An Irishman's Diary

SOCRATES speaks Irish – or, at least, Socrates is available in Irish. More often than not, the limits of literature in Irish are set at poetry and fiction. It is true that other works – on music and history, for example, appear – but poetry and fiction form the mainstay for the Irish-language reader. Yet there is another, very small, genre that exists: philosophy.

It is to the eternal credit of those who supported the revolutionary campaign to promote the use of Irish in the 20th century that no area was deemed to be unworthy of examination.

“Know thyself,” Socrates suggested;and it is clear that a handful of Irish speakers were only too happy to take his advice, managing to produce a small number of original philosophical texts as well as translating works into Irish.

Appropriately enough, the journey begins with Socrates and Plato. One Seoirse Mac Laghmhainn translated three Platonic dialogues — The Apology, Critoand Phaedo— into Irish. The book was published in 1929 in the old Gaelic script and, believe it or not, was to be used as a textbook in secondary schools. One wonders what points-chasing pupils of the modern era would make of being asked to study something as "useless" as philosophy. (Perhaps it would make "compulsory" Irish seem like fun.) Mac Laghmhainn produced a jewel of a book (long out of print) that connected Irish and philosophy to its European heritage. Seoirse Mac Tomáis's Tosnú na Feallsúnachta("The Beginning of Philosophy") was published in 1935, and aimed at giving would-be philosophers a grounding in their field. Mac Tomáis was a fascinating character, an English-born, Irish-speaking Marxist who did much to promote the Irish language during his time as a lecturer in UCG.

This work in the Roman script is written in simple chapters and offers a broad outline of pre-Socratic thought. Again, as Mac Tomáis writes in his introduction, the book is aimed at the general reader and not an academic one and, once again, the contemporary reader is struck by Mac Tomáis’s ambition in encouraging readers of Irish to stretch their minds. He includes a chapter entitled “Déleictic: Teoiric na nÍdéithe” (Dialectic: The Theory of Ideals). I imagine it was the first use of the word “dialectic” in Irish and offers a little glimpse on how progressive some writing in Irish was – even in the 1930s.

That desire to educate and reach out was also foremost in the mind of Ceallach Ó Briain, OFM, when he produced Eitic(1953). The title means "Ethics" and, again, the book is long out of print – though perhaps, given all the banking scandals, it ought to be republished.

In Eitic,Ó Briain aims to describe "the basic principles of morality". The chapters are short and there is a bibliography which contains texts in English, French, German and Latin on which the author drew. Ó Briain's essays were written with university undergraduates in mind, but he also hoped the ordinary reader would find the work of some use.

An tAthair Fiachra, OFM (who also wrote under his given name, Donncha Ó Corcora) produced An Bheatha Phléisiúrthain 1955. The title translates as "The Pleasurable Life" – but that may not have had the same meaning in 1955 as it might today. What Ó Corcora was trying to do, according to the book's introduction, was – in modern parlance – to synthesise three philosophical traditions: Gaelic philosophy, as it was to be found in our ancestral wisdom, traditional European philosophy from Aristotle to Aquinas, and modern philosophy, as espoused by the likes of Bergson, Joad and Freud.

Some readers may recognise Ó Corcora's name from the long defunct newspaper Inniu,where he wrote a regular column. Some of that material appeared in print in book form and still makes good reading. Interestingly, Ó Corcora completed a PhD thesis in Irish on modern philosophy in 1945 while he was a student at UCC. I tried to track this down – with no success – while I was a philosophy undergraduate at Queen's in Belfast, years ago. Ó Corcora's style is very fluent and I think that few people would have difficulty in following his writing, even without formal training in philosophy.

Philosophy has never been a big subject in the Irish academy and, if anything, what little hold it had on undergraduates is fading. My own former department of scholastic philosophy in Queen’s is no more, for example. It is not surprising, then, that there are so few texts in Irish on philosophy. Languages are, after all, media and they need people to speak them to keep them vital. The fewer people who use a language, in whatever field, the less chance of that area of expertise thriving for long.

That is not to say that philosophical material in Irish has entirely disappeared, but what does appear owes more to the philosophically aware than to any professional caste of thinkers. Philosophical material pops up in journals now and again; there have been a couple of books on Marx and Nietzsche in recent years and Monsignor Breandán Ó Doibhlin has translated vital works by Pascal and Montaigne from the original French into Irish.

It is not a huge body of work, but what exists is testament to the intellectual creativity of its authors and translators.

To paraphrase Descartes: cogito ergo sum Gaeilgeoir.