From An Claidheamh Soluis, February 23, 1907. Reproduced in Pádraig Pearse’s editorial ‘A Rosg Catha’.
The day sacred to our National Apostle, the 17th March, will soon be upon us. This festival always of interest to Irishmen in the past has now assumed in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of our race a more than ordinary significance. And I desire with your permission to make its approach the subject of a special appeal to your Irish readers. The cause of this I hope you will allow me to explain.
It is now about twelve years ago since a certain number of Irishmen began to open their eyes to the fact that the nationality of their native country, which has endured for over two thousand years, was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. They realised suddenly that they were being absorbed in another nationality and were becoming in every way deteriorated and vulgarised in the process. They saw with horror that in twenty years more Ireland would have lost everything that distinguished her from a mere vulgarised English county—namely, her distinctive language, songs, dances, games, music, and traditions. She, the oldest civilised nation in Western Europe, the nation which possessed the most valuable and ancient vernacular literature in Christendom, except the Greeks alone, the nation that single-handed for over three centuries held aloft to the Western World the torch of learning and of civilisation, the nation that was once the teacher and Christianiser of Europe, was falling from her high ideals of other days into the rank of something less than an English province—an English county. She was allowing her pure and exquisite Aryan language to die off with an appalling rapidity unequalled in the annals of any other speech in Europe. Her delightful music, once the joy of the Western World, was being replaced with the most worthless of foreign trash, her native instruments, the harp and bagpipes, were being superseded by the concertina and melodeon, and her traditional native songs were being universally replaced by the paltriest and lowest ditties from the music halls of London or of Liverpool.
About twelve years ago the Gaelic League for which I am making this appeal was founded for the purpose of checking the steam-roller of an imperfect and vulgarising anglicisation which was being passed over the face of Ireland, blotting out everything native, no matter how valuable or how interesting, and leaving behind it one dead level of barren imitation and of hopeless intellectual stagnation. The progress of the League was slow. For years it worked in silence and gained but few converts. One necessary corollary of its teaching, to-day almost universally accepted, that politics, no matter how useful, no matter how necessary, were not in themselves nationality, at first seemed audacious and estranging. Gradually, however, the ideas of the League worked their way all over Ireland, and of recent years its progress has been rapid. Its first success was in breaking down the hostility of the Boards of Primary and of Secondary Education. It has now succeeded in getting the Irish language taught—more or less badly as yet, but we hope for better things soon—in some three thousand schools. It has checked the music hall nuisance. The spirit of self-respect generated by the League has resulted in the starting of an Anti-Treating League, which has struck the biggest blow at the Drink Demon that has been struck since Father Matthew’s day. It has established Feiseanna or festivals for Irish singing, dancing, and music in almost every principal town in Ireland. It is trying to keep the Irish people at home by making life interesting for them on national lines. In one word, the Gaelic League is reviving what was at the point of death, a nationality which is in many ways the most interesting in Europe. We have drawn into this movement both Catholics and Protestants, Nationalists and Unionists. We have never looked to what religion or to what politics a man belongs so long as he is frankly an Irishman. We quarrel with no one, we oppose no one, we clash with no one who loves or works for Ireland. We have no actual enemies except the anti-Irish Irishman. He, indeed, does not love us, because we aim at creating a self-contained, self-sufficing Irish Ireland, instead of a weak, backboneless imitation of England, a country wry-necked from looking over its left shoulder to see what the English fashion-plates are doing before it will stir a step itself.
After this necessary explanation, for the length of which I apologise, I come to the real gist of this letter. For the last five years the Gaelic League has set apart that week of the year in which falls St. Patrick’s Day to make an appeal to the Irish people for help to carry on its work. Its expenses are necessarily heavy, and are increasing every day as the sphere of its work enlarges. It has a large staff of organisers and Irish teachers in the field, it has twelve other paid officers, it has spacious premises of its own, it has a weekly and a monthly newspaper mostly written in Irish, and it produces an enormous—enormous for Ireland—output of literature, having sold last year over a quarter of a million of books and pamphlets. Last year our expenses were close upon £700 a month. In the coming year they will be more. I have written this letter to explain matters to your Irish readers and to appeal to them to help us. I can promise Irishmen that if they support us their money will not be misspent. With the small amount at our disposal we have already changed the entire intellectual outlook of Ireland, and that is no small feat to have accomplished in a few years’ time. Our coming struggle will be with apathy rather than with hostility. On St. Patrick’s Day thousands of men and women, boys and girls, all over the country will be collecting for the Gaelic League. We are straining every nerve. The next ten years will decide the question of Ireland a Nation or Ireland an English county. If you desire to see Ireland once more a nation send us help to the Gaelic League, Dublin.