PRESERVATION OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 17, 23 January 1891, Page 11

PRESERVATION OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE.

The R v. B. Growney. Ballycargy, Meath, publishes a strong appeal in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record for November, on behalf of the effort hciig made fur tbe preservation «>I the Irish language, observing regretfully that the number of Irish who cm write their native language passably, or who have the slightest knowledge of its literature, is shamef ally small. Out of the thousands of schools in Ireland but forty-five encourage i' ; out of tbe tens of thousands of Irish boys and girls in those schools ool> 826 were examined in it last year. Only at.out three or four hundred people in Ireland have a respectable knowledge of the written language. The school teachers cannot be blamed, as Irish is forbidden to be taught to children untill they have reached the fifth class. In all Ireland only 274 passed in Irish at the .ate intermediate examinations. Of these 234 came from the the Christian Brothers' schools, leaving 40 to all the seminaries and colleges. la none of the Irish speaking counties is the vernacular recognised in the local colleges, except in two. Still there are more to-day than there have been for the last two centuries who can read and write Irish. According to the last census 800,000 people in Ireland can speak Irish and 60,000 no other language, while more than two millions in America speak it. Yet, he avers, if things do not change, it is certain that in another century the spoken language will have disappeared for ever, a conclusion which the above figures bardly warrant. Father Growney points attention to the strange anomaly that it is Protestants and foreigners who have devoted most attention to tbe most Catholic literature in the world -the ancient literature of Ireland— while among the Irish Catholic clergy there are very few Irish scholars. He counts eight or nine in the Regular Orders, the secular clergy being represented by Dr. McCarthy and one or two others. Yet the Bishop of Waterford noted that Irish children who were first taught their own language had a better knowledge of their religious duties than children sent to school where Irish is not recognised as worth teaching. Upon Irish Catholics, the writer contends, the study of Irish literature has a special c'aim. They rightly maintain that the faith they hold is identical with that taught by St Patrick and his successors in opposition to Irish Protestants who try to persnade their co-religionists to the contrary. Cardinal Newman had experience of the value of arguments drawn from Irish ecclesiastical li erature, which is so extensively and so thoroughly Catholic, and which throws a flood of light on the exact belit f of the early Celtic Church. The majority of those who study that literature are non-Catholics and might not see, or might be tempted to slur over, point* which favour the Catholic contention.— Liverpool Catholic Times.