In 1893, the Gaelic League was formed. The founder was Eoin Mac Néill, an historian of early and medieval Ireland. The first president was Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector from Co. Roscommon. A scholar and linguist, he had delivered a lecture in 1892 under the title ‘The Necessity for De-anglicising the Irish People’, in which he called for an arrest in the decline of the Irish language and deplored the advance of what he regarded as a vulgar, English commercial culture.
The new organisation established itself quickly. It had as its aim the revival of Irish as the common vernacular. It conducted language classes. It published stories, plays and a newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light). It opposed a campaign led by Mahaffy, the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, to have the language removed from the Intermediate school syllabus. It established language teacher training colleges. By 1908, there were 600 branches of the League around the country.
The Gaelic League successfully revived the Young Irelanders’ idea that cultural and linguistic autonomy was a good thing, and was part of a greater national revival. Hyde naïvely thought that the language was a non-political issue on which people of all religious and social backgrounds could meet without rancour. The League was indeed non-political for the first twenty-two years of its life. But its implied purpose was clear: the re-Gaelicisation of Ireland. That was a purpose that could not be kept innocent of politics forever, not in a country like Ireland. In some ways, it was a very Victorian phenomenon, appealing to the same kind of medieval nostalgia that animated the pre-Raphaelites and the arts and crafts movement in England.
Patrick Pearse was born in 1879 in Dublin, the son of an Irish mother and an English father. James Pearse was an ecclesiastical stone carver, a trade for which there was much demand in Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century. A Christian Brothers education introduced the younger Pearse to the Irish language at the age of fourteen. He was less impressed by the rest of his education: the Christian brothers focused on educating lower-middle-class boys for employment as clerks and civil servants and in the minor professions. Theirs was a utilitarian, Gradgrind kind of teaching that Pearse came to loathe. When, in later life, he opened his own school, it was to espouse an educational philosophy remote from and vastly more enlightened than that of the Brothers.
Pearse joined the Gaelic League in 1896, as his schooldays were ending but before he went to university. Within two years, he had made a sufficient mark to be co-opted to its executive committee, bringing him into close contact with people influential in the language revival movement. He was not yet twenty. He was already teaching Irish in his old school and now began to give classes in the Royal University, where he failed to impress his contemporary, James Joyce. The novelist thought the Irish teacher a bore, whose technique of promoting Irish by denigrating English he deplored. For instance, Pearse offered the view that ‘thunder’ was a most inadequate word: it was a favourite of Joyce’s (despite his chronic fear of thunderstorms).
Pearse first visited the Connemara Gaeltacht in 1898, making his way to the Aran Islands. Thus began a lifelong idealisation of the western peasant, something not unique to him and which was to have a long cultural afterlife. All the time, his command of colloquial and quotidian Irish was improving. In March 1903, he was appointed editor of An Claidheamh Soluis. It was also in the spring of 1903 that he first came to Ros Muc in the south Connemara Gaeltacht as an examiner for the Gaelic League. He fell in love with the place and looked around for a site where he could have a summer cottage built for himself.
He bought a site and the two-bedroomed cottage was duly built. It became a place of retreat for Pearse, although he was notoriously slow to pay the bills he incurred in building it. It is thought that there were still bills unpaid at his death in 1916. It was here that he began to compose the oration that he delivered over the grave of the old Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1915, one of the finest and most resonating pieces of oratory in Irish history.
Pearse went on to found a school in Dublin, St Enda’s, in which he applied his liberal educational theories and promoted his Irish-Ireland linguistic and cultural agenda. There were unpaid bills here too: Pearse was bad with money. He gradually moved from cultural to political nationalism, joined the IRB and was one of the key members of the military council — a self-appointed group within the IRB that organised the rising of 1916. He was formally commander-in-chief of the Irish Volunteers, president of the Provisional Government of the Republic that was declared on the steps of the GPO in Dublin on that Easter Monday, and a signatory of the Proclamation of the Republic. It was he who, at the end of Easter Week, formally surrendered to the British. He was executed on 3 May.
Pearse’s cottage became a place of pilgrimage. It also became a locus of myth. Pearse was an emotional man, better with imaginative imagery than with rational calculation. He was not alone in idealising the Irish-speaking peasants and smallholders of the west, but he seemed to stand as a symbol for all who did. And many did. The image of the anti-modern virtuous peasant, uncorrupted by English decadence and urban frivolity, became for a time a prevailing fetish in newly independent Ireland. Similar enthusiasms in contemporary Europe were invariably associated with fascist and reactionary movements.
It suited both church and state in nationalist Ireland to propose a cordon sanitaire against modernity. In the church’s case, it meant a docile, unquestioning laity. For the state, independence meant a withdrawal from the world rather than an engagement with it. Economic autarky, censorship, wartime neutrality, an emphasis on agriculture rather than on industrial development, an education system that scandalously neglected the sciences in an age of scientific wonders: sometimes the new Ireland seemed very old indeed.
