In the Galway fish market Rodenberg could not hear a single word of English spoken. The population of Connacht was at this time a little unnder a million, and the census of 1861 showed that about one-tenth of the whole population were ignorant of English. The population of the city of Galway in this year was 23,787, of whom 3,511 were ignorant of English.
According to the census of 1891 something over three-quarters of a million people in Ireland were bi-linguists, and 66,140 could speak Irish only, thus showing that in thirty years Irish was killed off so rapidly that the whole Island contained fewer speakers in 1891 than the small province of Connacht alone did thirty years before.
This extinguishing of the Irish language has not been the result of a natural process of decay, but has been chiefly caused by the definite policy of the Board of "National Education," as it is called, backed by the expenditure every year of many hundreds of thousands of pounds. This Board, evidently actuated by a false sense of Imperialism, and by an overmastering desire to centralise, and being itself appointed by Government chiefly from a class of Irishmen who have been steadily hostile to the natives, and being perfectly ignorant of the language and literature of the Irish, have pursued from the first with unvarying pertinacity the great aim of utterly exterminating this fine Aryan language.
The amount of horrible suffering entailed by this policy, and the amount of hopeless ignorance stereotyped in hundreds of thousands of children, and the ruination of the life-prospects of hundreds of thousands more, by insisting upon their growing up unable to read or write, sooner than teach them to read and write the only language they knew, has counted for nothing with the Board of National Education, compared with their great object of the extermination of the Irish language, and the attainment of one Anglified uniformity. In vain have their own inspectors time after time testified to the ill results of denying the Irish-speakers education in their own language, in vain have disinterested visitors opened wide eyes of astonishment at schoolmasters who knew no Irish being appointed to teach pupils[42] who know no English. In vain have the schoolmasters themselves petitioned to be allowed to change the system, in vain did Sir Patrick Keenan (afterwards himself Chief Commissioner of National Education) address the Board saying, "the shrewdest people in the world are those who are bi-lingual, borderers have always been remarkable in this respect, but the most stupid children I have ever met with are those who were learning English while endeavouring to forget Irish. The real policy of the educationist would in my opinion be to teach Irish grammatically and soundly to the Irish-speaking people, and then to teach them English through the medium of their native language."[43] All in vain! Against the steady, unwavering, unrelenting determination to stamp out the Irish language which has been paramount in the Board ever since the days of Archbishop Whately, every representation passed unheeded, and it would appear that in another generation the Board—at the cost of unparalleled suffering—will have attained its object.
This is not the place to discuss the bearings of this question still less to drag in the names of individuals, but the reader who has followed the history of Irish literature to this will be perhaps anxious to have it continued up to date, and so I may as well here place on record what I and many others have seen with our own eyes over and over again.
An Irish-speaking family, endowed with all the usual intelligence of the Irish-speaking population, with a gift for song, poetry, Ossianic lays, traditional history, and story, send their children to school. A rational education, such as any self-governing country in Europe would give them, would teach them to read and write the language that they spoke, and that their fathers had read and spoken for fifteen hundred years before them. The exigencies of life in the United Kingdom would then make it necessary to teach them a second language—English. The basis of knowledge upon which they started, and which they had acquired as naturally as the breath of life, would in any fair system of education be kept as a basis, and their education would be built up upon it. They would be taught to read the Ossianics lays which they knew by heart before, they would be given books containing more of the same sort, they would be taught to read the poems, and they would have put into their hands books of prose and poetry of a kindred nature. They had picked up many items of information about the history of Ireland from their fathers and mothers, they would be given a simple history of Ireland to read. All this they would assimilate naturally and quickly because it would be the natural continuation of what they already in part possessed. But the exigencies of life in the United Kingdom makes it necessary to read English poems and English books, and to know something of English history also, this they would learn after the other.
Will it be believed, the Board of National Education insists upon the Irish-speaking child starting out from the first moment to learn to read a language it does not speak.[44] It is forbidden to be taught one syllable of Irish, easy sentences, poems, or anything else. It is forbidden to be taught one word of Irish history. Advantage is taken of nothing that the child knew before or that came natural to it, and the result is appalling.
Bright-eyed intelligent children, second in intelligence, I should think, to none in Europe, with all the traditional traits of a people cultured for fifteen hundred years, children endowed with a vocabulary in every-day use of about three thousand words[45] (while the ordinary English peasant has often not more than five hundred) enter the schools of the Chief Commissioner, to come out at the end with all their natural vivacity gone, their intelligence almost completely sapped, their splendid command of their native language lost for ever, and a vocabulary of five or six hundred English words, badly pronounced and barbarously employed, substituted for it, and this they in their turn will transmit to their children, while everything that they knew on entering the school, story, lay, poem, song, aphorism, proverb, and the unique stock-in-trade of an Irish speaker's mind, is gone for ever, and replaced by nothing.
I have long looked and inquired in vain, on all hands, for any possible justification of this system, and the more I have looked and inquired the more convinced I am that none such exists unless it be an unacknowledged political one. Its results at all events are only too obvious. The children are taught, if nothing else, to be ashamed of their own parents, ashamed of their own nationality, ashamed of their own names. The only idea of education they now have is connected not with the literary past of their own nation, but with the new board-trained schoolmaster and his school, which to them represent the only possible form of knowledge. They have no idea of anything outside of, or beyond, this. Hence they allow their beautiful Irish manuscripts to rot[46]—because the schoolmaster does not read Irish. They never sing an Irish song or repeat an Irish poem—the schoolmaster does not; they forget all about their own country that their parents told them—the schoolmaster is not allowed to teach Irish history; they translate their names into English—probably the schoolmaster has done the same; and what is the use of having an Irish name now that they are not allowed to speak Irish! Worst of all they have not only dropped their Irish Christian names, but they are becoming ashamed of the patron saints of their own people, the names even of Patrick and of Brigit.[47] It is a remarkable system of education, and one well worth the minutest study that can be paid it, which is able to produce these effects, but with even the smallest philological regard for the meaning of words, it cannot be called "education."