THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 67

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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more conflict between the two than between a knowledge of the multiplication table and a knowledge of the Catechism. While they find the English tongue as indispensable as English coin in the commerce of men, they find in the Gaelic language also, in the more sacred home-life of an Irish community, treasures of devotion and affection, a balm for bruised hearts, a music of old times, a smack of rotund hospitality, a vehicle of fireside talk and of patriotic inspiration, and of young love whisperings under the milk-white thorn on the May eves, such as no Irish heart will ever find in equal luxuriance in the chilly English speech.

In that direction, so far as I can see, lies an assured future for the Irish language. The battle for its preservation will be won upon the day when the half-million of people who still understand the language are made to feel that a knowledge of Irish is not an encumbrance or a reproach, but an accomplishment to be proud of, to be envied for, and to be transmitted to their children as religiously as old family silver.

Let me give you two examples from my own experience of how grievously mere fashion operates to the contrary at this moment. A youngster whom I met on Croaghpatrick last autumn mentioned to me that when the Rosary was recited in his father's cabin every night the old people gave out the first part of the prayer in the ancient tongue and the children made the responses in English. The case presented, I think, a graphic and most moving picture both of the process of decay of the old tongue and of the ease with which that process might even yet be arrested. Who can doubt that if the children were taught to consider it a patriotic feather in their caps, and not a badge of inferiority, to be able to answer the old … continue reading »

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