Hyde’s First Stand: The Irish Language Controversy of 1899

HYDE’S FIRST STAND: THE IRISH LANGUAGE CONTROVERSY OF 1899 P.J. MATHEWS any student of Irish cultural history will be aware that the first decade of the twentieth century was marked by an intense, and at times heated, debate over attempts to define the essential nature of Irish identity. It is interesting that it was on the stage that the debate became most intense as objections to plays like Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (1899) as well as Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) bubbled to the surface. Undoubtedly much of the criticism directed at these plays stemmed from a belief within sections of nationalist Ireland that writers should display the inherent morality of Irish culture in the face of colonial stereotypes. Yet in many ways this need for the projection of an idealized Ireland was to prove as disabling as were the ethnic slurs. What is little appreciated, however, is that these anxieties of representation ever present in the first decade of the theater movement were prefigured and to some degree precipitated by one of the most important, though largely forgotten, controversies in modern Irish history—the Irish language controversy of 1899. Four months before The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, a row was developing that would place the Gaelic League in the spotlight as a major national institution for the first time. The occasion was the Vice-Regal Inquiry into Intermediate Education, which sat from 11 January to 23 February 1899 to examine the state of secondary education in Ireland. The Gaelic League, which was eager to influence the state education system to achieve its objectives, looked on this as the perfect opportunity to improve the status of Irish in the curriculum. Indeed “it became a primary objective of the League to ensure that the teaching of Irish would find a place in the normal educational system of the country, at both primary and secondary levTHE IRISH LANGUAGE CONTROVERSY OF 1899 173 els, and if possible at university level as well.”1 Although Irish had been smuggled into the system as an optional subject under the less offensive title “Celtic” in 1878, it was only allotted 600 marks (500 in first year), compared to 700 for French and German, and 1,200 for Greek, Latin, and English —a schema that reflected the priorities of the colonial state. In this regime the adoption of Irish “as a subject for examination or for scoring marks in, was distinctly and strongly discouraged, rendering its study almost impracticable.”2 The modest hope of the Gaelic League was that Irish should attain a position “intermediate between that of English and other Modern Languages.”3 The Anglo-Irish élite of Trinity College had other ideas, however. Clearly upset by the concessions being made to nationalists by a conciliatory British government, they felt the threat of a better educated, more culturally aware and self-confident nationalist population, advancing materially and, moreover, with the active support of some of the most talented of a new generation of Anglo-Irish intellectuals—including W.B. Yeats, AE, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde. Any attempt to legitimize the Irish language was undoubtedly perceived as threatening to their privileged position. But as the Gaelic League was emerging as a significant force in the revision of the imperial narrative of Irish cultural barbarism by restoring Irish as a language of culture, senior academics in Trinity College were beginning a vicious attack on the language and its literature. They seized on the Vice-Regal inquiry as an opportunity to remove Irish from the educational system once and for all. The ensuing controversy led to one of the most significant battles in Irish academic history and embroiled many of the country’s leading intellects in heated dispute. The opening shots in this row were fired by Trinity College Professor of Ancient History Dr. John Pentland Mahaffy. A former tutor to Oscar Wilde, Mahaffy had made his antipathy to the Irish language well known before 1899. In an essay on education in Hungary published in 1882, he had included the remark, “We are...