Whats deja vu9/28/2023 ![]() On the following day during a parliamentary debate, John Lonsdale, MP for Mid-Armagh and member of the Ulster Unionist Council, accused the Chief Secretary of favouring the new Gaelic movement which he claimed had degenerated into a mere political organisation, inspired by hatred of England and all things English. ![]() The Intermediate Board had become so implacably opposed to any improvement in the status of Irish as a school subject that the Lord Lieutenant had to write to them on 25 July and order them to make the necessary improvements. In Westminster the following year he opposed bilingual education for Irish-speaking children arguing that they should be educated through English only and expressed a desire to see Irish die out as a spoken language.īy 1906 unionists with strong imperialist views had become more concerned about the Gaelic League’s campaign to add a stronger Irish language dimension to Irish society. He considered the demand for its revival to be unreasonable, worthless and foolish. James Rentoul, Unionist MP for East Down declared in Westminster in July 1900 that Irish had no value, unlike English or French, and that it was a monstrous thing to fetter the educational energies of the country by trying to revive it. Consequently they opposed any public funding for Irish or any attempt to improve its status, particularly in education. In response they either ridiculed nationalists for being so impractical as to set about the revival of a totally useless language, or they encouraged loyalists to fear that the revival was the beginning of yet another Catholic conspiracy to subvert British Protestant civilisation. Others believed it would lead to the destabilisation of the British Empire and the subversion of British values in Ireland were Irish nationalists to develop its potential as a political weapon. Some considered it a manifestation of irrational behaviour amongst racial inferiors which had to be curbed for the common good. They opposed the Irish language revival for two reasons. Their enemies, the Irish nationalists, they portrayed as lazy, devious, anarchic, criminal types of inferior Celtic stock who, being impractical, were unfit for Home Rule. ![]() They saw themselves as a modern, progressive people who cherished British values and the British Empire. At a time of arrogant aggressive British imperialism they claimed the same characteristics as the popular English racial stereotype. From there he did what he could to oppose any improvement in the status of Irish as a school subject. In 1900 Mahaffy was appointed to the unionist dominated Intermediate Board which was responsible for second level education. ![]() The antidote, he believed, was linguistic and political imperialism which would guarantee intellectual and material progress. It would lead to the revival of many isolated unliterary languages and return Europe to the dark ages. Linguistic nationalism was, in his opinion, not only a threat to Ireland but also to European civilisation. It was, he believed, part of a general European tendency to reverse imperialism and would be exploited by Irish separatists. He also opposed the revival of the language. He opposed the teaching of Irish to young people because he believed it would provincialise them and starve their minds. Irish, he claimed, was a useless, obsolete and unliterary language on the verge of extinction. Dr John Mahaffy, a unionist academic from Trinity College, argued that the teaching of Irish in schools was a mischievous waste of time and that literature in Irish had no educational value. The next attack came in 1899 during the Palles Commission enquiry into second level education in Ireland. He was eventually persuaded to withdraw his amendment but not before the nationalist MP, Thomas Sexton, had hailed it as an object lesson in the kind of danger that the unionist imagination engendered in the unionist mind. During the committee stage of the second Home Rule Bill in Westminster that month, Thomas Lea, the anti-Home Rule MP for South Londonderry, proposed an amendment that would have prevented an Irish parliament from passing any law that would have increased the use of Irish in national schools, courts of law and other places where public money was expended. Unionist attacks on the Irish language began as early as June 1893 – six weeks before the Gaelic League was founded.
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