The Irish Language Movement

In 2006, in the presence of a large (and largely Irish-American) audience including the mayor and the archbishop, a plaque was unveiled in Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre to commemorate Douglas Hyde’s visit there a century earlier. As Timothy McMahon relates in his nuanced and insightful book on the impact of the Gaelic Revival on Irish society, Hyde had been encouraged to go on an American fundraising tour for the Gaelic League by W. B. Yeats, who himself had visited the United States a few years earlier. Hyde’s 1906 lecture on the Gaelic Revival in Milwaukee raised enough funds to pay the salary of a number of Irish language teachers. Yeats, one of the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre, knew no Irish himself but recognized, as did Hyde, that the language movement and the Anglo-Irish literary revival were parts of the same process to create an “Irish” Ireland. McMahon presents their collaborative friendship as an illustration for his argument that the League leadership was serious about the stated nature of the organization as inclusive, nonsectarian and nonpolitical; in this book, he aims to complicate the commonly held but too simplistic belief that the Gaelic League was a peasant-centred, backward-looking, “priest-ridden” and quasi-political organization. With the aid of numerous Irish and English language sources, and through a detailed analysis of League activities, festivals, and processions, and the backgrounds and motives of those who attended them, the author seeks to address a set of questions that turn out to have surprisingly complex answers: Who participated in the Gaelic Revival, and why? And to what extent, and in what way, was the revival a success? McMahon’s study shows that the revival was interpreted in different ways by those who participated in it, and that they did so from a variety of motives. Even if the revival failed in its stated aim to keep the Irish language alive, and may in some ways even have been counterproductive, the way in which League members understood its function did help change the perception Irish people had of themselves, their culture, and their country.

McMahon paints a fascinating picture of the role of the Catholic Church in the language movement and shows that the League’s reputation in some circles as a “priestly institution” deserves qualification. By virtue of their authority and community status, priests often served as leaders in their local League branches, which gave them a disproportionate amount of visibility within the movement. In practice, however, their attitude towards the Irish language was often one of indifference, and while some members of the clergy enthusiastically supported the movement—notably Fr Eugene O’Growney, one of the League’s founders and the author of a popular Irish language primer—it was more often the case that priests provided little practical support and sometimes even denounced League activities, such as coeducational language classes, on the grounds that they fostered immorality. The Catholic hierarchy was, by and large, not supportive of compulsory Irish language education in the institutions under its supervision. This negative attitude was caused to a large degree by the fear that a language requirement might hamper the seminary at Maynooth in its mission of supplying priests for service throughout the empire and would potentially prevent the newly created National University from attracting foreign (i.e., English) Catholic students. McMahon shows that lay members of the Gaelic League, as well as many students and seminarians, were willing to stand up to the Church authorities in the matter of language education and that disputes about the issue became, at times, acrimonious.

The decline of the Irish language after the Famine was a stark fact: while about half of the population could speak the language before 1845, that number had shrunk to 14% in 1901. McMahon attributes the decline of native speakers to the dire economic circumstances in the Gaeltacht regions of the country, where unemployment led to mass emigration to English-speaking parts of the world...