Albeit playfully, Myles often criticised the leading articles with which he shared a page. This column was provoked by an editorial suggesting that the half a million then spent annually on Irish would be better used for slum clearance. Behind the jokes, it's a serious statement of his attitude to a language with which he had a complex but protective relationship. The irony is that this was the same year in which he stopped writing columns in Irish, to the newspaper's regret. FRANK McNALLY
LAST WEEK we had a rather stern address [in an Irish Times editorial] regarding the inadmissibility of the Irish language and although it is almost a gaffe for anybody qualified to speak on this subject to express opinions on it in the public prints, I feel I must speak out; otherwise there is the danger that the lying rumour will be spread by my enemies that I am silent because once again money has changed hands. (It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was conclusive).
In my lordship’s view the movement to revive the Irish language should be persisted in. I hold that it is fallacious to offer the Irish people a simple choice between slums and Gaelic. Indeed, it is hardly an adult attitude and is known in the Hibernian philosophy as Ignoratio Mac Glinchy. If this doctrine of bread alone were followed, we would have (for one thing) to divert the revenues of Trinity College to slum clearance, and Alton and I simply will not have this. The horrible charge is made that Mr de Valera is spending half a million a year on reviving Irish. I may be a wild paddy, but I take the view that the free expenditure of public money on a cultural pursuit is one of the few boasts this country can make. Whether we get value for all the money spent on Irish, higher learning and on our university establishments is one question, but that we spend liberally on these things is to our credit, and when the great nations of the earth (whose civilisations we are so often asked to admire) are spending up to £100,000,000 (roughly) per day on destruction, it is surely no shame for our humble community of peasants to spend about £2,000 per day on trying to revive a language. It is the more urbane occupation. And what is half a million in relation to slum clearance? Faith now, could we be honest enough (for one moment) to admit to ourselves (in our heart of hearts) that there is another sort of Irish, and forced down people’s throats, too, and that we spend enough on it every year to re-build all Dublin.
Irish has an intrinsic significance which (naturally enough) must be unknown to those who condemn the language. It provides through its literature and dialects a great field for the pursuit of problems philological, historical and ethnological, an activity agreeable to all men of education and goodwill. Moreover, the language itself is ingratiating by reason of its remoteness from European tongues and moulds of thought, its precision, elegance and capacity for the subtler literary nuances; it attracts even by its surpassing difficulty, for scarcely anybody living today can write or speak Irish correctly and exactly in the fashion of 300 years ago (and it may have been noticed that the one person qualified to attempt the feat has been too tired to try for the past two or three weeks). True Irish prose has a steely latinistic line that does not exist in the fragmented English patois. Here is a literal translation of a letter addressed by Hugh O’Neill to a hostile captain: –
“Our blessing to ye, O Mac Coghlin: we received your letter and what we understand from her is that what you are at the doing of is but sweetness of word and spinning out of time. For our part of the subject, whatever person is not with us and will not wear himself out in the interest of justice, that person we understand to be a person against us. For that reason, in each place in which ye do your own good, pray do also our ill to the fullest extent ye can and we will do your ill to the absolute utmost of our ability, with God’s will. We being at Knockdoney Hill, 6 februarii, 1600.”
That seems to me to be an exceptional achievement in the sphere of written nastiness, and the original exudes the charm attaching to all instances of complete precision in the use of words.
There is probably no basis at all for the theory that a people cannot preserve a separate national entity without a distinct language but it is beyond dispute that Irish enshrines the national ethos, and in a subtle way Irish persists very vigorously in English. In advocating the preservation of Irish culture it is not to be inferred that this culture is superior to the English or any other but simply that certain Irish modes are more comfortable and suitable for Irish people; otherwise these modes would simply not exist. It is therefore dangerous to discourage the use of Irish because the revival movement, even if completely ineffective, is a valuable preservative of certain native virtues and it is worth remembering that if Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England, and it would stop there only because it could go no lower. Not even the Editor of the Irish Times is an authority on the hidden wells which sustain the ageless western Irishman, and cannot have considered the vast ethnogenic problems inherent in a proposal to deprive him of one of his essential chattels. I admire Liverpool, but if Cork is to become another Liverpool by reason of stupid admiration for the least worthy things in the English civilisation, then I can only say that the Corkmen will not live there any more, the mysterious language they speak, which is not Irish and certainly not English will be heard no more, and a race of harmless, charming and amusing people will have been extirpated.
There is another aspect to this question. Even if Irish had no value at all, the whole hustle of reviving it, the rows, the antagonisms, and the clashes surrounding the revival are interesting and amusing.
There is a profusion of unconscious humour on both sides. The solemn humbugs who pronounce weightily on the Irish language while knowing absolutely nothing about it I hold to be no less valuable than monetary reformers in the business of entertaining the nation. The lads who believe that in slip-jigs we have a national prophylaxis make life less stark. And the public-spirited parties who write letters to the papers in illiterate English expressing concern at the harm the revival movement is doing to the standard of education generally are also of clownish significance. They all combine to make colour and to amuse.
To one and all I would say this, my hand upon my heart: Go your ways, build and take down, capture and set free, gather in conclave and debate . . . but . . . do not tamper with the Irishman, touch not his sacred belongings, be solicitous that thy tongue contemneth not the smallest thing he may prize or the least thing he may love. For he is unique; if you kill him he cannot be replaced, and the world is poorer.
To celebrate the work of Myles na gCopaleen, The Irish Timeswill print one of his Cruiskeen Lawn columns each day during October