The Irish Language Revival

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 17, 23 April 1903, Page 29

The Irish Language Revival

We are in receipt of the ' Annual Iteport of the Gaelic League ' for 1901-2, and its 116 pages make interesting reading to all who are interested in the revival of the old language in Ireland. The movement has ' caught on ' not alone in the. Old Land, but has firmly established itself in England, Scotland, and the United States, and is even represented in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In New Zealand there are two blanches of the League, one at Milton (secretary, Mr. |P. Walsh), the other at Balclutha (secretary Mr. A. V. Dunne) ; and the Very Rev. Father O'Neill and the Very Rev. Monsignor O'Leary are ardent and practical friends of the movement.

One of the cheap, slap-dash order of London . writers recently described the Irish language and literary revival as ' the maddest of all literary crazes,' and asserted that not more than five people have ever wasted their time in learning an obsolete language without a literature to repay the trouble. The real facts of the case are gi\en in a recent issue of the New York. ' Sun.'

Up to the great famine in Ireland in 1847 the Irish language may be said, roughly speaking, to have been the language of the whole of Ireland, except the northeast corner, and it had been spoken there for 2000 years not only by the Milesians themselves, but also by the children of every invader who gained footing in Ireland — Normans, Danes, Elizabethans, and Cromwellians. Because of the enforced emigration the population of Ireland since the famine has diminished over one-half. During that time the Irish language, because of the efforts of the so-called ' national schools ' which excluded Irish from their courses, and the poverty of the people which made them unable to provide Irish teachers of their own or to print and buy Irish books for themselves, was threatened with extinction. Consequently the Gaelic League was formed, not ns ' a literary craze,' but with the noblest object of preserving to the Irish people the priceless heritage of their language, in which was enshrined their history, their traditions, their poetry, their great epics, and the very soul and genius of their race.

The -Irish language has never died out. It has always been a living language, largely as the result of the propaganda of the Gaelic League during the last fifteen years. The official census of Ireland for 1901 shows that the number of persons returned as speaking only Irish was 38,192, and the number speaking both Irish and English was 6 J0, 963, making a total of Irish speakers in Ireland in the year 1901 of 679,155. Look at these statistics of those who spoke both Irish and English :—: —

Irish is also largely spoken in the Highlands of Scotland by nearly as many people who know no English as in Ireland itself, the number being estimated at about 40,000.

To-day the Caelic League, under the presidency of Dr. Hyde, has over four hundred branches throughout Ireland, each branch with a membership of from fifty to four hundred members Many thousands of Irish children are studying Irish in the schools. The Cache League has sold 50,000 of its liish text-books in a single year. Fine plays are written and successfully performed in Irish So far from being the ' maddest of all literary crazes,' European schoiais like Zeuss, Bopp, Grim, Ebel. Zunmer, Windisch, Zimmerman, D'Arbois, De Jubainvillo, Dr. Vvhitley Stokes, Dr. Standish Hayes O'Grady, Professor Kudo Meyer, and Dr. Douglas Hyde, to name only a few out of many, have devoted a la? - ge part of their lives to the study of Irish literature and the Irish language. The 22 volumes of the ' Revue Celtique ' are devoted to the Celtic language and literature, and there are kindred Gorman publications, the ' Zeitschnft fud Celtische Philologie ' and the ' Jrische Texte,' edited by Dr. Ernest Windisch, ot the Unncrsity of Leipsic.

Standish Hayes O'Clradv's great catalogue of the Irish manuscripts in the British museum, of history, law, medicine, poetry, and folkloie, occupies nearly 700 pages, and is one of the most fascinating Irish books ever published It is estimated by a competent scholar that there is still in manuscript in Ireland enough of Irish, written within the last two thousand years to fill a couple of hundred octavo volumes Ihe Royal Irish Academy has catalogued about one-half of the manuscripts in it, and the catalogue is contained in 13 volumes, with 3448 pages, and contains about 10,000 pieces, varying from perhaps a single verse of a song up to a long epic. Irish literature possesses an almost perfect system of prosody, self-evolved, self-invented in llrish, that no other European country possesses. As early even as the year 750, Irish poets were making most perfect rhymes, a thing not known for at least two centuries later in any other modern vernacular ; and the great scholar Zeuss, who put Celtic studies on a sure foundation, and Constant in Nigra have strongly urged the fact that it is to the Colts that Europe owes the very invention of rhyme, and the modern poets of Ireland have carried rhyme to a perfection that people who have not actually read their poems cannot even dream of. Pr. Hyde's monumental ' Literary History of Ireland ' will reveal to any person

interested in the subject conclusive evidence-that the Irish language is one of the richest and its older literature among the greatest of the older literatures of the world. Dr. Sigerson's ' Bards of the Gael and Gaul,' an anthology of nearly 150 poems metrically translated from the Irish and covering the ground from" the earliest unhymed chant down to the peasant days of the 18th century, puts it into the power of any English reader to judge of some of the qualities of Irish poetry for themselves. The Irish translation of the New Testament is older than the English version or than the Douay edition of the Old Testament.

ounties. Cork Donegal Galway Kerry Mayo \\ ;i a/i citford Irish only. 2,273 7,073 17,6?,8 4,481 4,234 1,321 Irish anc English. 117,447 55,000 107,929 69,929 106,131 36,158