The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland by Douglas Hyde Delivered before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin, November 25th 1892 When we speak of the necessity for de-anglicising the Irish nation we mean it not as a protest against imitating what is best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish and hastening to adopt pell-mell and indiscriminately everything that is English simply because it is English. This is a question which most Irish men will naturally look at from a national point of view. But it is one which ought also to claim the sympathies of every intelligent unionist, and which, as I know, does claim the sympathy of many. If we take a bird's eye view of our island today and compare it with what it used to be, we must be struck by the extraordinary fact that the nation, which was once, as everyone admits, one of the most classically learned and cultured nations in Europe, is now one of the least so.
How one of the most reading and literary peoples has become one of the least studious and most unliterary and how the present art products of one of the quickest most sensitive and most artistic races on earth are now only distinguished for their hideousness. I shall endeavour to show that this failure of the Irish people in recent times has been largely brought about by the race diverging during this century from the right path. and ceasing to be Irish without becoming English.
I shall attempt to show that with the bulk of the people this change took place quite recently, much more recently than most people imagine, and is in fact still going on. I shall also like to call attention to the illogical position of men who drop their own language to speak English, of men who translate their euphonious Irish names into English monosyllables. of men who read English books and know nothing about Gaelic literature, nevertheless protesting as a matter of sentiment that they hate the country which at every hand's turn they rush to imitate. I wish to show you 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.
What did Mazzini say? What is Goldwyn Smith never tired of declaiming? What do the Spectator and Saturday Review harp on? That we ought to be content as an integral part of the United Kingdom because we have lost the notes of nationality, our language and customs.
It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this halfway house, how it continues to apparently hate the English and at the same time continues to imitate them, how it continues to clamour for recognition as a distant nationality and at the same time throws away with both hands what would make it so. If Irishmen only went a little farther they would become good Englishmen in sentiment also. But illogical as it appears there seems not the slightest sign of probability of their taking that step. It is the curious certainty that come what may Irishmen will continue to resist English rule, even though it should be for their good, which prevents many of our nation from becoming unionists upon the spot. It is a fact, and we must face it as a fact, that although they adopt English habits and copy England in every way, the great bulk of Irishmen and Irishwomen over the whole world are known to be filled with a dull ever abiding animosity against her and right or wrong to grieve when she prospers and joy when she is hurt such movements as young irelandism fenianism land-leagueism and parliamentary obstruction seem always to gain their sympathy and support it is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good members of the empire that are urged that they should not remain in the anomalous position they are in but since they absolutely refuse to become one thing that they become the other cultivate what they have rejected and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.
But you ask, why should we wish to make Ireland more Celtic than it is? Why should we de-Anglicise it at all? I answer because the Irish race is at present in a most anomalous position, imitating England and yet apparently hating it.
How can it produce anything good in literature? art or institutions as long as it is actuated by motives so contradictory. Besides, I believe it is our Gaelic past which, though the Irish race does not recognise it just at present, is really at the bottom of the Irish heart and prevents us becoming citizens of the Empire as I think can be easily proved.
To say that Ireland has not prospered under English rule is simply a truism. All the world admits it. England does not deny it.
But the English retort is ready. You have not prospered, they say, because you would not settle down contentedly, like the Scotch, and form a part of the empire. Twenty years of good, resolute, grandfatherly government, said a well-known Englishman, will solve the Irish question.
He possibly made the period too short. But let us suppose this. Let us suppose for a moment. which is impossible, that there were to arise a series of Cromwells in England from the space of one hundred years, able administrators of the empire, careful rulers in Ireland, developing to the utmost our national resources, whilst they unremittingly stamped out every spark of national feeling, making Ireland a land of wealth and factories, whilst they extinguished every thought and every idea that was Irish, and left us At last, after a hundred years of good government, fat, wealthy and populous, but with all our characteristics gone, with every external that at present differentiates us from the English lost or dropped, all our Irish names of places and people turned into English names, the Irish language completely extinct, the O's and the Mac's dropped, our Irish intonation changed.
as far as possible by English schoolmasters into something English. Our history no longer remembered or taught. The names of our rebels and martyrs blotted out.
Our battlefields and traditions forgotten. The fact that we were not of Saxon origin dropped out of sight and memory and let me now put the question, how many Irishmen are there who would purchase material prosperity at such a price? It is exactly such a question as this, and the answer to it that shows that difference between the English and Irish race.
Nine Englishmen out of ten would jump to make the exchange, and as I firmly believe that nine Irishmen out of ten would indignantly refuse it. And yet, this awful idea of complete Anglicisation which I have here put before you in all its crudity is, and has been, making silent inroads upon us for nearly a century. Its inroads have been silent because had the Gaelic race perceived what was being done or had they been once warned of what was taking place in their own midst they would I think never have allowed it. When the picture of complete anglicization is drawn for them in all its nakedness Irish sentimentality becomes suddenly a power and refuses. to surrender its birthright what lies at the back of the sentiments of nationality with which the irish millions seem so strongly leavened what can prompt them to applaud such sentiments as they say the british empire owes much to irish hands that irish valor fixed her flag or many conquered lands and ask if erin takes no pride in these her gallant sons her wolseley's and her lawrence's her wolves and wellingtons ah these were of the empire we yield them to her fame and ne'er in errands or horizons are heard their alien name but those for whom her heart beats high and benediction swell they died upon the scaffold and they pined within the cell of course it is a very composite feeling which prompts them but i believe that what is largely behind it is that half unconscious feeling that the race which at one time held possession of more than half of europe which established itself in greece and burned infant rome is now almost extirpated and absorbed elsewhere making its last stand for independence in this island of ireland and do what they may the race of today cannot wholly divest itself from the mantle of its own past through early irish literature for instance Can we best form some conception of what the race really was, which, after overthrowing and trampling on the primitive peoples of half Europe, was itself forced, in turn, to yield its speech, manners, and independence to the victorious eagles of Rome?
We alone, of the nations of Western Europe, escaped the claws of those birds of prey. We alone developed ourselves naturally, upon our own lines, outside of, and free from, all Roman influence. We alone were thus able to produce an early art and literature.
Our antiquities can best throw light upon the pre-Romanised inhabitants of half Europe. And we are our father's sons. There is really no exaggeration in all this.
Although Irish men are sometimes prone to overstating as well as to forgetting, Westward himself declares, that were it not for Irishmen these islands would possess no primitive works of art worth of mentioning. Jubinville asserts that early Irish literature is that which best shows light upon the manners and customs of his own ancestors, the Gauls, and Zimmer, who has done so much for Celtic philology, has declared that the only spurious criticism can make an attempt to doubt about the historical character of the chief persons of our two epic cycles. that of Cú Chulainn and that of Finn. It is useless elaborating this point and Dr Sigurdsson has already shown in his opening lecture the debt of gratitude which in many respects Europe owes to Ireland.
The dim consciousness of this is one of those things which are at the back of the Irish national sentiment and our business whether we be unionists or nationalists should be to make this dim consciousness an active and potent feeling and thus increase our sense of self-respect and of honor. What we must endeavor to never forget is this, that the Ireland of today is the descendant of the Ireland of the 7th century, then the school of Europe and the torch of learning. It is true that Northmen made some minor settlements in it in the 9th and 10th centuries. It is true that the Normans made extensive settlements during the succeeding centuries, but none of those broke the continuity of the social life of the island. Dane and Norman, drawn to the kindly Irish breast, issued forth in a generation or two, fully Irishised and more Hibernian than the Hibernians themselves.
And even after the Cromwellian plantation, the children of numbers of the English soldiers who settled in the south and midlands where, after 40 years residence and after marrying Irish wives, turned into good Irish men and unable to speak a word of English, while several Gaelic poets of the last century have, like Father English, the most unmistakably English names. In two points only was the continuity of the Irishism of Ireland damaged. First, in the north-east of Ulster where the Gaelic race was expelled, and the land planted with aliens whom our dear mother erin assimilative as she is has hitherto found it difficult to absorb and in the ownership of the land eight-ninths of which belong to people many of whom always lived or live abroad and not half of whom ireland can be said to have assimilated during all this time the continuation of aaron's national life centered according to our way of looking at it Not so much in the Cromwellian or Williamite landholders who sat in College Green and governed the country, as in the mass of the people whom Dean Swift considered might be entirely neglected and looked upon as hearers of wood and drawers of water.
The men who, nevertheless, constituted the real working population and who were living on in the hopes of better days. The men who have since made America. and have within the last 10 years proved what an important factor they may be in wrecking or in building the British Empire.
These are the men of whom our merchants, artisans, farmers mostly consist. and in whose hands the making or marrying of an irish nation but alas quantum mutatis ab ilo what the battle-axe of the dane the sword of the norman and the wile of the saxon were unable to perform we have accomplished ourselves we have at last broken the continuity of irish life and just at the moment when the celtic races presumably about to largely recover possession of its own country. It finds itself deprived and stripped of its Celtic characteristics, cut off from the past, yet scarcely in touch with the present.
It has lost, since the beginning of this century, almost all that connected it with the era of Cú Chulainn and of Uisín, that connected it with the Christianisers of Europe, that connected it with Brian Beru and the heroes of Clintarf, with the O'Neills and the O'Donnells, with Rory O'Meara, with the wild geese and even to some extent the men of ninety eight it has lost all that they had language traditions music genius and ideas just when we should be starting to build up anew the irish race and the gaelic nation as within our own recollection greece has been built up anew we find ourselves despoiled of the bricks of nationality The old bricks that lasted 1800 years are destroyed. We must now set to, to bake new ones, if we can, on other ground and of other clay. Imagine for a moment the restoration of a German-speaking Greece.
The bulk of the Irish race really lived in the closest contact with the traditions of the past and the national life of nearly 1800 years, until the beginning of this century. Not only so, but during the whole of the dark penal times they produced amongst themselves a most vigorous literary development. Their schoolmasters and wealthy farmers, unwearied scribes, produced innumerable manuscripts in beautiful writing, each letter separated from another, as in Greek, transcripts both of the ancient literature of the sires and of the more modern literature produced by themselves.
Until the beginning of the present century, There was no county, no barony, and I may almost say no town land, which did not boast of an Irish poet, the people's representative of those ancient bards who died out with the extirpation of the great Milesian families. The literary activity of even the 18th century among the Gaels was very great, not in the south alone but also in Ulster. The number of poets it produced was something astonishing.
It did not, however, produce many works in Gaelic prose, but it propagated translations of many pieces from the French, Latin, Spanish and English. Every well-to-do farmer could read and write Irish, and many of them could understand even archaic Irish. I have myself heard persons reciting the poems of Donagh Amhara o Daile, Abbot of Boyle in Roscommon, who died sixty years before Chaucer was born.
To this very day, The people have a word for archaic Irish which is much the same as though Chaucer's poems were handed down amongst the English peasantry but required a special training to understand. This training, however, nearly every one of the fair education during the penal times possessed. Nor did they begin to lose their Irish training and knowledge until after the establishment of Maynooth and the rise of O'Connell.
These two events made an end of the Gaelicism. of the Gaelic race. Although a great number of poets and scribes existed even down to the 40s and 50s of the present century, and a few may linger on yet in remote localities, but it may be said roughly speaking that the ancient Gaelic civilization died with O'Connell, largely, I am afraid, owing to his example and his neglect of inculcating the necessity of keeping alive racial customs, language, and traditions, in which the one notable exception of our scholarly idealist Smith O'Brien, he has been followed until a year ago by almost every leader of the Irish race.
Thomas David and his brilliant band of young Irelanders came just at the dividing of the line and tried to give to Ireland a new literature in English to replace the literature which was just being discarded. It succeeded and it did not succeed. It was a most brilliant effort but the old bark had been too recently stripped off the Irish tree and the trunk could not take as it might have done to refresh one.
It was a new departure. and at first produced a violent effect, yet in the long run it failed to properly leave in our peasantry who might, perhaps, have been reached upon other lines. I say they might have been reached upon other lines because it is quite certain that even well on into the beginning of this century, Irish poor scholars and schoolmasters used to gain the greatest favour and applause by reading out manuscripts in the people's houses at night.
some of which manuscripts had an antiquity of a couple of hundred years or more behind them and which when they got illegible from age were always recopied the irish peasantry at that time were all to some extent cultured men and many of the better off ones were scholars and poets what have we now left of all that scarcely a trace many of them read newspapers indeed Who reads, much less recites, an epic poem or chants an elegiac or even a hymn? Wherever Irish throughout Ireland continued to be spoken, there the ancient manuscripts continued to be read. There the epics of Cú Chulainn, Conor Mac Nessa, Deirdre, Finn, Oscar and Uisín continued to be told.
And there poetry and music held sway. Some people may think I am exaggerating in asserting that such a state of things existed down to the present century, but it is no exaggeration. I have myself spoken with men from Cavan and Tyrone who spoke excellent Irish.
Carlton's stories bear witness to the prevalence of the Irish language and traditions in Ulster when he began to write. My friend Mr Lloyd has found numbers in Antrim who spoke good Irish, and, as for Leinster, my friend Mr Cleaver informed me that when he lived in Wicklow, A man came by from the county Carlow in search of work who could speak not a word of English. Old labourers from Connacht, who used to go to reap the harvest in England and take shipping at Drogheda, told me that at that time, 50 years ago, Irish was spoken by everyone around the town.
I have met an old man in Wicklow, not 20 miles from Dublin, whose parents always repeated the rosary in Irish. My friend Father O'Growney, who has done and is doing so much for the Irish language and literature at Maynooth, tells me that there, within 20 miles of Dublin, are three old people who still speak Irish. O'Corry found people within seven miles of Dublin city who had never heard English in their youth at all, except from the car drivers of the great town.
I gave an old man in the street who begged for me a penny, only a few days ago, saying, I'm a shin-fing in the gut. And when he answered in Irish I asked him where he was from and he said Níona, that is Navan. Last year I was in Canada and out hunting with some red Indians and we spent a night in the last white man's house in the last settlement on the brink of the primeval forest.
And judging from a peculiarly Hibernian physiognomy that the man was Irish I addressed him in Gaelic and to the With intense astonishment both of whites and Indians we entered into a conversation which none of them understood and it turned out that he was from within three miles of Kilkenny and has been forty years in that country without forgetting the language he had spoken as a child and I although from the centre of Connacht understood him perfectly. When my father was a young boy in the county Leitrim not far from Longford he seldom heard it. the farm labourers and tenants speak anything but Irish amongst themselves.
So much for Ulster and Leinster but Connacht and Munster were until quite recently completely Gaelic. In fact I may venture to say that up to the beginning of the present century neither man, woman nor child of the Gaelic race, either of high blood or low blood, existed in Ireland who did not either speak Irish or understand it. But within the last ninety years we have, with an unparalleled frivolity deliberately thrown away our birthright and anglicized ourselves none of the children of those people of whom i have spoken no irish and the race will from henceforth be changed for as monsoigne benville says of the influence of rome upon gaul england quote has definitely conquered us she has even imposed upon us her language that is to say the form of our thoughts during every instant of our existence end quote It is curious that those who most fear West Britannism have so eagerly consented to imposing upon the Irish race what, according to Jovenville, who, in common with all the great scholars of the continent, seems to regret it very much, is the form of our thoughts during every instant of our existence. So much for the greatest stroke of all in our Anglicisation.
the loss of our language. I have often heard people thank God that if the English gave us nothing else, they gave us at least their language. In this way, they put a bold face upon the matter and pretend that the Irish language is not worth knowing and has no literature. But the Irish language is worth knowing.
Or why would the greatest philologists of Germany, France and Italy be emuliously studying it? And it does possess a great literature. Or why would a German savant have made the calculation that the books written in Irish between the 11th and 17th centuries and still extant would fill a thousand octavo volumes?
I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish feeling Irishman who hates the reproach of West Britianism should set himself to encourage the efforts which are being made to keep alive our once great national tongue. The losing of it is our greatest blow and the sorest stroke that the rapid anglicisation of Ireland has afflicted upon us. In order to de-anglicise ourselves we must at once arrest the decay of our language. We must bring pressure upon our politicians not to snuff it out by their tacit discouragement merely because they do not happen themselves to understand it. we must arouse some spark of patriotic inspiration among the peasantry who still use the language and put an end to the shameful state of feeling a thousand-tongued reproach to our leaders and statesmen which makes young men and women blush and hang their heads when overheard speaking their own language maynooth has at last come splendidly to the front and it is now incumbent upon every clerical student to attend lectures in the irish language and history during the first three years of his course.
But in order to keep the Irish language alive where it is still spoken, which is the utmost we can at present aspire to, nothing less than a house to house visitation and exhortation of the people themselves will do something. Something though with a very different purpose, analogous to the procedure that James Stevens adopted throughout Ireland when he found her like a corpse on the dissecting table. This, and some system of giving medals or badges of honour to every family who will guarantee that they have always spoken Irish amongst themselves during the year.
But, unfortunately, distracted as we are, and torn by contending factions, it is impossible to find either men or money to carry out this simple remedy. Although, to a dispassionate foreigner, to a Zeus, Jubanville, Zimmer, Coonamire. Vindish or Ascoli and the rest, this is of greater importance than whether Mr Redmond or Mr McCarthy lead the largest wing of the Irish party for the moment or Mr so-and-so succeed with his election petition. To a person taking a bird's eye view of the situation a hundred or five hundred years hence, believe me, it will also appear of greater importance than any mere temporary wrangle but unhappily.
Our countrymen cannot be brought to see this. We can however insist and we shall insist if home will be carried that the Irish language which so many foreign scholars of the first calibre find so worthy of study shall be placed on a par with or even above Greek, Latin and modern languages in all examinations held under the Irish government. We can also insist and we shall insist that in those baronies where the children speak Irish, Irish shall be taught, and that Irish-speaking schoolmasters, petty sessions, clerks, and even magistrates be appointed in Irish-speaking districts. If all this were done, it should not be very difficult with the aid of the foremost foreign scholars to bring about a tone of thought which would make it disgraceful for an educated Irishman, especially of the old Celtic race, McDermotts, O'Connors.
of sullivan's mccarty's and o'neil's to be ignorant of his own language would make it at least as disgraceful as for an educated jew to be quite ignorant of hebrew the necessity for de-anglicizing ireland by douglas hyde 1892