Conradh na Gaeilge
Conradh na Gaeilge is a social and cultural organisation which promotes the Irish language in Ireland and worldwide. The organisation was founded in 1893 with Douglas Hyde as its first president, when it emerged as the successor of several 19th century groups such as the Gaelic Union. The organisation was a spearhead of the Gaelic revival and of Gaeilgeoir activism.
While Hyde succeeded in drawing unionists to the League, the organisation increasingly gave expression to the nationalist impulse behind the language revival. From 1915, members of its executive acknowledged the leadership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the struggle for Irish statehood. After the creation of the Irish Free State, and limited advances with respect to the teaching and official use of the language, many members transferred their commitment to the new institutions, political parties and education system.
In 2008, Conradh na Gaeilge adopted a new constitution, dropping the post-1915 references to "Irish freedom", while reaffirming the ambition to restore Irish as the language of everyday life throughout Ireland. In Northern Ireland, it campaigned for an Irish Language Act. In the absence of an agreed Stormont executive, in 2022 the Westminster Parliament incorporated many of its proposed provisions in the Identity and Language Act.
Foundation: "De-Anglicising Ireland"
Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, a successor to Ulick Bourke's earlier Gaelic Union, was formed in 1893, at a time when Irish as a spoken language appeared to be on the verge of extinction. Analysis of the 1881 Census showed that at least 45% of those born in Ireland in the first decade of the 19th century had been brought up as Irish speakers. Figures from the 1891 census suggested that just 3.5% were being raised speaking the language. Ireland had become an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. Spoken mainly by peasants and farm labourers in the poorer districts of the west of Ireland, Irish was widely seen, in the words of Matthew Arnold, as "the badge of a beaten race."The first aim of the League was to maintain the language in the Gaeltacht, the largely western districts in which spoken Irish survived. The late 20th-century Gaeilgeoir activist Aodán Mac Póilin notes, however, that "the main ideological impact of the language movement was not in the Gaeltacht, but among English-speaking nationalists". The League developed "both a conservationist and a revivalist role".
The League's first president, Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector from County Roscommon, helped create an ethos in the early days that attracted a number of unionists into its ranks. Remarkably, these included the Rev. Richard Kane, Grand Master of the Belfast Orange Lodge and organiser of the Anti-Home Rule Convention of 1892. But from the beginning there was an unresolved conflict between non-political rhetoric and the nationalism implicit in the League's revivalist project.
With the aid of Eugene O'Growney Eoin MacNeill, Thomas O'Neill Russell and others, the League was launched in the wake of an address Hyde delivered to the Irish National Literary Society, on 25 November 1892: ‘"The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’". Citing Giuseppe Mazzini, Hyde argued that "in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim we have to nationality".
Implicitly, this was a criticism of the national movement as it had developed since Catholic emancipation. Although a gaeilgeoir, Daniel O'Connell had declared himself "sufficiently utilitarian not to regret gradual abandonment" of the language. For Emancipator's keenest supporters, the "positive and unmistakable" mark of distinction between Irish and English was "the distinction created by religion". Hyde's project spoke to a new exclusionary sense of what it is to be Irish. The simple practice of referring to Gaelic as "the Irish language", consciously or not, rendered "those who did not speak it as less Irish, and those who did not even acknowledge its status as non-Irish".
The League rapidly developed into the leading institution promoting the Gaelic Revival, organising Irish classes and student immersions in the Gaeltacht, and publishing in Irish. The League's first newspaper was An Claidheamh Soluis and its most noted editor was Pádraig Pearse. The motto of the League was Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin amháin.
Early campaigns
Among the League's few campaign successes in its first decade was acceptance by the Post Office of parcels and letters addressed in Irish, and the recognition of St. Patrick's Day as a national holiday.With national feeling heightened in part by the Boer War, membership increased from 1900. The number of branches rose from 43 in 1897 to 600 in 1904 with a membership of 50,000. A more substantial victory followed: in 1904 Irish was introduced into the national school curriculum.
The Catholic church, however, was not an early ally. The clergy had played a significant role in the decline of the language. In the National schools they had punished children for speaking it.
The national cause
Hyde declared that "The Irish language, thank God, is neither Protestant nor Catholic, it is neither a Unionist nor a Separatist." Although the League took this non-political principle seriously enough to decline participation in the unveiling of a 1798 centenary monument to Wolfe Tone, much like the Gaelic Athletic Association the organisation served as an occasion and cover for nationalist recruitment. Seán T. O'Kelly recalls that, as early 1903, as a travelling manager for An Claidheamh Soluis, he was in a position to recruit young men for Irish Republican Brotherhood in every one of 32 counties. It was through the League that many future leaders of the independence struggle first met, laying the foundation for groups such as the Irish Volunteers."While being non-political", Michael Collins saw the League, by "its very nature", as "intensely national". Under a system of foreign rule that made the people "forget to look to themselves, and to turn their backs upon their own country", it did "more than any other movement to restore national pride, honour and self-respect". Arthur Griffith had been similarly dismissive of the League's political neutrality of the League. Popular support for the revival of the language, he argued, sprang precisely from its role as a mark of Irish nationality.
As the nationalist impulse behind the League became more obvious, and in particular as the League began to work more closely with the Catholic Church to secure support for teaching Irish in the schools, Unionists withdrew. Hyde's effort to promote the "the native language and culture as a supra-factional and supra-sectarian field where Irish Protestants and Catholics could meet as equals" was lost. In the north, Protestants were themselves moving toward a distinct Ulster unionism that rejected claims of an overarching Irish cultural identity.
Increasingly Republicans were blunt about what they saw as the League's place within the nationalist movement. The paper, Irish Freedom, declared:
The work of the Gaelic League is to prevent the assimilation of the Irish nation by the English nation The work is as essentially anti-English as the work attempted by Fenianism or the Society of United Irishmen The Irish language is a political weapon of the first importance against English encroachment.The issue of the League's political independence was decided at its Annual General Meeting held in Dundalk in 1915. Rumours circulated that John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party were seeking to take over the League as they had earlier attempted to take over the Irish Volunteers. Diarmuid Lynch of the IRB mobilised Brotherhood members positioned throughout the League to secure the nominations and votes required to appoint a new Coiste that "was safe from the IRB viewpoint".
Northern Protestants
The first Ulster branch of the Gaelic League was formed in east Belfast in 1895, a year after the death of Robert Shipboy MacAdam who, with Dr. James MacDonnell, had presided over a precursor of the League earlier in the century: Cuideacht Gaoidhilge Uladh / The Ulster Gaelic Society. Following in this tradition of "Protestant Gaelicism", which had also drawn on the Irish language practice of Protestant church "home missions", the new Belfast branch was formed under the active patronage of the Rev. John Baptiste Crozier and the presidency of his parishioner, Dr. John St Clair Boyd, both unionists, and of the Orange Order Grand Master, the Rev. Richard Rutledge Kane. Claiming to afford a "common platform to Catholic and Protestant", by 1899 the League had nine branches in the city including one in the unionist Shankill ward where, in the 1911 census, 106 people recorded themselves as Irish speakers.For other Protestant pioneers of the Irish language in the north, Oliver MacDonagh suggests that, in allowing them to identify with Ireland's pre-Tridentine past, the League offered a non-sectarian door into the otherwise overwhelmingly Catholic nationalist community. This appears to have been the case for Alice Milligan, publisher in Belfast of The Shan Van Vocht. Milligan's command of Irish was never fluent, and on that basis Patrick Pearse was to object when, in 1904, the Gaelic League hired her as a travelling lecturer. She proved herself by establishing new branches throughout Ireland and raising funds along the way. In the north, in Ulster, she focused on the more difficult task of recruiting Protestants, working with, among other activists, Hyde, Ada McNeill, Roger Casement, Alice Stopford Green, Stephen Gwynn, and Seamus McManus.
James Owen Hannay, originally of Belfast, was co-opted onto the League's national executive body in December 1904 while a Church of Ireland rector in Westport in County Mayo. Hyde and Arthur Griffith sympathised with Hannay's desire for a "union of the two Irish democracies", Catholic in the south and Protestant in the north. In the north Hannay saw a potential ally in Lindsay Crawford and his Independent Orange Order. Like the Conradh na Gaeilge, he saw the IOO as "profoundly democratic in spirit" and independent of "the rich and the patronage of the great".
Crawford, who stood for election to the League's executive committee, was critical of what he regarded as the League's impractical romanticism. In his paper, Irish Protestant, he suggested that the Irish Ireland movement needed an injection of "Ulsteria", an "industrial awakening on true economic lines: it is wrong when people crave bread to offer them 'language and culture'".
Offence taken at his successful play General John Regan, and his defence of Crawford's opposition to church control of education, strained Hannay's relations with nationalists and he withdrew from League. Meanwhile, in North America, Crawford went on to campaign with Eamon de Valera for recognition and support for the republic proclaimed in 1916.
Ernest Blythe, who joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1909 with the distinction of maintaining for three years his membership of the Orange Order, had as his first Conradh na Gaeilge teacher Sinéad Flanagan, de Valera's future wife. To improve his knowledge of the Irish language, he lived in the County Kerry Gaeltacht earning his keep as an agricultural labourer. A similar path was followed by IRB organiser of the Irish Volunteers, Bulmer Hobson.