CBC News, a division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ran a story in their World news reporting, on the way the Irish language has seen a popular revival amid political controversy.
Young people attend Irish language school and communities use language to rebuild their economies
Don Duncan · CBC News · Posted: Dec 02, 2017
While a political crisis drags on over whether Irish should be enshrined alongside English as an official language of Northern Ireland, the language itself is undergoing a renaissance.
Nationalist politicians, led by Sinn Fein, want official status to be granted to the language in the form of an Irish Language Act. Unionists, represented by the Democratic Unionist Party, refuse to concede, saying it would erode the "British" character of Northern Ireland.
The Legislative Assembly, in which Nationalists and Unionists are supposed to share power, hasn't sat for 11 months amid the political impasse.
Meanwhile, down in the streets, the Irish language is thriving. According to the most recent census, in 2011, some 11 per cent of the total population can speak Irish to varying degrees, an increase of one percentage point on the previous census.
The language's new dynamism, however, is most apparent in the educational sector. Since 1998, when the 30-year conflict known as the "Troubles" ended, the number of Irish immersion schools in Northern Ireland has grown from 39 to 92, catering to some 6,300 students today.
High schooler Caoimhe Dillon is one of them. On a recent morning in Maghera, a town 40 kilometres west of Belfast, Dillon browsed stalls at a careers fair that focused on job opportunities that involve the Irish language — media work, translation work, teaching and openings in the EU, to name a few.
"[Irish] will be very useful in my life because there are so many jobs out there for people who do Irish," she said.
The cradle of Irish-language revival
The Irish immersion school movement in Northern Ireland started during the "Troubles," when the first such school was built in 1971, entirely funded and run by the Nationalist community of West Belfast, the cradle of the Irish language revival in Northern Ireland.
Two years previously, that community had created the first modern urban Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) as civil violence and discord exploded across the province. It was a time of much difficulty, said Jake MacSiacais, a resident of West Belfast, but he believes that hardship paved the way for later successes.
"If we hadn't have had it so hard, we would never have it so good," said MacSiacais, who is also director of Forbairt Feirste, a local organization that fosters economic development in West Belfast, using Irish.
Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the "Troubles," the Irish language has met with relatively improved conditions. More funding and support are available, but access to them is precarious, dependent on which political party – Nationalist or Unionist – holds the reins at ministerial level or on local council level in any given district.
Urban regeneration linked to language
Limited funding for the language has also been made possible through Foras na Gaeilge, a cross-border language promotion body established as part of the peace process.
This slight improvement in things, post-conflict, has enabled Forbairt Feiriste and other organizations to bring about urban regeneration along the once very run-down and deprived Falls Road area in West Belfast.
The Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, a large cultural centre opened in 1991, is the core of the regeneration. It houses a vibrant café, bookshop, gallery, and performance space as well as several units used to incubate start-up business. Once those businesses find their feet, they often move to more deprived areas further down the Falls Road so as to bring about development and employment there.
Our immediate goal must be economic self-sufficiency because you cannot do anything unless you have resources
- Liam Ó Flannagáin , co-founder of Carn Tóchair
This "Irish-as-community regeneration" model is also in evidence elsewhere in Northern Ireland.
Carn Tóchair, a small Irish-speaking community about 65 kilometres west of Belfast, is a good rural example of what has already been achieved in the urban context of West Belfast. Carn Tóchair, which means "stony causeway" in English, was established in the mid-'90s by a group of Irish speakers who have since been building it up as a hub of Irish-language activity.
The community now has a post office, in which you can do your business in Irish or English, as well as an Irish-language cultural centre, a kindergarten and a primary school. It even has small wind farm, a project developed to create more income for the community.
Innovative approaches to funding
"Our immediate goal must be economic self-sufficiency because you cannot do anything unless you have resources," says Liam Ó Flannagáin, co-founder of Carn Tóchair. "So far, though, we have been able to get by, by getting a pot of money here and there."
Getting such "pots of money" for Irish language-only projects is a tough sell to fund administrators uninterested or ideologically opposed to the Irish language, says Ó Flannagáin. Carn Tóchair has therefore had to take a leaf out of West Belfast's playbook and get innovative with its fundraising approach.
Carn Tóchair has learned to wrap its Irish-language ambitions into projects that fall into funding categories such as youth engagement, eco-business and adult education. Ó Flannagáin sees it as Irish language with the bonus of community development.
In Unionist East Belfast, the bonus is nothing less than peace and reconciliation.
In what is perhaps the most unexpected development in the Irish language's recent evolution in Northern Ireland, Unionists in East Belfast started to learn the language.
The Irish language is the perfect medium for reconciliation
- Linda Ervine , East Belfast Mission
It all began in 2011 with just one weekly class at East Belfast Mission, a community centre in the largely Unionist eastern part of the city. Since then, classes have ballooned to 13 classes per week, with a total of 170 students.
"I'm from a Presbyterian background which, of course, has historical links with Scotland," says Ivor McKeown, a Unionist student of Irish at East Belfast Mission. "I quite like the idea of bringing the Irish and Scottish culture together with my Presbyterian background."
Language a key to peace process
Unionists like McKeown no longer view the Irish language as antithetical to Britishness, but rather as integral to it – a part of the continuum of Celtic languages that includes Scottish Gaelic and Welsh which, together, contribute to the linguistic diversity of Britain.
This kind of logic flies in the face of the current divisive discourse surrounding the language in Northern Ireland's political sphere.
As the classes at East Belfast Mission grew, so too did the diversity of the students attending. The student body moved from a near totality of Unionist students in the beginning to a mix today of about 65 per cent Unionist and 35 per cent Nationalist.
Many of the Nationalists in the classes hail from Short Strand, a small Nationalist enclave ensconced in largely Unionist East Belfast. Their enclave is still segregated from the rest of East Belfast by high, so-called "peace" walls, which at once serve as obstacles to inter-religious violence and as barriers to post-conflict reconciliation.
In its small way, the growing diversity at East Belfast Mission's Irish classes is helping to break down those barriers.
"For us, it has been a journey, a journey into the language but it's also turned out to be a journey of healing because it brings people together," says Linda Ervine, the Irish language development officer at East Belfast Mission. "The Irish language is the perfect medium for reconciliation."
This recent phenomenon points to a significant social and cultural state change in modern Ireland.
Proportion of respondents aged 3+ who said they could speak Irish in the Ireland census 2011 or the Northern Ireland census 2011.
Ireland has a relatively modern history, beginning in the late nineteenth-century, where the differences in language usage have increasingly become political, as well as cultural, as, for example, with this story, covered by the BBC, on divisions on the status of the Irish language in Northern Ireland.
There are few places in the world where the issue of manhole covers would cause a political row. However, when a unionist councillor in Ballymena complained that new covers installed in the town included the word "uisce", no-one was particularly surprised. This is because "uisce" is the Irish word for water - two of the new covers installed as part of an improvement scheme were found to be bilingual.
The difficulty was 'resolved' by the Irish word being scraped off, but it was an illustration of how polarised attitudes to the Irish language are in Northern Ireland.Despite only a minority of the population speaking Irish as a vernacular, the language is seen as important to the wider nationalist community, and a small number of unionists, as a symbol of identity.
It is, in turn, vigorously resisted by many as a symbol of resistance to that identity.
'Curry my yoghurt'
The result is almost total polarisation of the issue among politicians, nowhere more so than in the Northern Ireland Assembly, where clashes on the language issue have made headlines.
In 2014, the DUP's Gregory Campbell was barred from addressing the assembly for a day for parodying the language and after failing to apologise.
He began a speech with: "Curry my yoghurt can coca coalyer".The Irish sentence "go raibh maith agat, Ceann Comhairle" translates as "thank you, speaker" and is used by Sinn Féin, and to a lesser extent, the SDLP, members to address the Stormont Speaker as "ceann comhairle" - in a similar fashion to the way the speaker is addressed in the Dáil (Irish parliament).
Mr Campbell said:
"My tolerance gets stretched beyond any credibility when I hear Irish ad nauseam on hundreds of occasions for no purpose other than a political one".The speaker said Mr Campbell's conduct fell "well short of standards expected from MLAs". The then deputy first minister, Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness said the incident "bordered on racism".The clashes have continued. DUP Agriculture Minister Michelle McIlveen took the decision in September 2016 to rename a fisheries protection vessel from the Irish name given to it by a previous Sinn Féin minister, Michelle Gildernew. Thus 'Banríon Uladh' became 'Queen of Ulster', a direct translation.
Same ship but a new name - this time, in English as opposed to Irish
Ms McIlveen said the move was part of a change to a "single language policy" and an attempt to give her department "a fresh identity".
Irish language group Pobal said it "deplored" the change, describing it as "a sad and petty action, which brings no benefit or value to a society struggling to move away from inequality and discrimination".
DUP Communities Minister Paul Givan's decision to withdraw funding for an Irish language bursary scheme two days before Christmas, which was subsequently revoked, is seen by Irish speakers as the latest battle in a cultural war.
Dr Niall Comer, president of Comhaltas Uladh, the Ulster Irish language organisation, called the move a "blatant act of discrimination".
Mr Givan said his original decision was not political, but Martin McGuinness cited the £50,000 cut as one of the reasons for his resignation as deputy first minister.
The subject of Irish medium education (IME) is also hotly debated in the chamber, where arguments on whether or not to officially recognise an Irish medium school will invariably split the parties along traditional lines.
IME is legislated for in the 1998 Education Order, however, limiting the scope for disagreement.
In recent years, assembly debates have focused on demands for an Irish Language Act - a legislative framework for the language.
The Irish language umbrella group, Pobal, has been focusing on the question of an Irish Language Act since 2003 and its chief executive, Janet Muller, said:"The Irish Language Act was promised in the St Andrews' Agreement in 2006. More than ten years on, it is more than time to move this issue forward. The political parties and the Irish and British governments now have the opportunity to resolve this outstanding issue. We welcome Sinn Féin's emphasis on the act, and call on them to state clearly that there will be no return to Stormont without a detailed guarantee and timescale on Irish language legislation."Other Irish language groups have also lobbied for legislation which has the political support of both the SDLP and Sinn Féin.
The Alliance Party supports the creation of a comprehensive languages act covering "indigenous languages and other spoken languages used within Northern Ireland, as well as various sign languages. But both main unionist parties oppose the proposed legislation.
Irish language activists point out that the Gaelic Language Act protects Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, despite the fact that, according census figures, there are fewer speakers of Gaelic in Scotland than Irish in Northern Ireland.
Graffiti in Belfast calling for an Irish language act, a proposal that divides the assembly along traditional community lines.
However, their opponents make the point that the vast majority of those speakers in Scotland are native speakers, brought up speaking the language, whereas the majority of Irish language speakers in Northern Ireland are not.
Sinn Féin attempted to introduce the Irish language bill in the assembly in 2015. The DUP criticised the effort as "futile" and it did not gain the necessary support to become law.
The SDLP had a private members bill on the issue before the assembly before it collapsed, the second such attempt it had made on the issue.
Political debate rarely involves the actual content of a possible Irish language act, focusing more on the general principle of whether there should be legislation or not.
Many Irish language activists call for legislation that would guarantee Irish was given the same official status as English.
That would lead to measures like:
- The option for Irish to be used in court
- Irish being used in assembly debates
- The widespread use of Irish by all state bodies including the police
- The appointment of an Irish Language commissioner to ensure the language is facilitated
- The right to be educated through the Irish language
- Bilingual signage on public buildings and road signage.
The DUP MP Gregory Campbell told his party conference in 2014 that the party would never agree to an Irish language act.His party leader Arlene Foster re-iterated that stance in February this year, telling a party event: "If you feed a crocodile it will keep coming back for more."
She later said she regretted that remark and struck a more conciliatory tone when she visited pupils studying the Irish language at a Catholic school in Newry, even going as far as saying thank you in Irish.
However, with political flux at Stormont, many Irish language speakers saw a chance to put demands for an act at the centre of those negotiations - calling on Sinn Féin and the SDLP to make an Irish language act a "red-line issue".
Thousands of Irish language activists attended a march and rally in Belfast earlier this year calling for language legislation in what was certainly the largest demonstration of its kind ever held in Northern Ireland.
Irish language groups have continued to press for "stand-alone rights based" legislation throughout the latest round of talks as Stormont aimed at re-establishing Northern Ireland's power sharing executive.
Privately, though, many fear that comprehensive language legislation, as exists in Wales, is highly unlikely to ever come about, given steadfast unionist opposition.
The language remains one of the key sticking points preventing the parties coming to an agreement although reports suggest that the DUP may be willing to accept that some sort of legal provision for Irish could be included as part of a wider 'Culture Act' which would include Ulster-Scots, a form of Scots taken to Northern Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster by Scottish settlers.
Irish language groups say that that would not be acceptable as there is no demand from Ulster-Scots speakers for legislation and because Ulster-Scots is in a very different linguistic situation from the Irish language.Language Facts
According to the 2011 Census 8% of Northern Ireland's population claim some knowledge of Ulster-Scots - just over 140,000 people.
Over 179,000 claim some knowledge of Irish according to the 2011 census, almost 11% of the population, however only 4,045 said that Irish was their main language.
Place-names in Northern Ireland come from a variety of sources, however the vast majority derive from Irish.
There were over 6,000 children being educated through Irish in Northern Ireland in 2016-17 according to Comhairle na Gaelscolaíochta, the body which promotes Irish medium education, there are no schools teaching through Ulster-Scots.
The Gaelic revival and issues of nation, tradition, and identity
The Gaelic revival is a relatively modern phenomenon. The Gaelic revival was a late-nineteenth-century national revival of interest in the Irish language, known as Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic culture (including folklore, sports, music, arts, etc.). Irish had diminished as a spoken tongue, remaining the main daily language only in isolated rural areas, with English having become the dominant language in the majority of Ireland.
Interest in Gaelic culture was evident in the beginning of the nineteenth century with the formation of the Ulster Gaelic Society in 1830, and later in the scholarly works of John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry, and the foundation of the Ossianic Society. Concern for spoken Irish led to the formation of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language in 1876, and the Gaelic Union in 1880. The latter produced the Gaelic Journal. Irish sports were fostered by the Gaelic Athletics Association, founded in 1884.
The Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) was established in 1893 by Eoin MacNeill and other enthusiasts of Gaelic language and culture. Its first president was Douglas Hyde. The objective of the League was to encourage the use of Irish in everyday life in order to counter the ongoing anglicisation of the country.
Constitution of the Gaelic League Late nineteenth-century Ireland saw a surge in interest in cultural practices that were closely defined with the idea of nationhood. Cultural nationalism, a paper published on the Irish history Live website says:
It can be argued that the catalyst for the establishment of the Irish language movement, the Gaelic League, was Douglas Hyde’s famous speech to the Irish Nationalist Literary Society in Dublin on ‘The necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland’, delivered on 25 November 1892.
Hyde’s mission was to draw attention to what he perceived as the widespread decline of native Irish culture in favour of English culture. In this speech, Hyde emphasised that he wished to show the assembled audience ‘that in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim which we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality’. Hyde thought it illogical that Irish men and women were dropping their native language in order to speak English and also translating their Irish names into English. The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 to promote Irish language and culture in the face of its massive decline amongst the native people.
Hutchinson argues that cultural nationalism ‘remained the vision of scattered poets, historians and folklorists until the 1890s, when cultural nationalism crystallized to form the Gaelic League’. The pre-League groups, however, failed to grasp the attention of the wider Irish public. Micheál Mac Giolla Ghunna argues that this was because they ‘had been antiquarian in outlook, viewing Irish not as the language of the future but of the past’. It is also suggested that the Gaelic League was better organised than previous movements and was inspired by strategies implemented by the Land League, which was adept at building a mass movement and engaging in propaganda work.
As previously mentioned, the major factor driving the Gaelic League was the fear that the native Irish language and culture could be permanently eroded from Irish life. Language was looked upon as the most fundamental part of self-image and self-definition in relation to the natural and social environment, the collective memory and the carrier of the native worldview. This fear of loss was articulated in a letter from the Gaelic League addressed to ‘the Irish in America’ in 1905, stating that when the League was founded, Irish culture was in such a dire state that the ancient Irish nation was rapidly degenerating into a West British province, or rather an English shire, and that it would be only a matter of time before Ireland would be referred to as ‘Irelandshire’. As well as seeing their mission as an urgent one, the Gaelic League also stressed that their mission was non-political; this was due in no small part to the divisive nature of Irish politics. This wish was prominent in the League’s constitution. with the second clause stating that the League shall be ‘strictly non–political and non-sectarian’. As well as attempting to bring Catholics and Protestants together, it was also hoped that this notion of inclusivity would keep the League sufficiently below the radar of unwanted political attention. It is also suggested by Garvin that the League appealed to some Protestants who showed an interest in Irish culture and that joining the League was ‘a way of claiming Irish identity without having to pay the heavy price of giving up their religion and conforming to the Catholic faith’.
The Gaelic League organised weekly gatherings to discuss Irish culture, hosted conversation meetings, edited and periodically published a newspaper named An Claidheamh Soluis, and successfully campaigned to have Irish included in the school curriculum. The League grew quickly, having more than 400 branches within four years of its foundation. It had fraught relationships with other cultural movements of the time, such as the Pan-Celtic movement and the Irish Literary Revival.
The Irish Literary Revival encouraged the creation of works written in the spirit of Irish culture, as distinct from English culture. This style fed a growing Irish identity, which also found inspiration in Irish history, myths and folklore. There was an attempt to re-vitalize the native rhythm and music of Irish Gaelic. Figures such as Lady Gregory, WB Yeats, George Russell, J .M. Synge and Seán O'Casey wrote plays and articles about the political state of Ireland
An Stad (Irish for 'The Stop') was founded at 30 North Frederick Street in Dublin in the late 19th century by Cathal McGarvey, author of the traditional Irish song Star of the County Down, as a meeting place for nationalists and Irish language enthusiasts.
Doorway of 30 North Frederick Street in April 2015
Gaelic revival and Irish nationalism frequently overlapped in places such as An Stad. In the 1890's, Donegal native Cathal McGarvey (1866–1927) established a tobacconist and pub on the premises. McGarvey was a well known humorist, storyteller and songwriter. His reputation spread quickly, and soon people were coming to An Stad at night to hear him tell stories, to smoke and to promote the Irish language. McGarvey's literary capabilities, anti-British attitude and magnetic personality attracted a mix of a literary and pro-nationalist audience. Public functions including poetry readings, literary discussions and official Oireachtas week activities often went on until sunrise, and sometimes ended with early-morning Pro-Independence rallies emerging onto North Frederick Street. McGarvey also established a guesthouse on the premises which helped to attract athletic visitors from the Irish countryside coming to Dublin to watch or play in the adjacent Croke Park sports ground. Among his guests was Michael Cusack, founder of the GAA and the man after whom Croke Park's Cusack Stand was named. At McGarvey's Gaelic evenings at An Stad, ideas for promoting Nationalism and Independence were proffered aggressively, from Arthur Griffith promoting Sinn Féin to Douglas Hyde espousing the idea of ignoring the British and establishing an Irish system of rulership without direct war, to Michael Cusack promoting Gaelic Games as a unifying force behind the Nationalist movement, An Stad was a place of lively debate and ideas. An Stad was frequented by literary figures like James Joyce and Yeats, along with leaders of the Nationalist movement such as Douglas Hyde, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. James Joyce was a frequent guest of An Stad during his student years in Dublin. While many people tried to convince him of the value of the Gaelic revival and others tried to convince him of the value of the Nationalist movement, Joyce was interested in neither and deeply suspicious of both, and eventually left Ireland entirely. However, his time at An Stad did have one lasting influence on Irish Literary history. His character 'The Citizen' in his landmark novel Ulysses is based on Michael Cusack, whom Joyce met at An Stad.
On 1 November 1884, a group of Irishmen gathered in the Hayes' Hotel billiard room to formulate a plan and establish an organisation to foster and preserve Ireland's unique games and athletic pastimes. And so, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) was founded. The architects and founding members included Michael Cusack, who appears in fictional form in a satirical portrait of "The Citizen", penned by James Joyce in the Cyclops episode of his miniature epic Ulysses. He is an old Irish nationalist with xenophobic and anti-semitic views who engages in an argument with Leopold Bloom in Barney Kiernan's pub, ultimately throwing a biscuit tin at Bloom.
"The Citizen" is an important figure in the "Cyclops" episode of the novel. The character has been described as having characteristics not only of the mythological Cyclops but also of the Irish epic figure Finn McCool.
"The Citizen" is, in part, a satirical portrait of Irish nationalist (and Gaelic Athletic Association founder) Michael Cusack and Joyce's portrayal operates to expose what one critic called the "xenophobic ideologies of radical Celticists".
On the centenary of Bloomsday The Irish Times ran this story. Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.
Joyce met Nora in 1904. On a brief visit home from his self-imposed exile in Paris, he was walking down Dublin’s Nassau St in his canvas shoes and yachting cap when he saw the tall young brown-haired woman, who’d just arrived in town to work as a hotel chambermaid. His boozing dad, when he heard Nora’s surname, is supposed to have grunted, “At least she’ll stick with him.” Somebody had to say it.
Quoted from In search of the wife and muse of James Joyce, by David Hill Dec 22, 2017
Cusack's creation is a blooming legacy
Wed, Jun 16, 2004
So it is upon us. The centenary of Bloomsday. And yes, the GAA have a place in all of this. No, the Management Committee will not be planning to slip on stripey blazers and hire a vintage car to chug around Sandycove. But the association's founder notoriously features in James Joyce's Ulysses and, as is equally well known, it is not a flattering portrait, writes Seán Moran.
In his definitive biography of Michael Cusack, Marcus de Búrca makes the point that due to the scarce attention the Clare man was paid for decades after his death, Joyce's caricature in Ulysses remained the dominant representation of Cusack for a long time.
Chapter 12 of the book, the Cyclops episode, is set in a pub in Little Britain Street, Barney Kiernan's and narrated by an anonymous member of the company. A group gathers at the bar where a character referred to only as "the citizen" sits in the company of his dog, Garryowen. That the citizen is Cusack is beyond doubt. The name is assumed to derive from his habit of referring to everyone as "citizen" (much like Larry O'Gorman calls everyone "brother").
De Búrca points out that by the original Bloomsday, Cusack was in his final years. Although he would die at the relatively young age of 59 in 1906, he looked much older and was cantankerous and argumentative. The citizen exhibits all the cod mysticism of early Irish nationalism and a strong touch of xenophobia. In his declining years, Cusack has become the sort of Dublin character that people normally hop into litterbins to avoid.
Bloom, the Jewish Ulysses of the title, drops into the pub on his wanderings around Dublin. He is prone to offering his views on every subject that arises and gradually earns the incandescent irritation of the citizen, who quickly slips into racist abuse.
" - What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen. - "Ireland, says Bloom, I was born here. Ireland." (Ehhh . . . news for you there, Leopold.) In reply the citizen spits a ball of phlegm, "a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner". The episode ends with Bloom being attacked by the citizen after pointing out that Jesus was a Jew.
Joyce lampoons the citizen's nationalist orthodoxies. "So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of the lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all of that . . .
"A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of Brian O'Ciarnain's in Sraid na Breataine Bheag, under the auspices of Sluagh na h-Eireann, on the revival of the ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race. The venerable president of this noble order was in the chair and the attendance was of large dimensions. After an instructive discourse by the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed, a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual high standard of excellence ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of the ancient games and sports of our ancient panceltic forefathers . . .
"Resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes, practised morning and evening by Finn MacCool, as calculated to revive the best traditions of manly strength and power handed down to us from ancient ages."
Yet there is evidence Joyce knew or was aware of the earlier Cusack, as he features in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero (an earlier draft discovered later) in more conventional references.
A college friend of Joyce, Davin in A Portrait or Madden in Stephen Hero, both based on a Limerick acquaintance of the author) is presented as an earnest follower of nationalist pastimes. Slagged off by Stephen as "Davin the peasant", the friend tells a bizarre story of walking home from a hurling match. Briefly it involves him stopping at a house on a lonely road to ask for a drink and getting not only his cup of milk but also an invitation from a young woman to stay the night, as her husband is away. He is flustered by this, makes his excuses and leaves. (The place seems to be near Kilmallock, so maybe he was wise to exercise restraint).
Stephen ruminates: " . . . the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a quaint turn of old English or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skill - for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael . . .".
There is also strong correlation between one of the citizen's speeches and a passage that appeared in Cusack's short-lived newspaper the Celtic Times. "We'll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid low by the batteringram and the Times [London, I hope] rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro."
The Celtic Times dated 23rd April 1887 includes the following passage: "The system of those days drove 600,000 people flying from plague-stricken Ireland, to make food for fishes, to fill the hospitals prepared for their reception in New York, and to crowd the nameless graves in the land they had hoped to prosper in. The Times, when all was over, said that now the Irish difficulty was at last solved, and that an Irish celt would soon be as great a rarity in Ireland as a red Indian in the shores of Manhattan."
Joyce would probably have been too young at the age of five to be reading Cusack's paper but the Times piece, another of that publication's sensitive interventions on Ireland, presumably stirred an outrage that lasted a while. It's hard to know whether the citizen arose principally from Cusack's decline or from Joyce's evident distaste for the excesses of the national reawakening.
But it's worth a thought today that just as Joyce has been rehabilitated in those Irish institutions that disowned him, so too Cusack should be remembered for the dynamism that brought the GAA into existence rather than the difficult personality that eventually alienated the association and, in his final days, set him up for immortal satire.
Joyce's take on "nation" and nationalism in Ireland is both critical and accepting, accepting of the fact of it, but also skeptical of its role in a modern society, in its culture and politics. The Celtic revival, was it a nostalgic fantasy, somewhat removed from the modernity of everyday life? In his essay "The Urb It Orbs": James Joyce and Internationalism Paul Kintzele contends that:
Despite the aversion to explicitly political matters that James Joyce cultivated in his later years, his work is nonetheless thoroughly political, covering both the specific questions facing Ireland as well as broader issues that constitute politics as a fundamental order of social being. His fiction, resolutely centered on the city of Dublin, explores the dilemmas and antagonisms unique to that metropolitan colony, but at the same time expands to incorporate issues that confront modernity as a whole.
The nation, being one of the most basic categories of modernity, and thus one of the primary sites for ideological and ethical struggle, stood as a perpetual challenge and instigation to Joyce, whose work followed a unique path of adherence to and deviation from Irish nationalism.
From the sharply etched details of Dubliners to the linguistic-historical fantasia of Finnegans Wake, Joyce repeatedly engaged the problems of how to form a distinctively modern nation and what sort of international sphere may one day exist, or ought to exist, beyond the nation-state.
In his writing, Joyce gives no sustained attention to any place other than Ireland; however, his politics do not stop at the Irish shoreline. By registering his difference from certain nativist ideas of nationalism, Joyce sought to occupy a position at the presumptive nation’s border.
He drew attention to those acts that use criteria as various as race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and language itself in order to fashion sociopolitical groups. His focus on these totems of tribal or national identity lent to his writing an ethical edge that he never ceased to sharpen.
Since Joyce chafed at the restrictiveness of a certain kind of nationalism, in what way could one describe his works as “cosmopolitan” or “internationalist”?
Although these terms are often used interchangeably, the word “cosmopolitan” is much older, with its origins in ancient Greece, while the term “international” was coined by Jeremy Bentham in his 1780 text An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Bentham designates as “international” the “branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations”. Bentham’s term thus often appears in legal and juridical contexts, while the term “cosmopolitan” is to be found in discourses that emphasize the cultural or ethical dimension of politics.
While this essay focuses on the international, because the term carries within itself the highly charged concept of the nation, it must also incorporate some consideration of the cosmopolitan as well.
Although it has been quite common for Joyce to be cast biographically as the cosmopolitan-in-exile, I would like to explore the question of internationalism as it emerges, directly and indirectly, at several states in his writing career.
I argue that internationalism informs Joyce’s work not as a simple, homogeneous idea but rather as a measure of his recognition of difference along racial, sexual, linguistic, and other lines, and as a reaction to the possessive claims of nationalism.
Joyce’s very approach to nationalism made him an internationalist, although he was careful to maintain his skepticism about one-world utopian solutions. Such a position was readily available in the turbulent first three decades of the twentieth century, when the question of what Ezra Pound referred to as the “sphericality of the planet” became more and more urgent due to rapid technological change and military conflict.
But what does it mean to be an “internationalist”? In the political sphere, the answer is fairly straightforward—there is a repertoire of political beliefs that can be categorized under this rubric, albeit with varying degrees of strength, that have in common the notion that the Nation is not (or ought not to be) the ultimate unit of political or social calculus. To be an internationalist is not necessarily to be anti-nation, but it does entail certain limits on what forms national commitments and national identity can take.
Joyce was "Earopean", to use one of his myriad wordplays in Finnegans Wake.
On Wed 28 Dec 2016 an opinion piece in The Guardian by Daniel Mulhall was published:A portrait of Europe as an old friend, by James Joyce
The sub-headline runs:
In the year of Brexit, issues of national identity in Ireland are back in vogue a century after Joyce explored them in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
This extract provides a relevant context, both for then and now:
Joyce was coming into his own at a time of burgeoning political interest in Ireland’s cultural identity, something that had not been a feature of the pragmatic, parliamentary nationalism of Daniel O’Connell and his successors who represented Irish interests at Westminster throughout the 19th century. Joyce’s father’s political hero, Charles Stewart Parnell, had fallen from grace in 1890, a political earthquake memorably dramatised in A Portrait’s Christmas dinner scene, where Ireland’s moralistic Catholic bishops are blamed for Parnell’s demise. New cultural/political movements were on the rise at the turn of the century – the Gaelic League dedicated to the revival of the Irish language and the Gaelic Athletic Association with its mission to promote Gaelic football and hurling. Many of those who took part in the Easter Rising were nursed into public life through cultural activity.
In the concluding chapter of A Portrait, the author is urged to conform to an emerging Irish zeitgeist. “Try to be one of us,” he is told. “In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.” While many of his contemporaries “worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland”, as he put it, he was forward-looking, wanting to embrace “the loveliness which has not yet come into the world”.
The young Joyce sniffed a narrowness of vision among his contemporaries and was having none of it, as a sarcastic diary entry at the end of A Portrait illustrates: “John Francis Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. European and Asiatic papers please copy.”
This image and quote from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake has more to do with Marshall McLuhan's use of Joyce as a guide to global communication phenomena. For Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, the "West" was the west of Ireland and its "wake up call" for a Celtic dream that had begun in certain sentimental ghettos of the "East" of the island, and especially in Dublin.
One such "wake up call" took place in January 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and is often referred to as the Playboy Riots. This riot took place on the occasion of the opening of John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. The riots were stirred up by Irish nationalists and republicans who viewed the contents of the play as an offence to public morals and an insult against Ireland. The riots took place in Dublin, spreading out from the Abbey Theatre and were finally quelled by the actions of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
The fact that the play was based on a story of apparent patricide also attracted a hostile public reaction. Egged on by nationalists, including Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith, who believed that the theatre was not sufficiently political and described the play as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform" and with the pretext of a perceived slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the line "a drift of females standing in their shifts", a significant portion of the crowd rioted, causing the remainder of the play to be acted out in dumb show. Nevertheless, press opinion soon turned against the rioters and the protests petered out.
The cultural and political setting of these events is superbly addressed by Declan Kiberd in this Theatre section article for The Guardian:
The riotous history of The Playboy of the Western World
https://ok.ru/video/333558188792
The 1962 film
The 1962 film version of the 1907 drama The Playboy of the Western World written by John Millington Synge, was directed and co-written by Brian Desmond Hurst and stars Gary Raymond and Siobhán McKenna. Filmed in County Kerry on the Inch Strand on Dingle Bay (on the LODE Zone Line), the film features many of the Abbey Players. The film was produced by the Four Provinces company created in 1952 by Hurst and Michael Morris.
In Declan Kiberd's article for The Guardian a key paragraph concerns the heart of Synge's art, the use in the everyday reality, and the aesthetic soundscape, of Hiberno-English:
Nationalists also resented the implication behind the Abbey project that there could ever be an Irish national literature in English, the language of the coloniser. Synge believed that there could, albeit in an English as Irish as it is possible for that language to be. So he created sentences in which standard English was reconfigured by peasants who were thinking still in Irish: "Is it you that's going to town tomorrow?" "Is it tomorrow that you're going to town?" Emphasis is achieved not by tonal underlining but by bringing the key word forward to the start of the sentence.
This is what the play is best known for, its use of the poetic, evocative language of Hiberno-English, heavily influenced by the Irish language, as Synge celebrates the lyrical speech of the Irish.
Irish English?
Hiberno-English (from Latin Hibernia: "Ireland") or Irish English, is the set of English dialects natively written and spoken within the island of Ireland, including both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
English was brought to Ireland as a result of the Norman invasion of Ireland of the late 12th century. Initially, it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with mostly Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country.
By the Tudor period, Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory lost to the invaders: even in the Pale, "all the common folk… for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit, and of Irish language". Some small pockets remained predominantly English-speaking; because of their sheer isolation their dialects developed into later (now extinct) dialects known as Yola in Wexford and Fingallian in Fingal, Dublin.
These were no longer mutually intelligible with other English varieties. However, the Tudor conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th century marked a forced decline in the use of the Irish language. By the mid-19th century, English was the majority language spoken in the country. It has retained this status to the present day, with even those whose first language is Irish being fluent in English as well. Today, there is only a little more than one per cent of the population that speaks Irish natively. English is one of two official languages, along with Irish, of the Republic of Ireland, and is the country's de facto working language.
Hiberno-English's spelling and pronunciation standards align with British rather than American English. However, Hiberno-English's diverse accents and some of its grammatical structures are unique, with some influence by the Irish language and a tendency to be phonologically conservative, retaining older features no longer common in the accents of England or North America.
Phonologists today often divide Hiberno-English into four or five overarching classes of dialects or accents: Ulster accents, West and South-West Region accents (including, for example, the Cork accent), various Dublin accents, and a supraregional accent developing since only the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Radio and the tribal drum?
Communication technology has a role here and a history, beginning especially, back in the day, with the impact of Radio.
Marshall McLuhan drew attention to the impact of radio in the resurgence of ancient tongues."Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have undergone resurgence of their ancient tongues since the coming of radio, and the Israeli present an even more extreme instance of linguistic revival. They now speak a language which has been dead in books for centuries. Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and animosities, but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all electric power and media."
An article by Arminta Wallace (Mon, Apr 27, 2015) in The Irish Times - The mini-revival of the Irish language says:
We are forever hearing about the imminent death of the Irish language, but there is a growing interest in the language worldwide, especially at third-level.
Apart from the cultural studies aspect of language and Irish cultural history, one of the significant elements in this revival identified here is the digital information environment and the use of social media.
There seems to be a general perception that our national language is perpetually on its last legs. But the view from within the Irish-language departments of our third-level institutions – and from colleges as far afield as the US and Australia – is rather different.
According to the Higher Education Authority, the number of students studying through Irish at third level – and studying all manner of subjects from economics and journalism to computing – is not only very healthy, but has been described as a “mini-revival”.
Why is this? Some point to the steady rise of Irish-language preschool and primary education since the 1970s, which may now be contributing to an increased demand for Irish-language courses at third level; others suggest that innovative programmes such as Dublin City University’s Fiontar have revolutionised the way in which students relate to the language.
“Fiontar is an interdisciplinary school established in 1993 to link the Irish language with contemporary finance, computing and enterprise, all taught through the medium of Irish,” says Emer Ní Bhrádaigh, a lecturer at DCU whose research specialism is entrepreneurship in Gaeltacht areas.
“Over the past 22 years we have evolved, so now we also teach journalism and the language itself. But not, as other schools might do, through literature, poetry and the history of the language. We would be looking at applied Irish.”
Fiontar has been instrumental in the development of online databases such as logainm.ie, which gives a detailed explanation of every placename in the country and maps locations, and tearma.ie, a dictionary of contemporary terminology. If you need to know the Irish for “profit maximisation”, tearma.ie is your man (it’s “uasmhéadú brabúis”).
Language skills
The idea is not just to maximise the relevance of Irish for a tech-savvy world but to allow those studying at DCU to use their language skills in that world.
“Putting up those systems required people who could put together and extract information from websites and databases – project managers, people who could consult the national terminology committee for the language and so on – skills other than simply a deep knowledge of the language,” says Ní Bhrádaigh.
On the international front, the Fulbright Commission Ireland sponsors student and teacher exchange programmes between the US and Ireland. In 2006 it was sending four Irish-language teachers to the US every year. Now it sends 10 and has links to 50 or so third-level American institutions and 90 community organisations involved with teaching and promoting the language.
“We found that there are three main reasons why people want to learn Irish,” says Colleen Dube, the commission’s executive director. “One would be for heritage and cultural reasons. That would be about a third. Then you have a group which I call the linguistic nerds: people who are really interested in languages. So they have a Romance language and then decide they need a Celtic language as well.
“And then what has been happening over the past five or six years, and is really interesting, is early-career scholars. These are PhD candidates who are looking to read early modern historical sources or Irish-language poetry not in translation. People working in the fields of anthropology or ethnography. That’s still emerging.”
One Fulbright student is currently undertaking an MA in nua-Ghaeilge (modern Irish) at UCD, with a research focus on contemporary women’s poetry.
International dimension
When Liam Mac Mathúna, emeritus professor of Irish at UCD and editor of Irish studies magazine Éigse, started as a lecturer in Irish in the late 1960s, student numbers were also healthy. But the language landscape was very different. Some university courses made a distinction between honours and pass classes; postgraduate research through Irish was practically non-existent. Now, he points to the development of postgraduate research and the international dimension as characteristic of the current scene.
“One of the things feeding into the interest in Irish at the moment is the interest in the US and in Australia,” he says. “That’s not new, but the level of organisation is new. In the past, offerings of Irish at third level abroad depended on one or two individuals. Now there’s more co-ordination at a practical level, through such groups as the American Conference of Irish Studies.”
Mac Mathúna says there have been good news stories at home as well. Irish has been given a boost by the success of TG4, the Official Languages Act, 2003 and, since 2007, the official working status of Irish in the EU. One obvious benefit is on the jobs front.
“When I was starting out there would have been an expectation of going into teaching or the civil service,” Mac Mathúna says. “There are a lot more choices now, abroad as well as at home. There are jobs in Brussels, for example, and academic jobs on the continent and in the States are certainly there as well.”
However, not everything is rosy. Many students sign up for Irish in first year because it’s not only a required subject for Leaving Cert but also for entry to the NUI colleges. “There is a fall-off in second year,” Mac Mathúna says. “The challenge is to keep students there once they come in.”
He challenges the perception that to study Irish at third level, you need to have been fluent since childhood.
“I checked out some third-level classes in recent years which were exceptionally good,” he says. “And I found that most of the students had not been to Gaelscoileanna. Two-thirds had been to other primary schools.”
It’s the old story: if you have a top-notch Irish teacher at primary and secondary level, the sky’s the limit. “The difficulty is that not everybody has a good, motivating Irish-language teacher. And so, when you move outside the Gaelscoileanna, it’s a bit hit and miss. The immersion in the Gaelscoil is of such a nature that it raises almost all boats, whereas the other system doesn’t. A phenomenon, which started in the North with the University of Ulster, is that we’d have ab initio [from the beginning] students of Irish at third level. In UCD, with which I’m most familiar, it’s possible to go from no acquaintance with Irish to PhD over time.”
But that requires resources to be put into the actual teaching of the language. Many students come to Irish for the first time through Irish studies courses, which are often seen as a soft option in the linguistic sense. But these courses have been central to the rising interest in Irish abroad as well as recognising the reality of the relationship been Irish and English at home.
“This is a bilingual culture and has been bilingual for several centuries,” says Louis de Paor, head of Irish studies at NUI Galway. “To study Irish culture in one language gives an incomplete sense of the achievements of writers, film-makers, performers and others involved in cultural production in Irish and in English. At NUI Galway, therefore, we insist on a bilingual approach to Irish literature, history and culture.”
For de Paor, the current state of the language – at third level, as everywhere else – is inseparable from the wider cultural situation. “We may have moved beyond the phase where there was a stand-off between people who considered it absolutely indispensable to a full sense of Irishness that you should have fluent Irish and people who railed against that, who felt that the very existence of the Irish language was somehow an affront to their Anglophone Irish identity.”
He also points to the positive contribution of the Gaelscoileanna and TG4.
“There’s a generation emerging now who have a much less troubled ideological relationship with the Irish language than people of my generation might have had. But identity in Ireland in the 21st century is as contested as it ever was. We have lost economic sovereignty now; before it was a matter of political sovereignty. As in the early 20th century, culture has a central role to play in articulating and complicating and – hopefully – resolving that loss.”
Social media
In the 21st century, another major player has been social media. There is a lot of blogging and tweeting through Irish. Oisín Ó Doinn, who is working on a PhD on the use of technology in the teaching of Irish at DCU, is in the thick of it all. He helped to develop the Irish strand of the global phenomenon that is the Duolingo app.
“We seem to have this thing in our psyche – and it’s reinforced all the time by offhand comments and by the media – that Irish is a dying or a dead language. Well, it’s not a dead language; it’s a growing language. We only launched the Duolingo Irish course six months ago and there are half a million people worldwide learning.
“I think the reason why people are so interested is they’re realising there’s a difference between the curriculum that’s in the schools and what the language actually is. I’m always surprised at people going, ‘Why would anyone want to learn Irish?’ My question would be, ‘Why would they not?’”
Mac Mathúna agrees. “If students are led to areas of Irish which are of interest to them, they find it energising and invigorating,” he says. “It should be possible to do new things and to allow people to express themselves in new ways.
MY IRISH: LIFE AS GAEILGE
Colleen Dube (Fulbright Commission): “I learned Irish as an American here. I moved to Ireland in 1990 and was living in Galway. I have a background in art history and museums. I did the master’s in Irish studies, and learned Irish as part of that. Then I went to work for the National Museum and lost a lot of my Irish. Now I’m working on getting it back.”
Emer Ní Bhrádaigh (DCU): “When I was growing up we were known as ‘the kids who spoke Irish’ on our street. It was unusual then. But now there are so many languages at Irish primary schools that kids almost have an expectation there’ll be a different language spoken at home. These days I’m also a member of Na Cnocadóirí, a fully Irish-speaking hillwalking club. All the chat in the club is about the exact same things that other hillwalkers talk about and we are members of Mountaineering Ireland as well.”
Louis de Paor (NUI Galway): “I had a very benign introduction to the Irish language in childhood. My experience was very different to those who felt put-upon by the language from the outset.”
Oisín Ó Doinn (DCU): “I went to a Gaelscoil so I’ve always had Irish. Irish words would have peppered the household: bainne, arán, stuff like this. My father and mother had a very active interest but it’s only through myself, my brother and my sister that they’ve become fluent over the years. I spent years trying to get my father to look at a bit of the grammar. Since I became involved with Duolingo and helped to make the Irish course on that, he’s actually discussing some grammatical rules with me now, which I never thought we’d be doing.”
Dublin City University’s Fiontar programme has revolutionised the way in which students relate to the language
Update
Mon, Aug 12, 2019
This photo of the founders of the Gaelic League, Connradh na Gaedhilge, Eoin MacNeill (1867 - 1945) and Doctor Douglas Hyde (1860 - 1949) is used in an article in The Irish Times headlined:
Rethinking the meaning of revival of the Irish language
The role of the Irish language in the ongoing Stormont impasse has led to much talk of the language being politicised, weaponised and otherwise instrumentalised. Yet it would be wrong to think of this as being a recent development or to assume that languages should remain in some way neutral.
This article in the Culture section of The Irish Times is by Fionntán de Brún, Professor of Modern Irish at Maynooth University. This article is based on his book, Revivalism and Modern Irish Literature: the anxiety of transmission and the dynamics of renewal (Cork University Press). In the conclusion of the article he writes:
Taken in the current context of globalisation and pervasive cultural homogeneity, this minority language awareness is a powerful instrument. To go against what appears to be the inevitable course of things, be it language decline, climate change or societal apathy is an act of Promethean defiance.
The alternative view, summarised in TG4’s “súil eile” motto, is the default outlook of Irish-language literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where else did Brian Ó Nualláin (Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen) acquire this alternative perspective, if not from being raised in an Irish-speaking family far from the Gaeltacht?
Ó Nualláin was an admirer of Seosamh Mac Grianna’s autobiographical Mo Bhealach Féin (1940), in which a series of quixotic adventures is played out as part of a manifesto of radical idealism summarised in his assertion “b’fhearr liom siúl sa ré dorcha ná a bheith dall” (I would rather walk in darkness than be blind). Mac Grianna’s refusal to be bought was later characterised in his novel Dá mBíodh Ruball ar an Éan (1940) by the figure of a martyr-artist who is likened to Prometheus.
It is likely that the reference to Prometheus came via the translation of Aeschylus’ play, Prometheus fé Chuibhreach (1933) by George Derwent Thomson/Seoirse Mac Thomáis, an English professor of Greek who was the main instigator and later translator of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s world-classic tale of youth, Fiche Blian ag Fás (1933). Thomson’s translation was in turn translated as Vingt Ans de Jeunesse (1936) by the French surrealist Raymond Queneau who later wrote a burlesque novel of the 1916 Rising, On est Toujours Trop Bon avec les Femmes (1947). Who thinks of 1930s Ireland producing such a sequence of events?
Yet none of this would have happened without the Gaelic League revival, nor would the INNTI poets of 1970s Cork, and so the contemporary Irish poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson or Doireann Ní Ghríofa would most likely never have been written. Yet the Gaelic League was itself a specific manifestation of what is a perennial, universal concern with recovering the loss of what we value. In essence, it and other revivals are about the bold imagining of alternative histories and cultures - it is this that gives force to revivalism and to its enterprise of creative renewal.
Rather than focussing on the perceived failure of state-led language revival we need to embrace the value of a tradition of revivalism, one that has brought us an awareness of language and culture as constructs that are negotiable rather than fixed.
What emerges is the potential to challenge that which appears pre-ordained, inescapable and insurmountable. That is a very powerful instrument indeed.
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