Irealand - Gaelic
Irish is the ancestral language of the 70-million-strong Irish diaspora, and of most Scots, throughout the world. The Irish language as the national language is the first official language of Ireland. The English language is recognised as a second official language. Ireland is constitutionally a bilingual state, with Irish, as the national language, afforded status as the firstofficial language in Article 8 of the Constitution. The Irish language is often referred to as Gaelic (although it is only one of three Gaelic languages, the others being Scots Gaelic and Manx). Gaelic, which, from a variety of causes, has retained, in a considerable degree, its original purity, is bold, expressive and copious. It derives no assistance from the languages either of Greece or Rome, from which it differs in its structure and formation.
Irish has probably been spoken in Ireland since the sixth century BC and until the sixteenth century was almost universally spoken on the island of Ireland. However a series of conquests and plantations of settlers from Britain largely eliminated the Irish ruling classes and undermined their culture. Irish continued as the language of the greater part of the rural population but, as more social and economic mobility became possible, the more prosperous members of the Irish-speaking community began to adopt English, a phenomenon accelerated by the Great Famine (1846–1848).
The Celtic languages constitute one of the seven or eight main groups comprised in the great family of IndoEuropean languages: thus the Celtic is a sister language of Sanskrit, Old Persian, Armenian, Slavonic, Lithuanian, etc., as well of the Latin, Greek, Teutonic, and of the dominant modern languages of Europe. Within historic times Celtic speech prevailed throughout western Europe. As late as Caesar's time it was the language of northern Italy. The language of these Celtic peoples, as well in antiquity as at the present time, presented dialectic differences sufficient to warrant a division of their common speech into two groups, the Gaelic, now represented by the Celtic speech of Ireland, Scotland, and Man; and the Cymric or Kymric, represented by the Celtic speech of Wales and Brittany.
Nearly all the remains of ancient Gaelic literature, and they are comparatively very voluminous and intrinsically valuable, are of Irish origin, the documents written in the Scots and the Manse dialect being of little or no importance. In libraries in many continental European countries are many Gaelic texts of early times; but in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, and in that of the Royal Irish Academy, in the Bodleian at Oxford, and in the British Museum, are treasured monuments of a very copious Irish Gaelic literature, by good fortune rescued from the destruction which has overtaken the great mass of Ireland's literary product during the "dark ages" of European history. According to their contents these MSS. are classed as histories, annals, biographies, pedigrees, mythological stories, fairy tales, hero stories, religious and devotional writings, lives of saints, lyric poetry, satire, many of the hero tales and myths being in poetical form.
Ireland became in the darkest of the Dark Ages, the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries the sanctuary of learning, and to her schools students flocked in thousands from Gaelic and Saxon Britain and from the continent, while Irish missionaries carried abroad to the banks of the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Danube, and to the Swiss in their mountains, with the cross, the lamp of learning. The profession of a Fili being a highly privileged one, and the Fili being numbered by thousands, the poetical and imaginative literature of Ireland was exceedingly voluminous, and though most of it has perished, a very considerable portion remains. Of special value are the numerous glossaries, which were the means, in the hands of modern scholars, of reconstructing the vocabulary of the language.
As early as the year 1360, the English appear to have taken the alarm at the inroads which the Irish language — at that time a much more highly-cultured form of speech than their own — had made upon the colonists, and King Edward III issued orders to the Sheriff of the Cross and Seneschal of the Liberty of Kilkenny prohibiting speakining Irish with other Englishmen and ordering that every Englishman must lean English. In 1367, the last year of the administration of the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, a parliament held at Kilkenny passed the famous act that inter-marriage with the Irish should be punished as high treason, and that any man of English race using the Irish language should forfeit all his land and tenements to the Crown, and forbidding also the entertainment of bards, ministrels, and rhymers.
For some centuries thereafter, these and other efforts to suppress Gaelic and replace it with English continued, but with little success. By the 17th Century Irish was the usual spoken language of the country, even in Dublin, but there are indications that the ardour with which it had been cultivated and the respect with which its professors had been regarded was dying out.
Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh, in his book printed at Louvain in 1632, says that Irish is the language of the whole of Hibernia, but there were some differences of pronunciation in the various provinces, and between the learned and the common people, the universal opinion being that the people of Connacht spoke it best, they having both power of expression and propriety of phrase, while the men of Munster had the power of expression without the propriety, and the people of Ulster the propriety without the power of expression. The people of Leinster were considered deficient in both.
An almost universal acquaintance with a traditional literature was a leading trait among the Irish down to the 18th century, when every barony and almost every townland still possessed its poet and reciter, and song, recitation, music, and oratory were the recognised amusements of nearly the whole population. That population in consequence, so far as wit and readiness of language and power of expression went, had almost all attained a remarkably high level, without however producing any one of a commanding eminence.
Once the English Government got the upper hand in the seventeenth century, and placed bishops and clergy of its own in the sees and dioceses throughout Ireland, they made it a kind of understood bargain with their nominees that they should have no dealings and make no terms with the national Irish language. Even so late as the latter half of the eighteenth century Dr. Woodward, Protestant bishop of Cloyne, stated that "the difference of language is a very general (and where it obtains an insurmountable) object to any intercourse with the people," on the part of the Protestant clergy, but, he adds coolly, "if it be asked why the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer that it should be the object of Government rather to take measures to bring it into entire disuse."
Even Dean Swift, so clear-sighted a politician where Ireland's financial wrongs were concerned, was in his policy towards the people's language quite at one with men like Woodward. He was, like the other Protestant dignitaries of his day, a declared enemy of the Gaelic speech, which he considered prevented "the Irish from being tamed," and at one time he said he had a scheme by which their language "might easily be abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble." In another place he says, " it would be a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in the kingdom..."
The absorbing power of Irish nationality continued so strong all through the seventeenth century that many of the children of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers who had settled in Ireland could not speak a word of English. Still later, during the Peninsular War, the English officers in one of the Highland regiments attempted to abolish the speaking of Gaelic at the mess table, but the Gaelic-speaking officers completely outvoted them.
It is from the middle of the eighteenth century onward that the Irish language begins to die out. The old Irish legends and traditions, the ancient pagan gods and other supernatural beings of Erin, the hero tales and love episodes of the Red Branch and Ossianic cycles of romance, and Irish fairy lore and folk-lore, were never entirely forgotten. Thomas Moore's 'Irish Melodies' (1808 et seq.), although primarily produced for English consumption, were perhaps the first real revelation of the Irish spirit in English literature. Moore not only sang of the episodes of the struggle between Saxon and Celt and of the earlier glories of Malachy and Brian the Brave, but that he also helped to keep alive enthusiasm for the memory of a still remoter past by celebrating the coming of the Milesians to Ireland, and those later but still olden periods when skilled generals led the Red Branch Knights to battle and when Tara was as yet the seat of mighty kings.
But anybody who applied himself to the subject of Celtic literature would have a good deal to tell about the condescending contempt with which his studies have been regarded by his fellows. The illustrious Dr. Brinkley of Trinity College wondered "Surely, sir, you do not mean to tell us that there exists the slightest evidence to prove that the Irish had any acquaintance with the arts of civilised life anterior to the arrival in Ireland of the English?" And another suggested that the "sooner the Irish recognised that before the arrival of Cromwell they were utter savages, the better it would be for everybody concerned."
By most learned men, the Gaelic language was regarded as a subject for pure scholarship only, and as a thing dead, having no immediate or necessary connexion with the country or the people that had given it birth. Their scholastic labours, however, may to some extent unconsciously prepared the way for the popular desire to rebuild the nation, if possible, upon native lines. Certain it is that a great popular movement in favour of the language and literature sprang up at the very close of the nineteenth century in Ireland itself, under the auspices of a society called the Gaelic League, founded upon a previous society called the Gaelic Union, which was an offshoot from an older and still existing body, the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language.
Daniel Dewar, in a book entitled "Observations on the Character, Customs and Superstitions of the Irish," writing thus in 1812 :— "The number of people who speak this language [Irish] is much greater than is generally supposed. It is spoken throughout the province of Connaught by all the lower orders, a great part of whom scarcely understand any English, and some of those who do, understand it only so as to conduct business. They are incapable of receiving moral or religious instruction through its medium. The Irish is spoken very generally through the other three provinces except amongst the descendants of the Scotch in the north."
In 1825, 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."
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." 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 vears Irish was killed off so rapidly that the whole island contained fewer speakers in 1891 than the small province of Connacht alone did thirty sears 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, backed by the expenditure every year of many hundreds of thousands of pounds. This Board, evidently actuated by a sense of Imperialism, and by an overmastering desire to centralise, and being itself appointed by Government chiefly from a class of Irishmen who had been steadily hostile to the natives, and being perfectly ignorant of the language and literature of the Irish, pursued from the first with unvarying pertinacity the great aim of utterly exterminating this language.
Eventually a great popular movement to revive the speaking of Irish began with the founding of the Gaelic League, founded in the year 1893. The objects were: (1) The preservation of Irish as the national language in Ireland and the extension of its use as a spoken tongue. (2) The study and publication of existing Irish literature and the cultivation of a modern literature in Irish. Such was the intellectual stagnation in Ireland at the period of this foundation that it would be safe to assert that there were not, at the time, more than a few hundred people living, if so many, who could read or write in Gaelic. After many years of silent labor and much painful uphill toil, the League at last became a widely spread popular movement throughout the Irish world.
In Ireland in 1900, when the population was 4,500,000, the speakers of Gaelic were but 700,000, a decline of 50,000 from their number 10 years before. This decline was due to the large emigration from the western province, the last foothold of Gaelic in Ireland. But the people of Ireland and the children of Ireland abroad were making a concerted effort to resuscitate the ancient speech of their race and to make it again the home-speech of the people, concurrently with English. High hopes were entertained of the success of this movement, which purposed a revival, not only of the Gaelic speech but of Celtic art, and music, and literature. It was a struggle for the supremacy of Gaelic ideals in the spiritual life of the people. In 1902, in a convention of the Gaelic League in Dublin, 475 branches of the League were represented. The membership of the branches amounted to 50,000. Gaelic was taught in 1,600 schools in Ireland, and there were that year several Gaelic periodicals, and nearly every newspaper in Ireland had a column or a page printed in Gaelic. There were 600 Gaelic literary and musical compositions entered in a prize competition held at Dublin during the convention, to which resorted thousands of visitors from all parts of Ireland and from abroad.
Following the foundation of the State in 1922 it became compulsory for all Irish schoolchildren to learn it. In the Irish census of 2006, nearly 42% of the population described themselves as Irish speakers and nearly 30% said that they used Irish every day. Most of these speak Irish in an educational context - just 4.4% of the population indicated that they spoke Irish every day outside of education.
Following on from the “Statement on the Irish Language 2006”,the Minister decided to institute a language planning process to increase the number of daily or active usersof Irish from the then current level of approximately 72,000 to 250,000 in 20 years.
Irish takes its place in the communicative repertoire of the Irish people alongside English. The Irish language links both its speakers and supporters as a sophisticated cosmopolitan and globally oriented nation to a Europe forging closer interaction. Irish makes Ireland unique and remarkable. It provides a bond of social cohesion and social capital identified in research as a key advantage to Ireland’s economy.
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