Republican News · Thursday 26 June 2003

Gaelic and free?

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In the third part of a series of articles exploring the republican vision, PAUL O'CONNOR argues that the revitalisation of the Irish language and culture should continue to form part of the republican vision

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From its origins, the demand for political independence has been associated with the assertion of Ireland's separate cultural identity. The first meeting of the Belfast United Irishmen took place alongside the Belfast Harpists Festival, which attempted for the first time to write down and preserve traditional Irish airs. In the opening years of the 20th century, the Gaelic League was the nursery of many men and women who would graduate to the IRA and Sinn Féin. Everyone is familiar with Pearse's aspiration that Ireland be "not free merely, but Gaelic as well".

So now, in a new millennium, what is the relationship between republican politics and the heritage of the Gaelic past?

In assessing that relationship, we must take account of the substantial failure of Gaelic revivalism. Contemporary Ireland is considerably less Gaelic than it was when Douglas Hyde made his plea for the "deanglicisation of Ireland" a hundred years ago. In 1900, the Gaelteacht accounted for 15% of the population. Today it is reduced to tiny pockets, which English infiltrates through television and tourism. As Ireland has changed from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban country, much folklore and oral traditional has also been lost.

Efforts to revive the language through the education system have been a dismal failure. My own experience is probably that of many - after 14 years, I left school barely able to string together two coherent sentences in Irish. I don't remember a single teacher that tried to inspire us with a love of the language, or a text on the Irish course that genuinely interested me.

My primary school reader dealt with the activities of a pair called Pól and Sheila - probably the dullest youngsters ever born. Daidí was always amach ag obair, while mamaí stayed at home ag déanamh cáca. Quite apart from the obvious gender stereotyping, did the children never get sick of cake? No more imaginative method of teaching Irish could be come up with than getting all 30 pupils in the class to recite the same passage, one after the other. Small wonder I got through the complete works of Enid Blyton in fourth class, reading under the desk.

In a global culture becoming ever more homogenised and bland, cultural diversity and distinctiveness are more valuable than ever before

Secondary school brought the dreaded Peig - now thankfully defunct. That old woman has singlehandedly done more to eradicate the Irish language than Victoria and Cromwell combined. Whenever a collective moan escaped us at the sight of Peig being opened by the teacher, he would remind us that we only had to endure the book for one year - while he had had to work through it annually for 30 years.

The failure of Gaelic revivalism has had much to do with its celebration of aspects of Ireland's past most people would prefer to forget. The early collectors of Irish folklore and editors of Gaelic texts were romantic primitivists who looked to rural, pre-industrial Ireland, with its age-old traditions, for an antidote to what they saw as the decadence and soullessness of the modern city. Themselves comfortable and middle-class, they allowed the hardship of rural life in 19th and early 20th century Ireland to be blotted from their vision by the Celtic mists. These enthusiasts associated Gaelic culture, and Gaelic revivalism, with a stifling and impoverished way of life from which millions sought to escape by emigration, and which the vast majority in today's Ireland are only too glad to have left behind them.

Furthermore, the transformations of Irish life over the last number of decades have dramatically widened the distance between us and our past. Hardly three generations separate us from the world of Peig Sayers - but to a young person growing up in Ireland today, her life and attitudes are as alien as those of another planet.

So what can we salvage from the Gaelic past? As republicans, is our ambition still an Ireland Gaelic as well as free? There are at least two good reasons why the revitalisation of the Irish language and culture should continue to form part of the republican vision.

Gaelic was the language of this island for almost 3,000 years. If we leave the language die, not only will we lose something unique and irreplaceable, we will be severing our last contact with that history, and condemning all those generations of Irish-speaking men and women to silence forever.

Secondly, in a global culture becoming ever more homogenised and bland, cultural diversity and distinctiveness are more valuable than ever before. Control of television, the print media and the music industry is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Globalisation has fast food for our minds as well as bodies. Ronald McDonald and Rupert Murdoch march hand in hand to conquer the world for greed, banality and consumerism.

We cannot aim to "restore" the culture of the past as did Hyde and the founders of the Gaelic League. There is no such thing as a pure essence of native culture to recapture. All cultures are hybrids, incorporating influences from many sources, and Gaelic culture is no exception. If the Irish language has a future, it is as a living language expressing the ideas and feelings of people in the 21st century, not some hoary antique from a cabin in Connemara, taken down from the attic and dusted off every so often for form's sake. It is over 150 years since Irish was the language spoken by a majority on the island, 400 years since it was the language of education and politics. Inevitably, much of the Gaelic heritage is of historical rather than living interest.

Rather than seeking to restore the past, our aim should be to create a space in the present in which a distinctive and vibrant popular culture can evolve on the island. Rather than being passive consumers of print and images produced elsewhere by global multimedia conglomerates, communities should feel empowered and motivated to find their own forms of cultural expression, expressive of their own surroundings and concerns. Events such as Féile an Phobail in Belfast or recent plays exploring the experience of nationalist communities over the past 30 years are examples of the kind of activities republicans should be supporting throughout the island.

The Irish language has an important role to play in this. Not only is its use a badge of distinctiveness, a declaration that we Irish are still here in spite of every effort to crush us as a separate people, it can allow some measure of distance from a globalised consumer culture. English is the language of global capitalism and the Disneyworld culture that accompanies it. Irish, by virtue of its marginal status, is not a language of business or consumerism. When was the last time you saw a Big Mac advertised as gaelige? One might say Irish stands in the same relation to English as An Phoblacht to the Murdoch - or O'Reilly-controlled media! It can help us attain what the writer Virginia Woolf, in a different context, called "a room of one's own".

Likewise, Gaelic myth can provide symbols that reflect contemporary concerns, while simultaneously connecting us to our past. Think of how Pearse used the figure of Cúchulainn defending his land from its enemies as an emblem of defiance and heroic courage winning out against the odds.

In conclusion, the goal for today's republicans is not so much to revive the culture of the past but to foster cultural diversity and distinctiveness on the island. "Culture" is the property neither of self-constituted intellectual elites nor of multinational conglomerates, but of communities, and we must make sure ownership of Ireland's culture is vested where it belongs. The Irish language and Gaelic culture have an important role to play in this project. But so has the creativity of individuals responding to the conditions of contemporary life, and, indeed, the contributions of new traditions arriving on the island.