by Dermot Keogh
Furthermore, among the disciples of the new political nationalism in Ireland from the later eighteenth century there were a few thinkers, notably the young Thomas Davis, who were especially alert to the cultural implications of the constitutional-legal claims being made for an autonomous Irish ‘state’ on behalf an ‘Irish nation’, and who were aware of the general European criteria for recognising the claims of different groups to ‘nationhood’ (and to national states). In this valuation of claims to ‘nationhood’, a distinctive language was commonly acknowledged as a paramount criterion.6
However, it is from the last two decades of the nineteenth century that we come upon those ideas and programmes regarding cultural renewal, and language ‘revival’, that are commonly referred to as ‘the philosophy of Irish-Ireland’ or, in the case of some commentators, ‘the Gaelic League idea’.7The timing of this stirring of ideas and cultural concern was not accidental, and neither was its focus. By the closing decade of the nineteenth century, as a result of the electoral success of Parnell’s political movement for Irish ‘Home Rule’, some form of devolved self-government for Ireland seemed imminent.8 At the same time, the census returns were clearly indicating that the death of the Irish language seemed now inevitable and hardly less imminent. It was at this juncture that what we may term a deliberate project of ‘decolonisation’ was formulated and adopted by a group of intellectuals and artists with, in time, significant support from a larger constituency of political activists who were to form the political leadership of the new Irish state eventually established in 1922.9
While a movement for the revival of nativist sports and athletics had already been founded in 1884, with an explicit declaration that it sought to reverse the tide of seemingly relentless adoption of English cultural and leisure pastimes in place of native Irish customs, the appropriate starting point for discussion of the project of decolonisation is probably Douglas Hyde’s seminal lecture, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, delivered to the National Literary Society in November 1892. Hyde’s personal encounter with the Irish language, and the manner in which it fired his imagination, is a familiar story, and need not be rehearsed here.10But, so far as his views on language and identity are concerned, it is worth noting that while he became committed to the ‘extension of our [i.e., Irish] language among the people’, it is clear that he was especially exercised to maintain and preserve Irish as a living language among the base-community of Irish-speakers whose vernacular it still was. By the late nineteenth century these were largely concentrated in areas in the western counties of the Atlantic coast. As he told a New York audience in 1891: ‘What I wish to see is Irish established as a living language, for all time, among the million or half-million who still speak it along the west coast, and to ensure that the language will hold a favourable place in teaching institutions and government examinations. Unless we retain a bilingual population as large as we now have, Irish may be said to be dead, and with it nine-tenths of the glories of the past.’11When Hyde, with others, founded the Gaelic League two years later, the primary objective of the new movement was declared to be: ‘The preservation of Irish as the national language of Ireland and the extension of its use as a spoken tongue.’12
While Hyde’s principal concern may have been the maintenance (i.e., reproduction) of the existing Irish-speaking communities, the League’s objective of preservation and extension was no more than the logic of Hyde’s basic propositions regarding language and identity and the need for socio-cultural regeneration in late nineteenth century Ireland. Hyde claimed that the purpose of the Gaelic League and the language revival mission was ‘to render the present a rational continuation of the past’. For Hyde, it would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions for any people (for both the individuals and the collectivity) were the continuity of its cultural tradition, articulated and given form principally through language, to be ruptured. Such a cultural tradition encompassed thoughts, feelings, perceptions, wisdom, a distinctive world-view based on a unique configuration of values. The case made for cultural continuity, through the medium of Irish, and, therefore, for language revival, rested on a set of assumptions and propositions that combined elements of general humanism with specific tenets of cultural nationalism.
Hyde’s understanding of the relationship between language, thought and identity was unremarkable for his time. Whereas, in the beginning, thought and feeling may have given rise to language, the dynamics of language development and of cultural formation within human society had become more complex over time. Hyde quoted approvingly Jubainville’s definition of language as ‘the form of our thoughts during every instant of our existence’. As a language develops it encodes a complex system of understandings, meanings and values particular to its community of users – a distinctive world-view. As the Prussian philosopher and theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, had written some time earlier: ‘every language constitutes a particular mode of thought, and what is thought in one language can never be repeated in the same way in another.’13
The abandonment of a language, therefore, to say nothing of its enforced abandonment, inevitably involved a disorientating rupture in cultural continuity at several levels; not only an alienation from landscape (placenames) and inherited historical narratives and communal myths, but also a deep psychological trauma, at an individual and communal level, caused by the loss of a rich inherited matrix of wisdom and knowledge – knowledge of self and of the world. This elemental trauma, it was believed, had been exacerbated by a number of features particular to the language change in Ireland: that it was the outcome of conquest, military and political, so that the abandonment of the native communal language in the face of the dominant new language of the conqueror (in law, commerce, politics, administration, etc.) became internalised as part of the shame of being conquered, of experiencing defeat, dispossession, humiliation and general impoverishment.14This general syndrome among a conquered people – the self-disparagement and shame, the contempt for the native culture felt by many of its carriers in the face of their need to come to terms with a seemingly invincible new culture sustained by a new ruling group – is well-documented in the literature on colonialism, from Memmi and Fanon to Said.
It was an outrage to Hyde and his fellow ideologues of the Gaelic League that this language abandonment had produced frightening inter-generational tension, incomprehension and emotional violence. The natural inter-generational transmission of love, wisdom, knowledge, sensibility and feeling was violently interrupted and sabotaged, through silence, reproach, repression and physical punishment, in the interests of a language-change enforced by the need to conform to an external structure of power and material opportunity. This, in essence, was the ‘humanist’ impulse advanced by Hyde on behalf of the language revival.
The specifically cultural nationalist aspects of Hyde’s propositions are also of interest, though also unremarkable for his time. As Hyde saw it, by abandoning their own distinctive language, customs and traditions (for Hyde, a broad but conventional inventory of demonstrably nativist modes), and adopting uncritically the English language and cultural fashions (popular and elite) originating in England, while continuing at the same time to insist vehemently on their own distinctiveness as a people or nation, and, accordingly, their entitlement to an Irish national state, the Irish had succeeded in having the worst of all worlds:
It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this half-way house … how it continues to clamour for recognition as a distinct nationality, and at the same time throws away with both hands what would make it so. If Irishmen only went a little further they would become good Englishmen in sentiment also.
In short, if thoroughly assimilated to English culture, they might at least be able to generate a truly creative life and to achieve something of consequence by their collective energy (in the economic or soc
ial sphere, for example), untroubled by contradictions in self-definition or disorientating cultural confusion. But this hadn’t happened and, on the evidence of nationalist political rhetoric, seemed unlikely to happen. As Hyde saw it, general social debilitation had been caused by the simple fact that ‘we have ceased to be Irish without becoming English. It is to this cause that I attribute more than to anything else our awful emigration and impoverishment.’ Accordingly, if the Irish were determined not to be assimilated to the powerful English culture, and to insist on their distinctiveness as a people – and for Hyde all the evidence was that they were determined so to insist – then at least they owed it to themselves to try to give that claim to separate or distinct peoplehood some verifiable basis, some authentic and convincing evidence:
It is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good members of the empire that I urge that they should not remain in the anomalous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become the one thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they rejected, and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.
This was the basic formulation of the decolonising impulse. For Hyde and the Gaelic League activists the restoration of the Irish language as the national vernacular was the cornerstone of this project of national reconstruction; a healthy identity being a prerequisite for a reconstruction of the social and economic fabric and the collective energy and self-belief of the national community.15
Of course, the alternative badge of communal identity which might be widely recognised was religion. Religious identity was, for historical reasons, deeply and pervasively communal in Ireland. But religion was a divisive and exclusive instrument of cultural differentiation. While history had determined that ‘the dispossessed people’ in Ireland were in fact the Catholic people, no theorist of Irish nationalism advocated that Irishness be considered synonymous with, or a condition of Catholicism. This did not prevent Catholic leaders – clerical and lay – from regularly lapsing into such an identification of Catholic with ‘Irish’ and historically-oppressed ‘native’.16This strong communal sense of religious identity, with its deep historical roots, would inevitably present a challenge to a project of decolonisation based upon language as the key marker of identity.
One further feature, or refinement, of Hyde’s claim for the revival of Irish was that it was not simply a general plea for the cultural particularity encoded in language to be allowed to live and develop, but a specific set of claims for the kind of cultural differentiation which marked off the Irish from the English. This, it must be said, was fairly representative of the stereotyping common to cultural taxonomy in the later nineteenth century, benignly voiced by Renan, Arnold and others, with its more morbid versions formulated in racist discourse (Gobineau and Chamberlain, for example). In effect, the artistic and imaginative and spiritual Celts were contrasted with the solid and practical and materialist Teutons.17As with all stereotypes, it was not all pure invention, but, rather, exaggeration, distortion and omission. With Hyde, it involved a generous measure of hyperbole and more than a few grains of nonsense:
The English race are admirable for their achievements … their perseverance, their business faculties, their practical qualities … wealth, power, and the teeming fruits of industry are theirs … Well, the characteristics of this Irish race of ours are lightness, brightness, wit, fluency, and an artistic temperament. The characteristics of the Teutonic race are an intense business faculty, perseverance, and steadiness in details … The more divergence of thought and genius, of natural aptitudes, the better, because, I tell you, there is an individuality in nationalities exactly as there is in persons – and to attempt to mould or crush everything into one particular type has invariably been fatal to the people that attempted it.
A version of this particular stereotyping also informed Yeats and his collaborators in the enterprise of establishing an authentic Irish national literature in Hiberno-English, and many Gaelic Leaguers gave the formula a more deeply religious hue.
In sum, ‘the Irish revival’, as a holistic project of decolonisation based on the restoration of the Irish language as the communal ‘voice’ of Ireland, was advocated on fairly orthodox grounds of cultural stereotyping as well as on the higher humanistic grounds of cultural continuity and ‘wholeness’ in language, thought and feeling.
Hyde’s main collaborator in founding the Gaelic League, the noted historian and scholar, Eoin MacNéill, also emphasised the need for spiritual as well as social renewal in Ireland. Where MacNéill diverged from Hyde, perhaps, as Hutchinson’s work has shown, was in MacNéill’s emphasis on the way in which the glories of the Gaelic tradition and inheritance, still resonating in the living Irish vernacular, emerged from the uniquely rich cultural fusion of the Celtic genius with the light of Christianity; it was this encounter with the Christian vision which had fructified and given a unique focus to the Celtic spiritual and artistic genius in Ireland.18Again, the noted journalist and propagandist, D. P. Moran, produced a more schematic model than Hyde of cultural absorption (with the Gael as the matrix absorbing all later arrivals), and a more colourful and corrosive flagellation of the contradictions and paradoxes present in the Irish debate on cultural identity; but Moran’s views, though influential, did not present any fundamental challenge to the main Gaelic League propositions.19
It is generally accepted that the political leadership of the popular front Sinn Féin, after 1917, and of the first generation to exercise political power in the Irish Free State, after 1922, included a substantial quota of men, and, to a lesser extent, women, who had been influenced, some deeply, by the Gaelic League idea and the cultural agenda of the revolution. Indeed, the political scientist Tom Garvin has suggested that ‘the Gaelic League was in many ways the central institution in the development of the Irish revolutionary elite’.20This claim needs some qualification. The actual number of those in the new political establishment from the 1920s through to the 1950s who were fully or firmly committed to the project of cultural change (or, more crucially, perhaps, who had any clear idea of what such a project might mean in practice) was probably significantly lower than is commonly supposed, even if the ranks of the committed included some of the more notable political leaders. A larger question, however, is the extent to which the commitment to cultural, and specifically the language, change penetrated other elements of the ruling classes, the key elites of the new Irish state: the bankers, merchants and business class, the lawyers and doctors, financiers, bishops and wealthy farmers.21The new state was, from the outset, a conservative and substantially confessional bourgeois state. The established power elites of the pre-independence era remained largely undisturbed in the exercise of their economic and social dominance. How likely was it that such a power structure would be hospitable to a radical programme of linguistic and cultural change? Controversies over the place of Irish in the education system – notably in the new National University of Ireland – had already given evidence of sharp differences within the nationalist community.22
Nevertheless, in the first generation after independence the leaders of the main political parties in Ireland all gave obeisance to the notion that it was right and proper, indeed that it was a solemn obligation, for the government of an independent Irish state to enhance the status of the Irish language and to attend to its preservation and extension as a living ‘national’ language. There was a large measure of consensus among the political leaders that the Irish language was the principal and most irrefutable mark of that sense of nationality on whose behalf an Irish national state had been demanded and, whatever its shortcomings, established. Accordingly, Irish was accorded official status as the national language in the 1922 Free State constitution, and this was later repeated and indeed strengthened in de Valera’s 1937 constitution.23Additionally, poli-cy initiatives in the 1920s and 1930s, nota
bly in the areas of education and recruitment to the public service, sought to extend competence and use of the language. With subsidised publications, progress in lexicography and standardisation of the language, a modest presence in the arts and broadcasting, and significant symbolic recognition for Irish (in the nomenclature of state offices, public companies, ritual use in solemn state occasions, etc.), it would be wrong to say that no progress was made. By the 1950s a substantial cohort of secondary bilinguals had emerged from the schools and Irish had achieved a degree of penetration and a presence in public domains in Ireland from which it had been excluded for many centuries.24
Yet, all this fell very short indeed of the radical cultural project of decolonisation proclaimed by the more advanced Gaelic Leaguers. The constitutional status of Irish was not elaborated or translated into statutory legal rights for Irish-speakers; the ritual symbolic use was minimalist and increasingly seen as tokenism; the degree of real penetration by Irish even within the state services and the apparatus of government (local and national) was very limited; and, above all, the actual base-communities or enclaves of Irish-speakers – the Gaeltacht communities – continued to contract at an alarming rate, due to the ravages of emigration and the continuing shift to English within the diminished communities, and there seemed to be no coherent state strategy for arresting this accelerating decline.25
In seeking explanations for this, however qualified, ‘failure’ of the cultural project of the Gaelic League and its political offspring, one may choose to begin from any one of a number of ideological positions. A primary site of explanation is the Irish state itself, its nature and the capacity for identity-endorsement instinct in its very existence as a national state. In terms of economic and social power structures, the Irish Free State was a conservative bourgeois state from its inception. The new political leaders made relatively few changes – and none of substance – in the centralised apparatus of government they inherited from the British. Nor were there many changes, apart from ritual matters of nomenclature and minor procedural and ceremonial matters, in the structures of law, government and public administration: the decision to opt for an unarmed police force was probably the most radical departure from the prevailing systems. The economic and fiscal policy of the new state was considerate of existing interests.26