1. Social Identities
Vol. 13, No. 3, May 2007, pp. 307 Á 323
Learning a Strange Native Language
Anne O’Byrne
The colonial practice of destroying native cultures and supressing native languages is
already familiar; less thoroughly investigated is the set of practices adopted by newly
independent (or simply new) nations in an effort to re-establish (or simply establish) a
cultural and national identity, particularly insofar as that involves attempting to revive
(or invent) a dead or moribund language. Here I bring Derrida’s work to bear on these
issues through an examination of the fate of the Irish language after colonization. Can a
population now monolingual in the language of the coloniser be convinced that
acquisition of its no-longer-native native language is a cultural imperative? How to
describe the experience of a population upon whom this imperative is officially imposed
by a state apparatus that is no longer that of the coloniser? In what sense is this unknown
language its own? In what sense is this state apparatus or this culture its own? How is this
peculiar split in the identity of such a nation-state to be understood? How is such an
entity to understand itself in the midst of a post-national Europe?
On 6 December 1921, as Eamonn De Valera was arriving at the Mansion House in
Dublin for a cultural event, he was met by two Sinn Fein colleagues with urgent news
of the Anglo-Irish treaty (O’Leary, 1994, p. 496). The treaty*signed in London that
morning*would grant independence to most of the island of Ireland and end the
war of Independence but would also soon plunge the country into civil war; by
creating both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland it would set the conditions
from which the Troubles would erupt in the north some 50 years later. Meanwhile,
the scholarly gathering over which de Valera would preside that evening was a
colloquium marking the 600th anniversary of the death of Dante and would include a
lecture on ‘the question of the language in Italy in the time of Dante compared with
the question of the Irish language in Ireland at present’ and a comparison of the
meters used by Dante and those of Old Irish poetry. Thus the man who would long
preach the virtues of a frugal, pious, isolated, inward-looking, Irish-speaking Ireland
and would, in 1937, introduce a constitution that attempted to make that vision law,
Anne O’Byrne, Department of Philosophy, Hofstra University, Hempstead NY 11549, USA. Email:
phiaeo@hofstra.edu
ISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13504630701363952

2. 308 A. O’Byrne
could, on that evening on the threshold of the era of independence in 1921, celebrate
the ties that bind Ireland to the cultures and languages of Europe.
At that point the Irish language could indeed appear to be poised on the threshold
of a grand new era. It had declined slowly over centuries of colonial British rule but,
due to famine and mass emigration, the decline had become precipitous in the
previous 80 years, with the number of Irish speakers reaching its lowest (recorded)
ebb of 13.3% of the population in 1911 (Hughes, 2001, p. 115). But the campaign to
restore the language was already 40 years old and closely allied to the nationalist
struggle for independence, so it could be taken for granted that complete restoration
was at hand. In 1919 Peadar Mac Fhionnlaoich wrote:
´
Everyone knows that if the Dail [Irish parliament] takes control of the country *
and everyone knows that there is at least a chance that it will *the Irish language
will be restored to preeminence in every part of the country. (Mac Fhionnlaoich,
1919, p. 170, quoted in O’Leary, 1994, p. 496)
Even among those keenly aware that this was going to be a difficult task there was no
doubt that it was a quite necessary undertaking:
We have to restore the Irish language, and only few realize what a gigantic duty it
will be to restore a language which has for generations been used only by a few
peasants, which most of us learn as we would learn French, which has no literature
´
in modern times, and a completely archaic vocabulary. (M.OT., quoted in O’Leary,
2004, p. 20)
From the point of view of such clear-eyed optimism, what in fact happened to the
Irish language after independence is a puzzle; the restoration, after almost a century
´
of Dail control, has not been achieved. Of course, optimism and devoted energy are
not enough, and we would have no good reason to be puzzled if that were all that the
project of restoration had going for it. Yet it has had enormous institutional and
political support; it was made the first official language of the state; street signs
appear in both Irish and English; vast resources have been poured into Irish
education; Irish is studied in every school and university in the country. Yet, even
given this, the language is not pre-eminent. It is a national first language that is the
first language of less than 5% of the population and the second language of less than
30% (Hughes, 2001, p. 111). It is a language I studied on the five days of every school
week between the ages of 4 and 16 and that I now reserve for the clumsy and
grammatically atrocious conversations I have with the Irish parents of my English-
born nieces when we do not want the children to understand what we have to say.
In addition*and this is what is of greater interest to me here*the movement for
language restoration has had at its disposal a powerful national rhetoric with the
´
Herder-inspired slogan ‘Nı tir gan teanga’*there is no country without a
language*as one of its central claims. This is the very rhetoric that generated
the received account of the nation’s story as that of a long struggle against the
conquering power stretching from 1169 to 1921 and*as far as Northern Ireland is

3. Social Identities 309
concerned*beyond; because these centuries of domination by the British meant the
loss of the Irish language, surely the end of that domination could be expected to
mean its restoration. In other words, the nationalist rhetoric that generated the
expectation gives us no tools with which to explain its disappointment. The failure of
restoration, then, is not the deepest puzzle.
Nevertheless, debate over that failure and that puzzle continues, and on many
levels. Hindley (1990) and Carnie (1995) judge the failure to be all but complete and
point, among other things, to the overwhelming force of English as a tool for
economic liberation, to poor methods of teaching Irish and to the lack of a
connection between teaching of Irish in schools and encouraging its use as home.
Slomanson (1994) argues that language will not be transmitted naturally if it is taught
largely as a subject in the way maths or history is taught but, rather than pronouncing
Irish dead, he proposes fostering a certain level of Irish monolingualism in order to
´
make possible language transmission. O Laoire (1996) asks specifically what allowed
the restoration of Hebrew as the national language of Israel while Irish fared so poorly
in Ireland by comparison, and argues that the motivation of Jewish and then Israeli
nationalism has had an overwhelming ideological component that was lacking or
only secondary in the case of Ireland.
However, in the midst of such research and such debate, my aim is to ask not why
restoration failed but the prior question of how it came to be, both as a dream and as
a project. Encouraged by Derrida’s unravelling in The Monolingualism of the Other
(1998) of his particular experience of French and Arabic growing up in Algeria and by
his thought’s insistence on uncovering the deeper puzzles embedded in all language, I
ask here what his thought of a jealous rage of language appropriation can tell us
about the nationalist struggle to make the Irish language pre-eminent. Also, how is
the desire we share for the prior-to-the-first language revealed in post-colonial
Ireland’s project of a return to a pre-colonial language? Finally, since the question of
the Irish language now also occurs in the context of a rapidly integrating Europe,
what can be gained from also turning to The Other Heading (1992), one of Derrida’s
considerations of the phenomenon of Europe? Can we understand the fate of the Irish
language in the terms offered there, that is, cultural fragmentation, centralization and
the gap that separates them?
I will argue that what Ireland has experienced (and continues to experience) is a
doubled alienation. There is alienation involved not only in the loss of a language
under the pressure and violence of colonisation, but also, it turns out, in the
attempted restoration of the all-but-lost national language precisely insofar as it is an
attempt to make good the loss. If the restoration of a national language is presented
as the healing of an inflicted alienation and operates under the promise of wholeness,
it compounds rather than cures alienation. The jealous rage of coloniality that
Derrida describes is succeeded, in the aftermath of colonisation, by the jealous rage of
language; so long as we understand such rages as particular they carry the promise
that they can be vented and overcome, that the hurt that generated them can be
healed, that the demands they make can be satisfied. This is the mistake. What

4. 310 A. O’Byrne
Derrida reminds us is that, together, these peculiar alienations must direct us instead
to the ‘abiding alienation that, like ‘‘lack’’, appears to be constitutive’ (Derrida, 1998,
p. 25). They are exemplary in a way that, being unique demonstrates more vividly a
structure that is universal (p. 20).
After all, the Irish language has not been restored and the alienation of its loss as the
pre-eminent language of Ireland and/or the Irish has not been overcome. That
constitutive alienation is such that we are denied the satisfaction of completeness at
every turn. In the case of Ireland, the power of the Irish language to unify the
population of the island was never complete, not even before 1169, given that the two
preceding centuries had seen Viking invaders establish towns on the East coast that
were not and did not ever become Irish-speaking. The subsequent loss of the language
was never itself complete, and, by the same token, the failure of restoration has been an
incomplete failure. Despite everything, the language does survive and in many forms
never anticipated by those who looked forward, at the founding of the state, to the
rapid restoration of a pre-colonial linguistic inheritance. Even if it does not live as
the hubbub of the streets of Dublin, it does on the roads of the Dingle Peninsula and
the homes of the Belfast Gaeltacht, in contemporary poetry and prose, on the national
Irish language television station TG4 and, still, in every primary and secondary school
in the country. And if the linguistic experience of colonialism is understood to include
not only the travails of the Irish language under imperialism but also the fate of the
English language made local in Ireland, it is a lively survival indeed.1
If the experience of native and national language after colonisation is understood
in this way, it is only to be expected that the sporadic debates on the status of the Irish
language should*as indeed they do*show both pride and resentment, nostalgia for
an old Ireland and enthusiasm for a new Europe, a desire to abandon the project of
restoration and an insistence that it is still possible, the assumption of culture as a
monolith and intimations of the multi-cultural Ireland to come.
National Language, Native Language
In the National Gallery of Ireland, one wall of the old building’s largest hall is
occupied by Daniel Maclise’s monumental 1854 canvas ‘The Marriage of Princess
Aoife of Leinster with Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke (Strongbow)’. In the
centre of the painting stand the bride and groom, she young, fair, tiny and in an
attitude of pained submissiveness, he tall, stern, exuding an aura of barely
suppressed violence. The eye moves from the figure of the bride to the noble
Gaels in the foreground, (semi-)clad in flowing, richly-coloured robes, the women
wailing in grief, half of the men poetically dead, the other half crouched but baring
their chests and clenching their teeth, furious and emasculated. Behind and over
them stands an army of Normans, each soldier dressed in chain mail and standing
to attention. The foreground is ablaze with light; a dark pall hangs over the middle
ground. Thus the old Gaelic order met its doom. The Norman gloom took the

5. Social Identities 311
place of Gaelic light and all that happened from then until now was determined on
that wedding day.
Maclise’s painting is the very image of the nineteenth century myth of Romantic
Irish nationalism, a myth that has been tweaked, rejected, surpassed, overcome,
sublimated and complicated in academic and literary discourse but that remains
´
astounding in its resilience. It is the myth that gives colour to Sean O Ceallaigh’s
´
exclamation, on the eve of the first meeting of Dail Eireann in 1919:
When the national assembly is convened more Irish will be heard spoken by its
members than in any parliament in Ireland since the Norman invasion . . . A
parliament with Irish as its ordinary official language *what a wonderful advance!
´ ´
(O Huallachain, 1994, p. 31)
´
That is to say, independence was to be a revival of Gaelic Ireland; the new Dail would
allow the restoration of the Irish language and thus the experience of 800 years of
colonization would be . . . what? Overcome? Or elided? That it should be forgotten
was a natural hope, if not a reasonable expectation, for anyone convinced of the
received account*which is certainly the one I received in primary school in Ireland
in the 1970s*of the decline of the Irish language. The beginning of the end came in
the late twelfth century when Norman adventurers arrived in Ireland, invited by a
local king to help in a struggle with his neighbours. The Normans came and fought
but did not go home again; their leader, Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare (Strongbow),
married Aoife and soon there were aristocratic Norman families*Fitzgerald,
Lambert, Roche*established throughout the Eastern part of the country.
There, in the classroom where I learned this history, we already had the evidence
that could complicate the story. Majella Fitzgerald sat three rows from me. Elsewhere
in the town, the shop where we bought sweets was run by my father’s cousin, Joe
Lambert; the chap from the Shamrock Hotel who played the guitar was Billy Roche.
Normans, all of them, but that turned out to be alright once we learned, in
subsequent lessons, that we could think of their ancestors as the Normans who
became more Irish than the Irish themselves. Yet their absorption and the fact that
they took up the Irish language was not allowed to interrupt the grand narrative of
decline. After all, their wave of invasion would be followed by the Elizabethan wave of
the sixteenth century, Cromwell and the planters of the seventeenth century, the
enforcers of penal laws in through the eighteenth century and, while the process was
not a steady one *there were long periods during which the colonial power appeared
to lose interest in Ireland, and even granted a degree of independence under native
governments*the periods of mass settlement by colonists and energetic suppression
of the Irish population and the Irish language were indicative of the encroaching tide.
´
Sean de Freine argues that the claim of ‘800 years of oppression’, a frequent trope of
nationalist rhetoric, is deeply misleading; there was at most 320 years of active
´
oppression beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century (de Freine, 1965,
p. 20). Nevertheless, the received account can accommodate his argument since the
general trend was the same, and three and one fifth centuries is bad enough. Each

6. 312 A. O’Byrne
wave of colonisation, whenever it came, was a further blow to the Irish language as
colonists*bearers of the colonial language and culture*not only came to account
for an ever greater portion of the population but, far more significantly, came to
occupy the locus of power. As a result, the Irish-speaking population had ever greater
incentives to adopt the new language first in the form of punishment for the use of
Irish and then in the necessity of English as a means of access to power.
Even so, the period of 1200 to 1600 saw the flowering of Classical Irish. The
households of the native and Norman chieftains supported two classes of poet, the
´
bards and the filı whose works survive today. In fact, a set of statutes*the Statutes of
Kilkenny*had to be issued in 1366 to insist, among other things, that subjects of the
English crown speak English and thus avoid assimilation. As late as 1841 it was still
the case that an estimated 50 per cent of the population of Ireland still spoke Irish.
That is to say, centuries of colonial rule had severely damaged but not destroyed the
language. It had eliminated the Irish ruling class and all but ended the literary
tradition, but had not managed to kill the language; famine and the haemorrhage of
emigration of the following decades would all but accomplish that. It is not a
question of natural disaster delivering a sad but inevitable blow. Rather, the fact that
the famine of 1845Á47 happened the way it did and had the consequences it had has
everything to do with the colonial power’s management of the Irish economy and
Irish agriculture and with the patterns of land ownership and land use that had
developed in the aftermath of the plantations. The number of Irish speakers had
dropped by half, to 23 per cent, by the time of the 1851 Census, and continued a
steady decline reaching a low point in 1911. Meanwhile, the number of Irish-speaking
monoglots had fallen to less than 0.5% of the population (Hughes, 2001, p. 115).
According to this scheme, the story of the loss of the language is part and parcel of
the story of oppression by Britain, and so independence from Britain would mean
recovery from that oppression and, necessarily, the restoration of the language. The
nineteenth century rhetoric of nationhood found a ready audience in Ireland and with
the claim that Ireland was indeed a nation came the claim that it needed a distinctive
national language.2 The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 with the aim of preserving
the Irish language, extending its use as a spoken tongue, and encouraging the study of
existing Irish language literature. Here, at last, a group was working to reverse the
trend of 800*or perhaps only 320*years. Now, the hope was the decline would be
reversed and, with the founding of the Irish Free State in 1921, the weight of
oppression would be thrown off and the independent country could use its powers to
accomplish the restoration of what was, after all, Ireland’s own language.
The statistics do show an improvement. In 1926 19 per cent of the population
described itself as Irish-speaking, and the figures rose*23 per cent in 1936, 28 per
cent in 1971, all the way up to 32 per cent in 1981 (Hughes, 2001, p. 111). There is
now a national radio and a television station devoted to Irish-language programming;
school children all learn Irish (sometimes in the very schools where their great-
grandparents were punished for speaking Irish); government documents are typically
available in both languages. This is what the restorers would have hoped for. Yet these

7. Social Identities 313
institutions are still, in the early twenty-first century, signs of a lack of anything
approaching complete restoration rather than an indication of its accomplishment.
Few people would use the language to buy a loaf of bread. There exists a lively Irish-
language poetry and literature scene, and the classics of the literary tradition are still
studied, but the language has not become the first language of the population.
Of course the details of the national myth that are captured in MacLise’s painting
and that fuel disappointment in the project of restoration*that the island of Ireland,
prior to 1169, was populated by racially, culturally and linguistically uncontaminated
Celts, noble and handsome people*were false. Pre-Norman Ireland may have been
Irish-speaking, but the language most probably existed in several distinct dialects,
given the division of the country into as many as 150 petty kingdoms; it was hardly a
land of peace and prosperity, given the endless wars between rival chieftains in the
absence of a strong central power; the people of Ireland were no pure Celtic race
(whatever that would be) given that they had recently absorbed a population of
Viking invaders-turned-settlers as the latest in a long series of migrants. Yet all of this
is mere detail compared with the more important fact that the myth provided a way
to elide the centuries (whether eight or three) of colonisation at a moment when
those who were fighting for independence and those who were struggling to restore
the language had fixed their attention on the strength in the muscles of MacLise’s
Gaels and not on their reduction to frustration and impotence.
How many would now acknowledge cherishing precisely this founding myth,
outside the most deeply traumatised sectors of the nationalist/paramilitary commu-
nity in Northern Ireland and the most sentimental Irish-American groups? Not many,
but it is the myth upon which, as a schoolchild, my conception of Irish-ness was
founded, which is also to say that it provided the context in which I learned the Irish
´
language. In 1965, Sean de Freine, chief executive of the government Bord na Gaeilge
[Irish Language Authority] wrote:
to regard [the arrival of the first Normans in Co. Wexford in 1169] as the beginning
of Ireland’s oppression and to bewail the bliss of preceding years ‘’ere Norman foot
had dared pollute her independent shore’ is fanciful in the extreme. The arrival of
´
the Normans was not a tragedy. (de Freine, 1965, p. 20)
Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon family trips to the South Wexford coast in the
mid-70s, we would stop at the site of the Norman landing and as we children ran to
the beach or peered over the cliffs, some adult would invariably declare:
’Twas on the head at Baginbun
That Ireland’s history was lost and won.
In school, our classes would often begin with a prayer for the latest victims of violence
in Northern Ireland, and would continue, in the early years, with legends of
´
Cuchulainn and Fionn and the Red Branch Knights. Later, legends gave way to a no
less colourful (hi)stories of rebellions and risings against the English, each one more

8. 314 A. O’Byrne
or less tragic, each one with its romantic heroes, each one a failure thanks to the
perfidity of some traitor. In secondary school we studied James Clarance Mangan’s
‘Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century’ (1843) with no historical or ironic
distance. It’s first and last stanzas are indicative:
I walked entranced
Through a land of Morn;
The sun, with wondrous excess of light,
Shone down and glanced
Over seas of corn
And lustrous gardens aleft and right.
Even in the clime
Of resplendent Spain,
Beams no such sun upon such a land;
But it was the time,
’Twas in the reign,
Of Cathal Mor of the Wine-red Hand.
...
I again walked forth;
But lo! the sky
Showed fleckt with blood, and an alien sun
Glared from the north,
And there stood on high,
Amid his shorn beams, a skeleton!
It was by the stream
Of the castled Maine,
One Autumn eve, in the Teuton’s land,
That I dreamed this dream
Of the time and reign
Of Cathal Mor of the Wine-red Hand!
We approached the text as a testimony to the cultural destruction of the Norman
invasion rather than as an artifact of nineteenth century nationalism. We may as well
have been living in 1843.
All of which is to say that the gap between the reflections of a chief executive of a
government authority and the teachers and pupils of a small town convent school was
great.
Thus the spectre of the pre-Norman Celtic Ireland continues to haunt national
debates and discussions of the Irish language, allowing participants to forget that
Irish history has long been a story of invasion (of and by the Irish) and absorption of
those invaders; that even those first Norman invaders quickly became native; that the
oppressing power of the fourteenth century was vastly different from the power that
enforced the penal laws into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The question
then becomes: to what extent were those who envisioned a joyful and enthusiastic
restoration of the Irish language and those who remain disappointed that this has not
taken place prey to the myth of the pre-Norman paradise and of the pure language

9. Social Identities 315
that never existed? To what degree is this myth still in place as the place-holder for an
alienation overcome?
Prior-to-First-Language
After all, how can a language be pure? Only as the prior-to-first language that is the
manifestation of a desire. Derrida writes:
Invented for the genealogy of what did not happen and whose event will have been
absent, leaving only negative traces of itself in what makes history, such a prior to
the first language does not exist. It is not even a preface, a ‘foreward’, or some lost
language of origin. It can only be a target language or, rather, a future language, a
promised sentence, a language of the other, once again, but entirely other than the
language of the master or colonist, even though, between them, the two may
sometimes show so many unsettling resemblances maintained in secret or held in
reserve. (Derrida, 1998, p. 60)
Ireland in the late nineteenth century had not evolved into a triumphant, noble,
Celtic, Irish-speaking society. It had not successfully resisted the imperial power of
´
England. It had not maintained the bards and the filı. It had not*self-assured,
independent and prosperous*spared its people suffering and hunger. Such a state of
affairs cannot go un-accounted for, and the accounting required the construction of
an imagined prior-to-domination way of being that could be re-established and a
prior-to-first language that could be restored. It was a desire, as Derrida writes:
to reconstruct, to restore, but it was really a desire to invent a first language that would
be, rather, a prior-to-the-first language that would translate that memory . . . the
memory of what, precisely, did not take place. (Derrida, 1998, p. 61)
The language that is the first official language of Ireland today is certainly an
invented language. When the revival movement started there were two options open
to it: to attempt to revive the language of Classical Ireland available through the rich
literature that survived from that time, or to restore/preserve the ‘language of the
people’ that survived in a few remote areas of the Western Seaboard. The choice was
quickly made in favour of the latter, but this ushered in a new set of issues: which
‘language of the people’, or the language of which people? The Irish language had
developed into three or four distinct dialects and while each had its partisans
claiming that Donegal Irish was most accurate, or Munster Irish was most musical, or
Connaught Irish had the most compelling contemporary literature, no one dialect,
that is, no one ‘natural’ language, won out. In addition, many of the native speakers
were extremely poor, eking out a subsistence existence on the Aran or the Blasket
Islands and illiterate in Irish and English. If Irish was to be a national language, Irish
speakers at least had to be mutually comprehensible, and the written language had to
be standardised. When, after years of research and work by government linguists,
´ ´n ´il
Gramadach na Gaeilge agus Litriu na Gaeilge: an Caighdea Oifigiu [Grammar and

10. 316 A. O’Byrne
Orthography of Irish: the Official Standard], was published in 1958, the invention had
taken place and, with the introduction of the Official Standard into the schools in
1963, the place of the official version of the language in the symbolic order was
secured. Now at last the national language was (once again) one, and national unity
in this one area was restored/produced.
The fantasy that drove the restoration was the fantasy of the mother tongue: like the
fantasy (or the nightmare) of a home in the womb, the mother tongue is that utopia,
that no-place we dream of where we would be quite at home. Of course such a return is
impossible. We never are and never will be at home, and having or, more accurately, not
having a lost mother tongue means having a category under which to classify one’s
homesickness, and a distinct character to give that home. Instead of formless, universal,
existential angst one has national, post-colonial, Irish longing. The resuscitation of the
Irish language would be the homecoming, one that would never be accomplished.
Under colonisation, the Irish-speaking population suffered alienation from its
language; the dis-alienation promised by independence and restoration was a second
alienation as the now English-speaking population had Irish legislated into the life of
the new state. As Derrida writes, the prior-to-first language is always in danger of
‘becoming or wanting to be another language of the master’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 62),
and this was a process formulated, proposed and enforced by new masters. In
´
February 1922, two months after the signing of the Treaty, Dail Eireann granted Irish
a special place in the school curriculum; steps were taken to expand the use of the
language in the work of the Post Office; in 1923 it became a requirement that civil
servants pass an Irish exam; in the same year, births, deaths and marriages were to
begin to be recorded in Irish alone; in 1928 a private member’s bill was passed by Dail ´
Eireann making the language a requirement for practising law. From 1927, Irish had
to be taught at all recognised secondary schools; in 1932 it became a compulsory
subject for all students; in 1933 it was made a requirement for the School Leaving
Certificate. Some time later, in 1943, an Irish exam was made compulsory for
graduation from primary school. That is to say, the new government had taken it
upon itself to change the character of the population. The Minister of Education,
Eoin Mac Neill, noted confidently in a memo of April 1924 that ‘the ministry of
education can and will Gaelicise the young people up to eighteen’ and went on to
appeal to the other ministries for support in ‘keeping them Gaelicised when they
´ ´
leave the schools’ (O Huallachain, 1994, p. 87).
Not all elements of the new ruling elite were equally persuaded. In the debate over
the law that all births, deaths and marriages be registered in Irish, Countess
Markiewitz remarked: ‘It is not possible to revive Irish by law . . . compulsion is no
´ ´ ´
good’ (O Huallachain, 1994, p. 85). Gavin Duffy, speaking in the same Dail debate,
echoed her view:
It is unfair, in the present state of Ireland, to compel numbers of people who have
not our view to accept our Gaelic ideals. This proposal would be an oppressive one,
´ ´
and would be unfair to the majority of our countrymen. (O Huallachain, 1994,
p. 85)

11. Social Identities 317
Michael Collins also weighed in:
The proposal reminds me of the old GAA [Gaelic Athletic Association] rule that
Irish be spoken as much as possible, and that after 1912 nothing but Irish be used
on the playing field. I believe that it is rather an unwise thing to put a definite date
´ ´
to a matter like this. (O Huallachain, 1994, p. 85)
Nevertheless, the law making this use of Irish compulsory after 1 July 1923 was passed
unanimously. Yet even Mac Neill would write in 1924:
[P]urely bureaucratic and official favouring of Irish, in the absence of a strongly
favourable public attitude would lead to no desirable result, nothing more than
barren conformity . . . The truth is that a great deal is being done officially and
governmentally in favour of Irish, [but] very little and much less than in the past is
´ ´
being done socially. (O Huallachain, 1994, p. 88)
´
Sean de Freine remarks that a crucial element of the failure of Irish in the schools
to work the miracle of mass Gaelicisation*apart from the early lack of qualified
teachers and antiquated teaching methods, both substantially remedied by the time of
my schooldays*was the absence of an appreciation that what was under way was a
form of social change. Schoolchildren were expected to respond to ‘rather vague
exhortations’ from those who felt that restoration of the language was simply ‘right’,
people who unquestioningly accepted the dogma that a special language was
´ ´
necessary for nationality (de Freine, 1965, pp. 117Á18). What, then, were De Freine’s
own reasons for promoting the Irish language? In The Great Silence he could offer no
more than this:
Irish nationality can be justified on the grounds that the Irish people have certain
basic values and principles which are worth preserving . . . Since there is no reason
for believing that the Irish are fundamentally different from the rest of the human
race, there is no reason for believing that when it comes to preserving and
developing their ideals and values, they can do without the cultural and
institutional means [e.g., a distinctive language] which have been found to be
´
indispensable for others (de Freine, 1965, p. 114)
Exhortations on the basis of ‘certain basic values’ are still hopelessly vague and, for
schoolchildren, far less appealing than the stories of Celtic knights and queens and
doomed rebels. We did not appreciate that our Irish classes were part of a campaign
of social change. We were living in a protracted nineteenth century, since those classes
made sense to us only in terms of a lost culture yet to be restored, the continuation of
a Celtic way of life cruelly interrupted by centuries of colonisation.
Jealous Rage of Language Appropriation
A reading such as this, one that concentrates attention on the pre- and post-colonial,
effectively circumvents the experience of colonisation. According to this reading,
there are reasons why the language shrank and threatened to die, but they are

12. 318 A. O’Byrne
ultimately less important than the restoration of a pre-colonial language. In contrast,
approaching the movement to restore Irish using the thought of a rage of language
appropriation focuses attention keenly on the functioning of that experience. It must
begin with the particular form of colonial alienation described by Edouard Glissant in
Poetique de la relation as the ‘non-mastery . . . of an appropriated language’ (Derrida,
1998, p. 23). For those natives who have a first language distinct from the language of
their colonial masters, to be colonised means to live in a situation dominated by and
through and in a language which will never be their own, and in which they cannot
imagine achieving mastery. Learning the coloniser’s language is not enough since the
effect is not lessened when the native no longer speaks the native language as his
native language, that is, when the native’s first language is the colonial language. (This
was true of the vast majority of Ireland’s population in the years immediately before
independence.) The experience of non-mastery persists, supported by the operation
of shibboleths of dialect and accent, and the colonised native’s experience is ever more
an experience of alienation.
Add to this the fact that Irish was helped in the last stages of its rapid decline by an
active repudiation of the language by native speakers. Parents would punish their
children for speaking Irish. Children were encouraged to report Irish-speaking among
their friends. It was not uncommon for a child to be made wear a tally stick, a piece of
wood worn on a string around the neck upon which an adult who heard the child
lapse into Irish would make a mark; the child would later be slapped by her parents or
´ ´ ´
teachers, once for every notch on the stick (de Freine, 1965, p. 73). Tomas O Ceallaigh
described the experience of the language shift in the rural areas of Sligo and
Roscommon. The grandparents knew scarcely any English; the parents acquired a
tolerable command of the language in school:
When these people married they taught their children not the old speech that was
honey on their lips, but the English which with so much pain they had acquired.
They had been brought up in the belief that English was the top-notch of
respectability, the key that opened Sesame . . . Irish was to their children an esoteric
speech employed by their elders to express things not meant for their ears. (O ´
Ceallaigh, 1911, quoted by de Fre ´ ine, 1965, p. 74)
As a result, the English spoken in Ireland retains the cadence and often the syntax of
Irish. (Note, for example, the tendency of speakers of Hiberno-English to avoid using
‘Yes’ and ‘No’ which have no direct translations in Irish, e.g., ‘Will you go to the
library today?’ ‘I will.’) So, while people alienated themselves from the Irish language
in order to gain, through their own efforts, a language which might grant access to
prosperity or a modicum of power, they would discover that, as speakers of a rich,
colourful, weird English, they remained alienated from the language of their colonial
masters.
This trajectory of alienation is inevitably launched from of an understanding of the
master as the master of the language, and an envy of that privilege. The mistake, as
Derrida points out, is that:

13. Social Identities 319
contrary to what one is often most tempted to believe, the master is nothing. And
he does not have exclusive possession of anything. Because the master does not
possess exclusively, and naturally, what he calls his language, because, whatever he
wants or does, he cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are
natural, national, congenital or ontological, with it, he can [only] . . . pretend
historically . . . to appropriate it in order to impose it as ‘his own’. That is his belief;
he wishes to make others share it through the use of force or cunning; he wants to
make others believe it as they do a miracle, through rhetoric, the school, or the
army. (Derrida, 1998, p. 23)
Yet, according to Derrida, this is only the first trick. Independence is the second.
It will provide freedom from the first while confirming a heritage by internalizing
it, by reappropriating it *but only up to a certain point, for, as my hypothesis
shows, there is never any such thing as absolute appropriation or reappropriation.
Because there is no natural property of language, language gives rise only to
appropriative madness, to jealousy without appropriation. (Derrida, 1998, p. 24)
Those who hoped (and hope) for a Gaelic revival certainly experienced this jealous
rage of appropriation. Britain had its language, but Ireland had been robbed of its
Irish language or, in Derrida’s terms, Britain’s violence and cunning had succeeded in
persuading an element of its Irish subjects that English did belong to the British and
would always be an alien tongue in the mouth of a mere Irishman, an epithet that
would be translated to ‘true Irishman’ by the revivalists. The very insistence that there
cannot be a country without its distinctive language is a symptom of the madness of
that appropriation. So too is the fetish of language purity, still played out in the
Belfast Gaeltacht. While Irish speakers in the gaeltachts of Donegal or Kerry (that is,
of the Irish Republic) are quite happy to refer to a bicycle, car and computer as
´
bısical, carr agus compu´tear, the speakers of the Belfast Gaeltacht (at the embattled
centre of the Troubles in Northern Ireland) insist instead on the ‘properly’ Irish words
´n ´
rothar, gluaistea agus rıomhaire. The problem is in mistaking colonial domination
for ownership of a language, and mistaking the alienation experienced in the loss of a
language under colonisation for an ailment that can be cured by the re-appropriation
of that language or, indeed, by the appropriation of the colonial language.
Yet it would be a mistake to ignore phenomena that suggest that this point is
already taken, even if only partly and in certain quarters. While there is still dismissal
to be discerned in the insistence that authors such as Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Heaney
be described as Anglo-Irish rather than Irish writers, and there are still those who
claim without irony that the Irish language must resist contamination, as well as
those*and they must be included in this camp*who insist that the language is
dead and gone, Irish does manage to survive in many and various hybrid and
variegated ways. For instance, one of the earliest innovations of the Irish language
television station was a soap opera where characters lapsed contentedly between Irish
and English much as Indian families lapse between Indian languages and English. A
shift in emphasis in the primary school history curriculum has students focus on

14. 320 A. O’Byrne
local history and has provided the forum for a fresh understanding of Irish and
Anglicised-Irish place names.3 The old songs are still sung, but so too are new
compositions by Michael McGlynn (founder of the singing group, Anuna), ´
´
Connemara singer and songwriter Sean Monaghan and very many others.
Such phenomena are testimony to the realization that language is never a matter of
propriety and the alienation that we experience as speakers of language is the
alienation constitutive of our being. However understandable as a response to the
dislocations of power and the trauma of colonisation, no rage of language
appropriation will be its cure.
Antinomy of Fragmentation and Centralization
Yet the rage is still in us. There is an anxiety that is still occasioned in Ireland by that
´ ´
rallying cry of the nineteenth century nationalists*‘Nı tır gan teanga’*even as it is
joined by another anxiety occasioned by a different cry*‘One Europe’. Here is the
antinomy of fragmentation and centralization, made concrete as a diminution of
national power in the face of regionalism on the one hand and ever greater
concentration of power in the governing structures of the European Union on the
other. In cultural terms, it is, on the one hand, the fear that Europe’s cultures will
disperse ‘in a dust of provinces, a multiplicity of enclaved idioms or jealous,
untranslatable little nationalisms’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 41) and, on the other, a response
to the threat (or is it the accomplished reality?) of a single, perhaps virtual, cultural
capital imposing uniformity. This last is also the threat of capital to culture, since
uniformity is imposed in the name of efficiency and profitability.
It is a familiar conflict, one identified with particular acuity in Derrida’s The Other
´
Heading [L’Autre Cap] from 1992. Here he uses Valery’s geographical/historical/
cultural description of Europe as a cap, a cape or headland jutting out from Asia into
the Atlantic Ocean, emerging from the old culture of Asia, reaching towards the new
one of the Americas. What he does not consider is what this might mean for these
Atlantic islands, fragments flung off from the bulk of the continent, European but
marginal, though that marginality and that European-ness is experienced very
differently in Ireland and Britain. Ireland, westerly, tiny and long-colonised takes its
marginal status for granted and is occasionally shocked to find itself in the midst of
European integration. (This might help explain the unexpected defeat of the Irish
national referendum to ratify the Nice Treaty in 2001; the treaty paved the way for the
entry of several Eastern European countries into the Union, changed the decision-
making process in the European Commission and was understood as posing a threat
to Ireland’s military neutrality. The referendum was held a second time, and the
amendment to the constitution was passed.) Britain, meanwhile, conceives itself as
the centre, though it is not now clear what it can be the centre of. An empire that no
longer exists? A largely ceremonial Commonwealth? The Eastern pole of a North
Atlantic alliance, thanks to the ‘special relationship’ with the United States? How does
Derrida’s antinomy look from Ireland, the island off the island off the headland that is

15. Social Identities 321
the European continent? How does the antinomy help us think about native and
national languages? How does it help us read a national language movement that, in
the course of revival, found its language and literature ‘of the people’ on the island of
Ireland’s own most westerly islands?
The effort to establish Irish as Ireland’s national language has involved its share of
petty nationalism and parochialism, for example, the resistance to words borrowed
from or shared with English or, internally, the squabbles between the advocates of the
various regional dialects of Irish. Yet, at the same time, links to broader European
culture were forged and strengthened. One early claim to hegemony on the part of the
Munster dialect was the popularity of Se ´adna, a novel by a native speaker that was a
retelling not of an ancient Irish myth, but of the Faust story. Some of the earliest
books to be published in Irish were translations of The Aeneid and The Odyssey. That
is to say, the revivalists could look outward more readily if their gaze could fall not on
Britain but on the continent of Europe.
In fact, Ireland’s ties to the continent are long-standing and historically significant.
In the sixteenth century the people of Connemara, isolated by land from the
commercial centres in the east of the country, conducted busy trade by sea with
France and Spain. When the Earls fled in 1606, they dispersed to royal courts in
Belgium, Spain and Rome. A leader in the seventeenth century wars against William
of Orange was France’s St Ruth. When Catholicism was most severely repressed under
the Penal Laws in the eighteenth century, Irish priests were educated in Salamanca
and Rome. The problem in independent Ireland seems to have been in fitting those
ancient bonds into an historical narrative that was structured around the fiction of
800 years of more or less single-handed struggle against the British. The story I
received in school was that of a basic Irish sensibility that confronted an alien English
way of being. We had lessons on European history, but under another heading [un
autre cap], and the links were never made: as a result it could come as a surprise to
me later to grasp that while Catholics were persecuted in Ireland, they were also
persecuted in England, and were, for their own part, engaged in persecuting
Protestants in France. We learned about the French Revolution and the rights of man,
and also about the French forces sent to aid the Irish rebellions planned in the late
1790s, but it was never quite clear why the French should have been so interested in a
minor Irish skirmish.
The fault lay in the conflation of Gaelicism and an eerie nativism. The only way to
authentic existence for a real Irishman or woman was through adherence to
autochtonous ways and values and language and, finally, to Roman Catholicism. Yet
alongside the nativist strain or revivalism there had also run an outward-looking
progressive strain. In a 1920 essay entitled ‘An tSaorise/Sglabhuiocht Aigne in Eirinn’
[Intellectual Freedom/Slavery in Ireland], Michael Mac Liammoir, a cosmopolitan
young man who would go on to become the grand master of Irish theatre, wrote that
art and literature must be given the freedom in independent Ireland that they have in
France. Irish artists must not hesitate for ‘fear of expressing one thing or another
because ‘‘it isn’t Gaelic’’’ (O’Leary, 1994, pp. 469Á470). A Capuchin priest replied in a

16. 322 A. O’Byrne
letter to the same publication: ‘That damned expression ‘‘art for arts sake’’ should
never be heard in Ireland. The law of God does not give unrestricted freedom to the
artist’ (O’Leary, 1994, p. 70). At the same time, Galway Irish language short story
´
writer Padraic O Conaire was encouraging his fellow writers to look to other
languages, and cited as his own inspiration Chekov, Turgenev and Thoreau. Articles
in Irish appeared dealing with ‘foreign’ figures from Plato to Alfred de Musset. Yet
however lively the debates might have been on the nature of the Gael conducted in
intellectual journals at the time of independence, the nativists won with the result
that the version of Irishness received by us schoolchildren up through the 1970s was
univocally nativist.
Conclusion
Today, in Europe, Irish joins many other minority languages granted particular
recognition but rarely used. Meanwhile, there is more interest than ever in foreign
language learning in Ireland, with Japanese, Polish and several others now added to
the secondary school curriculum. There are Irish language learning groups in Madrid
´
and Berlin. In Ireland, as RTE shifts its English-language radio stations to ever more
anodyne and mainstream programming, its Irish-language station becomes a refuge
for anyone trying to escape the onslaught of global blandness. Letting our
imaginations run, and in the most hopeful direction, we can look forward to an
Ireland and a Europe where no-one is monoglot; where we will each speak English*
for good or ill our lingua franca* and our native tongue, or, if English is already
native to us, we will acquire another language not least for the sake of the experience
of alienation that that particular experience brings. The experience of coming to a
language*whether native, national or foreign*as a second language is a particular
experience of an alienation that is universal.
We may already know that each identity is a split identity and that each culture is
non-identical to itself. Yet how anyone*any one*experiences split and non-
identity is determined by a very peculiar, local nexus. In a Viking town, 800 years
since Norman settlement, after centuries of British colonization and in the course of
years of an education embued with a nineteenth century Irish nationalism that*in
´
its enthusiasm for both tır and teanga *struggled to emphasise the significance of a
nation’s losing its tongue without taking to heart the humiliation that such a loss
involves, I learned a language that should have been native, that was certainly
national, but to me would always also be strange.
Notes
[1] On the phenomenon of the colonial language *English in particular *becoming local, see
Salman Rushdie, 2002, pp. 267 Á69. See also Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1993.
[2] This is intimately bound up with the question of whether the nation preceded the
nationalism or vice versa. Adrian Hastings (1997) argues that the nationalism became
necessary to defend the nation (in relation to Ireland see pp. 80 Á86) against the contrary

17. Social Identities 323
and dominant view that nationalism created nations in the nineteenth century. For succinct
account of this view, see Anderson (1991), Gellner (1983) and Hobsbawm (1990).
[3] See Brian Friel’s (1981) landmark play on colonisation and the translation of placenames. See
´ ´
also Tomas O hAodha (2005). This small book was sponsored by the Irish language
organisation Conradh na Gaeilge in an effort to help property developers in Ireland
understand the names of the localities where they build and to resist the temptation to attach
names such as ‘Tuscany Downs’ to their developments.
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