Subaltern Voices? Poetry in Irish, Popular Insurgency and the 1798 Rebellion

Apologizing to his patron, the Protestant antiquarian, John George Augustus Prim (1821–75), for the delay in sending “the four verses relative to the bloody engagement at Ross in ‘98,” Seán Ó Doinn, Gaelic scholar and collector of folk material, explained, “but delays are often unavoidable in rescuing from oblivion all that can be gleaned from the native tongue of Ireland in its declining days.” ¹ The loss of so much Gaelic material is one reason why we have so little evidence for the motivation and outlook of the rebel rank and file, compared to the massive documentation on the official side, and its focus on the French-inspired radicalism of the bourgeois leadership of the United Irishmen. ² It is a loss hardly noticed by historians, in part because of an assumption that the Wexford rebels were English speaking. And yet, in the fullest and best eyewitness account of “the bloody engagement at Ross,” on 5 June 1798, James Alexander several times reports them as speaking Irish:

Passing by the barrack lane a rebel came out and levelled an old musquet at me, but presently crossed himself and took aim at a soldier, in doing which he was himself shot by a Dublin Militia man. As he fell his piece went off and he exclaimed, “Scoilt an Deoil!” (The Devil split you) his last words. ³

Such instinctive use of Irish was almost certainly combined with some competency in English and literacy in neither language. The verses collected by Ó Doinn show that this “Hidden Ireland” was neither self-contained nor entirely backward looking. The unknown poet welcomed Napoleon’s defeat of the Austrians, “mar do chualas insa news dá léamh” (as I heard read in the newspaper). Yet, far from seeing the battle of Ross in terms of contemporary European revolution, he described it in the language of earlier religious (and colonial) conflicts, the enemy being “Clanna Luther” (the followers of Luther). ⁴ This poem is unusual in its lack of any overt Jacobite dimension, because this seemingly archaic tradition dominated ballads and poetry in Irish, not only in 1798, but for at least another generation. It is important to understand the extent to which the language, imagery, and aspirations of this defunct élite discourse came to articulate the hopes of a peasant insurgency, and in so doing became part of a wider revolutionary dynamic.

A general failure to take Irish language sources into account is one reason why the present generation of Irish historians has been largely resistant to seeing the Irish experience in the modern period in terms of colonialism. Instead this field has been left mainly to the more theoretical, global models developed by literary scholars. The intensely political focus of Irish historiography and its massive reliance on official sources has marginalized cultural developments and has led to a view of colonialism that is over-legalistic and reductionist. It was unfortunate that the most significant Irish analysis of the cultural dimensions of colonialism, that by Daniel Corkery, was vitiated by a crude nationalism, and could be dismissed for its historical ⁵ inaccuracies; for Corkery posed some of the right questions and can be seen as an early pioneer in the field later redefined by Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, who in their different ways viewed colonialism as a complex interactive phenomenon, producing unexpected cultural and psychological patterns. ⁶ This view, the basis of modern postcolonial studies, is well developed in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism: “Partly because of Empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic.” Cultural identity should not be seen in terms of artificial essentialisms, but of “contrapuntal ensembles,” involving “an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions.” ⁷ The value of such insights for an understanding of Irish cultural development in the modern period can best be seen in David Lloyd’s Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment, the most important Irish study on literature and colonialism since Corkery. ⁸

In India, on the other hand, historians have been at the...