The Nation or the 'Local Organic Community'?: Ó Cadhain versus Ó Droighneáin

Abstract

A series of letters in the magazine An tUltach gives an important insight into the rural/urban dichotomy which has characterised Revivalist discourse. The Republicanism of the writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–70) is tempered by the knowledge that while the cultural identity of the Gaeltacht [Irish-speaking area] has been instated as the official national image, this image was at odds with the social reality of emigration and rural decline. The state’s need to centralise and standardise the Gaelic culture of the rural west was vehemently opposed by Ó Cadhain who felt that the local organic community was being supplanted by a vampiric corporate machine. Muiris Ó Droighneáin (1901–79) represents that section of Irish society in towns and cities who had embraced the ‘imagined’ linguistic community and corporate identity of the Republic and saw the need to replace the local with the national, particularly in his obsessive advocacy of standardised Irish. This paper will examine how the national Revivalist movement paradoxically displaced the integrity of local communal identity in which Gaelic culture found its most enduring refuge.