Dochum glóire Dé agus an mhaitheasa phuiblidhe so/ For the glory of God and this public good : the Reformation and the Irish Language

Abstract

476 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Dochum glóire Dé agus an mhaitheasa phuiblidhe so/ For the glory of God and this public good: the Reformation and the Irish Language Mícheál Mac Craith OFM A consideration of the Irish language vocabulary associated with the Reformation can prove both interesting and informative, if not always edifying.1 I will start with T O’ Neill Lane’s English Irish Dictionary, published in 1915. Under the heading ‘Reformation’, there is a subheading, specifically ‘Protestant Reformation’, malartughadh creidimh, a highly charged term which doesn’t mean ‘reformation’ at all, but ‘change of religion’. The keyword ‘Protestant’reads, ‘n. an adherent of Luther, (1) Gall, -aill,m., also fear Gallda; (2) Sasanach, aigh, m.’ The implication is that Protestants are not Irish but foreign and English. Turning next to Dineen’s Irish English Dictionary, first published in 1927, a significant entry from our point of view is ‘Albanach, aigh, pl. id., m., a Scotchman; a Presbyterian or Protestant’. Equally significant is ‘Teampall, -aill pl.id., and –mpla, m. a temple, a church, a Catholic church (Antr), more gnl. a Protestant church, t. Gallda’. The entry concludes with a note: ‘up to recent times t. was generally confined to Protestant churches, séipéal to Catholic churches, hence táim ag iompáil chum teampaill mar a labhrann dubh-Shasanaigh, I am turning towards the church where bigoted Protestants speak’ (literally ‘black English men’). Again we note the conflation of Protestant with English. Athrú creidimh, the word for reformation which I used from my school days without giving any thought to it until quite recently, is a synonym of the fore-mentioned malartughadh creidimh, again signifying change of religion rather than reformation. The earliest example of this term known to me occurs in a poem composed by Conchobhair Ó Briain, a Cork priest who died in 1720. (Unfortunately, we cannot be more specific than that regarding dating). Addressing a Franciscan who had abandoned his vocation Mícheál Mac Craith OFM Studies • volume 106 • number 424 477 to marry and become a Protestant minister, the poet asserts that the Church was healthy and true until the time of Luther and Calvin, and then asks: who gave them the authority to preach a change of faith: Ná cé thug úghdarás dóibh / athrúghadh creidimh do sheanmóir?2 Since the publication of De Bhaldraithe’s English Irish dictionary in 1958 and Ó Dónaill’s Foclóir Gaeilge Béarla in 1977, the transliterated loanword Reifirméisean has become the norm, despite the reservations some purists have regarding loan-words. The fact that it is a linguistic borrowing, however, indicates that the Reformation was introduced to Ireland externally and was not a native phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is a very late addition to the language, not found until the mid-1820s in the poetry of Raiftearaí. Equally telling is the fact that the great Franciscan historian Mícheál Ó Cléirigh used the almost equivalent form Reformasioin but in a completely different context. In compiling a chronological list of the Franciscan houses of Ireland in 1632, he uses this word no less than thirty times to refer to an internal reform within the Franciscan order itself called the Observantine Reform, a reform that began on the continent in the early fifteenth century and was formally recognised in Ireland in 1460. Ó Cléirigh calls this year bliaidhain an Reformaisioin, ‘the year of the Reformation’. The Observantine Reform on the continent was far from sweetness and light and eventually resulted in the rupturing of the Franciscan movement into two separate orders, the Observants and the Conventuals. This happened in the fateful year of 1517, the very same year that brought Martin Luther to the fore. While Ó Cléirigh deliberately glosses over any possible tensions between the Observants and the Conventuals in Ireland, his intentional coining of the word Reformaision suggests that, as far as he was concerned, the only genuine reformation was that inspired by the Observant movement and not that inspired by Luther.3 The word Protestant is found for the first time in Irish in the plural form Protastúin in the introduction to Geoffrey Keating...