Irish History Articles - GAA and the Gaelic League

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
IX. The Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League

by Dr. Sam Couch, Ph. D.
Owner, Rising Road Tours

The movement which put down successful roots from end to end of the country was the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), founded in 1884, which was dedicated to the promotion of traditional Irish games. Such an aim could be expected to dovetail neatly with the artistic and literary revival, but the founder of the GAA were determined that it should not. No less than fostering Celtic games - hurling, Gaelic football, camogie and handball - their aim was to exile the traditional English games of cricket, soccer and rugby. It called these "foreign games" and it forbade its members to play or attend them - a ban that lasted up to the 1960s. The intention behind such rules was evident and, on its own terms, sensible: to make breathing space for games which were being pushed into oblivion by introduced English sports. But from the beginning the GAA attracted other more political factions, most importantly the revolutionary Fenian movement, which was able to use the organization's concern with the most innocent of pastimes as a front for its more sinister and seditious activities.

Parnell himself could be said to be the victim of the inflexible forces of nationalism. In the 1880s, he seemed the most important man in Ireland, regarded by many as an unofficial king. He had ridden several attempts to discredit him, including the printing of some scurrilous forgeries in The Times. The, in 1890, he was named as co-respondent in a divorce case. He had lived with the woman, Kitty O'Shea, for years, and pleaded that his public and private lives should be distinct. But, along with other bodies, the Irish Catholic hierarchy condemned him. He struggled to retain the leadership for a year, but the strain killed him in 1891.

In 1893, another organization came into being, founded on the wish to conserve and restore the native language. The president of the Gaelic League was Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland parson, who had learned Gaelic and written poetry in both languages. His other passion, on which he wrote a famous lecture, was "The Necessity for de-Anglicizing Ireland," in which he advocated the resuscitation of everything Gaelic, from language to dances and songs, with the consequent banishment of English practices. At first the enmity to the Anglo-Saxon was less evident than the desire to revive the Gaelic corpse, and for a while Yeats, Hyde and their respective colleagues respected each others' ambitions. But Yeats, in spite of his naïve credulity in some other matters, never thought the Irish language could entire replace the English, and still less that its literature could oust the brimming legacy of England's. Hyde and his fellows did. Their campaign to spread Irish touched a nostalgic nerve in the minds of thousand so their countrymen. In a few years there were well over five hundred branches of the league all over the country. Irish had to be taught in schools and proficiency in it became a condition for entry to the national university. One wit warned that this measure would make most Irish illiterate in two languages. Predictably, nationalist agitators found their way to the top of the League, and in 1915 Hyde himself resigned as president for that reason. By that time Padraig Pearse, whom many regard as the founding martyr of Irish independence, had described the league as "the most revolutionary influence that has ever come into Ireland," to be mentioned in the same breath as openly militant revolutionary organizations.

One of the more curious aspects of the League was the debate that went on within its ranks about the provision of an Irish literature for the Irish to read when they renounced English. Various solutions were proposed but all had to acknowledge that there was simply not, as yet anyway, enough Irish to fill the gap. Certain Irish authors - the popular poet Tom Moore was one - were therefore allowed to figure on reading programs as temporary stopgaps. In time, contemporary and future authors would, it was assumed, supply all needs. Of course it is in the nature of fervent idealists, planning their Utopias, to think along such lines, blind to their absurdities, blind also to the implications of political control over literature and the easy descent from this to general censorship. In the event, when the new state of Ireland emerged, the censorship it imposed was immoderate, banning some of the work of almost every Irish author of note. Moreover, the plan to replace English with the Irish language would be regarded by most people today as a costly failure. In many schools it became the medium for teaching not only literature but also subjects like history and mathematics. Yet there was never the slightest change of English being displaced. Not English, but education itself was the casualty; and within months of leaving school most Irish people had consigned the language of their forefathers to the same dusty mental archive as logarithms. It mattered not at all that the constitution named Irish as the country's first language.

To the visitor today, the visible remnants of this campaign are few, often rather quaint, sometimes irritating. Gaelic is not an easy tongue, and to complicate matters, several distinct regional dialects of it are maintained. Its spelling, though simplified from time to time, has nothing but its letters in common with English. On street names, signposts and buses it can, unless the English equivalent is displayed (which is not always the case), be utterly baffling. Fortunately the Irish name - say, An Nuaimh - seldom appears on the signpost without the English version - Navan - being shown too. In the Gaeltacht, in which Gaelic is the first language of some 40,000 people, natural courtesy would instantly cause a conversation to switch to English if someone ignorant of Gaelic were present. Many people have opted for the Irish spelling of their names, and not a few speak Irish among themselves in the privacy of their homes, including middle-class homes in the smarter suburbs of Dublin and Limerick. For the fondness of the idea of a national language understandably persists, as does admiration of the unique quality of old literature written in Irish. Many would say that the Famine and its aftermath saw Irish to a grave in which it should not have been disturbed. Many would add that the Irish are quite different enough from everyone else without having to adopt a language nobody outside the country understands.

This series of articles is based on lectures given by Dr. Samuel Couch to Irish Studies courses at Georgia Southern University and Young Harris College between 1997 and 2004. Documented sources come from Couch's research and studies in American universities and with scholars in Ireland. The articles are in no way intended to be comprehensive.

Background materials come from, but are not limited to, readings in the following books:

Duffy, Sean, ed., Atlas of Irish History. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1997.
Joyce, P.W., Outlines of the History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1905. M.H. Gill & Son: Dublin. 1909.
Killeen, Richard, A Short History of Ireland. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1994.
Smyth, Daragh, A Guide to Irish Mythology. 2nd ed. Irish Academic Press: Dublin. 1996.

Any lack of attribution to primary sources is unintentional and the sole responsibility of Dr. Couch.

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Articles: 19th Century Ireland IX. The Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
IX. The Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League