Being subjugated by the Vikings, the Normans and the English for the best part of 1,000 years was not good for the Irish soul. It was quite difficult to hang on to one’s Irishness when foreign types were forcing you to speak their language, play their faintly ridiculous sports and become as much like them as possible.
Throw in the fact that the English also made it illegal to “look or act in an Irish fashion” and it was a miracle the Irish had any culture left.
However, in the second half of the 19th century, things began to change. The Irish realised that the English way of life wasn’t really doing it for them. Movements began to spring up all over the country that aimed to get people to embrace all the Irish traditions and pastimes that had been beaten out of them.
It was time to revive Irish culture and make Ireland a happening nation once again. Irish people in the late 19th century knew they were “cúl”; now they just had to show it.
Hedging their bets
The first target for the country was the Irish language, the fiery tongue of the mighty Gaels, which had been used to repel the Romans, the Visigoths and, much later, a large group of rather nice Australian tourists who hadn’t done anything wrong.
The Irish had done their best to speak Viking, Norman and English but had never really been comfortable with any of them. Now they were determined to get their own language back.
The revival was driven by the Gaelic League, which encouraged ordinary people to speak Irish, look Irish and act Irish. Schoolchildren were encouraged to speak the old tongue through the shrewd and injudicious use of things like big sticks, leather straps and clips around the ear.
Classes were held in or near hedges, though generally on the non-raining side of the hedge if one could be found. Hedges were used for two reasons: one, the teacher could use a bit of the hedge as a stick, and two, the Irish knew the English wouldn’t be smart enough to look for hedge schools behind hedges.
A Gaelic League of their own
The Gaelic League also commanded the nation’s poets, novelists, playwrights, storytellers, gossips and barflies to use Irish whenever possible. It translated various words such as potato, cement and ramps into Gaelic as potáto, shemint and rampaí.
From 1893 on, poets were ordered to include at least one of these words in every poem they wrote. This was met by a lot of opposition, with the Union of Sensitive Poets issuing a statement saying it restricted their expressiveness.
The Gaelic League responded that if a 19th-century Irish poet couldn’t get the word potáto into a poem, they were hardly worthy of the name poet.
Novelists were also asked to write their books in Irish or at the very least stick in a few Irish accents (or fadas as the Gaelic League liked to call them) so they looked and sounded more authentically Irish.
Playwrights were instructed to write plays that were related to typical Irish themes, such as oppression, emigration and death. Upbeat plays were outlawed and there was in fact no happy Irish play until Samuel Beckett wrote Happy Days in 1961.
Requited love of Ireland
Of all the Irish writers of the time, one stood out because of his huge love of Irishness (and of Irish women who tended not to love him back). This was the great William Butler Yeats, who was named Ireland’s Least Boring Poet a record 36 times.
Just over 90 per cent of his poems are dedicated to a woman called Cathleen ní Houlihan, although no records can be found of her birth or death. In fact, she may have been just made up to represent Ireland, which is typical of the kind of stuff poets get up to when we’re not looking.
Yeats was also a staunch supporter of the Irish revival and founded the Irish Literary Theatre along with Lady Gregory.
Later known as the Abbey, it staged many Irish plays in its early incarnation, including When the Rain Fell and Just Didn’t Stop, The Day All the Spuds Died and Begob Here Come the English Again, as well as three of Yeats’s lesser known musicals, Marry Me Maud, Come Here to Me, Cathleen, You Fine Thing! and Don’t Leave Me this Way, Cathy Dearest.
The cult of culture
There was no point having a cultural revival if Irish people were just going to sit at home and drink whiskey until they fell asleep in front of the fire. The plain people of Ireland were urged to take up traditional Gaelic pastimes such as fiddling, piping, line-dancing and doing impressions of the English.
The local pub, church hall and cumann became hubs for people to gather in and be Irish for a few hours every evening. Here, they would sing songs, tell stories and, when they got around to it, plot the overthrow of their English oppressors.
Fighting to be Irish
As the Irish started becoming more Irish than even the Irish themselves, they grew very proud of their heritage. Indeed, the people were so happy to have their own culture that they often swore that they could defend it to the death – something that, unfortunately, would come in very handy in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The Trueish History of Ireland by Garvan Grant with illustrations by Gerard Crowely, published by Mercier Press, is in book shops now, priced €7.99
