THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 68

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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folk in their own tongue, they would quickly discard their muddled English for limpid Irish, and find comfort as well as fervour in the exchange? My second experience was even more striking. A great prelate of distinguished attainments in Irish was on his way to the visitation of a parish where almost everybody understood that language. I asked should we have the advantage of hearing him address the people in Irish? The answer was that nothing would give him greater pleasure—that the native tongue alone could sound all the depths of devotion in the Irish heart, but that one could not insult an Irish-speaking congregation more effectively than by addressing them in Irish—that they would take it as a suggestion that they were a pack of barbarians who knew no English.

We have no right to be too hard upon such a sentiment. It is not surprising that the simple-hearted peasants of the West should have come to think so meanly of the dialect of their own smoky cabins, associated as it is in their minds with every tradition of poverty and ignorance and lurking shame, in comparison with the proud conquering language of England, the language of the schools and of the courts and of the great, clothed in the beauty of an unsurpassable literature, supported by the power of innumerable bayonets, and carrying the key to the kingdoms of the earth in its hand. But here again we have to deal not with the enlightened judgment of a people, but with the prejudice of a twilight state of mind, with a fashion rather than with a natural necessity. The Western village populations have only to learn that in the most favoured parts of Ireland the Gaelic language is as much honoured and cultivated as it has hitherto been despised; that young Irishmen in the Irish cities are engaged in acquiring it as ardently as all young fellows of intelligence … continue reading »

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