From Sinn Féin, February 15, 1913.
Daniel O’Connell killed the Irish language politically. In his day the Irish speakers formed the vast majority of the total population. In 1836 Lord Lyndhurst referred to Irish Catholics who sought equality with Protestants as ‘aliens in blood, in religion and in language.’ The movement led by O’Connell depended on its success on the publicity given to his orations in the English Press. To this end he sacrificed the Irish language, which he spoke fluently. A natural consequence of this new idea was the turning of the eyes of Ireland eastwards. O’Connell convened monster meetings of the people. One of these at Limerick in 1843 is said to have been attended by 110,000 people. 150,000 is the estimate given of those at Kells and Mullingar the same year, while the climax was reached at Tara on August 15th, 1843, when 700,000 assembled from all parts of Ireland to hear O’Connell speak.
At these meetings the English language was the official tongue. The people conversed amongst themselves in Irish. The great Tribune thundered to them in the language they little understood. He threw the weight of his mighty personality, his conquering eloquence, his genuine patriotism into the scales against the native tongue, and the native tongue never recovered its proper place since in the political life of the people.
The Young Irelanders, who had less excuse than O’Connell, were almost equally guilty in regard to their attitude towards the native tongue. Thomas Davis saw the value in it, and his splendid essay on the subject is well known. For the rest no practical steps were taken to keep Irish alive. All the fervid poetry and oratory of their movement was conceived and born in the English language.
John O’Mahony stood out amongst the Fenians for his scholarship in the Irish language. Even at that period it is regrettable that the great value of Irish for secret organising purposes was not recognised.
To-day every election in Ireland is fought in the English tongue. On rare occasions, a public speaker is requisitioned to interpret or misinterpret the cause at issue to the illiterates who do not know the tongue of the British House of Commons.
Perhaps on reflection it is just as well that the agitation which has centred round the English Parliament should be conducted in the English language. The end of that form of agitation, either by the granting of Home Rule, or the failure to pass it, must be made the opportunity of de-Anglicising our people politically and linguistically.
It is now commonly accepted that Ireland without its language cannot lay claim to nationhood, though it might obtain political independence. Without the language, but with political independence, it might, owing to its insular situation, resist Anglicising influences for generations. But the world would not see in Ireland any longer a Celtic nation, while the final disappearance of the Irish language would give to England and to the world a pretext for forcibly compelling us to re-enter the British Empire.
On the other hand Ireland with a language of her own would be immeasurably stronger even though freedom were still in the distant future. The Sinn Féin idea at present permeates public and private life in Ireland. I do not refer to the political application of that idea, which I hope is a thing of the near future, but to that spirit of self-reliance which has grown with the language movement. It is inconceivable that an Irish-speaking Ireland would not develop a strong sense of its own powers and possibilities. With current literature in Irish, political speeches and pamphlets in Irish, a daily newspaper in Irish, our people would be phenomenal fools if they did not come to have more regard for and interest in their own affairs than those of their neighbours. A Press catering for such a public would undoubtedly give the news of the world in a more accurate perspective than at present. Germany’s Kaiser would not then gyrate before our eyes the bullying braggart of Europe. France would cease to be a land of atheists and dancing masters. America’s race and labour problems would reconcile our countrymen to the terrible fate of living in their own land. In a word, we should see the world for the first time in hundreds of years through Irish glasses.
A people who think first of their own country and its interests will have all material things added to them in the course of time.
Sinn Féin and Gaelic League propaganda have exploded the notion that a nation lives on unanimous resolutions, and monster meetings. Unanimous resolutions and monster meetings are futile except as means of giving concrete expression to the determination of the people. A people devoted to the national language are a patriotic people. A people who let their language die will let their country slip into the hands of the enemy. The possession of a national language, particularly when shared with no other nation, is in itself evidence of separate nationhood. The revival of a decaying tongue is evidence of a nation’s re-birth. When that tongue has to be nursed back to life in spite of all the machinations of a powerful garrison its revival will strike the observant foreigner with singular significance.
I will not discuss the possibility that the Irish language is being revived from merely linguistic or philological reasons. I dismiss equally the assumption that it is being revived as a lever for the furtherance of religions or temperance or Irish industries. I will content myself with asserting that 90 per cent of those who have actively assisted in Gaelic League work, and all those outside the League who have given their assent to the movement, have done so from motives of nationality and, from motives of nationality, alone. The people of Ireland have seen in the Gaelic Revival a new phase of the old national movement. The fact that the movement has not been hitherto frankly recognised as political is due to the simple device of writing over its doors—‘This is a non-political movement.’ The non-political device was good policy in the past. Whether it will continue to be good policy in the future is open to question. The non-political rule of the League has produced an abnormal state of mind in its leaders inasmuch as it has generally been interpreted to mean—‘Here no politician shall enter,’ instead of ‘Here all politicians are welcome.’ It has had the still more curious result of tying up for political purposes one of the strongest weapons that any nation could have—its national language. Moreover, it has excluded from discussion in Irish the subject of all subjects which most interests the Irish-speaking people, viz., politics.
Not only has the language movement deprived the general national movement of a powerful weapon, but it has itself stumbled along when it might have walked and walked, when it might have run but for its timidity in the use of the traditional methods of Irish agitation.
The Gaelic movement in its first place was educational. Its aims were new and strange, and the people had to be persuaded of the value of a national language. During this period it is scarcely doubtful that a frankly National propaganda would have been more fruitful of results. Be that as it may, the work of educational propaganda was persevered in and was shared in by many who might have been engaged in a political struggle. Consequently the enemies of Irish-Ireland—who were the enemies of Ireland—could lie abed without fear of having their slumbers disturbed by an occasional volley of shot. The head master and the manager could afford to disregard the entreaties of those who ignored the persuasive force of the boycott and the hazel stick, and the midnight serenade. Threats were occasionally used to be sure, but these threats were not always carried out. And so to-day the Post Office delays my Irish-addressed correspondence with the same impunity as it did ten years ago. Mr. Starkie can afford to blather sympathy with the language of Ireland secure in the knowledge that his array of myrmidons are carrying on the work of language-killing in every inspectorial district of Ireland.
In the early days of the Gaelic League there were not absent those who feared that the Irish language movement might from its non-political character produce a population of Irish speakers singing God Save the King (of England) in Irish. That result has not come about, nor is it likely now to develop. The language movement has now reached a point from which it is probable as well as possible to get a fair perspective view of it. And while it has not produced a feeling of loyalty to England it has done little or nothing to foster a spirit of violent hatred of that country.
The language movement has put backbone into our people and taught them a little of their own powers. It has taught them to distrust many lip patriots and many others who sit in high places. It has enabled them to see that the politicians have continually Anglicised the people by ignoring their language from O’Connell’s time down to this year of grace 1913. The feeling of distrust of politicians so resulting added to the introspective character of their movement as a whole has obscured from their eyes the long hand of Great Britain whose grip is tightly on the throat of the language to-day. Even now Gaelic Leaguers led by earnest men and women regard the National Board as an enemy but as one of our own creation. What are the facts? The National Board is nominated by the British Lord Lieutenant. The British Lord Lieutenant can by a stroke of the pen remove these nation-killing Commissioners from their positions and replace them by educationalists in whom Ireland has confidence.
The National Board throws dust in the eyes of the Irish people by pretending independence of the British Parliament. As a matter of fact it is the creation of that Parliament and no more independent of it than any other Board in the country. It could be abolished by the Government of the day at any time, and its continuance as at present constituted is a tacit admission that it is doing the work of the British Government and doing it well. Now in all the propaganda of the Gaelic League directed against the National Board there is an absence of any attempt to identify that Board with the whole system of British government in Ireland. The Board is the buffer which absorbs the shock of organised public opinion. (On September 9th, 1830, the British House of Commons voted £30,000 ‘to enable the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to assist in the education of the people.’ That was the beginning of the National Board.) The new system was forced on the people without their wish. It was opposed by the Catholic clergy and also by the Presbyterians at different times, and for different reasons. Between 1832-5 four schoolhouses were wrecked and burned in Ulster and five more were closed on account of intimidation. After a while the Catholic Bishops agreed to accept the system—all but that ‘Lion of the fold of Judah,’ John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam. In the diocese of that patriotic Gael the National Board never succeeded in planting a school. Till the day of his death he held out against the Anglicising schools run by the British Lord Lieutenant with the aid of Commissioner Whately. One of the first acts of the notorious Dr. Whately, Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, was, in 1838, to strike out of the school-books the verse beginning:—
‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead,’ etc.
And:
‘Freedom shriek’d as Kosciusko fell.’
In 1868 there was not a single Irish air in the School Manual then in use.
Since 1843 National School Teachers can not attend political meetings.
The Board was established by England in England’s interest. It continued doing its devilish work on the youth of Ireland without serious or organised opposition down to the advent of the Gaelic League. Since 1893 the country has been hearing of the National Board. There has been a great deal of light let in on its past history and its present doings. But the Board continues to speed on its way, throwing an occasional bone to the Gaelic League wolves when they howl a little loudly. They have succeeded in doing this mainly because the opposition emanated from a non-political body. If the forces ranged behind the language propaganda had been political forces, frankly acknowledge the claim of the Irish people to control all public services, the struggle with this West British Board would long since have reached a climax, and the end would have come either for the League or for the Board. That climax would have certainly involved an appeal to physical force in some form or other. No political body could afford to march its forces up the hill to the G.P.O. and down again as did the Gaelic League. No political body could have permitted Councillor Pádraig Ó Cearbhaill to have his goods seized and sold in Dublin by public auction because he refused to put an English name on his carts. No political body could afford to allow the sacrifice of Dr. O’Hickey by the Irish Catholic Bishops. No political body would have sat down so long as the Gaelic League has done under the treatment meted out to them by the Dublin National Press. In the issue of the ‘Freeman’s Journal’ which contained the brief but pregnant announcement that Irish was to be given its rightful place in the National University, there appeared a sub-leader dealing with the affairs of the Manchester University. But the most careful search through the columns of this organ of Irish Nationality on that day failed to reveal any evidence that after many months of travail the National University had produced the momentous decision to which I have referred. During the period immediately preceding that decision I was a member of the Coisde Gnotha and so became aware of some of the methods and the weapons that were used against the advocates of Essential Irish. I refer in particular to the suppression of free speech amongst the Catholic clergy. I have in my possession evidence of the direct silencing of earnest and brilliant priests by their bishops during this period. They were given plainly to understand that if they wish to air their views in public they were quite free to do so, so long as those views did not run counter to those publicly expressed by the Catholic Hierarchy. In the face of this private terrorism many priests continued quietly to influence public opinion and to stick to their own. One priest, not of those to whom I have already alluded, told me pathetically that he feared speedy removal from the comfortable parish in which he was stationed to some remote mountainy district as condign punishment for daring to assert the Gaelic League demand. Another of a different type whipped up 85 delegates to vote right at the Convention which approved the Gaelic League demand.
Speaking of this Convention reminds me that another patriotic P.P. who was intended to be a leader that day on the Irish side had booked his room in a well-known Dublin hotel. At the last moment the rev. gentleman was given to understand that his Bishop could not possibly dispense with his services on that day. So he remained away. Bhí go maith is ní raibh go h-olc. His place was taken and his very room was occupied by a worthy priest whose views were not likely to offend the Bishops. But Ireland won that day against all the forces of West Britain.
Now it may be asked how could the language be linked effectively with political activity. The answer is by introducing it prominently and obtrusively into every department of Irish life. To give a local example, the Corporation of Dublin makes Irish compulsory on clerks entering its service by examination. The large army who find their way into secure jobs under the same authority by other means are never questioned as to their knowledge of Irish. A resolution was formally passed, requiring the headings on notepaper and envelopes to be in the Irish language. This resolution has been treated with absolute contempt in the chief department of the Corporation. There is another resolution requiring all correspondence to be forwarded in Irish-addressed envelopes. We are aware of countermanding orders being issued peremptorily forbidding certain clerks obeying this reasonable order. In a word, Irish is not a living thing in the Dublin Corporation. Some of the officials deny all rights to a citizen who insists on using his Irish name, even when spelled in the Roman character. The register of voters is entirely free from suspicion of having emanated from the Nationalist Corporation of the capital of Ireland. Only a few weeks ago the Treasurer of the Gaelic League was insulted at the polling booth by the official representative of the Returning Officer and refused a voting paper because he declined to speak English.
I am aware of a clerical school manager who has humbugged—as he thinks—the local branch of the Gaelic League to the top of his bent. He is president of the branch, but by an ingenious trick appointed an assistant school teacher who knew no Irish. He had evidently measured the forces against him, and acted accordingly.
In other places, school teachers who loyally carried out the League’s programme have been left to fight alone and unaided, sometimes the manager, sometimes the National Board.
More significant to my mind that any of these incidents, which could be multiplied ad infinitum, is the recent attitude of the National Teachers. Now the teachers of Ireland, given a free hand, could save Irish to Ireland in our generation. Unfortunately they have not a free hand. Deprived of the ordinary rights of citizenship, they present a pitiful spectacle. Unable to reverse the dismissal of their leader and colleague, Mansfield, they yet managed to screw up sufficient courage to bare their teeth and snarl at the Gaelic League. No further proof of the weakness of the language leaders is necessary than the stand taken by the teachers against them.
This supineness, this want of self-confidence, is due largely to the timidity inherent in a movement led by civil servants, teachers, and priests. The numerical superiority of these classes—all of whom are in Ireland subject to a strict discipline—has at all times confined the League’s methods within a very narrow compass. These methods might be catalogued as persuasion, education, resolution, and deputation. Outside this magic circle, the leaders of the League rarely stepped, fearful that they might be borne away in a fairy whirlwind to the bad nightmare land of public meetings, broken heads, hasty meals, midnight maraudings and a plank bed.
In passing, let me remark our present day dread of anything approaching even in remote degree the region of physical force.
Now, while drawing attention to the evil effects of that timidity which goes hand-in-hand with ‘no politics,’ I must not be understood as arguing that better results all round would have resulted from a political league. But at the present time, on the eve (perhaps) of political changes of considerable magnitude, it behoves Nationalists to take stock of every weapon in the national armoury, with a view to the necessity of utilising them singly or collectively in the immediate future.
The forces of the League as at present constituted are nearly spent. There is evidence that the Hibernians have their eyes on the organisation. Hibernianism is growing like a noxious weed in Ireland to-day. Nationalists must see that the future of the language be not handed over to a mere sectarian society which would exclude Dr. Hyde and Joseph Lloyd, while welcoming to its bosom Mr. George MacSweeney the packer and the Right Hon. Dr. Cox. If the League is going to give up the ghost, its place must be taken, its activities must be carried on by a political body.
The very existence of the language movement is in jeopardy this moment. It simply cannot go on in the old jogtrot way under Home Rule. The National Board must go as a matter of course. The whole language, too, may go on a carefully wire-pulled referendum to the people. In a word, Home Rule spells chaos and danger to Irish unless the foundations of new methods are carefully laid. There are as many enemies to Irish in the councils of Hibernianism and the U.I.L. as on the National Board. They are almost un-Irish in the language sense. No lend may be expected from that quarter. They will suffer the decay of the language without a pang; being even to-day unconvinced of its importance, not to say necessity, in the Ireland of the future.
If I were called upon to recommend a policy to the League in the event of Home Rule I would say—Go at once into the arena of national politics. Draw up your demands and force them on every candidate for Parliamentary honours. Make the language a reality in public life. Split the vote and run your own candidates wherever there is doubt as to the others who may be standing. Support that party which makes the language a reality to Irish affairs. And to the Nationalists of Ireland I would say under similar circumstances—If you desire to serve the Irish language, go learn it and speak it. Put the Gaedhilgeoir in the place of honour and make for the final expulsion of English.
In case the Home Rule mirage should fail to materialise it is even more necessary than before to choose our weapons, decide our policy and re-organise our forces. For a time it is possible that the language would be treated with scant ceremony. Other matters would be more pressing. All political parties would change. The aim of Nationalists would be to give one final knock and blow to the rotten policy of Parliamentarianism whining at the door of John Bull; to rub in the salt of their bitter disappointment with our people’s wounded self-pride; to teach them the Sinn Féin lesson that the east wind and everything evil for Ireland comes over the sea from England. Should Sinn Féin succeed in getting the manhood of Ireland to rally round its banners, the motto on that banner must be in the Irish tongue.
Irish must be made a political fact. Our un-Irish newspapers must be punished; our un-Irish schools boycotted; our un-Irish public officials and public representatives and registrars and the whole tribe of mean-spirited shoneens must be lashed into a semblance of respect for the true medium of expression and last bulwark of a nation—its national language.
ÉAMONN CEANNT.