A Literary History of Ireland, from Earliest Times to the Present Day

by Douglas Hyde

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]