When Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s renowned Irish language novel Cré na Cille was finally published in English for the first time a decade ago, it brought new readers to a long-dead writer. Ó Cadhain’s modernist masterpiece appeared in 1949 but more than 60 years passed before it was translated into the second national language.
Now the influence of Ó Cadhain’s long career in language activism is highlighted in a new book on the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement that came together in 1969.
“Ó Cadhain didn’t set up the movement but his own agitation prepared the ground for it,” says Rónán Mac Con Iomaire, author of the 446-page study.
Gluaiseacht, the first history of the movement, recalls an era of economic dereliction when people took to the streets demanding political action to secure the survival of Gaeltacht areas ravaged by generations of emigration and the lack of employment.
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All of that is a world away from the global reach in the 21st century of hit movies such as Kneecap and An Cailín Ciúin. But the assertive media sector behind such productions would be nothing today without innovations such as Raidió na Gaeltachta, whose foundation in 1972 flowed from civil rights agitation. The same goes for TG4, the Irish language television service set up in 1996.
“Without the movement, this would not have happened,” says Mac Con Iomaire.
Like the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was spurred by Martin Luther King in the US and student protests in France, the Gaeltacht campaign looked to international events for encouragement.
The founders included Peadar Mac an Iomaire, an academic and community activist, and Seosaimh Ó Cuaig, a print journalist who went on to become a radio broadcaster and Independent councillor.
Ó Cadhain was not an establishing member but became involved in the early days and had a seminal influence. He died in 1970 when the movement was still young.
“A timely convergence of contexts, coincidences and various causes led to the flowering of the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement, when earlier efforts had withered on the vine. But there’s a compelling case to be made that without Máirtín Ó Cadhain, these seeds would never have taken root,” Mac Con Iomaire writes.
Despite a long history of Gaeltacht stagnation, times were changing in the 1960s. The demand to improve conditions came amid reduced emigration and more second- and third-level education. Members saw a successful community co-op in Indreabháin, Co Galway, as an example to follow.
“There was no longer just an ineffective talking shop. People saw they could actually have an impact on their immediate community,” says Mac Con Iomaire.
Formerly head of Irish language at RTÉ, Mac Con Iomaire was once a TG4 journalist. He is now a director with Údarás na Gaeltachta, the State development authority for Gaeltacht areas whose establishment in 1980 realised a key aim of the campaigners. His book was partly inspired by family members who took part.
Ó Cadhain, born in 1906 in Connemara, was a revolutionary writer. Sacked as a school principal in 1936 because of his IRA membership, he was imprisoned in Arbour Hill barracks in Dublin at the outset of the second World War in 1939 and then interned in The Curragh in Co Kildare from 1940 until 1944.
Just as Brendan Behan’s time as a republican prisoner had a formative influence on his witing, Ó Cadhain honed his craft and learning behind bars.
Cré na Cille (Graveyard Clay) was serialised over seven months in the Irish Press, with copies passed hand to hand between enthusiastic readers. Set in a cemetery and presented as bawdy conversations between the dead, the book was decried for being too “Joycean” by one publisher when that was the opposite of a badge of honour.
Now it is regarded as one of Ireland’s pre-eminent works of art, the long delay in translation being attributed at least in part to reverence for the original text and concern to avoid a botch job.
Language campaigning was the pursuit of a lifetime for Ó Cadhain, who wrote a column for The Irish Times between 1953 and 1956 and was for many years an academic in the Irish language department of Trinity College Dublin.
In the 1930s he was co-founder of social campaign group Muintir na Gaeltachta (the Gaeltacht People). In the 1960s he was a leading light in Misneach (Courage), an agitation group that adopted a more confrontational approach than the long-established Gaelic League. Misneach, with direct links to republicanism, clashed with the Language Freedom Movement as it campaigned to scrap compulsory Irish in State exams and Civil Service recruitment.
“The convergence of the Irish language movement and the republican movement in the form of Misneach clearly had an influence beyond theory and philosophy. Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Misneach had created a new template for protesting on behalf of the Gaeltacht and the Irish language,” writes Mac Con Iomaire.
“The day of the ‘respectable [Irish-language] movement’ was over. All of a sudden, there were opportunities in forming alliances with other organisations and factions. Publicity could be achieved through action and protest. And all of this had been noted out west in Connemara.”
While there were republicans in the civil rights movement, Mac Con Iomaire says it wasn’t set up as a republican organisation.
“It was very much a Gaeltacht-driven movement with a core agenda of development of the Gaeltacht more even than development of the language. There’s no explicit reference to development of the language in its core principles. That wasn’t set out,” he says.
The movement had two ideological wings that eventually came apart as the movement petered out in the mid-1970s, he adds. “One would have been an agitation wing, so a protest wing. The other would have been more developmental and community development and planning.”
The worsening Troubles also had an influence. “When it started in 1969, the North was a very different place,” says Mac Con Iomaire.
“By 1973 – between what was happening in the North and the splits in the republican movement – there’s a view among the Gluaiseacht themselves that instead of a welcome there was kind of a suspicion in Ireland around any movement of agitation or a protest movement.
“It wasn’t welcomed with the open arms that it had been a few years before that.”
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