“Our curse has been,” he continued, “that we have been divided so much amongst ourselves.”
I was surprised when he told me of the Government’s present efforts to improve Irish agriculture. There is an Agricultural Department, which furnishes instructors on such subjects as improving of crops, and stock, butter and poultry. They also furnish seeds and fertilizers, and are doing a great deal in promoting prosperity in the backward parts of the island. Mr. O’Neill was enthusiastic about the Gaelic revival.
“Why,” he said, “they are even teaching Gaelic now in the National Schools of Ireland. In former times the use of the native tongue was discouraged in every way by the Government, but now teachers are being trained to teach it.”
I suggested to him that the English was quite a useful language, since it was spoken in America, and so widely throughout the world.
“We still expect to use English, of course,” he exclaimed. He then explained that the efforts of Douglas Hyde and his friends were to make the Irish a bi-lingual people, just as the Welsh are.
In speaking of the progress of this interesting revival of Gaelic in Ireland he gave me some facts.
In 1901 as many as 638,000 could speak Gaelic in Ireland, and the number is constantly increasing. All the churches in Ireland, Protestant, and Catholic, have endorsed the movement. There is a strong Gaelic League, which employs over a dozen lecturers and organizers, who promote the study of Gaelic all over the island. I was assured that even in America there was a strong branch of this Gaelic League, and Mr. O’Neill told me that Mr. Roosevelt had endorsed the work highly.
O’Neill was also deeply interested in the temperance reform.
“Ireland,” he said to me, “has been a place where they have had too much good whisky and too much bad politics. These two things have ruined us.”
He spoke with much pride of the fact that scientific temperance instruction had been introduced into the National schools of Erin in 1905, and also told of the work that all the churches were doing. He was an ardent admirer of Father Mathew.