Gaelic and free?
In the third part of a series of articles exploring the republican vision, Paul O'Connor argues that the revitalisation of the Irish language and culture should continue to form part of the republican vision

From its origins, the demand for political independence has been associated with the assertion of Ireland's separate cultural identity. The first meeting of the Belfast United Irishmen took place alongside the Belfast Harpists Festival, which attempted for the first time to write down and preserve traditional Irish airs. In the opening years of the 20th century, the Gaelic League was the nursery of many men and women who would graduate to the IRA and Sinn Féin. Everyone is familiar with Pearse's aspiration that Ireland be "not free merely, but Gaelic as well".

So now, in a new millennium, what is the relationship between republican politics and the heritage of the Gaelic past?

In assessing that relationship, we must take account of the substantial failure of Gaelic revivalism. Contemporary Ireland is considerably less Gaelic than it was when Douglas Hyde made his plea for the "deanglicisation of Ireland" a hundred years ago. In 1900, the Gaelteacht accounted for 15% of the population. Today it is reduced to tiny pockets, which English infiltrates through television and tourism. As Ireland has changed from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban country, much folklore and oral traditional has also been lost.

Efforts to revive the language through the education system have been a dismal failure. My own experience is probably that of many - after 14 years, I left school barely able to string together two coherent sentences in Irish. I don't remember a single teacher that tried to inspire us with a love of the language, or a text on the Irish course that genuinely interested me.

My primary school reader dealt with the activities of a pair called Pól and Sheila - probably the dullest youngsters ever born. Daidí was always amach ag obair, while mamaí stayed at home ag déanamh cáca. Quite apart from the obvious gender stereotyping, did the children never get sick of cake? No more imaginative method of teaching Irish could be come up with than getting all 30 pupils in the class to recite the same passage, one after the other. Small wonder I got through the complete works of Enid Blyton in fourth class, reading under the desk.

In a global culture becoming ever more homogenised and bland, cultural diversity and distinctiveness are more valuable than ever before Secondary school brought the dreaded Peig - now thankfully defunct. That old woman has singlehandedly done more to eradicate the Irish language than Victoria and Cromwell combined. Whenever a collective moan escaped us at the sight of Peig being opened by the teacher, he would remind us that we only had to endure the book for one year - while he had had to work through it annually for 30 years.

The failure of Gaelic revivalism has had much to do with its celebration of aspects of Ireland's past most people would prefer to forget. The early collectors of Irish folklore and editors of Gaelic texts were romantic primitivists who looked to rural, pre-industrial Ireland, with its age-old traditions, for an antidote to what they saw as the decadence and soullessness of the modern city. Themselves comfortable and middle-class, they allowed the hardship of rural life in 19th and early 20th century Ireland to be blotted from their vision by the Celtic mists. These enthusiasts associated Gaelic culture, and Gaelic revivalism, with a stifling and impoverished way of life from which millions sought to escape by emigration, and which the vast majority in today's Ireland are only too glad to have left behind them.

Furthermore, the transformations of Irish life over the last number of decades have dramatically widened the distance between us and our past. Hardly three generations separate us from the world of Peig Sayers - but to a young person growing up in Ireland today, her life and attitudes are as alien as those of another planet.

So what can we salvage from the Gaelic past? As republicans, is our ambition still an Ireland Gaelic as well as free? There are at least two good reasons why the revitalisation of the Irish language and culture should continue to form part of the republican vision.

Gaelic was the language of this island for almost 3,000 years. If we leave the language die, not only will we lose something unique and irreplaceable, we will be severing our last contact with that history, and condemning all those generations of Irish-speaking men and women to silence forever.

Secondly, in a global culture becoming ever more homogenised and bland, cultural diversity and distinctiveness are more valuable than ever before. Control of television, the print media and the music industry is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Globalisation has fast food for our minds as well as bodies. Ronald McDonald and Rupert Murdoch march hand in hand to conquer the world for greed, banality and consumerism.

We cannot aim to "restore" the culture of the past as did Hyde and the founders of the Gaelic League. There is no such thing as a pure essence of native culture to recapture. All cultures are hybrids, incorporating influences from many sources, and Gaelic culture is no exception. If the Irish language has a future, it is as a living language expressing the ideas and feelings of people in the 21st century, not some hoary antique from a cabin in Connemara, taken down from the attic and dusted off every so often for form's sake. It is over 150 years since Irish was the language spoken by a majority on the island, 400 years since it was the language of education and politics. Inevitably, much of the Gaelic heritage is of historical rather than living interest.

Rather than seeking to restore the past, our aim should be to create a space in the present in which a distinctive and vibrant popular culture can evolve on the island. Rather than being passive consumers of print and images produced elsewhere by global multimedia conglomerates, communities should feel empowered and motivated to find their own forms of cultural expression, expressive of their own surroundings and concerns. Events such as Féile an Phobail in Belfast or recent plays exploring the experience of nationalist communities over the past 30 years are examples of the kind of activities republicans should be supporting throughout the island.

The Irish language has an important role to play in this. Not only is its use a badge of distinctiveness, a declaration that we Irish are still here in spite of every effort to crush us as a separate people, it can allow some measure of distance from a globalised consumer culture. English is the language of global capitalism and the Disneyworld culture that accompanies it. Irish, by virtue of its marginal status, is not a language of business or consumerism. When was the last time you saw a Big Mac advertised as gaelige? One might say Irish stands in the same relation to English as An Phoblacht to the Murdoch - or O'Reilly-controlled media! It can help us attain what the writer Virginia Woolf, in a different context, called "a room of one's own".

Likewise, Gaelic myth can provide symbols that reflect contemporary concerns, while simultaneously connecting us to our past. Think of how Pearse used the figure of Cúchulainn defending his land from its enemies as an emblem of defiance and heroic courage winning out against the odds.

In conclusion, the goal for today's republicans is not so much to revive the culture of the past but to foster cultural diversity and distinctiveness on the island. "Culture" is the property neither of self-constituted intellectual elites nor of multinational conglomerates, but of communities, and we must make sure ownership of Ireland's culture is vested where it belongs. The Irish language and Gaelic culture have an important role to play in this project. But so has the creativity of individuals responding to the conditions of contemporary life, and, indeed, the contributions of new traditions arriving on the island.

Letter Replies

It's the way you teach it

A Chairde,

Paul O'Connor's piece on republicanism and the Gaelic language was balanced and fair, I thought. He mentioned that his Irish teacher would apologise for 'inflicting' Peig Sayer's book on his students, which he told them would be 'only for one year'. The old adage comes to mind that 'a bad carpenter blames his tools'.

Whilst Peig quite often had a propensity for rambling on, it is well to remember that she was first and foremost a renowned seanchaí whose gift was in telling stories with such skill that she could weave a spell around her fireside audience. The lowly hearth was her theatrical arena but many of her themes had an international resonance. Her stories encompassed the perennial themes of love, despair, revenge, bravery, joie de vivre, etc.

Her mind was steeped in a vibrant oral tradition redolent with numerous cross-cultural references, so that 'Ou sont les neiges d'antan?' became 'Cá bhfuil an sneachta a bhí anuraidh ann?'

The point is that a good teacher, such as I luckily had, would (a) be professional enough to do the richness and relevance of the text justice and (b) enthuse the students by the quality of his or her teaching and knowledge.

Seamus O Muirthile
Hong Kong

Where Irish culture is at

A Chairde,

Paul O'Connor's 19 June article in An Phoblacht, titled Gaelic and Free, was certainly a timely and compelling piece, but I must express my objection to some of the central assumptions and arguments he makes, and the logic with which they are expressed.

O'Connor's criticism of the "primitivism" and obfuscating "Celtic mists" that have often marred the efforts of Irish language enthusiasts is certainly merited, but his argument follows similarly depressing lines of thought. Indeed, it seems to me that the over-politicisation of the Irish language, a practice in which O'Connor engages, has repulsed the interest of potential learners more than the much-derided Peig could ever have done.

The rhetorical exaggeration of his argument - the proclamations that if we are to neglect the language we are "condemning all those generations of Irish-speaking men and women to silence forever" (monuar! and ochón! ochón! indeed), and that the language exists as a "declaration that we Irish are still here in spite of every effort to crush us as a separate people" - do little to inspire. We shouldn't use the language to "restore the past", he says, but why, then, should we be trying to save "those generations" of which Peig was a very representative exemplum, from "silence"? Doesn't he want to shut Peig up?

Silencing has largely been conducted by the elites of society, since time immemorial. History has been recorded from 'above' and, thus, we know little of the vast body of people who inhabited our past, because we tend to focus on the figureheads. The habitual, banal world of a Peig or Tomás Ó Criomhthain, their lives of perpetual drudgery and pain, hold little interest in historical terms - or so the prevalent convention says.

So, if Peig, and the majority of our ancestors who lived just like her, are not where Irish culture is at, who is? Cúchulainn, says he, "defending his land from his enemies" is "an emblem of defiance and heroic courage". Samuel Beckett's frenzied character Neary, in his novel Murphy, crazily dashing his head against the buttocks of the Cúchulainn statue in Dublin's GPO, registers the kind of frustration I feel when I hear this kind of gobbledigook. Cúchulainn, as an "emblem of defiance and heroic courage", has indeed been used in recent UDA murals. Do we really want to invoke such a parallel?

I agree with O'Connor that Irish must be part of a "vibrant popular culture", but it has to be fun - not some museumised heirloom we drudge up from the past and superimpose on a present that is largely oblivious to it. It can't be associated just with the Cúchulainns or even the Peigs, but with the here and now. We can cherish and enjoy tradition without making it staid and anachronistic.

This was the success of the Revival, to some extent, tapping into the youth culture of the time, making Irish an exciting part of a general cultural phenomenon. But we must not make the mistakes of those revivalists who alienated Douglas Hyde by portraying the language as the preserve of an ethnic group of which he, as a Protestant, was not a part.

Irish, then, in my opinion, cannot be merely a "badge of distinctiveness". It can form part of an effort at distancing in a globalised consumer culture, but this part must not be contrived or artificial, or else it will bore and fall flat on its face. O'Connor pithily re-contextualises Virginia Woolf's call for women to find "a room of one's own", but didn't she also say that "life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged"? Identity is not as simple or straightforward as a mathematical equation, as O'Connor's simplistic claim that "English is the language of global capitalism and the Disneyworld culture that accompanies it". Eurodisney is in France - are we to reject French as well?

This fundamentalism is tired, and a little silly. It is the equivalent of the UKUP's Bob McCartney, on a recent programme, claiming that he and his people own Shakespeare. I presume I'm not included in this gang, but don't I own Shakespeare as well? And for that matter, what about Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, Yeats, Swift, Goldsmith, Behan, OíCasey...?

Yet he asks us to "foster cultural diversity and distinctiveness on the island"! The fact is that the "hoary antique" from a Connemara cottage, indeed, that social history, or 'writing from below', of Peig, is just as much a part of Irish culture as Shakespeare, Shaw, or Eminem (sadly, the latter may now take precedence), or, indeed, anything O'Connor would like to resurrect. He talks of a homogenous "Irish culture" - but what about Irish "cultures", what about recognising that there is a huge diversity in what Irishness can mean? The Irish language will thrive if it is allowed to stand on its own merits, not as some adjunct to a political project. Languages are just a means of expressing ideas. It's the ideas that count.

Do we want an "Ireland Gaelic and free"? O'Connor fails to answer the question he sets himself. Free, certainly, but Gaelic? As a Gaeilgeoir and someone who very much enjoys that language as well as the one in which I write, I think we should be cherishing diversity rather than placing boundaries on what is or is not Irish. Our hybridity is nothing to be ashamed of - if we're mongrels, it's better than being inbred.

Michael Pierse,
Dublin