Published in An Claidheamh Soluis, October 26, 1912.
The following are An Craoibhin’s words spoken at the Ardchraobh inaugural meeting, 1911:—
Just as Yellowstone Park, the national reservation in America, contains all the noble fauna which have disappeared elsewhere, so does our national reservation of the Irish-speaking districts contain for us the invaluable life and traditions of the past. But these districts are dying out like ice before the sun. The Irish strip that was twenty years broad ten years ago is now ten miles broad. In five years more it will be half that again. In ten it will be gone, dried up and slain largely by the rule of the Board that ‘English is to be mainly the medium of instruction for the higher standards.’ Those are the penal words. Now I make this irreducible demand on the part of the Gaelic League, I take it on myself to make it to-night. It is this: We demand that these invaluable Irish districts be at once scheduled. All put together, they are less, I am sorry to say, than the size of a good Irish county. We ask that a dozen or twenty special organisers, of the same sort as those appointed some years ago by the Board, be instantly thrown into these districts to report upon the teaching in every hole and corner of them. We ask that henceforth the teaching be Irish teaching, and that every schoolmaster or schoolmistress who cannot teach the three R’s in Irish be either exchanged at once or generously pensioned. We do not want to see any niggardly pensioning, for if they are found wanting, it is not their own fault, but the fault of the Board itself who taught them, or rather wouldn’t teach them.