Schooling, the Gaelic League, and the Irish language revival in Ireland 1831–1922

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the two decades preceding Irish independence the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge, founded 1893), an organisation dedicated to the revival of the Irish language, campaigned to persuade both national and intermediate commissioners of education to reposition the language within the curriculum to reflect what the League believed was both its cultural significance and educational value. The campaign represented a fundamental principle in the rising wave of cultural and political nationalism that preceded the Easter Rising (1916) and its champion, Patrick Pearse, was until 1908 editor of the League’s periodical An Claidheamh Soluis (hereafter ACS). Pearse founded two Dublin schools, St Enda’s and St Ita’s, and, in 1916, was executed for his part in the rebellion. This article analyses that campaign in relation, not to its wider political or linguistic implications, indeed, as O’Rourke and Walsh note, “a definitive critical analysis of the revival of Irish in the late 19th Century has yet to be written”, but in terms of: the position of the language in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, its success at national (primary) and intermediate (secondary) level, the expectations placed upon the teaching body, and the demands made of teacher training colleges, and reviews the success of the campaign in terms of the afterlife of the language in an independent Ireland.