THE IRISH LANGUAGE AND THE POLITICIANS
[BY AN IRISH CORRESPONDENT.]
THE Free State Government's policy in respect of the Irish language revival has alreadybecome a centre of controversy. Recently the Minister for Education published regulations governing the National School (i.e., elementary) programme, from which it appears that after 1927 no new teachers will be ap- pointed who are not qualified to teach the Irish language. Now the Press gives publicity to an official scheme for the erection of preparatory teachers' colleges in the Irish- speaking districts, through which it seems all candidates for the teaching profession will be required to pass. The Government is evidently determined that in a few years the Irish language shall be the medium of elementary educa- tion in the Gaelic and half-Gaelic territories, and a con- siderable factor in education in the anglicized countries.
Opposition to this "compulsory Irish" policy is strong. A large part of the population regards the lan- guage revival as a retrograde movement. Many people, who are sympathetic to the language, have been ant- agonized by the havoc wrought in general education by the clumsy efforts of the past three years at gaelicizing the schools. Unhappily the issue is coloured by the political obsession which curses all Irish life. To oppose compulsory Irish or the present methods of teaching Irish is to be denounced as a "West-Briton," and it is made a test of political loyalty to insist on Irish at all costs. Seeing the language made a racial test, and debased in the process, by the political Gaelic party, Anglo-Irishmen are driven to oppose even the milder aspects of the Gaelic propaganda.
It must be recognized, however, that the Irish language is destined to play a considerable part in the life of the people of the Free State. As a minimum, Gaelic will be cultivated as an ornament of liberal education and used for ceremonies and inscriptions. Its songs—copious and fascinating as the Elizabethan songs—will be sung, and its literature and folk-lore will continue to be a fertilizing influence in Anglo-Irish letters, giving to the work of Irish novelists and poets a distinctive, regional richness. The late T. W. Rolleston—whose writings drew so much poetic charm from his Gaelic studies—was the chief exponent of what may be called the non-political cultiva- tion of Irish. The 2naocimum—the object sought by those who govern Free State policy at present—amounts to the ousting of English from the Free State as the common speech, and its relegation to the place held by French and Spanish—that of a secondary tongue, studied chiefly for commercial uses and known only to the educated classes. Were this policy to succeed, every place name in the Free State would be changed like that of Kingstown. Kings- town has gone back not to the name formerly familiar to English speakers, Dunleary, but to the primitive Thin Laoghaire, which contains sounds unpronounceable by the English tongue.
Between these two alternatives there lies a course which no one now seems to be following. The late Padraic Pearse, the most idealistic and yet the most practical, of the Gaelic leaders, preached bilingualism. He wished to maintain English as the language of commerce, science and practical life in general, while retaining Irish as the language of the home, of religion, and of literature. He held that Irish could be brought to the pitch of develop- ment reached by Welsh in Wales, and that it would -then serve as the medium of a heroic and yet homely imagina- tive life to which men could escape when turning from the grey world of daily toil in factories and offices. He shared Rolleston's scholarship, but differed from him in wishing to maintain Irish as a spoken language.
Rolleston's minimum is certain to be attained, because Irish literature has an innate interest which will survive all political vicissitudes. Pearse's aim, however, may fail to be attained, and, indeed, the political Gaels stand in its way. When a scholar like Dr. Douglas Hyde tells his countrymen something of the hidden beauty of Gaelic song and story and says : "Let us study this for its own sake," then every lover of the island that gave birth to the Gaelic literature is inclined to sympathy ; but when a politician says, "Let us call Kingstown Thin Laoghaire, and so demonstrate our separation from all things British," then those whose blood or interests are not purely Celtic are antagonized. The Gaelic League always has been torn between two schools of thought. Its founders—Dr. Hyde, Pearse and Dr. MacNeil (though the last is now Minister of Education and supports the com- pulsory policy) set out to revive the literature along with the language, and preached , Gaelicism for its own sake. Another group, which ultimately dominated the League, took for its text Davis's saying that a nation's language is its strongest frontier, and declared that "bad. Irish is better than no Irish." They even said that the lan- guage had no inherent merit, and that it must be revived solely as a badge of nationality—a means to distinguish the patriot from the enemy. Originally conservative in inspiration, the language movement became revolu- tionary. In the efforts to cram Ireland into an un-' English mould the genius of Gaelic and the study of its literature have been neglected. The revival has become a matter of forcing a different set of syllables on to men's tongues rather than the cultivation of wider interests in their minds. It has been counted more important to call a bicycle a rothar than to know the poem made about one's native moorland by a bard who peopled that heathery country with memories.
In the language movement the positive and negative phases of Irish nationality are exhibited. Some Irish' patriots have striven for nationhood, some solely for separation from Britain. The one party has been ani- mated by love of what is individual and ancient in Ireland, the other by hatred for what is international and progressive in the living world. Many of the best Gaelic scholars have been, as to politics, Unionists. Mr. Standish O'Grady, who discovered to our age the heroic past and virtually fathered the Irish literary revival, is a Unionist, and his essays represent the separatist movement as repugnant to all those aristocratic and heroic ideas which his books show to have been the genius of antique, mediaeval and modern Gaeldom. On the other hand, many of the most irreconcilable enemies of England in Ireland have drawn their ideas from Radical English writers and have despised the Gaelic tradition.
The " compulsory Irish policy seems to be dictated by the. negative school of Gaelic opinion. It is not true- as„some, have said—that the Irish which .is used in Free State official documents is bad Irish. Indeed, some fine scholarship has been displayed in bilingual proclama- tions and similar linguistic exercises. kis true, however, that it is bad Irish that is being taught in the schools. The national teachers have been put through annual courses of Irish and then sent back to their schools to pass on what they have learnt. A few have possessed sufficient interest and aptitude to profit by these hurried courses, but most of them have learnt little of a difficult inflected language and have passed on to the children only broken, ill-pronounced and ungrammatical phrases. The children learn to express themselves neither in English nor in Irish and a school inspector declared that a half- witted generation is being created by these methods. Moreover, in the effort to teach Irish as a modern language, more endeavour has been given to fabricating a modern terminology than to conveying the literature and idiom which are the real intellectual content of the old tongue.
Were Irish taught by well-qualified scholars, and were due attention given to the written language and the songs—leaving modern terminology out until such time as it comes into real use in real life (if ever)—it might be a valuable educational instrument. There is no need to repeat what impartial foreign scholars already have stated regarding the philological, grammatical, historical and phonetic value of Gaelic. Something may be said, however, regarding the fear that its cultivation by the educated classes must needs involve the faults of the "compulsory Irish" policy. Apart from the fact that— as has been said—Unionists have been among the best exponents of Gaelic in Ireland, and the fact that the strongest Imperial sentiments cherished in these islands are found among the Celtic speakers of Scotland, the truth is that the literature of Irish is one charged with the doctrines of conservatism. No one can guess what "political Gaelic" may produce, but it is impossible to imagine an Ireland familiar with the true Gaelic idiom becoming Bolshevistic. It would require more than a paragraph to adduce the proofs of this statement, and it must suffice now to declare that the Gaelic mind, as expressed in literature, is always royalist ; that patriotism, in the Gaelic mould, wholly lacks the revolutionary colour of Anglo-Irish patriotic poetry ; and that the principal bulk of modern Gaelic letters comes from the Jacobite poets whose work was conservative and aristocratic throughout. Did not the word Tory itself originate as a name for the Irish Gaels—for the gentlemen of the old order who were driven from their lands by Cromwell, as they would be driven forth, if they lived in our own times, by the levellers of to-day ?
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