We have looked at the obsessive-compulsive neurosis of modern Protestant Irish Language enthusiasts regarding the censuses of 1901 and 1911. We have also seen the effects of Gaelic League activity on those censuses. But the revival of Gaelic predates the Gaelic League. The first moves had more to do with Irish music than language, and took place in Belfast at the end of the 18th century. They included the organisation of the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, and the consequent efforts of Edward Bunting to collect Irish songs, on which Patrick Lynch was employed. However the Irish Gaelic language was also being taught in Belfast: Lynch had been engaged in this activity in 1794, and William Neilson was to teach Irish Gaelic in the Royal Belfast Academical Institution during his time there as professor of Classics and Hebrew (1818-21).
Although it had existed informally for some time, the year 1830 saw the official foundation in Belfast of Cuideacht Gaedhilge Uladh (The Ulster Gaelic Society) for the preservation of the remains of ancient Irish literature, maintaining teachers of the Irish language where it most prevails, and publishing useful books in that tongue. Leading members included Dr James McDonnell, Rev Dr R.J. Bryce, and Robert S. McAdam. The president was the Marquis of Downshire.
Robert McAdam (1808-1895) was the most active of the members. He had attended the Belfast Academy and very probably learned Irish Gaelic from William Neilson. He was a founding partner in 1835 of the Soho Foundry in Belfast’s Townsend Street, and this was his employment for most of his life. But the Irish Gaelic language was his great interest. He amassed a great collection of manuscripts, and employed individuals such as Peadar O Gealacháin and Aodh Mac Domhnaill from Meath and Art Mac Bionaid from South Armagh in writing and copying material in Irish. McAdam himself compiled manuscripts of Irish materials which he encountered in his travels to all parts of Ulster, including a large manuscript dictionary.
The Cuideacht Gaedhilge Uladh was not merely academic in its approach to Irish Gaelic, but actively promoted its use , for example, by sending teachers of Irish Gaelic to Gaelic-speaking areas such as Ballinascreen in County Londonderry. However its activities were confined to Ulster, and it never envisaged the possibility of reviving Irish Gaelic among the common people in areas where it had been dead for several generations. Yet this was to be the ambitious aim of an organisation founded in 1893, two years before McAdam’s death, Connradh na Gaedhilge or the Gaelic League.
This was a period of heightened nationalistic awareness, led by young and vigorous organisations, such as the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association on the cultural side, and Sinn Fein and the United Irish League on the political side. In this atmosphere the language revival became a mass movement, capable of capturing the nationalist imagination, and people of all ages began to learn Irish Gaelic as a second language in evening classes run by branches of the Gaelic League.
County Down was to the fore in Gaelic League activity in the early years of the 20th century. The first Gaelic League branch in the county was founded in Newry in September 1897. The following branches are mentioned as preparing for the first Feis an Dúin in 1902: Leitrim, Clanvaraghan, Drumaroad, Newcastle, Magheramayo, Kilcoo, Castlewellan, Bryansford, Glassdrummond, Shanrod, Dechomet, Annaclone and Magherill; while branches were also active in Newry, Mayobridge, Killowen, Portaferry and Ballyvarley, at least. The comparatively good showing in the language question of the 1911 census by Moneyreagh, situated well to the north, was apparently due to Gaelic League classes organised there by Rev Richard Lyttle, who had died in 1905.
In the years from 1911 to 1915 Downpatrick was the home of An tAth. Domhnall Ó Tuathail, the author of a the teaching method known as Módh na Ráidhte. In that short time he made a considerable impact on the revival in East Down, and was instrumental in founding the short-lived Irish College at Rossglass in 1921.
A detailed history of the Gaelic League in County Down has yet to be written. But the success of the Gaelic League had some consequences for the kind of Gaelic which was promoted. In the early days especially, Gaelic had to be taught by whoever was available and able to teach it. In Ulster generally, and in County Down in particular, these were usually members of the teaching profession or customs and excise officials, very often from the south or west of Ireland. Naturally enough, they taught the dialect of Gaelic with which they were most familiar. In county Down, where native Ulster Gaelic was on the point of extinction, they did not know the local variety.
Moreover, republican nationalist philosophy provided a rationale for a centralised view of Irish Gaelic and for discounting Gaelic in Scotland as something external, although it must be said that individual Gaelic Leaguers were enthusiastic supporters of Gaelic contacts with Scotland. The centrist trend met with opposition, and the “dialect wars” raged fiercely in Belfast between the rival colleges of Coláiste Chomhghaill, run in the main by Munstermen living in Belfast, and An Árd-Scoil Ultach, which insisted on Donegal Gaelic as the best-known variety of Ulster Gaelic. The point had earlier been diplomatically expressed by Séamus O Ceallaigh (James Kelly):
“Ulster has many Munster and Connacht teachers, and they are nearly all giving instructions in Irish, bail ó Dhia orthu, but the blessing is not an unmixed one. It is easy to see that all attempts to rehabilitate the language in any district should be made from a basis of local usage in the matter of pronunciation. The gap between the Irish-speaking mother and her English-speaking child is so big already that nothing in our methods should tend to widen it. And should not the implied principle be observed as far as possible even where Irish has died out.”
A simple but typical illustration is provided by Adams, commenting on Pulleine’s oration for Owen O’Neill, where the Irish Gaelic name of Holywood is given as Ard Mhic Criosg: ˜about the middle of the 18th century there were enough Irish speakers around north Down …to know its proper pronunciation in the original Irish dialect of the area, which is more than can be said for many bilinguals in the area nowadays who have acquired Irish as a second language.” It is not the abilities of learners which are being criticised here, but rather, an unconscious lack of concern with the local dimension of Gaelic.
The view that Irish Gaelic should be uniform throughout Ireland and that Gaelic outside of Ireland is of no relevance has been formalised in the definition of official standard Irish, which now dominates Gaelic education and publishing in Ulster as it does elsewhere in Ireland, to the detriment of Ulster Gaelic. Comhaltas Uladh, the semi-autonomous Ulster regional organisation of the Gaelic League which was founded in 1925 with the specific object of fostering Ulster Gaelic made representations when standard Irish, An Caighdeán Oifigiúil, was being designed in the late 1940s and 1950s, but these went unheeded.
As a popular expression of Irish culture, the Gaelic League has been rather eclipsed for most of its history by another organisation founded at around the same period, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Though perceived primarily as a sporting organisation, the aims of the GAA include the fostering of Irish culture generally. In the early days, both organisations had a good part of their membership in common, and were often confused in the popular mind, with the result that the activities of one were sometimes attributed to the other.
The GAA appoints Irish-language officers to encourage use of standard Irish, but its promotion of Irish Gaelic suffers from the difficulty that purely recreational activities – such as Gaelic games, Irish music, and Irish dancing – are more easily approachable and pay quicker dividends than re-learning a language, and may be enough in many cases to satisfy the demand for cultural expression. However, by maintaining a positive attitude to things Irish, the GAA has helped to create a situation which is at least passively favourable to the Gaelic language, although of the nationalist variety of Dublin Gaeilge and not Ulster Gaeilic. The influence of the GAA has spread widely as a result of spectacular sporting successes. It is paradoxical, though, that by basing its most prestigious competitions on the county unit, it has created passionate allegiances to those artificial administrative divisions, which, unlike baronies or dioceses, have no historical basis. The GAA celebrated the centenary of its foundation in 1984, and this was the occasion for much historical reflection, which resulted in a number of club histories, as well as a comprehensive county history.