Forcing Irish down children's throats did more damage to the language than anything inflicted upon it during the years of British rule, suggests a new book. Emmet Oliver examines the evidence
People who went to primary school during the 1950s, 1960s and even 1970s were carrying more than heavy school bags on their backs every morning when they left for school.
They were also carrying something else, a burden placed there by successive governments and Irish society generally.
This was the not inconsiderable burden of reviving the Irish language.
As recorded in a new book* by Dr Adrian Kelly, this burden may have alienated thousands of pupils from the education system and contributed - at least in some part - to the underperformance of the education system for many decades.
Whether it did or not is of more than just passing historic interest.
To this day thousands of people are functionally illiterate in the Republic, and the vast majority of them attended school during this period, many of them solely schooled at primary level, where the efforts to revive the language were most intense.
Was this intensity responsible for undermining the education of so many?
The book firmly suggests this is so, but also balances it by saying that overcrowded classrooms and pupil truancy didn't help either.
Also the questions raised about the compulsory Irish policy still resonate, with respected education figures such as Dr Edward Walsh, former president of the University of Limerick, recently agreeing with Dr Kelly's essential thesis and calling for the whole area to be looked at again.
The decline in grades in Irish at Leaving Cert level and the number of students taking it as pass level suggest all is not well. But the reasons are complex.
Based on the bleak conclusions of the book, was James Dillon right when he said that successive Irish governments did more damage to the Irish language than the British government was able to do in the previous 100 years?
Dr Kelly's book suggests the answer is yes.
He explains that the founding fathers of the State, particularly de Valera, prosecuted the compulsory policy with zeal because they believed it was through the schools a Gaelic nation, resembling that of previous centuries, could be re-created. Or at least re-imagined.
The view was that in the late 19th century national schools had crushed the language so after independence that was where it could be rebuilt.
This may have been a laudable idea. At the time the new State was fragile, and the immediate instinct was to reject everything from the recent past and go back further to the Gaelic myths of old. This was because Ireland seemed to have little to boast about in the 1920s and 1930s.
"Ireland has invented nothing of importance during the century but the Dunlop tyre," one acerbic observer noted.
And this attempt to build a uniquely Gaelic society was not to be waged by adults, but children.
However, much to the disappointment of the policy-makers the children (and it continues to this day) appeared to be peculiarly unmoved by this attempt at a cultural revolution.
Maybe, as the book suggests, this was because many of their teachers could not speak Irish themselves.
Or perhaps it was because their textbooks were archaic and badly produced or because, once they walked out the school gates in the evening, nobody was there to converse with them in Irish.
It is hard for today's students to appreciate just how intense the attempt to revive Irish was.
There were three parts: Irish was a compulsory part of the curriculum; a pass in the subject was needed to pass your examinations overall; and you needed Irish for entry to the Civil Service.
Nowadays this could be described as a "triple whammy", but the particular association between Irish and exams was to prove the most damaging because people who didn't do well in exams, right or wrongly, tended to blame Irish and harbour resentment against it for many years.
BUT IN MANY ways the compulsory policy proved damaging, not because it meant Irish was always included on the curriculum, but because of what was excluded, for instance science, art and nature studies.
Even as early as 1927, the book discloses, an accountancy group warned that the compulsory policy was hitting business, because schools devoted little attention to matters of commerce because of the emphasis on Irish.
The book suggests that politicians and civil servants (who often could not speak Irish themselves) were prepared to sacrifice lots of things to keep Irish at the forefront of primary education.
"You cannot do it without making sacrifices . . . You have frequently to take second best," said de Valera in 1939.
He admitted that often better people were passed over in public appointments because their Irish was not as good as somebody else's.
The enemies of the compulsory policy were few, but often came from unlikely quarters.
According to a document which has been thrown up in British government papers, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr McQuaid, was more alive to the dangers of the policy than de Valera, and they clashed on the issue.
According to a confidential note sent from the Republic back to London by his majesty's representative here, Sir Eric Machtig, in 1945, Dr McQuaid was aware of "the evils which flow from compulsory Irish".
The note is a record of a conversation between the British representative and Dr McQuaid in that year.
Asked if the policy was working, Dr McQuaid is reported to have given the following extraordinary response:
"The children forced to learn their lessons in Gaelic went back to English-speaking homes.
"The thing didn't work. Mr de Valera was entirely obstinate and refused to listen to reason.
"His only response to His Grace's pleadings was to maintain that the experiment had not yet been tried out."
If the eminent Dr McQuaid realised it was not working, why didn't the education establishment?
The "experiment", as it was ominously called, continued to rumble on until well into the early 1970s.
In 1973, when the minister for education was Richard Burke, the necessity to pass Irish in order to pass Leaving and Inter Cert exams was ended.
However, four huge universities under the umbrella of the NUI - UCD, UCC, NUI Galway and NUI Maynooth - retained a pass in Irish for matriculation.
If one desperately wanted to attend one of these colleges, an element of compulsion remained.
Indeed that is still the position. But Irish is now competing for its status on the school curriculum, and the NCCA, the Government's advisory body on education reform, is reviewing its future at post-primary level.
The brief of this review is to find ways to "support" the language, but with many parents pushing for greater emphasis on French, German and other languages, there is no doubt the previously assured position of the subject in schools could be under threat.
Even with TG4's presence on television, English encroaches on every part of our lives and Irish rarely does.
Against this background, the future may be more about survival than revival.
* Compulsory Irish - Language and Education in Ireland, 1870s to 1970s is due to be published shortly by the Irish Academic Press