Gaelic League

Gaelic League, Irish‐language organization established in 1893 by Eoin MacNeill and others, with Douglas Hyde as first president. Unlike earlier movements concerned with antiquarian and folkloric studies, the league sought to revive Irish as a spoken and literary language. It ran language classes and Irish‐speaking social gatherings, including from 1897 a national festival, An tOireachtas, modelled on the Welsh Eisteddfod, published a newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis, and sponsored the publication of contemporary verse and prose. Public awareness of its work was heightened in 1899 when it opposed attempts, headed by John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919), provost of Trinity College, Dublin, to have Irish removed from the intermediate school syllabus. During 1908–9 it campaigned successfully to have Irish declared a compulsory matriculation subject in the National University of Ireland.

The membership of the league was drawn mainly from the urban lower middle classes of English‐speaking Ireland. As such it testifies, like the near contemporary Gaelic Athletic Association, to the acute need for cultural roots experienced by many at the end of several decades of exceptionally rapid social change. There was an inevitable tendency to idealize the culture and way of life of the surviving Gaeltacht areas, and the neo‐medieval fantasies indulged in by enthusiasts are easy to caricature. Yet if the return to an imagined Gaelic world represented for some an escape from the pressures of modernization, for others language revival was the means by which Ireland could enter the modern world without losing its identity.

The leadership of the league, notably Hyde, insisted that it should be non‐political, and the movement initially attracted significant support from Protestants and unionists. However, the Mahaffy and matriculation controversies, while boosting membership, gave the language question an inescapable political undertone. Differences in outlook between nationalist and unionist members were evident in debates on whether the league should create links with other parts of the United Kingdom through the Pan‐Celtic movement. In 1914 the Church of Ireland clergyman Canon James Hannay (1865–1950) was expelled for what were considered derogatory portrayals of Irish life in works published under his pseudonym George Birmingham. By this time a concerted IRB takeover of the movement was largely complete, leading to Hyde's resignation as president in 1915. League members took a prominent part in the rising of 1916 and in the subsequent growth of Sinn Féin and the IRA. The league itself was declared an illegal organization in September 1919. Today, generally known by its Irish name Connradh na Gaeilge, it remains active in the promotion of Irish language and literature.

Bibliography

Hutchinson, John , The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (1987)