THE IRISH.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 29 September 1917, Page 3

THE IRISH.

THEIR LAND OF TO-DAY. DRIVING POWER OF THE GAELIC RENAISSANCE. (By Louis J- McQuilland, in the London Express.) The strength of the insurgent movement in Ireland to-day is in the young men, and their strength lies in the fact that they have outgrown the material decadence of the great famine of 1846-9, in which 800,000 people died of hunger and over 1,250.000 emigrated to the United States. Those who reminded were the aged and the weaklings, Only in this generation has national health completely reasserted itself. The young men of to-day are well fed, and they have also an intellectual equipment—l speak of the bulk of the people—denied to their predecessors. Only since the Board of Intermediate Education was established in 1878 have the Catholic youth of Ireland had any secondary education a higher facility being offered in the following year, when the Royal University of Ireland was founded, which passed through its hands an ; average of 1800 students every year. It was, however, a university only in name, not even having a residential qualification. It is just nine years since the Irish National University wdiich does resemble the real article, came into being after long and bitter parliamentary struggle. Many of the Sinn Feiners to-day arc graduates of the Royal University —doctors, lawyers, mathematicians scientists; even the degreelcss ones infinitely better off educationally than their fathers are Maynooth turns out Sinn Feiners wholesale. Nearly all the younger school of writers in Ireland to-day are in the new movement, especially the poets — a dangerous race whom Plato declared he would not have in his republic. Better food, better surroundings, better learning —these are very material ingedients in the development of a national obstinate selfwill. If English education has had great force in the development of the new Ireland, Irish education had a greater. It is said that Sinn Fien has absorbed the Gaelic League. It might be said as a more exact truth that the Gaelic League has encompassed Sinn Fein. The Irish language movement was started twenty-three years ago by Dr. Douglas Hyde, a Protestant. Founded explicitly for the relearning of the Gaelic tongue, it -constituted in reality a national renaissance, whose object was to de-Anglicise Ireland. The task was not so difficult as it looked, for in Western Ireland the Gaelic tongue has never been abandoned; and Irish has prevailed to a lesser extent in the midlands, and even in the north in such counties as Cavan and Donegal. The Gaelic League has always professed to hold aloof from politics, but it has somehow managed to impregnate the whole body politic of Ireland. It has aimed at what that marvellous observer of Irish life, M. Paul Dubois, has termed "moral Home Rule, psychological emancipation." and it has to a great extent succeeded. The Sinn Feiners are out against what they call an English Ireland—an Ireland, by the way, which was good, enough for Grattan, for Swift, for O’Connell and ParnoH. ffhey desire the failure of the Convention, and the restless hope they hug to their hearts is that "unfinished questions have .no unity for the repose of nations.”