Parnell and the Irish language?

gaiscioch

Daniel O'Connell's negative attitude to Irish is well known, but what was Parnell's view on Irish, and on the role of creating a culturally distinctive/intellectually independent Irish State? Was he in any sense a cultural nationalist, or sympathetic to the Young Irelanders and such like?

Given that the earliest 19th-century campaigners for, and scholars in, Irish were mostly liberal Protestants it wouldn't be too unlikely for Parnell to also be supportive of the language. Or would he have settled for a home rule parliament in Dublin/political independence in some form?

Manach

From a lecture on the Irish Language at UCC, I remember hearing that Parnell's attitude was mostly indifference. He was focused on other topics he felt of greater importance (to the party) of land reform and Home Rule. So he left the Language question to the NGOs of the time such as the Gaelic league whose members tended to attract support across all aspects of the political divides of the time.

Mick Tator

My recollected impression is that Parnell would have found the Irish language revival a distraction. How would Irish have served his cause? Most of the remaining speakers at that date were from the bottom strata, usually illiterate and powerless. Did the language not become politicised until after the birth of Conradh and Hyde/McNeil’s efforts to ‘de-anglicise’ Ireland? Most of the ‘gentry’ interested in Irish during the mid-1800’s and earlier had an academic interest in the language, simply as a means to understand ogham, monuments, annals, dinnshenchas, etc. I’ve no memory of any of them promoting adoption of Irish and it would have been unlikely for people such as Vallency, Dunraven, Stokes, etc. to do so. Stokes was political as a young man, but was not a promoter of a wider use of Irish. (He joined the United Irishmen and although he left before 1798 he lost his positions at TCD for several years as a result.) Was it not the ultra-Republicans who came later, those who saw Irish as a catalyst for kicking out British culture, creating ‘Irishness’ and a glue to hold a new nation together? Those aspirations existed up to and after WW2 if the writings of Flann O’Brian are accurate.

Jim2007

I don't think he even had a concept for an independent Ireland beyond having home rule within the Empire...