Conradh na Gaeilge backs Irish unity at annual assembly

An increasing number of children in the UK and Ireland are growing up speaking more than one language. The many advantages of bilingualism are acknowledged; however, this increased linguistic diversity presents particular challenges for speech and language therapists (SLTs). The case is often more complex with speakers of minority languages such as Welsh and Irish, which are acquired almost exclusively in bilingual contexts. Lack of appropriate standardized assessments for bilinguals is a key issue for SLTs internationally; however, little is known about the practices, personal perspectives or wider challenges faced by SLTs in assessing minority language skills. We focus on SLTs working with English-Irish bilinguals across Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI) where status, use and exposure to Irish differ significantly. To investigate the perceptions and practices of SLTs in NI and the ROI in the assessment of bilingual English-Irish-speaking children. A 33-item online survey was distributed to SLTs working with children in community settings in NI and the ROI. A total of 181 SLTs completed the survey. The majority of respondents had bilingual English-Irish-speaking children on their caseloads; however, less than one-quarter had assessed Irish language skills. Responses indicate confusion as to whether best-practice guidelines applied in this particular context where the majority of speakers have English as their first language and limited domains of exposure to Irish outside of the education system. Resources available to assess Irish language skills were found to be limited. Informal analysis of language samples emerged as the most popular assessment tool. SLTs in the ROI had a significantly higher level of competence in the Irish language than SLTs in NI. This reduced the challenge of assessment. Many SLTs reported scoring assessments standardized on monolingual populations when assessing English language skills in bilingual English-Irish-speaking children. Our findings highlight the challenges faced by SLTs in meeting best-practice guidelines in the assessment of speakers of minority languages such as Irish. Further work is needed to ensure clinicians and other professionals have access to information and enhanced training on bilingual language acquisition in minority language contexts and implications for assessment and diagnosis. This study underlines the need for further research on the acquisition of minority languages as well as the development of alternative assessment tools to assist SLTs in meeting the needs of this population. What is already known on the subject Existing research indicates that SLTs face challenges in assessing bilingual clients. Lack of assessment resources is a global issue, particularly with respect to minority languages. Emerging research indicates that SLTs and other professionals are dissatisfied with current resources for assessing Irish-speaking bilinguals and are struggling to meet best-practice guidelines. What this paper adds to existing knowledge The status of the Irish language differs significantly between NI and the ROI, while English is the dominant language in both areas. This study provides the first exploration of current assessment practices for bilingual English-Irish-speaking children as reported by SLTs across both regions. The challenges of assessing bilingual clients in many other countries are mirrored by SLTs in NI and the ROI. The majority of children acquiring Irish are doing so in a specific context: the immersion education setting. This raises uncertainty for SLTs about whether the definition of bilingualism actually applies. Despite clinicians and clients sharing the same majority language, the complexity of minority language assessment remains. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? SLTs require specific support and resources to help them meet the assessment needs of bilingual English-Irish-speaking children. Ongoing education and training are required for clinicians and other professionals to facilitate understanding of the complexities surrounding bilingual speakers of minority languages and the application of best-practice guidelines. A greater understanding of the context in which children are acquiring Irish and the impact this may have on their acquisition of English would further support clinicians in identifying speech, language and communication needs in this population.

Preface to the Second Edition - Abbreviations - Introduction - Synge's Knowledge of Irish - Scholar and Translator - Synge and Irish Literature: Saga, Myth and Romance - The Songs of the Folk - Synge and Folklore - Deirdre of the Sorrows - Anglo-Irish as a Literary Dialect: The Contribution of Synge - Synge, the Gaelic League and the Irish Revival - Notes - Select Bibliography - Index

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.

This chapter focuses on press and periodical press spaces as significant vehicles for Irish language and culture. Such development took place in spaces that juxtaposed Irish- and English-language usage within confined societal structures. The Gaelic column in English language newspapers from the 1850s onwards developed into a forum for the Irish Ireland movement. Much early nineteenth century Irish-language print material was linked to religious organisations; it is not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that Irish emerges in public discourse forums. A notable feature from the 1880s onwards is the use of journals such as the Irish Ecclesiastical Record and the Gaelic Journal as stepping stones for the foundation of the Gaelic League, the main Irish-language Revival organisation. The first dual-language newspaper of the Revival period An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae (1899-1932), added new dimensions to the political space while maintaining cultural dominance. Irish-language journalism alone was not the cornerstone for Irish-language Revival, but as a cultural element in an evolving new social and intellectual structure, it embraced new writing and communication styles and formats.

SummaryThis paper considers the relationship between the Irish language and ethnic identities in Northern Ireland. It suggests that the language is more than a relic feature of the cultural landscape, that it transcends traditional religious and political divisions, and is a vital component of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. However, it is a shared inheritance that needs careful nurturing, through a more comprehensive and integrated approach to language planning and policy formulation.

“A Quiet Life”: Journals, 1974–2014 Thomas McCarthy (bio) from the Archives This article originally appeared in New Hibernia Review 23:3. thomas mccarthy (b. 1954) lives in Cork with his wife. He is the author of several collections of poetry and prose and the recipient of both the Patrick Kavanagh and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Awards. He attended University College Cork, where he studied under John Montague and was classmates with what Thomas Dillon Redshaw has called “that remarkable generation” of writers who attended UCC at the time. AUGUST 10, 1974 Michael Hartnett has decided to write exclusively in Irish. I can understand the politics of his decision, but from the point of view of poetry it is a huge mistake. Paul Durcan thinks he’s our greatest Southern poet, more lyrical and beautiful than Kinsella, more disciplined than Kennelly. But why is he so easily pushed from the podium of his own voice? English poetry offers endless possibilities, and it can embrace even the most eccentric and parochial kinds of Irishness. So why this rush into the Irish language? Is it a spiritual pursuit of Caitlín Maude or an emotional escape from Seamus Heaney? Perhaps the Irish language will be like a second wife to him: . . . As gold-green mossclose to the barkwhen the winds tossmy limbs to tragedy and dark. But it is sad to lose such a good Munster poet in English. Almost like Ledwidge, but very primary and angry and raw. The delicacy of Anatomy of [a] Cliché is [End Page 145] beautiful, poised, elegant. And this is the problem with switching from English to Irish: is his Irish vocabulary equal to all the suffering and pain of human consciousness? Will he be able to carry our existential grief like Seán Ó Ríordáin? And it took Ó Ríordáin at least twenty years to develop an all-embracing Irish vocabulary—and he was only stung into a purposeful, Dunquin-based learning of this by Máire Mhac an tSaoí’s stinging critique of his work. And will Hart-nett have a patient audience, an audience that will wait for his vocabulary? As patient as Theo Dorgan, for example, who thinks his decision is a marvel. Or has he merely committed an act of linguistic piety, thereby creating an imaginative dead-end like Daniel Corkery? Corkery’s embrace of the Gaelic League marked the end of his career as a serious artist. Middle-aged Irishmen often embrace “The Language” with the same hopeless abandon that certain English writers embrace Roman Catholicism—and their decision is defined not by what they’ve embraced but by what they think they’ve abandoned. AUGUST 15, 1974 In his Wintering Out Seamus Heaney breaks away from the mere material of Ireland like a greyhound out of a trap. He has found an impersonal personal voice and method, something beyond our national, conventional voices. His year in California has changed him, loosened him and enlarged him; though it does make him sound more like Ted Hughes: the Hughes of Wodwo and Crow. Heaney still hasn’t reached Hughes’ intensity or precision. The linguistic precision, the calculated emotional weight, in every phrase of Hughes is simply astonishing. There is still too much of pietistic Irish Catholicism and too little of hard Pen-nine granite in Heaney, but, still, he has his own material: he has Ireland, he has Ulster. Heaney is surely the poet of eels as Hughes is the poet of eagles. And, poetically, Hughes is Heaney’s great technical rival. I wonder is Hughes, over there in England and making a completely English life, aware of Heaney yet? Does he think of him with fear and contempt, the way Montague does? Or is he unaware of this powerful, unwavering Irishman, the way Lord Byron was unaware of the real power of Shelley? Can one poet ever really feel the force of another poet’s future? A poet can only imagine his own success, never another’s. The continuing resentment H. generates in Montague is so wild and intense. Pat Crotty and I have to be careful not to talk of Heaney when John is...

CORKERY’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER ALF MACLOCHLAINN patrick Maume’s life of Daniel Corkery1 appeared when Maurice Harmon was already correcting proofs of his biography of Sean O’Faolain,2 neither scholar obviously having had the advantage of the mature opinions of the other. That is a pity, as Corkery and O’Faolain have become handy pegs on which to hang tracts in an ongoing disputation about insularity versus cosmopolitanism in modern Irish culture.3 Corkery gave O’Faolain a copy of The Hidden Ireland, his first monographic work of criticism, at Christmas 1924, when it was, so to speak, hot off the press. In this work, Corkery lauded the eighteenth-century Munster poets writing in Irish. O’Faolain, troubled by what he saw as Corkery ’s excessive praise for these poets and concerned that the book would be a bible for Gaelic revivalists, accused The Hidden Ireland of a narrow identification of modern Ireland with “a cowed Ireland, a land of poverty .” He pointed instead to the classical, scholarly Ireland he had discovered through the works of Kuno Meyer and other editors and translators of the earlier literature. There were, moreover, other areas in which O’Faolain noted a tendency to insularity in his former mentor. Harmon writes: “When Sean first met him, he [Corkery] was enthusiastic about Russian literature , thinking that Ireland and Russia had much in common, that Irish novelists could emulate the Russian novelists. But after the Civil War, he opposed the idea, said Irish writers should not learn from foreign models.”4 CORKERY’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER 219 1 Patrick Maume, “Life that is Exile:” Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland (Belfast, 1993). 2 Maurice Harmon, Sean O’Faolain (London, 1994). 3 See, for example, Lawrence J. McCaffrey, “Daniel Corkery and Irish Cultural Nationalism,” and Emmet Larkin, “A Reconsideration: Daniel Corkery and His Ideas on Cultural Nationalism,” Éire-Ireland 8:1 (Spring 1973), 35–41; 42–51. 4 Harmon, 66. CORKERY’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER 220 It is, then, of interest to note the opinions on modern literature in Irish expressed by Corkery in response to a request from another writer of the younger generation, Art Ó Riain.5 The occasion of Ó Riain’s request may be briefly described. In 1924 he had won the fiction prize in the Oireachtas , the annual festival of Gaelic literary and platform competitions organized by Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, with a collection of linked short stories entitled An Tost (the silence). It may be of interest to note en passant that winners of prizes in other competitions included Liam Gógan, principal assistant to Father Patrick Dinneen in the compilation of the great dictionary of the Irish language and later a distinguished poet, Micheál Mac Liammóir, actor and author, and one Micheál Ó Donnabh áin of Cork, who took third prize in the competition won by Ó Riain.6 Can this be the Michael O’Donovan, so well known to us as Frank O’Connor, who is often bracketed with O’Faolain as another of Corkery ’s liberal former students set against his erstwhile mentor’s conservatism ? With the addition of further stories, Ó Riain’s An Tost was to be published in 1927. It was these additional stories that Ó Riain submitted for Corkery’s opinion. (They were to appear in the Gaelic League journal Fáinne an Lae through 1925, while the episodes of the title story were published in another Irish-language journal, An Lóchrann, through the second half of 1926.) Why it was to Corkery that Ó Riain should have made this submission is not established. Perhaps Ó Riain admired Corkery’s essays in The Leader, or perhaps—although this is a long shot—there was a more direct connection. Ó Riain was secretary to Eoin Mac Neill, minister for education in the Free State government, and may thus have been involved in organizing courses in Irish-speaking areas to impose or improve standards of Irish among teachers in the schools of the fledgling state. This program included a summer school in Baile Bhúirne (Ballyvourney) in West Cork, and Corkery was one of the lecturers. (Ó Riain had perfected...

This article explores the reasons for persistent memory wars surrounding the Northern Ireland conflict in Irish and Northern Irish politics between the leading political groups including Sinn Féin, political unionism, the Irish and British governments. I expand on existing literature on commemoration and memory in Northern Ireland to explain how constitutional, political, communal, personal, moral and generational factors together encourage conflicting memories surrounding the past to continue in Northern Irish and Irish politics. Politically, what is remembered about the conflict is used to challenge contemporary political opponents. Selective conflict memories also seek to support ongoing constitutional objectives regarding Irish unification in the present. In addition, individual leaders’ and communal experiences of the conflict are recalled to assist the pursuit of justice and commemorate communal suffering. Each political group seeks to morally justify their past actions based on their conflict experience too. The emergence of a post-conflict generation of voters also means that political leaders draw comparisons between the past and present to encourage the youth to support their ongoing constitutional objectives, political strategies and leadership. The conclusion suggests that contested memories and commemorations in Irish and Northern Irish politics are particularly persistent because the constitutional question has not been resolved.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the most devout supporters of the Union between 1921 and 1972 inhabited the one part of the United Kingdom that had legislative devolution. In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere in the United Kingdom, the construction of distinctive political and cultural identities was compatible with the existence of the Union. Northern Ireland had been created in the British government’s attempt to disengage from Irish politics after the First World War and Ulster Unionists, who had not asked for a separate parliament, came to see its establishment as enabling them to defend their Britishness in a potentially hostile political situation in Britain. Captain Charles Craig, brother of James, the first Northern Irish Prime Minister, gave the House of Commons at Westminster a clear explanation of how the Ulster Unionists saw their position: We would much prefer to remain part and parcel of the United Kingdom. We have prospered, we have made our province prosperous under the union … We do not in any way desire to recede from a position which has been in every way satisfactory to us, but we have many enemies in this country, and we feel that an Ulster without a parliament of its own would not be in nearly as strong a position as one in which a parliament had been set up … We profoundly distrust the labour party and we profoundly distrust the right hon. gentleman the Member for Paisley (Mr Asquith) … We see our safety, therefore, in having a parliament of our own.1

Great War Strains and Easter Rising Breaking Point: Douglas Hyde’s Ideological Ambivalences Liam Mac Mathúna (bio) This article is concerned with the skein of ideological threads that motivated and animated Douglas Hyde (1860–1949) and, more broadly, the body politic in twentieth-century Ireland. First president of the Gaelic League (1893–1915), first professor of modern Irish at University College Dublin (1909–32), and first president of Ireland under the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann (1938–45), Hyde remains a difficult historical figure to pinpoint ideologically. Professor David Greene once referred to Hyde as “that strange and complex man,” a tellingly accurate characterization given that behind his outward affability and gregariousness, Hyde maintained an unwavering commitment to the Irish language and Irish nationality in ever-changing political and social circumstances.1 Much of the challenge of understanding Hyde revolves around trying to reconcile the thinking and actions of the private and the public man, a task that is complicated by the presence of two competing and conflicting emphases that may be noted in examining Hyde’s long public career. One is the insistence on the nonsectarian, nonpolitical nature of the language movement’s credo, a movement that united nationalist and unionist, Catholic and Protestant, landlord and tenant. Hyde himself repeated this mantra so often that he more or less came to believe it and decided that he had to resign as president of the Gaelic League at the 1915 Ard-Fheis in Dundalk after Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) protégés swept the board at the elections to the League’s executive committee. But away from the spotlight, buttressed by a vitriolic opposition to Trinity College’s ethos, there continued to be [End Page 7] indications of the Fenian leanings of the younger Hyde that were hidden behind his second—and less widely addressed—nom de plume, “An Géagán Glas.” In fact, as early as 1918, and overwhelmingly by 1923, Hyde had reinterpreted his nonsectarian, nonpolitical stance to embrace the new status quo of militant separatist nationalism that had by then been endorsed by most of the people on the island. When it was no longer expedient or advantageous to speak of overarching Redmondite Home Rulers and IRB republicans, Hyde simply abandoned the previous gospel and projected his new public stance back to the beginning of the Revival and his famous 1892 lecture, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.” To fully comprehend this holistic interpretation of Hyde’s ideological stance, one must begin with his formative years. As he came of age in Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon, the young Douglas chose for his friends and informal tutors Irish-speaking countrymen who had strong Fenian leanings.2 The most influential of these was undoubtedly Seamus Hart, Lord De Freyne’s gamekeeper, who was the first person to teach Hyde Irish. Indeed, Hart became a father figure to him, and his death at the end of 1875, when Hyde was just fifteen years old, affected him significantly.3 Hyde never forgot Seamus Hart. The Dunleavys maintained, accurately and insightfully, I believe, that when Hyde became president of Ireland in 1938, Hart was with him in Áras an Uachtaráin, the president’s residence in the Phoenix Park, Dublin.4 The vehemence with which the young Hyde expressed anti-English sentiment in the Irish-language poems he composed in the period 1877–82 is quite striking. The tone is set in the first poem he composed, in March 1877. This was in English and was entitled “Graun ’a Peeca Géur” (Graun of the Sharp Pike): [End Page 8] Those damnable English and traitors and allSays Graun a peeca géur,I’ll close with them soon and I’ll get them a fallSays Graun a peeca géur,And I’ll bid them bewareAnd I tell them take careFor I’ll come like a snareOn the face of them allAnd I’ll give them a fallSays the peeca géur.5 Although the poem proceeds to advise the peeca géur to “take care of yourself when the bullets are flying,” the reader is assured that “the danger of falling, the...

In the 1990s, Ulster-Scots language and culture was mobilized by some Ulster unionists in Northern Ireland as a badge of their cultural identity. The Ulster-Scots language and culture had its eighteenth century, premodern heyday in the north-eastern counties of the north of Ireland where it expressed distinctiveness from English and Englishness. However, in common with many regional dialects elsewhere in Europe, the processes of modernization signalled the demise of Ulster-Scots. The contemporary reinvention of an Ulster-Scots identity was precipitated by the 1990s political transformation of Northern Ireland. This reinvention has multiple manifestations. It is, variously, a myth of origin, a language and culture, a communal consciousness, a reaction against Irish nationalist cultural assertiveness in Northern Ireland, an embryonic nationalism, and a component part of the British identity. Ultimately, the reinvention of the Ulster-Scots cultural narrative appears designed to offset advances made by Irish nationalists in the assertion of their culture in Northern Ireland. Ulster-Scots has also been reinvented in an attempt to provide the Ulster unionist identity with the cultural booster required to deliver security and continuity to an identity experiencing chronic insecurity and doubt during a period of political transformation. However, the ability of Ulster-Scots to deliver on these aims is questionable.

O’Leary’s authoritative treatment of the history of Northern Ireland and its current prospects is genuinely unique. Beginning with an in-depth account of the scale of the recent conflict, he sets out to explain why Northern Ireland recently had the highest incidence of political violence in twentieth-century western Europe. Volume 1 demonstrates the salience of the colonial past in accounting for current collective mentalities, institutions, and rivalrous animosities, culminating in a distinct comparative account of the partition of the island in 1920. The major moments in the development of Irish republicanism and Ulster unionism are freshly treated by this Irish-born political scientist who has spent thirty-five years mastering the relevant historiography. Volume 2 shows how Ulster Unionists improvised a distinctive control system, driven by their fear of abandonment by the metropolitan power in Great Britain, their anxieties about Irish nationalist irredentism, and their inherited settler colonial culture. British political institutions were exploited to organize a sustained political monopoly on power and to disorganize the cultural Catholic minority. At the same juncture, the Irish Free State’s punctuated movement from restricted dominion-level autonomy to sovereign republican independence led to the full-scale political decolonization of the South. Irish state-building had a price, however: it further estranged Ulster Unionists, and Northern nationalists felt abandoned. Volume 3 unpacks the consequences and takes the reader to the present, explaining Northern Ireland’s distinctive consociational settlement, accomplished in 1998, and its subsequently turbulent and currently imperiled implementation. An assessment of the confederation of European Union and the prospects for an Irish confederation close the book, which vividly engages with feasible futures that may unfold from the UK’s exit from the EU.

Education in Northern Ireland is undergoing its most extensive reform since the late 1940s. For the first time ever the whole curriculum is being subjected to a degree of prescription by the Department of Education which is affecting all subjects in the most profound ways. A significant focus of interest is the manner in which the curriculum is being planned as a means of promoting a greater knowledge and understanding of Northern Ireland's different cultural traditions than was possible in the past. To this end, the Department of Education is requiring that all subjects of the new Common Curriculum should incorporate elements of a theme entitled ‘cultural heritage’. In effect, this means that all subjects, in so far as it is possible and feasible, will include cultural themes and topics reflecting the different traditions to which the people of Northern Ireland are heirs. The inclusion of cultural heritage marks a break with curriculum practices of the past which had to a considerable extent been influenced in mutually exclusive ways by Northern Ireland's two denominationally separate school systems, one Roman Catholic and generally Irish nationalist in outlook, the second Protestant and generally unionist and British in outlook. This paper discusses the historical background to recent reforms, their nature as far as cultural heritage is concerned and some of the community reactions which they have evoked. Considerable space is devoted to discussing two pioneering projects in the area of cultural studies, both of which paved the way for the general introduction of cultural heritage. Attention is also paid to the manner in which cultural heritage will be considered within particular areas of the curriculum. In this respect the changes affecting the status of the Irish language are highlighted.

Models of Irish Unification Processes

This paper examines the gendering of unionist national identity in Northern Ireland through an analysis of organizations that are central to unionist politics today. While the commonplace observation that unionist women are ‘tea‐makers‘ conveys a critical dimension of the gender order within unionism, it does not fully capture the significance of women's contributions to the establishment or maintenance of unionism. The article analyzes how Stormont constituted an ethno‐gender regime, examines unionist women's political engagement during the Stormont era and under direct rule, investigates how the peace process and Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement have affected the unionist ethno‐gender order and the gender politics of unionism, and explores the possibilities for political transformation.