An Irishman’s Diary on pioneering lexicographer T O’Neill Lane

It has very nearly been one hundred years since the death of T O’Neill Lane, and reading this article is a way to participate in the commemoration of his centenary. The west Limerickman was born in Brosna, Co Kerry, in 1852, but raised in Templeglantine West, going to school there, teaching in school there, and eventually became a great Irish language lexicographer, a tidy term which refers to the fact that he is primarily remembered as a writer of dictionaries.

Those who saw the great man in person remarked on his hat, his pinstripe coat, and his walking stick, and on his sallow complexion, which bore witness to lifelong travel and lengthy stints in continental Europe. After giving up a handy number in the local primary school in 1877, O’Neill Lane went off to Dublin where he was refused a job in the civil service because one of his legs was longer than the other. This was only a minor setback for a determined man like O’Neill Lane, and his response was to move to London and get employed by the Incorporated Law Society.

Travel guides

He returned to Ireland again around 1884 under instructions from publishers the Hardy Brothers to write Irish travel guides “replete with all the information on these subjects that any tourist could possibly desire, and very much more than most Irishmen are acquainted with”, as

The Irish Times

wrote of

The Way About the Irish Lakes and Rivers

.

O’Neill Lane made the most of his travel expenses to pay visits to native speakers of Irish living all over the country, from counties such as Kildare to what we now consider to be the traditional Gaeltacht counties. He was fittingly proud of his own west Limerick heritage, and he would include in his dictionary many insights into the dialect of Irish once spoken there.

The word damhsa (dance), we are told, was in west Limerick “confined to the frisking of lambs, calves, etc”.

O'Neill Lane married a young English actress (or cleasóg, in O'Neill Lane-speak) by the name of Dorotte Ayley on his return to London, later abandoning her, their son and their daughter to live in Paris as the French correspondent for the Times of London, where in 1903 he penned the introduction for an early edition of his ambitious unfinished English-Irish dictionary project.

He founded a Paris branch of the Gaelic League in 1906, remaining an active member while completing his ongoing dictionary project which had come to 1,700 pages by 1912, at which time he was still £1,000 shy of the fees associated with printing and publishing his work, and this, despite income supplements from entities as varied as his uncle Aeneas O’Neill, Roger Casement, priests, and even the British government, which granted £250 in acknowledgement of his efforts.

The help of a west Limerick-based publication committee meant that O'Neill Lane was in possession of his personal copy of the dictionary one evening in May 1915, mentioning that he would examine it the following day. The next day came, and O'Neill Lane had passed away, suddenly, according to a report in The Irish Times on June 18th, 1915. An ugly debt of £821 outstood him, and the publication of his life's work was only made possible when this debt was assumed by the Educational Company of Ireland, whose contemporaries duly praised it for its "patriotic enterprise".

O'Neill Lane deserves recognition for his own "patriotic enterprise", undertaken entirely on his own initiative. Preceding Dineen's Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (1927) by more than a decade, Lane's Larger English-Irish Dictionary (1916) was during the early years of the Irish Free State the only sizeable modern Irish dictionary available to educators and to civil servant translators.

Resting place

It is to be regretted that his final resting place has remained unmarked during the entire century that has elapsed since his death, but this state of affairs is soon to be remedied by yet another O’Neill Lane related committee in west Limerick.

The recent fund-raising efforts of Coiste T O'Neill Lane mean that a new gravestone is due to appear at O'Neill Lane's burial place in Brosna, as well as a commemorative display box in Templeglantine West. Both monuments will be unveiled as part of an official commemoration ceremony beginning at 3pm on Saturday, in Brosna cemetery, proceeding from there to Halla Inse Bán in Templeglantine West, where O'Neill Lane's biography, The West Limerick Man Who Wrote a Dictionary, will be launched.