Deireadh leis an nGaeilge - Death of the Irish language?

In reality there can never be a straightforward final and absolute assimilation when your dealing with slippery matters like institutions, laws, customs & character traits - the latter two particularly are notoriously difficult to define (though people know it quick enough when their immersed in a milieu alien to their own - even if they do share the same language). Cultures aren't like genetic codes; a double helix unravelling itself, absorbing scattered material then replicating the same old indefinitely - there are an infinity of subtle variations involved all of which collectively produce the difference; difficult to convey perhaps, but there nevertheless - good travel writers make their living peddling these shades of grey and once they hit upon the happy formula which betrays a peculiar trait the attuned can recognise it instantly.

In terms of overall 'worldview', character 'disposition', typical attitudinal stance - whatever you want to call it - you'd have to be from another planet not to notice strong cultural differences between the various English-speaking countries. That said, the mutually comprehensible language once established creates it's own bind and momentum and without question alters the nature of the relationship - increasing exponentially all those potentially shared cultural memes which begin to dovetail and produce their own mutually appreciated 'storyboard' - technology (tv and internet) permits me now to have a conversation with any English, American, Australian, Canadian etc. on thousands of different topics which would be otherwise mutually barred to us were it not for a shared colonial past - we are rapidly altogether merging into a singular international Anglophone community whose multiple points of contact and terms of reference are surely beginning to outweigh those cultural traits which are peculiar to our own country. Present-day Anglophone dominance in trade and commerce compels French, German & Spanish speakers (for instance) to become bilingual English not vice versa, while most of the English-speaking world usually rests content with being monolingual bores; there being no compelling reason to force them being otherwise. France, Germany and Spain; their people, politics and culture are cut off to me in ways that can never exist with America; information of whom I can absorb a thousand times more rapidly by flicking through Fox, CNN and the like or by reading their views on internet boards. After a while of such exposure, though I never may have set foot in the place; the 'idea' of what they're about comes across naturally enough.

The fact of the matter is that Ireland was assimilated (obviously not completely but clearly not in any minor or negligible fashion); and it's as good a word as any - principally and most obviously through language, secondarily through the engrafting of political institutions which upended completely a particular mode of living ('tribal', 'kin-based', semi-nomadic non-feudal, pastoralist, - 'pre-modern' if you like) tearing across in the process the fabric of a two thousand year old highly evolved system of reciprocal rights & duties (see the seanchus law tracts); a 'civilization' in the making interrupted in it's stuttering progress by first Norse then Cambro-Norman settlers/invaders. Half a dozen dynasties in the 8th century (O' Connor, O' Neill, O' Brien, MacMurrough, MacCarthy etc.) vied for a putative high-kinship mutually acknowledged as having it's core seat and focal point in semi-legendary Teamhra (Tara); the concept of an Ard-Rí though never in actuality achieved without "opposition" in the historical period and most likely not before either (despite best efforts of sundry 'synthetic' historians & annalists to doctor fantabulous lineages for their patron-chiefs thereby granting them retrospective legitimacy in contemporary power struggles) was nevertheless an institution towards which these fierce clan-based rivalries were inexorably moving towards.

In fact, in terms of grasping all the baffling ramifications and potentialities of cultural assimilation, the 11th century of 'the Isles' is one of the most fascinating periods to reflect on - if Canute had consolidated a Scandinavian dynasty and had there been an Irish Alfred to unify the Gaelic septs it would have been more natural for the Dál Riata derived kings of Scotland to look westwards to Ireland to their Gaelic-speaking cousins for marriage alliances thus in time creating the basis for a pan-Gaelic kingdom. The resultant map of 'the Isles' at this point would have been a reverse mirror-image of what actually occurred under Henry II a century later when Norman hegemony was extended into most of southern and eastern Ireland. You can usually catch a glimpse of some of these many 'might have beens' through the lineages of the day. The 'Conqueror' was Henry's grandfather but his maternal grandmother (the Empress Matilda's mother) was a Gaelic-speaking daughter of Máel Coluim MacDonnchada, King of the Scots - the same line also connected him to the Anglo-Saxon Margaret of course which was the principle advantage of the match.

The Anglo-Saxon Norman invasion was in essence a conquest of Scandinavian blood; Viking raiding ships always had a safe berth in the Norman foothold paying tax and tribute from their plunder of Anglo-Saxon lands to the successive Norman lords who evidently never completely shed their piratical roots, indeed finding them essential to consolidate their power. Despite Christian conversion, ennoblement and intermarriage with the feudal lords of the day the Normans were essentially loathe to completely reject their 'wild' Norse past -'going soft' being a constant irritable refrain from their ex-Viking feudalised vassals. Richard I of Normandy in fact married an out and out Viking, Gunnor, who was to be an extremely influential Norman court matriarch up until her death c.1030; their daughter Emma marrying two English kings (Aethelred the Unready and Canute) and giving birth to two more (Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor). Unlike her fist marriage with the Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred, Emma probably had no difficulty communicating with the son (Canute) of Viking marauder, Swein Forkbeard, via her mother's tongue. As far as I'm aware there is little trace of the post-William English Norman rulers celebrating their clearly very recent Viking vintage - they looked instead to their feudal entanglements in France and their insertion into the wider Christian world; perhaps the residue of their (presumably for a time proudly recalled Scandinavian past) was kept as an unofficial sub-culture of court life for a few generations at least and the potential embarrassment simply excised from official documentation.

Back in Ireland, the high-kinship was the prize desperately coveted by them all; all it required was a far-sighted, administrative & political genius of the calibre of Alfred to knit the factions together just like he had done with the exactly contemporaneous individual Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The most important ingredient was there all along; brehons, bards, priests and monks could traverse freely from one corner of the land to the other simply because they shared the same overall culture; laws, language, religious and political institutions - a common reference point that would require no great imagination to weld together. It didn't happen of course, the powers remained too equally balanced and in the end came the intervention of the same Normans who tore asunder the Anglo-Saxon nobility - thus you had the fracturing and degrading of the respective dominant Gaelic dynasties throughout the Middle Ages until by c.1500 there were no fewer than 90 odd individual Gaelic chiefs, each "captains of their countrye", semi-feudalised, half vassalised, independent, proud, headstrong, champing at the bit and each fighting tenaciously their corner - a civilization first interrupted, then transformed, increasingly according to the goals and objectives of a conquering power; and finally squashed, utterly. Assimilated.

The monolingual Gaelic speaking proportion survived in the cracks and crevices thereafter, ignored in the main by a buoyant Ascendency unless it was to collect rents or tithes, eking out an increasingly precarious living on vanishingly small plots of land & surviving in the main on a solitary food source; the spud, until in time nature deprived them too of this necessity and they were either stuffed into limepits or blasted to the four corners to be assimilated afresh. But what they were; their language, culture & institutions proved remarkably resilient (though degraded, bastardised and downtrodden - the 1741 'Bliain an air' famine or 'year of the slaughter' doesn't even register an agitated blip in the proceedings of the altogether otherworldly and apartheid Dublin parliament!) - up until 1845 that is, when the earth opened up and swallowed them whole. The Gaelteachts today are the punch drunk remnants of that social catastrophe; a shadow of a shadow of a life that once was. Enough anyhow to remind us all we were once something else entirely. "Assimilation" as a general process was to be sure an ongoing rude upheaval, a continuous slap in the face, the proverbial boot pressed low and hard, forever, not even for the proud but any with a squidgeon of self-respect; socially, culturally, politically, economically, downgraded and excluded, the hills ever aflame with the wraiths of a thousand rueful ancestors asking you how and why you can put up with it - speaking a language you can't even understand. That's the source of every bomb I grew up with it; tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.

Truly, its something of a miracle that anyone speaks the Irish language at all given all the hammer blows it has received. Successive waves of colonisation and plantation from Elizabethan times through to the Williamite land settlements were the initial fatal first steps as this established unequivocally an Anglophone monopoly in government and administration. So, you might say the crucial years were from Henry's 'surrender and regrant' programme up to the collapse of the Tyrconnell regime; i.e. roughly 1540 to 1690. Here, you had the systematic and self-conscious attempt to 'de-Gaelicise' the country principally via the eradication of specifically Gaelic institutions - Brehon laws, tánistry, mode of land ownership (where primogeniture was enforced over derbfine claims to collective ownership), chieftain's 'cuddy' and even modes of dress. Apart from the obvious colonial dimension the bulk of these changes were designed to claw in more revenues for the Crown diverting the flow of taxable goods from a Gaelic sphere of autonomous chieftains into a centralised Westminster controlled bureaucracy. The native leadership cadre were effectively beheaded and supplanted while for those that remained the cultural focus now switched to England and the ennobling powers of the Crown; this was the new route for power, advancement & security - the organic connectivity with the Irish-speaking majority held together by common custom law and language was effectively severed.

Medieval English kings never had the financial clout to 'complete the conquest' being for the most part tied up in continental commitments or domestic crises; Hundred Years war, War of the Roses etc. with the Reformation when it did come providing the great spur for a further 'othering of the other'. Resistant Catholicism could now be readily equated with and explained by these self-evidently 'barbarous' Gaelic institutions which seemed to nurture recidivist and 'backward' church practices and altogether promote 'popish superstitions'. Such was the hubristic certitude that it was naturally assumed given the 'correct example' that English habits, customs, language (and religion) would inevitably be diffused and picked up willingly by the populace. Such was the power of this propaganda that Molyneaux in the 1690's defending Anglo-Irish (i.e. Ascendency) rights to carve out it's own economic laws independent of Westminster could off-hand say that there was no aboriginal population left in Ireland; the suggestion being that political and economic hegemony (full spectrum dominance in reality) would soon see to it - if it hadn't done the job already.

So, the post-Reformation religious divide enacted the first major schism as hitherto Anglo-Norman medieval lords particularly outside the Pale (Desmond, Butler, Clanrickard, the Fitzgeralds) were long accustomed to the realities of a dual culture; pragmatically intermarrying, learning Irish and even adopting Gaelic customs where appropriate to suit their own needs - no threat to the language there; bilingualism being in fact the norm among both aristocracies although the peasant subclass of both still remained relatively isolated from one another. With the Reformation the 'Old English', who retained their Catholicism, (itself a function, if not of widespread integration of the two communities at the very least a cultural alienation from mainland Britain) were henceforth bracketed and 'downgraded' with the 'native Irishry' and slowly displaced in their turn by the 'newcomer' Protestant English and Scots settlers. It's interesting that after the final collapse of the Jacobite cause (the '45) and more specifically with the Papal assertion of Hanoverian legitimacy (1760) the fight for civil and political liberties now assumed a constitutional as opposed to a simmering underground martial dimension. It was no longer 'open warfare' as such, framed by European Counter-Reformation politics and the attempts of displaced and dispossessed continental Gaelic and Old English emigrés to have their ancestral lands restored - what was now tapped into for the furthering of the now Irish Catholic cause was the universalist enlightenment language of tolerance, democracy, human rights, enfranchisement etc. 'Romanticism', with it's reverence for indigenous languages and customs came two generations later and was too late in a sense for the Irish context; despite best efforts from Davis, O' Donovan, Mangan and the other early cultural nationalists.

In the 1770's, the only practical means by which this new paradigm of struggle could be pushed through to successful completion was via lobbying, speechifying & petitioning through the English language - the drama of the hour; Grattan's speeches, parliamentary Reform Bills and so on were all inevitably reported and circulated by English language pamphlets and broadsheets. English and French were rapidly displacing Latin as the language of learning and knowledge and perforce to participate in this new dialogue the old vernaculars of Europe began to look around this time increasingly like so much dead ballast. The antiquarians ploughed ahead of course and continued to file new discoveries; etymological curios for the consumption of detached scholars - but there were few attempts in Ireland to convey or convert any of this into the native vernacular for the consumption of the masses. Literacy was commonly cited as an obstacle and even those who could read couldn't do so in Irish due to the paucity of material actually printed in the language. This is more clearly a question of power and resources hampered as always by the ubiquitous Penal Code; hedge school masters with slender means at their disposal had no option but to resort to English language publications.

The actual survival of quasi-bardic and seanachaí traditions in Munster and Connaught, as well as the rundale/clachan communal settlements in which they thrived, perversely contributed to this linguistic malaise as knowledge was still by and large communicated as it always had been; by song and word of mouth - so the actual still resonant cohesiveness of Gaelic cultural life in the long run worked against the necessity of adopting a vernacular print literature. Though probably the biggest blow to Irish during this crucial period of the early 18th century (when the majority of the island still spoke the language) was the retention of the Latin mass and the decision by the Vatican (c.1720's) not to allow a translation of the Bible in the vernacular - we sorely needed a Counter-Reformation equivalent of Thomas Cromwell or Catherine Parr both of whom assiduously promoted the like in England; Dublin priest Cornelius Nary favoured the adoption as far as I remember but was shot down.

By the time the National Schools system was rolled out in the 1830's which pointedly excluded any instruction in Irish, post-Emancipation middle-class Catholics led by O' Connell were optimistic of grabbing a share of governance and an increased share of the spoils but this was predicated obviously on them and their offspring being fluent in the language of power and (city) commerce - tally sticks were introduced into primary schools (usually with priest and parental approval) and Irish-speakers punished each time they spoke their native tongue. O' Connell himself set the tone, though a native speaker, saying it were well it vanished off the earth (or words to that effect), it serving no demonstrable purpose - the difference in his attitude and that of the (mainly Protestant) Young Irelanders in this regard couldn't be more pronounced; influenced by Herder and German Romanticism (& Walter Scott) the volksgeist for them took on a powerful and apposite meaning in the Irish context which largely eluded the 'Liberator'. Indeed, when William Carleton wrote his monumental Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry in the 1830's and 40's he was self-consciously preserving country idioms and a way of life which he knew to be rapidly vanishing despite all the fulminations of the Nation.

The final curtain call is preserved for us in the impressions of a contemporary Donegal native who manages (for me) to put it all in a nutshell -

"Tháinig blianta an ghorta agus an droch shaoghal agus an t-ochras agus bhris sin neart agus spiorad na ndaoini. Ní rabh ann ach achan nduine ag iarraidh bheith beo. Chaill said a' daimh le chéile. Ba chuma cé a bhí gaolmhar duit, ba do charaid an t-é a bhéarfadh greim duit le chur i do bhéal. D' imthigh an spórt agus a caitheamh aimsire. Stad an fhilidheacht agus a' ceol agus damhsa. Chaill said agus rinne said dearmad den iomlán agus nuair a bhisigh an saoghal ar dhóigheannai eile ní tháinig na rudaí seo ariamh arais mar a bhí said. Mharbh an gorta achan rud."

"The years of the Famine, of the bad life and of the hunger, arrived and broke the spirit ad strength of the community. People simply wanted to survive. Their spirit of comradeship was lost. It didn't matter what ties or relations you had; you considered that person to be your friend who gave you food to put in your mouth. Recreation and leisure ceased. Poetry, music and dancing died. These things were lost and completely forgotten. When life improved in other ways, these pursuits never returned as they had been. The famine killed everything."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t59y1Hr7900