The availability of Irish language texts before indepedence

the O Reilly connection

Hello

Does anyone know how available Irish language texts were before independence? When I say texts I mean newspapers and books.

Thanks

iniscealtra

https://cnag.ie/en/info/history/an-claidheamh-soluis-online.html

I have no idea of circulation numbers.

Manach

A good text on this is Doyle's "History of the Irish Language". English language always dominated the urban centres and hence the printing industry (compared to the decentralised manuscript writing which survived until the 19th Century). Post famine there were numerous societies that were formed to encourage Irish language authorship with local clerics such as Father Peader O'Laoghaire writing local history and novels in regional Irish dialects. Thus while much less prevalent than English language books, I'd reckon there would have been a higher percentage available than in modern times.

Peregrinus

What <anach said. The bible and other religious works aside, virtually nothing was printed in Irish before the mid-nineteenth century, but from then on there's a growing interest among scholars and antiguarians which leads to more publishing about, and in, the Irish language. Much of this is academic - e.g. the printing of old Irish texts, often with parallel translation, but as time goes on the focus widens, and new texts, written for publication, are issued covering history, folklore, language, new fiction and poetry, etc.

I suspect the big gap would have been access to the wider European literary heritage in Irish. Very little literature written other languages was translated and published in Irlsh until the Free State began to subsidise this work. There still isn't a great deal of this, since almost everybody who can read Irish can also read English, and there is a vast corpus of literature translated into English.

gaiscioch

Niall Ó Ciosáin has published a considerable amount on printed works in Irish in the 18th and 19th centuries, and made some comparisons with the better fortunes of Welsh at the same time. Breandán Ó Buachalla's Aisling Ghéar is perhaps the most famous study of the intellectual world as seen through Irish language manuscripts. Some recent studies, such Lesa Ní Mhunghaile study of the Irish language in 19th-century Meath explore links between Meath poet-scholars like Peadar Ó Gealacáin and Robert Shipboy MacAdam, the Belfast industrial and patron and many of those texts still survive.

Philip O'Leary in Boston College's The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881-1921 is a very engaging book, full of humour about various 'An Claidheamh Soluis' contributors and insight, with great credit given to Liam Ó Rinn and other little-known scholars in their struggles to write in Irish in an industrial world where a different lexicon, etc was required. There's actually quite a lot on Irish language texts before independence, and Pádraic Ó Conaire's Deoraíocht (1910) is considered to be the first modernist novel in Irish . Nicholas M. Wolf's An Irish Speaking Island (2015) is a great overall text for the Irish language in the 19th century.