Table Of ContentIrish Speakers
and Schooling in
the Gaeltacht,
1900 to the Present
Tom O’Donoghue
Teresa O’Doherty
Irish Speakers and Schooling in the Gaeltacht,
1900 to the Present
Tom O’Donoghue · Teresa O’Doherty
Irish Speakers
and Schooling
in the Gaeltacht,
1900 to the Present
Tom O’Donoghue Teresa O’Doherty
Graduate School of Education Marino Institute of Education
University of Western Australia An Associated College of Trinity
Perth, WA, Australia College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-030-26020-0 ISBN 978-3-030-26021-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26021-7
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C
ontents
1 The Gaeltacht: Constructed, Located and Promoted 1
2 Education and the Irish Language in the Longue Durée 17
3 “Saving the Child”: The Gaelic League’s Campaign for
Bilingual Education for Irish-Speaking Districts 43
4 Shifting Concern for “Saving the Child” to Concern
About “Saving the Language”: 1918–1926 75
5 Schooling of Students from the Gaeltacht and the
National Policy of “Saving the Language” Through All
Primary Schools, 1922–1965 97
6 Marginalised Amongst the Marginalised: An Overview
of Schooling in the Gaeltacht Up to the Mid-1960s 135
7 “You Don’t Want to Be a Gaelic Dafty in This Town”:
Memories of Gaeltacht Residents on Their Schooling 155
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 From Cultural Nationalism to Human Capital
Production: Schooling in the Gaeltacht in a Changing
Ireland, 1967–1998 179
9 A New Multilingual Ireland and Schooling
in the Gaeltacht: 1998 to the Present 207
10 Looking Backwards 225
Appendix: Irish-Speaking Districts in 1911 239
Bibliography 241
Index 257
P
rologue
There was a time when Irish was the language most commonly used
throughout all of Ireland. That, however, was over 1200 years ago.1
By 1841, only about half of the population of the country was Irish
speaking.2 Furthermore, ten years later, in 1851, the first year in which
a country-wide census of population documented information on lan-
guage usage, the total number of Irish speakers recorded was now only
about one-and-a-half million out of a total population of six-and-a-half
million.3 Even allowing for some adjustment to the figures due to the
possibility that the number of Irish speakers was significantly under-
estimated, the decline in language use over the previous ten years was
still very substantial. This situation can be attributed primarily to the
impact of the Great Famine of 1845–49; while the effects of the trag-
edy were experienced all over the country, they were particularly devas-
tating amongst the monoglot Irish-speaking communities residing on
marginal agricultural land in the north-west, west, south-west and south
of Ireland. Over succeeding decades, rapid emigration resulted in what
remained of this cohort of the population declining further.
By 1891, the number of native speakers of Irish had declined to just
over 700,000, while the concentration of these in Irish-speaking com-
munities was probably below 500,000.4 The census of 1891 revealed
also that while about 14.5 per cent of the population of Ireland were
bilingual, over 85 per cent were monoglot English-speakers, leaving less
than one per cent monoglot Irish speakers. Within another decade, those
ix
x PROLOGUE
areas in which Irish was the dominant vernacular contracted to such an
extent that they became clearly identifiable from the majority English-
speaking parts of Ireland. Now also, language activists constructed them
as being a collective, with the title of An Ghaeltacht, or “the Gaeltacht”.
In the mid-1920s, the new Irish State outlined the broad parameters
of the boundaries of the Gaeltacht. These were re-drawn, and in more
detail, on a number of occasions. Furthermore, by the time we, the pres-
ent authors, were born, the term “the Gaeltacht” had become so much
part of regular discourse throughout Ireland that very few, if any, realised
it was a construct of recent origin.
At the same time, no full-length treatise has appeared to date on the
history of various aspects of life in the Gaeltacht. This work is one con-
tribution to rectifying the deficit. Specifically, it is concerned with the
schooling of Gaeltacht students from 1900 to the present. This took
place primarily in State-funded primary schools (generally known as
national schools) and, to a much lesser extent, in State-funded secondary
schools and vocational schools.
There is a sense in which it is not surprising that we, the authors,
cooperated in writing this book as we both have intimate family connec-
tions to particular Gaeltacht districts. We also deemed it appropriate to
clarify these connections for our readers so that they might have some
idea as to how we initially arrived at our research focus. Thus, the next
section details how each of us is positioned vis-à-vis the Gaeltacht.
our Positioning vis-a-vis the gaeltaCht
I was born in the town of Lismore, County Waterford, in 1953, and
was christened as Thomas Anthony O’Donoghue in the local Roman
Catholic Church. The town has long been the Irish seat of the Duke
of Devonshire. However, the census returns for 1901 and 1911, show
that, at that stage, many residents, far from being English speaking only,
were bilingual. This I attribute to individuals moving into the town
from the Irish-speaking rural communities within walking distance in all
directions.
My paternal grandfather fitted the latter profile, having arrived in the
early 1900s, from nearby Bualadh Uí Chadladh. My father was insistent
I should know about this aspect of our family background. He also made
sure I became acquainted with some of the native speakers of Irish who
still lived close to the town. These included Bríd Ní Ghadhra from Móin
PROLOGUE xi
Mhóir, which is in Cam Thíar, south of the town, on the old road known
as Bóthar a’ Loingsigh that connects Coill na hAile to Eó Choill and
runs close to the River Blackwater. I also spent many hours north of the
town, listening and speaking in Irish to Micheál de Leondra who lived at
Gleann Ghairid.
The connection I had with Irish speakers was even stronger through
my mother than it was through my father. She was born in the parish
of An Seana Phobal, which, along with the nearby parish of Rinn Ua
gCúanach (An Rinn) and a small part of the parish of An Áird Mhór,
collectively constituted (as they still do) the County Waterford Gaeltacht.
She lived there for the first 16 years of her life and attended the local
school at Baile Mhic Airt. Not long after she was born, her father,
Padraig Ó Catháin, who had also been born in An Seana Phobal, and
who had originally been landless, bought a small landholding when he
married my grandmother, Ellen Nic Craith, from An Rinn. This farm
was in the townland of Móin Fionn in a part of An Seana Phobail known
as Barra na Stuaic.
In 1939, my grandfather, along with some others, decided to leave
the area. Because of government policy of the day, some in his situation
were able to surrender their small plots to the State and receive a farm of
good land somewhere else. As a result, three families moved a distance
of 27 miles to Ballymote in the Parish of Kilwatermoy, not far from the
town of Tallow. This meant they continued to live in County Waterford,
albeit now in an English-speaking district. Here, my mother, along with
her three brothers and nine sisters, found herself in very different sur-
roundings. Yet, later on, she made sure that from the time I came into
the world, I knew about the Irish language and Gaelic culture back-
ground of her earlier years.
My father used to bring my siblings and I to our mother’s parent’s
house each time she was about to give birth. We also spent many sum-
mer weeks there. What I remember most was my grandfather calling out
to my uncles at the height of his voice early in the mornings, to arise and
milk the cows. His order was always prefaced by a t’anam ’on diabhal
(your soul to the devil).
At evening time, when our aunts and uncles had gone their separate
ways, we used to listen to our grandparents recalling in Irish those they
termed “na rí sean-daoine” (the real old people). At the time, we could
not relate to their focus, but later I came to understand that these were
the monolingual Irish speakers who came after them and who saw the
