They wanted to make Protestants
of the people, but they could not talk to them nor preach to them. The
only possible course for the bishops to pursue, supposing them to have
been in earnest, and to have been ecclesiastics and not Government
place-men, would have been to appoint Irish-speaking clergy under them,
a thing which with scarcely an exception they utterly and obstinately
refused to do. So that for a hundred and fifty years the native
inhabitants of Ireland were obliged to pay a tenth of their produce to
a foreign clergy whom they could not understand and who never troubled
themselves to understand them. How gentlemen and scholars like Ussher
could take up the position they did, is marvellous. He declares with
one breath that "the religion of the Papists is superstitious and
idolatrous, their faith and doctrines erroneous and heretical, their
church in respect of both apostatical, to give them therefore a
toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion
and profess their faith and doctrine is a grievous sin,"[26] and with
the next breath he tells Bedell when he circulated books in the Irish
language meant to convert these same Papists, that nothing was ever
done "at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense."
This can only be accounted for, so far as I can see, by strong social
prejudice and race hatred. The desire to see the Irish and their
language crushed and _in extremis_ was stronger than the desire to make
Protestants of them, and this feeling continued for at least a hundred
and fifty years.[27] Even so late as the latter half of the eighteenth
century we find Dr. Woodward, Protestant bishop of Cloyne, stating that
"the difference of language is a very general (and where it obtains an
_insurmountable_) object to any intercourse with the people," on the
part of the Protestant clergy, but, he adds coolly, "if it be asked why
the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer that it should
be the object of Government rather to take measures to bring it into
entire disuse,"[28] one of the most cynical avowals I can remember on
the part of an Irish prelate as to what he was there for--not for the
spiritual good of the people who paid him tithes, but as the official
tool of the Government to crush their nationality.
Even Dean Swift, so clear-sighted a politician where Ireland's
financial wrongs were concerned, was in his policy towards the people's
language quite at one with men like Ussher and Woodward. Yet he knew
perfectly well that over three-fourths of the island he and his
_confrères_ were, so far as polemical arguments or conversion went,
powerless either for good or evil. He was, like the other Protestant
dignitaries of his day, a declared enemy of the Gaelic speech, which
he considered prevented "the Irish from being tamed," and at one time
he said he had a scheme by which their language "might _easily_ be
abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense
and less trouble." In another place he says, "it would be a noble
achievement to abolish the Irish language in the kingdom, so far at
least as to oblige all the natives to speak only English on every
occasion of business, in shops, markets, fairs, and other places of
dealing: yet I am wholly deceived if this might not be effectually
done in less than half an age and at a very trifling expense; for such
I look upon a tax to be, of only six thousand pounds to accomplish
so great a work." Whatever the Dean's plan was, he did not further
enlighten the public upon it, and the scheme appears to have died with
him.
The absorbing power of Irish nationality continued so strong all
through the seventeenth century that according to Prendergast many of
the children of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers who had settled in Ireland
could not speak a word of English.[29] It was the same all over the
country. In 1760 Irish was so universally spoken in the regiments of
the Irish Brigade that Dick Hennessy, Edmund Burke's cousin, learnt
it on foreign service.[30] Still later, during the Peninsular War, the
English officers in one of the Highland regiments attempted to abolish
the speaking of Gaelic at the mess table, but the Gaelic-speaking
officers completely outvoted them. Irish was spoken at this time by
_all the Milesian families of high rank_, except when they wished
to deliberately Anglicise themselves. Michael Kelly, the musical
composer and vocalist, who was born in Dublin in 1764, tells us in his
"Reminiscences:"[31]--
"I procured an audience of the Emperor of Germany at Schoenbrunn,
and found him with a half-dozen of general officers, among whom were
Generals O'Donnell and Kavanagh, my gallant countrymen. The latter
[he was from Borris in the Queen's County] said something to me in
Irish which I did not understand, consequently made him no answer. The
Emperor turned quickly on me and said, 'What! O'Kelly, don't you speak
the language of your own country?' I replied, 'Please, your Majesty,
none but the lower orders of the Irish people speak Irish.' The
Emperor laughed loudly. The impropriety of the remark made before two
Milesian Generals flashed into my mind in an instant, and I could have
bitten off my tongue. They luckily did not, or pretended not to hear."
It is from the middle of the eighteenth century onward that the Irish
language begins to die out. I doubt whether before that period any
Milesian family either in Ireland or the Scotch Highlands spoke English
in its own home or to its own children.
I have been at much pains to trace the decay of the language, and
the extent to which it has been spoken at various periods from that
day to this, and have consulted all the volumes of travellers and
statisticians upon which I have been able to lay hands. The result,
however, has not been very satisfactory so far as information goes. It
is simply amazing that most Irish and many English writers, who have
had to deal with Ireland from that day to this, have in their sketchy
and generally unreliable accounts of the island, its people, and its
social conditions, simply ignored the fact that any other language
than English was spoken in it at all. Perhaps the most trustworthy
accounts of the anomalous condition of the Irish-speaking race in their
own island are by foreigners who have recorded what they saw without
prejudice one way or the other, whereas one cannot help thinking that
English and Irish writers who, while going over the same ground, have
yet absolutely ignored[32] all allusion to the question of language,
did so because they found it a difficult and awkward question to deal
with.
The first authorities I know of who speak of Irish as dying out are
Dr. Samuel Madden, who, writing in 1738, states that not one in
twenty was ignorant of English, and Harris, who, in his description
of the county Down six years later, says that Irish prevailed only
amongst the poorer Catholics. Both these statements, however, are
preposterously exaggerated. In the very year that Madden wrote died
O'Neill of Clanaboy, one of the best-known and most influential men of
the county Down, and I found in the Belfast Museum the Irish manuscript
of the funeral oration pronounced over his body,[33] and any O'Neill
would probably at that period have turned in his grave had his funeral
discourse been spoken in English.
Madden's statement that in 1738 nineteenth-twentieths of the population
knew English is an incredible one and so utterly disproved by all
the other evidence, that it is astonishing that so sound and careful
a historian as Mr. Lecky should have accepted it as substantially
true. The evidence upon the other side is overwhelming. Forty-seven
years after Madden wrote this the German, Küttner, travelling through
Ireland, wrote a series of letters in which he distinctly says that
he found the common people either did not understand English at all or
understood it imperfectly.[34]
More than two generations had passed away after Madden's statement
that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, when we find
a Scotchman, Daniel Dewar, in a book entitled "Observations on the
Character, Customs and Superstitions of the Irish," writing thus in
1812:--
"The number of people who speak this language [Irish] is much greater
than is generally supposed. It is spoken throughout the province of
Connaught by all the lower orders, a great part of whom scarcely
understand any English, and some of those who do, understand it only
so as to conduct business. They are incapable of receiving moral
or religious instruction through its medium. The Irish is spoken
very generally through the other three provinces except amongst the
descendants of the Scotch in the north. It cannot be supposed that
calculations on this subject should be perfectly accurate, but it has
been concluded on good grounds that there are about two millions of
people in Ireland [out of about six millions] who are incapable of
understanding a continued discourse in English."
"I have always found," says Dewar, with much shrewdness, "that in
places where gentlemen hostile to this tongue assured me there was
not a word of it spoken, in these very districts I heard very little
English." He gives an amusing account of the various contradictory
objections that he found at that time urged against it.
"Some of the Anglo-Hibernians at that time (1808) strongly maintained
that this dialect is so barbarous that it cannot answer the purpose
of instruction, others that it would awaken the enthusiasm of the
_Wild Irish_ (as they call them) to make any attempt of this kind,
and consequently that it might prove dangerous to the Government, and
others, that they had no desire to be taught in Irish, and that it
would be useless to send teachers among them for this purpose."
Dutton, in his statistical history of the county Clare, published in
1808, says that almost all the gentlemen of that county spoke Irish
with the country people, but he adds, "scarcely one of their sons is
able to hold a conversation in this language. The children of almost
all those who cannot speak English are proud of being spoken to in
English and answering in the same, even although you may question them
in Irish. No Irish is spoken in any of the schools, and the peasants
are anxious to send their children to them to learn English." This
apparently does not refer to the hedge schools of the natives, but
to the charter and other English schools. "I think the diversity of
language and not the diversity of religion," writes Grattan, in 1811,
"constitutes a diversity of people. I should be very sorry that the
Irish language should be forgotten, but glad that the English language
should be generally understood."[35] This seems to have been also the
position taken up by his great rival Flood, who, when dying, left some
£50,000 to Trinity College for the cultivation of the Irish language.
Trinity College, however, never secured the money, and its so-called
Irish professorship, lately established, in the fifties, is only an
adjunct of its Divinity School, and paid and practically controlled,
not by the college, nor by people in the least interested in the
cultivation of Celtic literature, but by a society for the conversion
of Irish Papists through the medium of their own language.
In 1825, that is eighty-seven years after Madden's statement that
nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, the Commissioners
of Education in Ireland, in their first report laid before Parliament,
state "it has been estimated that the number of Irish who employ the
ancient language of the country exclusively is not less than 500,000,
and that at least a million more, although they have some understanding
of English and can employ it for the ordinary purposes of traffic,
make use of their [own] tongue on all other occasions as the natural
vehicle of their thoughts."
Lappenberg, a German who travelled in Ireland, reckoned that out of
a population of seven millions of inhabitants in 1835, four millions
spoke Irish "als ihre Muttersprache."
In 1842 Mac Comber's "Christian Remembrancer," discussing the
possibility of "converting" the Irish, says, "there are about 3,000,000
of Irish who still speak the Irish language and love it as their mother
tongue," and "that part of the Irish population which still speaks and
understands little else than Irish" is "nearly a third of the entire
population of Ireland."
A German, J. C. Kohl, who travelled extensively in Ireland in 1843,
shortly before the famine, says that in Clare the "children would run
by the side of the car crying, 'Burnocks[36] halfpenny,' burnocks being
an appellation applied to every stranger, and 'halfpenny' the only
English that the little rogues seemed to know." The neglect of the use
of Irish in the churches, which had even then set in, largely owing to
the teaching and wishes of O'Connell and his parliamentarians, struck
the German spectator as something astonishing, for apparently he could
not understand how an ancient nation with whose fame all Europe had
recently been filled owing to the exertions of O'Connell, should be
casting away its national birthright. "The great city of Cork," he
notes, "which lies in a district where much Irish is still spoken,
contains only two churches where sermons are preached in Irish. A short
time ago the Irish prisoners in Cork gaol petitioned the chaplain that
he would preach his Sunday sermon to them in Irish."
This acute foreign observer gives a very interesting account of the
state of the Irish language round Drogheda, a coast town some twenty
miles north of Dublin, which is worth quoting here since it accurately
describes the condition of affairs over the greater part of Leinster
sixty years ago, but which is now so absolutely extinct that few modern
Irishmen could believe it except on the most unimpeachable testimony.
"Drogheda," he writes, "is the last genuine Irish town, the suburbs
of Drogheda are genuine Irish suburbs ... and a great many people are
to be found in the neighbourhood who speak the old Irish tongue more
fluently and more frequently than the English." Kohl was hospitably
entertained by a priest in Drogheda--whose name unfortunately he
does not mention, but who appears to have been a man of superior
intelligence. His house had several harps in it, and he was delighted
by a young blind harper who first played Brian Boru's march for him,
and then an air called the Fairy Queen. At Kohl's request the priest
also sent for a reciter of Irish poetry, who asked what he would wish
recited. "If you were to repeat all you know," said the priest, "we
should have to listen all night, I suppose, and many other nights as
well."
"The man," says Kohl, "began to recite and went on uninterruptedly for
a quarter of an hour. His story, of which I, of course, understood not
a word, but which my friendly host afterwards explained to me, treated
of a Scottish enchantress named Aithura,[37] who forsaken by her
Irish lover, Cuchullin, laid a cruel spell upon his son Konnell which
compelled him by an irresistible enchantment, and entirely against his
will, to follow, to persecute, to fight, and at last to destroy his
father, Cuchullin. At the last moment, after stabbing his father to
the heart in spite of the efforts by which he struggled to resist the
horrible impulse of his destiny, his own heart broke in the struggle,
and he and his father died together, while the revengeful spirit of the
cruel enchantress hovered in exultation over the dying, repeating to
her treacherous lover the story of his inconstancy and her revenge."
"I was glad," adds Kohl, "of assuring myself by oral demonstration
of the actual existence of Ossianic poetry like this, at the present
day. The reciter was, as I have said, a simple and ignorant man, with
a good deal of the clown about him, and his recitation was as simple,
unadorned, and undeclamatory as himself. Sometimes, however, when
carried away by the interest of his story his manner and voice were
animated and moving. At such times he fixed his eyes on his hearers
as if demanding their sympathy and admiration for himself and his
poem. Sometimes I noticed that the metre completely changed, and I was
told that this was the case with all Irish poems, for that the metre
was always made to suit the subject.[38] I also heard that the most
beautiful part of this ballad was the dialogue of father and son upon
the battlefield, but that a prose translation would give me no idea at
all of its beauty."
The priest told him that "Ossianic poetry was very abundant in the
neighbourhood of Drogheda." "This," he says, "I had heard before, and
from all I heard in Ireland I am much inclined to believe--which indeed
many have also conjectured--that Macpherson obtained the materials for
his version of Ossian's poems from popular tradition and ballads of the
North of Ireland. The whole Irish nation both in the south and north,
is certainly much more imbued with the spirit of this poetry and still
possesses many more traces of it than the Scottish people, whether of
the Highlands or Lowlands."[39]
Another very acute German traveller, Rodenberg, describes the people of
Kerry as always speaking Irish among themselves in 1860, while their
English was so bad that he could hardly understand it. He notices,
however, that several words of corrupted English were interwoven with
their Irish conversation, which so disgusted him that he remarks,
"everything about these people is patchwork, their clothing, their
dwellings, their language."[40] He reports at full length a most
interesting conversation which he had with a priest near Limerick, who
assured him that they had to pull down in order to build up, that is,
pull down the edifice of the Irish language in which the people were
denied education in order to build up a new education in the English
language. "Nor is it," said the priest, "the first time that the
Irishman has had to turn his hand against his most sacred things. Red
Hugh of Donegal destroyed the house of his forefathers that the enemy
might not make of it a fortress against his own people, but he wept
while he destroyed it."[41]
In the Galway fish market Rodenberg could not hear a single word of
English spoken. The population of Connacht was at this time a little
unnder a million, and the census of 1861 showed that about one-tenth of
the whole population were ignorant of English. The population of the
city of Galway in this year was 23,787, of whom 3,511 were ignorant of
English.
According to the census of 1891 something over three-quarters of a
million people in Ireland were bi-linguists, and 66,140 could speak
Irish only, thus showing that in thirty years Irish was killed off so
rapidly _that the whole Island contained fewer speakers in 1891 than
the small province of Connacht alone did thirty years before_.
This extinguishing of the Irish language has not been the result of a
natural process of decay, but has been chiefly caused by the definite
policy of the Board of "National Education," as it is called, backed
by the expenditure every year of many hundreds of thousands of pounds.
This Board, evidently actuated by a false sense of Imperialism, and
by an overmastering desire to centralise, and being itself appointed
by Government chiefly from a class of Irishmen who have been steadily
hostile to the natives, and being perfectly ignorant of the language
and literature of the Irish, have pursued from the first with unvarying
pertinacity the great aim of utterly exterminating this fine Aryan
language.
The amount of horrible suffering entailed by this policy, and the
amount of hopeless ignorance stereotyped in hundreds of thousands
of children, and the ruination of the life-prospects of hundreds of
thousands more, by insisting upon their growing up unable to read or
write, sooner than teach them to read and write the only language they
knew, has counted for nothing with the Board of National Education,
compared with their great object of the extermination of the Irish
language, and the attainment of one Anglified uniformity. In vain have
their own inspectors time after time testified to the ill results
of denying the Irish-speakers education in their own language, in
vain have disinterested visitors opened wide eyes of astonishment at
schoolmasters who knew no Irish being appointed to teach pupils[42] who
know no English. In vain have the schoolmasters themselves petitioned
to be allowed to change the system, in vain did Sir Patrick Keenan
(afterwards himself Chief Commissioner of National Education) address
the Board saying, "the shrewdest people in the world are those who are
bi-lingual, borderers have always been remarkable in this respect, but
_the most stupid children I have ever met with_ are those who were
learning English while endeavouring to forget Irish. The real policy of
the educationist would in my opinion be to teach Irish grammatically
and soundly to the Irish-speaking people, _and then_ to teach them
English through the medium of their native language."[43] All in vain!
Against the steady, unwavering, unrelenting determination to stamp out
the Irish language which has been paramount in the Board ever since the
days of Archbishop Whately, every representation passed unheeded, and
it would appear that in another generation the Board--at the cost of
unparalleled suffering--will have attained its object.
This is not the place to discuss the bearings of this question still
less to drag in the names of individuals, but the reader who has
followed the history of Irish literature to this will be perhaps
anxious to have it continued up to date, and so I may as well here
place on record what I and many others have seen with our own eyes over
and over again.
An Irish-speaking family, endowed with all the usual intelligence of
the Irish-speaking population, with a gift for song, poetry, Ossianic
lays, traditional history, and story, send their children to school.
A rational education, such as any self-governing country in Europe
would give them, would teach them to read and write the language that
they spoke, and that their fathers had read and spoken for fifteen
hundred years before them. The exigencies of life in the United Kingdom
would then make it necessary to teach them a second language--English.
The basis of knowledge upon which they started, and which they had
acquired as naturally as the breath of life, would in any fair system
of education be kept as a basis, and their education would be built up
upon it. They would be taught to _read_ the Ossianics lays which they
knew by heart before, they would be given books containing more of the
same sort, they would be taught to read the poems, and they would have
put into their hands books of prose and poetry of a kindred nature.
They had picked up many items of information about the history of
Ireland from their fathers and mothers, they would be given a simple
history of Ireland to read. All this they would assimilate naturally
and quickly because it would be the natural continuation of what they
already in part possessed. But the exigencies of life in the United
Kingdom makes it necessary to read English poems and English books, and
to know something of English history also, this they would learn after
the other.
Will it be believed, the Board of National Education insists upon the
Irish-speaking child starting out from the first moment _to learn to
read a language it does not speak_.[44] It is forbidden to be taught
one syllable of Irish, easy sentences, poems, or anything else. It is
forbidden to be taught one word of Irish history. Advantage is taken of
_nothing_ that the child knew before or that came natural to it, and
the result is appalling.
Bright-eyed intelligent children, second in intelligence, I should
think, to none in Europe, with all the traditional traits of a people
cultured for fifteen hundred years, children endowed with a vocabulary
in every-day use of about three thousand words[45] (while the ordinary
English peasant has often not more than five hundred) enter the schools
of the Chief Commissioner, to come out at the end with all their
natural vivacity gone, their intelligence almost completely sapped,
their splendid command of their native language lost for ever, and a
vocabulary of five or six hundred English words, badly pronounced and
barbarously employed, substituted for it, and this they in their turn
will transmit to their children, while everything that they knew on
entering the school, story, lay, poem, song, aphorism, proverb, and the
unique stock-in-trade of an Irish speaker's mind, is gone for ever,
_and replaced by nothing_.
I have long looked and inquired in vain, on all hands, for any
possible justification of this system, and the more I have looked and
inquired the more convinced I am that none such exists unless it be
an unacknowledged political one. Its results at all events are only
too obvious. The children are taught, if nothing else, to be ashamed
of their own parents, ashamed of their own nationality, ashamed of
their own names. The only idea of education they now have is connected
not with the literary past of their own nation, but with the new
board-trained schoolmaster and his school, which to them represent the
only possible form of knowledge. They have no idea of anything outside
of, or beyond, this. Hence they allow their beautiful Irish manuscripts
to rot[46]--because the schoolmaster does not read Irish. They never
sing an Irish song or repeat an Irish poem--the schoolmaster does
not; they forget all about their own country that their parents told
them--the schoolmaster _is not allowed to teach Irish history_; they
translate their names into English--probably the schoolmaster has done
the same; and what is the use of having an Irish name now that they are
not allowed to speak Irish! Worst of all they have not only dropped
their Irish Christian names, but they are becoming ashamed of the
patron saints of their own people, the names even of Patrick and of
Brigit.[47] It is a remarkable system of education, and one well worth
the minutest study that can be paid it, which is able to produce these
effects, but with even the smallest philological regard for the meaning
of words, it cannot be called "education."
* * * * *
Ar n-a críochnughadh ag Ráth-Treagh anaice le Dungar, i bparráiste
Tigh-Baoithin i gcondae Roscomáin, an ficheadh lá Lúghnasa, le Dúbhglas
de h-Íde, d'á ngoirthear go coitchionn an Craoibhín Aoibhinn, de phór
na nGall-Ghaedhal i n-Eirinn.
Buidheachas le Dia!
CRÍOCH.
[1] Preface to "Glossarium Palaeo-Hibernicum."
[2] Red Book in Archives of Diocese of Ossory. The statute is in the
barbarous law-French of the period, "et si nul Engleys ou Irroies
conversant entre Engleys use la lang Irroies entre eux-mesmes encontre
cest ordinance, et de ceo soit attient, soint sez terrez," etc.
[3] Municipal Archives of Waterford. Hist. MSS. Commission, 10th
report. Appendix v. p. 323.
[4] Galway Archives.
[5] "Ulster Journal of Archæology."
[6] _See_ "Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland,"
1897, p. 192.
[7] State Papers, part iii. vol. ii. p. 502.
[8] One of the four prophets of Ireland, _see_ ch. XVI, note 23.
[9] Archdale ii, 27.
[10] Cal. of State Papers, p. 130.
[11] "Tribes of Hy Many," p. 20.
[12] State Papers, Dom. Eliz. an. 1600, p. 496.
[13] This was that Father Nugent who improved and developed the powers
of the Irish harp. A letter in Irish to him from Maelbrighte O'Hussey
is printed by Father Hogan, S.J., in "Ibernia Ignatiana," p. 167.
[14] Father Hogan's "Distinguished Irishmen of the Sixteenth Century,"
p. 38.
[15] MS. in Royal Library of Brussels of Stephen White's "Vindiciæ,"
fo. 62. Consulted by Father Hogan, S.J.
[16] "Transactions of the Ossory Arch. Society," vol. ii. p. 350.
[17] Preface to Halliday's edition of Keating's "Forus Feasa," p. xi.
The fine poet, David Bruadar (p. 592), wrote a satiric poem on the
haste the Irish made to speak English when the Duke of Ormond was in
power, two lines of which I quote from memory:
"_Is mairg atá gan Béarla binn_
_Ar dteacht an Iarla go h-Eirinn._"
[18] _See_ above p. 578.
[19] Published by the late Father Denis Murphy, S.J., for the Irish
Antiquarian Society.
[20] I fear many of our moderns are also more or less open to this
reproach.
[21] "Ar an adhbhar sin as cóir agus as iommochuibhe dúinne na Herenaig
bheith ceanamhail gradhach onórach an ar dteangain ndúchais nádurtha
féin, an ghaoilag, noch atá chomhfuelethach chomhmúchta soin, nach
mór na deacha si as coimhne na nduine; a mhileán so as féidir a
chur ar an aois ealathain noch as udair don teangain, do chuir i fá
fórdhoreatheacht agus cruos focal, da scribha a modaibh agus fhocalaibh
deamhaire doracha, dothuicseanta, agus ni fhoilid saor mórán d'ár
nduinibh uaisle dobheir a tteanga dhuchais nadurtha (noch ata fortill
fuirithe onórach fólamtha géarchuiseach inti féin) a ttarcuisne agus
a neamhchionn, agus chaitheas a n-aimsir á saorthudh agus á foghlaim
teangtha coimhtheach ele" (pp. 10 and 11, preface).
[22] "Tertio notandum quod hoc ipsum idioma sit vernaculum toti in
primis Hiberniæ, tamsetsi cum aliquo discrimine turn quoad dialectum
nonnihil variantem inter diversas provincias, turn quoad artificii
observationem inter doctos et vulgares.... Et dialecti quidem variatio
ita se habere passim æstimatur, ut cum sint quatuor Hiberniæ provinciæ
Momonia Ultonia Lagenia Conactia, penes Conactes sit et potestas rectæ
pronunciationis et phraseos vera proprietas, penes Momonienses potestas
sine proprietate, penes Ultones proprietas sine potestate, penes
Lagenos nec potestas pronunciationis nec phraseos proprietas."--"De
Hibernia Commentarius," p. 7. Louvain, 1632. This shows the antiquity
of the Irish saying, "tá ceart gan bias ag an Ulltach, ta blas gan
ceart ag an Muimhneach, ni'l bias ná ceart ag an Laighneach, tá blas
agus ceart ag an gConnachtach."
[23] "Ní maith tuigthear leis an bpobal gcoitcheann éinteangadh acht
an ghaoidhealg amháin" (see p. 11). _See_ also a mandate of the "Sacra
Congregatio Visitationis."
[24] "Quando aderit Rector Hibernicus val alius linguæ peritus,
legantur ad mensam ter in hebdomada, libri spirituales, in idiomati
Hibernico compositi, ne alumni ejus obliviscantur."--Extracted from the
"Archiv. Coll. Hib. Romæ.," lib. xxiii., by Father Hogan, S.J.
[25] Ellington's "Life and Writings of Ussher."
[26] _See_ above, p. 555.
[27] It was not, I think, until the tithe war took place, that the
established clergy began to see anything irrational in their attitude.
In 1834, however, the Hon. Power Trench, Archbishop of Tuam, wrote to
Phillip Barron, of Waterford, editor of _Ancient Ireland_, a weekly
magazine for the cultivation of the Irish language, regretting that
in the whole of his diocese (where probably not one in twenty at that
period understood a word of English) he had not outside of his own
brother, a single clergyman who had "acquired a proficiency in the
Irish language."
[28] "Present State of the Irish Church," seventh edition, 1787, p. 43,
quoted by Anderson, in his "Native Irish."
[29] Robert Molesworth's "True Way to Make Ireland Happy," printed in
1697, is also quoted as an authority for this statement, but I have
not been able to discover a copy of this book even in the Library of
Trinity College.
[30] Roche's "Memoirs of an Octogenarian."
[31] Vol. i. p. 263.
[32] Thus on referring to a recent history of the County Sligo in two
volumes by a distinguished author to see how far Irish prevailed in a
certain barony, I find the fact that any other language than English
either was or is spoken in Sligo, so far as I could see, quietly
ignored. It is the same with most authors of local and county histories.
[33] I published this with a translation in the "Journal of Ulster
Archæology."
[34] "Das Englische wird vom gemeinen Volke entweder gar nicht oder
sehr unvolkommen erlernt" ("Briefe Aus Irland," Leipzig, 1785, p. 214).
[35] Grattan's "Miscellaneous Works," p. 321, edition of 1822.
[36] "Burnocks" does not look like a real word. I have no idea what it
means or it is meant for.
[37] This is a singular distortion of the story of Aoife [Eefy] and the
coming of her and Cuchulain's son, Conlaoch to Erin. _See_ above p. 300.
[38] This of course is a misapprehension.
[39] It is curious to observe that Kohl found the race of harpers by no
means extinct in Ireland, and his testimony appears quite disinterested
and trustworthy. "I afterwards heard," he says, "that piece (The Fairy
Queen) on the pianoforte, but it did not sound half so soft and sweet
as from the instrument of this blind young harper.... We were very much
delighted with our harper who was certainly an accomplished artist, yet
Ireland contains many of still greater ability and celebrity. The most
celebrated of all, however, is a man named Byrne, blind also if I do
not mistake. When, therefore, Moore sings--
"'The harp that once through Tara's hall
The soul of music shed
Now hangs as mute on Tara's wall
As if the soul were fled,'
"his lamentation must not be literally understood." He also mentions
that when he was in Drogheda "a concert was in preparation to be given
next week at which seven harpers, mostly blind, were to play together."
An English tourist, C. R. Wild ["Vacations in Ireland," London,
1857], mentions meeting a harper at Leenane in Connemara in 1857, who
requested permission to play to him during his meal. He describes him
as "an ancient man bearing a small Irish harp such as were common in
olden days; ... the music produced was, for the most part, plaintive
and slow, and the tones particularly soft and melodious." The priest
who entertained Kohl had a number of harps in his house, but,
unfortunately, the German says nothing of their size or shape. From
these instances it would appear that the race of Irish harpers did not
quite die out with those who assembled at Belfast at the close of the
last century when Bunting secured so many of their airs, but that some
lingered on till after the famine. How far these latter harpers could
be regarded as the genuine descendants of the old race is doubtful.
[40] "Wenn sie unter sich sind so sprechen sie immer das naturale
Irisch, aber auch das nicht mehr rein sondern mit corrumpirtem English
durchwoben. Alles an diesem Volke ist Fetzenwerk, ihre Kleidung, ihre
Wohnung, ihre Sprache" ("Insel der Heiligen," vol. i. p. 185. Berlin,
1860).
[41] See Vol. ii. p. 9 for this interesting conversation in which the
attitude of the typical Catholic priest towards his national language
is shown.
[42] In spite of the well-known opposition of the National Board the
National Schoolmasters themselves as early as 1874 in their Congress
unanimously passed the following resolution:--"The peasants in
Irish-speaking districts have not English enough to convey their ideas,
except such as relate to the mechanical business of their occupation.
Hence they are not able in any degree to cultivate or impress the
minds of their children (though often very intelligent themselves),
who consequently grow up dull and stupid if they have been suffered to
lose the Irish language or to drop out of the constant practice of it."
This is _exactly_ what I and every other spectator have found, and it
means that the Board of National Education is engaged in replacing an
intelligent generation of men by an utterly stupid and unintelligent
one.
[43] Sir Patrick Keenan, C.B., K.C.M.G., who was for a time head of
the Educational system in Ireland, and was employed by the Government
to report upon the plan of teaching the people of Malta in Maltese,
reported to Parliament that the attempt to substitute English or
Italian for Maltese in the schools was a fatal one. "Such a course
would simply mean that the people are to get no chance, much less
choice, of acquiring a knowledge either of their own or any other
language." This is exactly true of spots in Ireland, and after his
experiences in Donegal, Sir Patrick Keenan drew up the following
memorial:--"1. That the Irish-speaking people ought to be taught the
Irish language grammatically, and that school books in Irish should
be prepared for the purpose. 2. That English should be taught to all
Irish-speaking children through the medium of the Irish. 3. That if
this system be pursued the people will be very soon better educated
than they are now, or possibly can be _for many generations_ upon the
present system. And 4. That the English language will in a short time
be more generally and purely spoken than it can be by the present
system for many generations." When he became head of the National
System of Education, Sir Patrick found himself unable to carry out his
own recommendations without personal inconvenience, being probably
afraid to offend his colleagues, and nothing has been since done to
remove the scandal.
[44] For many years the schoolmaster was not even allowed to explain
anything in Irish to a child who knew no English! This, rule, however,
has been abrogated.
[45] Dr. Pedersen, a Dane, who recently resided for three
months in the Arran Islands to learn the language that is there
banned--at the present moment the only inhabitant in one of these
islands, not counting coastguards, who does not speak Irish is the
schoolmaster!--took down about 2,500 words. I have written down a
vocabulary of 3,000 words from people in Roscommon who could neither
read nor write, and I am sure I fell 1,000 short of what they actually
used. I should think the average in Munster, especially in Kerry, would
be between 5,000 and 6,000. It is well known that many of the English
peasants use only 300 words, or from that to 500.
[46] A friend of mine travelling in the County Clare sent me three
Irish MSS. the other day, which he found the children tearing to pieces
on the floor. One of these, about one hundred years old, contained a
saga called the "Love of Dubhlacha for Mongan," which M. d'Arbois de
Jubainville had searched the libraries of Europe for in vain. It is
true that another copy of it has since been discovered, and printed
and annotated with all the learning and critical acumen of two such
world-renowned scholars as Professor Kuno Meyer and Mr. Alfred Nutt,
both of whom considered it of the highest value as elucidating the
psychology of the ancient Irish. The copy thus recovered and sent to
me is twice as long as that printed by Kuno Meyer, and had the copy
from which he printed been lost it would be unique. These things are
happening every day. A man living at the very doors of the Chief
Commissioner of National Education writes to me thus: "I could
read many of irish Fenian tales and poems, that was in my father's
manuscripts, he had a large collection of them. I was often sorry for
letting them go to loss, but I could not copy the 1/20th of them....
The writing got defaced, the books got damp and torn while I was away,
I burned lots of them twice that I came to this country.... I was
learning to write the old irish at that time; I could read a fair share
of it and write a little." That man should have been taught to read and
write his native language, and not practically encouraged to burn the
old books, every one of which probably contained some piece or other
not to be found elsewhere.
Even where the people had no manuscripts in common use amongst them,
their minds were well-stored with poems and lays. A friend wrote to me
from America the other day to interview a man who lived in the County
Galway, who he thought had manuscripts. Not finding it convenient to do
this, I wrote to him, and this is his reply: "Dear sir, about twenty
years since I was able to tell about two Dozen of Ossian's Irish poems
and some of Raftery's, and more Rymes composed by others, but since
that time no one asked me since to tell one Irish story at a wake or by
the fireside sine the old people died. Therefore when I had no practice
I forgot all the storys that ever I had. I am old. Your most Humble
Servant, Michael B."
Another writes: "I have no written manuscript. I had three poems about
the dareg more [Dearg Mor] the first when he came to Ireland in search
of his wife that shewed (?) him, when Gaul [Goll] faught him and tied
him he come to Ireland, a few years after, when he got older and
stronger, and faught Gaul for 9 days in succession the ninth day Gaul
killed him then in 18 years after his son called Cun [Conn] came to
Ireland to have revenge and faught Gaul, and after eleven days fighting
he was killed by Gaul. I had a poem called Lee na mna mora [Laoi na mná
móire] or the poem of the big woman who faught Gaul for five days, but
Osker [Oscar] kills her. I had the baptism of Ossian by St. Patrick the
best of all and many others of Ossians' to numerous to mention now, I
also had some poemes of Cucullan the death and the lady in English and
in Irish I had the beettle in English and Irish and when fin [Finn]
went to denmark in English and Irish and many other rymes of modern
times. I seen some address in the Irish times last year where to write
to some place in Dublin where Ossians poems Could be got but I forget
the Number. The people that is living Now a days could not understand
the old Irish which made me drop it altogether their parents is
striving to learn their children English what themselves never learned
so the boys and girls has neither good english or good Irish. Hoping
your friends and well wishers are well, fare well old stock. M...."
[47] This is the direct result of the system pursued by the National
Board, which refuses to teach the children anything about Patrick
and Brigid, but which is never tired of putting second-hand English
models before them. Archbishop Whately, that able and unconventional
Englishman, who had so much to do with moulding the system, despite his
undoubted sense of humour, saw nothing humorous in making the children
learn to repeat such verses as--
"I thank the goodness and the grace
Which on my birth have smiled,
And made me in these Christian days
A happy English child!"
and the tone of the Board may be gathered from this passage, I believe,
which occurred in one of their elementary books: "On the east of
Ireland is England, where the Queen lives. Many people who live in
Ireland were born in England, _and we speak the same language, and are
called one nation_." The result of this teaching is apparent to every
one who lives in Ireland, and does not shut his eyes. "God forbid I
should handicap my daughter in life by calling her Brigid," said a
woman to me once. "It was with the greatest difficulty I could make any
of the Irish christen their children Patrick," said Father O'Reilly of
Louisburgh to me, talking of his Australian mission. For the wholesale
translation of names, such as O'Gara into Love, O'Lavin into Hand, Mac
Rury into Rogers, and so on, which is still going on with unabated
vigour, see an article by me in "Three Irish Essays," published by
Fisher Unwin.
INDEX
(Not retained for this plain text version.—Transcribers' note.)
End of Project Gutenberg's A Literary History of Ireland, by Douglas Hyde