EIRE'S TWO TONGUES
By BANN LE KNOX
EVEN before the Republic of Ireland was officially declared on Easter Monday, little posters began to appear in odd corners of Dublin, urging, in heavy funereal type: "Now break the language connection." The diehard Gaels were at it again. Ever since 18503, when Douglas Hyde (lying dead, fate will have it, as these words appear) formed the Gaelic League "to keep the Irish language spoken in Ireland," official nationalist policy has thrust further toward the ideal of keeping the English language from being spoken in Ireland. The modesty of the results has only inflamed missionary passions. Today no Irish Government, whatever the private views of its members, would dare deny that it hopes one day to see a thirty-two-county Irish-speaking Republic.
The Irish have made such a show of being foreign to all things British that the timid visitor sometimes wonders if he is going to need an Irish grammar to make himself understood in Dublin. If he travels by Holyhead he may suffer his first start of alarm when he hears sailors speaking in a fierce, foreign tongue. He can take heart, however, for they are talking Welsh ; and he is most unlikely to meet an Irish speaker until he has crossed the whole breadth of the Republic. Wales may still be subject to dictation from West- minster, but a great part of her people even now speak Welsh in normal conversation. Eire's last census showed that pure Irish speakers numbered 12,5oo in a population of 3} millions, though as lately as 1851 the comparable figures were 320,000 in 61 millions. (Pure Gaelic-speaking Scots, by the way, number little over too,000.)
Today many English-speaking Irishmen remember their grand- fathers, some even their fathers, conversing ordinarily in the native tongue, but in the last few generations the language has been patter- ing fast downhill, almost to silence. It is a paradox of Irish history that much of the blame for this must be taken by Daniel O'Connell, reverently titled "The Liberator." The reforms he secured by his great efforts in the second quarter of the last century so suddenly opened such a wide field of opportunity to Irish Catholics that he urged them to learn the tongue in which they could get jobs for the asking. It was late in the nineteenth century before the nationalists realised that the warnings of Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam should have been heeded, and that the country was in danger of losing one of her prime weapons against the English— that of incomprehension. Emigration had bled the Gaelteacht (the small areas, chiefly in South and West, where pure Irish is still spoken), for the Irish speakers lived on some of the poorest land in the country. Association after society after league sprang up to protect or restore the language, but it was not until Ireland gained a government of her own that practical steps were taken. The Fianna Fail Government began a tomato-farming scheme for Connemara, which, however, proved woefully uneconomic. The good grassland of Co. Meath was ploughed up to settle native speakers from the West, many of whom at once began to learn the English which everyone around them was talking. The biggest and best incentive yet offered to the Gaelteacht is the £5 which every child there earns when he passes his examination in the language. But in spite of every inducement the pure Gaelteacht continues to shrink further and further towards such places as the Blasket Islands, whose storm- bound barrenness effectively protects them from anglicisation.
Throughout the twenty-six counties the main language attack is made in the school. Most Irish children go to a State school in their fifth or sixth year, and for the next three years are given all instruction through the medium of Irish ; even in recreation periods they are not supposed to use English. It is a system which intelligent children swallow with ease, but the one who is not so bright, getting no assistance in his homework from English-speaking parents, is left to grope through murky jungles of Latin and mathematics guided only by strange, half-understood directions. After the three years classes emerge with a far greater gap in standards between top and bottom than is usual in England. Humane teachers, of course, relax the strict language-rule when they see that a child is in difficulties. But these are not the teachers best loved by Government inspectors.
The more ambitious an instructor for promotion, the more closely he or she sticks to the Gaelic letter of the law.
Officially, applicants for Government or Government-controlled jobs. in the Republic must know Irish. This is a rule supposedly applied to all—municipally-employed navvy or Aer Lingus hostess. (Though a good pair of shoulders on the one, or a good pair of legs on the other, is usually enough to make an employer waive the Irish.) In the Civil Service, of course, a high language standard is required. Unfortunately civil servants the world over have a language of their own, and are not the best custodians of a national tongue. In Eirc the official language of Dublin is becoming rapidly unintelligible to the true Irish speaker of the Gaelteacht, for Irish, with all its poetic qualities, is the language of a primitive agricultural people, and officialdom—to express itself at all—has had to introduce a whole clutter of borrowed jargon.
While the purists despise the Government for bastardising Irish, they themselves make its restoration harder by refusing to budge an inch in the direction of simplification. The language blooms over- profusely in prefixes and suffixes. An even greater difficulty is the stubbornness with which Ulster, Connacht and Munster each defend their own dialects. (A recent examination paper for the elementary schools certificate in Irish has come in for hot criticism because it was set in the dialect of Donegal.) There is a story that when the first Minister of Posts and Telegraphs in the Irish Free State sent his men with pots of green paint to daub out the hated British red on the post offices, there was especial rejoicing in the West where the national spirit was of the strongest. But a few days later more men were sent out, this time with gold paint, to reletter the post offices with their Irish names. Within a week a deputation from the West came to see the Minister to protest disgustedly that the names had been written in the barbarous Munster dialect.
It is easy to understand and sympathise with nationalists who are loth to give up the ideal of an Irish-speaking State. The language revival played so great a part in the political struggle for inde- pendence. And until the split between de Valera and Griffith there was a real chance that the revival would be complete. But the wildfire enthusiasm which was spurring old men and young girls to night classes and tutorials in Irish was damped by the civil war, which killed for ever something of the life-urge for Irish nationalism. Now the official language policy is only a shell—a shell that often covers hypocrisy only thinly. At every public meeting there is the character who begins his speech with a sentence of Irish, then says: "Since the majority of those present do not have the Irish, I will now continue in the hated tongue of the foreigner."
Yet, despite all difficulties, a real interest in the language still lives among the Irish people. You will find barmaids and bus-conductors who wear the fainne, that little gold circle which proclaims that the owner has passed a special examination in Irish. Every year about 6,000 university students invade the Gaelteacht, to live in the villages of Connemara and try to learn Irish as the natives speak it. A recently formed Irish Book Club has a membership of over 5,00o. This is in spite of the fact that the best Irish writers, such as Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and Briain O'Nualain cannot afford to write in Irish, and therefore An Gum (the Government-sponsored Irish publications plan) has to rely largely on strange-looking transla- tions of Sir Walter Scott and Conan Doyle.
With such interest not only existing but persisting there is no real danger that the language will die. But many people fear that the present method of teaching Irish in the schools will drive as many people to hate the language as to love it. Perhaps the Irish Govern- ment could be persuaded to change their language policy, which costs much in money and more in lost tempers, if they understood that Ireland has already brewed a tongue of her own out of English. Any English writer can prove this by asking himself whether he could write a novel about Irish characters which would deceive the natives for more than a couple of sentences. For the whole logic of the Irish is different ; their way of thinking is in the Irish language, and it comes through into their English as something untranslatable. It should be, for any country, enough of an ambition to preserve the speech in which Yeats and Synge and O'Casey have written.
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