Wildfowling President

You are coming through Frenchpark on your way back to Dublin and, of course, Douglas Hyde is on your mind

You are coming through Frenchpark on your way back to Dublin and, of course, Douglas Hyde is on your mind. You have seen the centre before. You press on but with many anecdotes on your mind. Such as those told long ago in McKee Barracks of his aides going out shooting (he himself liked the term wildfowling) and, adding a bit of zest if not downright exaggeration to the story, by having the officers lagging behind while "old Duggie", as some disrespectfully referred to him, lepped from tussock to tussock, blazing away at snipe or woodcock or whatever.

But remember: he was 78 when nominated, an agreed candidate, to be the first Uachtaran na hEireann under the 1937 constitution. Dominic Daly produced a splendid book The Young Douglas Hyde in 1974 (Irish University Press). Hyde was born in 1860 and his father, a minister of the Church of Ireland was moved to Frenchpark in Co. Roscommon in 1866. Lord de Freyne, gave him shooting rights over his land. "Fowling over these lands was always a favourite pastime", wrote Douglas in a short review of his life. His academic schooling was nearly all at home: French, German, Greek, Latin. And then to Irish. He gives praise to one James Hart, the keeper of the bogs, "the finest and most gentle countryman I ever saw". When he died on 1875 Hyde thought that his Irish would go from his memory, but "I began speaking to Mrs William Connolly when she came to milk the cows in the evening." That helped.

Then he learned from other neighbours and people he met out wildfowling. He went on to read in Irish, including a New Testament "in English characters". When the Society for Preserving the Irish language started, he knew that he had done well. His reading was prodigious. In Latin four or five books by Livy, seven books of Virgil and others including "all of Horace". In Greek 16 books of Homer; in French Paul and Virginia more than 300 pages of the Confessions of Rousseau. And that is only a selection.

Life in the rectory was not too austere. A barrel of porter in the celler, a couple of gallons of whiskey upstairs. When he was 12 years of age, out shooting with father and two brothers: 16 grouse, 4 hares, 2 teal, 2 snipe, 1 curlew. Aged 17 he notes, "I am writing this under the influence of whiskey". And at 19, at the local castle, "I drank three glasses of champagne, three or four of sherry and about six of claret .... A good dinner".

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And on to scholarship and professorship, The Gaelic League and The Park. An all-round man, he was made President at the age of 78 and died in 1949 at 89.