The Last of the Gaels
THE LAST OF THE GAELS TF THERE be left on earth a corner where the poet •* grows as naturally as the weather changes or the wild flowers bloom, it is the coast of western Ireland where those who...
...Many people who know Gaelic do not speak it as a rule, and many children counted as Gaelic-speaking in the statistics have learned it in schools rather than at home...
...The actual Gaeltacht cannot support its numerous population, and migration to other parts of Ireland is hampered by several practical circumstances...
...Today the state of affairs obtaining is outlined clearly in the Commission's report, as follows: "There is not a district into which English has not penetrated and gradually tended to acquire supremacy...
...The last Celts are going, the last inheritors of those obscure throngs who piously erected dolmens and menhirs on the farthest coasts of the western sea, nearest to the setting sun and to the realm of souls...
...And perhaps, on our poor earth, beauty is able to survive only by a lucky chance, or as an omen of death...
...The next part, the census-takers report, has lost 30 percent of its Gaels in ten years, despite the fact that the population as a whole is now less numerous...
...Such is the subject, poignant in some respects and hard to realize in others, which Roger Chauvire discusses in a paper recently contributed to the French review, Le Correspondant...
...THE LAST OF THE GAELS TF THERE be left on earth a corner where the poet •* grows as naturally as the weather changes or the wild flowers bloom, it is the coast of western Ireland where those who are virtually the last inheritors of the Gaelic tradition wrestle with the stones for the most meager of livelihoods...
...It might be added that the latest census was taken under the auspices of a government favorable to the development of Gaelic, whereas the earlier count of Gaelic-speaking residents has been made by the British authorities...
...The influence of a hostile government has prevailed against it...
...Statistics published by a commission appointed by the Free State government show, first of all, that the total population of the district has decreased 13 percent in fourteen years (or almost 1 percent a year), in spite of a high birth rate...
...Can the crude, diffuse, powerful tide of industrial wellbeing be pushed back by dreams and memories ? Is it not true that an admirably artistic people of prehistoric times slowly disappeared on the approach of a race without genius, but endowed with practical shrewdness and greater brute force...
...In general the representatives of public opinion—men of affairs, ecclesiastical authorities—do not speak it...
...There are slightly more than two-thirds as many as there were in 1911...
...When these figures are analyzed, social facts of the greatest interest emerge...
...and when they shall have gone no one will whisper the secrets preserved in their immemorial tradition alone...
...Even what remains of the Gaeltacht, or the Gaelic-speaking district—the coast line and the islands from Kerry northward—is gradually being invaded by the modern spirit...
...The limits to which this concession went during the nineteenth century are indicated by such facts as that even O'Connell, born in the heart of Kerry and reared by a Gaelic nurse, attached no significance to the old speech and addressed all his audiences in perfect, polished English...
...In the end he resigns himself to writing a threnody, the moods of which most of us will share: "Who knows but what this constant retreat before the English advance, particulary as it has been in progress during the past century, is not an inevitable phenomenon—the outcome of a struggle between essentially unequal forces...
...And when the public schools impressed the diction of the king upon hordes of little ones, only the sturdy archbishop of Tuam, MacHale, offered them any determined opposition...
...Formerly it was supplanted as a medium of instruction, and ignored or suppressed by the administration...
...In the first part, the number of Gaels remains fairly stable while the number of English-speaking residents has diminished...
...Finally, in the third part there are now 80,000 fewer Gaels than there were, and the number of people who speak English is increasing slightly...
...Sacrificed as so many another people has been to the idol of our times —the modern state, blind Moloch devouring its victims without even observing their presence—they disappear, victims more kingly than their devourer...
...The educated classes do not know it and defend their ignorance by displaying a contempt which is either affected or, often enough, sincere...
...All of which means: the Gael is disappearing rapidly in regions where nature affords more than a meager livelihood and is adopting English where advancement is possible...
...And so it is now customary to believe that the language is destined to die out...
...Meanwhile the number of residents who speak Gaelic has decreased to a far more alarming extent...
...The prestige of the national tongue in the Gaeltacht is inferior...
...What reasons underlie the change, apart from the natural circumstance that a nation subject to another conceded, little by little, that the tongue of the ruling caste was a matter of great practical importance...
...And when the last Gaelic murmur shall have grown silent, and the last dreaming Gael have closed his eyes, a light which shone tenderly during ages in the world's darkness, will go out forever...
...The district has been divided into three parts, according as the proportion of those who speak Gaelic is near the total, or near onehalf, or less than a fourth...
...Round about them the old customs and the speech which had once quivered with the ecstasy of harpers and bards have largely been abandoned...
...After having described the situation with color and thoroughgoing attentiveness to facts, he concludes that it is difficult to find any effective remedy for what is happening...
...Those who retain the tradition of speaking it see opening before them or their children a perspective in which there is no hope of success...
...M. Chauvire is a novelist one of whose books has been published in America, and a man who knows Ireland and its history very well...
...These are the last-born of ancestors whose battle-cry once filled the Europe of antiquity and their voices grow weaker and more scattered day by day...
Vol. 12 • September 1930 • No. 19
