|
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin
|
| Contents: Ideology - The Nation, Ethnicity and Language - Language Policy 1893-1945 - Language Policy 1946-2000 - Progressive Politics. |
| Peter Lang Publishing Group Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2006. 345 pp. |
| ISBN 3-03910-171-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6981-5 pb. |
Language from Below is
for sale at
Peter Lang academic publishers
Copies also on sale from author - 30 Euro
Email: caoimhghin@yahoo.com
Foreword to
Language from Below
by
Prof. Michael Cronin
In a lecture delivered before the Cork National society on the 13 May 1892,
William O’Brien MP warned his audience against substituting piety for politics
on the question of language:
It was emigration […] that drove the Irish language out of fashion. Once the
eyes of the Irish peasants were directed to a career in the golden
English-speaking continents beyond the setting sun, their own instincts of
self-preservation, even more than the exhortation of those responsible for the
future, pointed to the English language as no less essential than a ship to sail
in and passage ticket to enable them to embark on it, as a passport from their
miserable surroundings to lands of plenty and independence beyond the billows.
[1]
Although O’Brien’s prose is replete with the rhetoric of his age and cannot
quite escape the dragnet of Arnoldian sentiment, he is enough of a politician to
know that those who vote with their feet are as eloquent in their own way as
those who gesticulate with their hands. Language may be discussed in texts, but
it survives or perishes in contexts. What those contexts might be and how we
might describe them has generally been left to the linguist as if the proper
business of politicians was to run the world and for the linguists to parse it.
What O’Brien suggested to his Cork audience, however, is that to understand what
happens to a language is to understand what is happening to a society and an
economy and even more importantly, what is happening ‘beyond the billows’.
In that wider world which is the setting for Irish linguistic fortunes, there
are not only ‘lands of plenty and independence’ but ‘miserable surroundings’
that have brought other language communities to their knees. That misery and
plenty often share the same space is borne out by the catastrophic incidence of
language death in such favoured Irish emigrant destinations as Australia and the
United States of America. Yet despite the ample evidence that the Irish are not
alone in their linguistic predicament, there has been a remarkable reluctance
until very recently to see the situation of Irish as ominously routine in its
mistreatment rather than tragically exceptional in its treatment. Caoimhghin Ó
Croidheáin in Language from Below performs a signal service by opening up
debates on Irish to the news from elsewhere. In particular, he interrogates very
fundamental questions relating to ideology, ethnicity and class and brings to
bear the insights of a whole array of thinkers to tease out the issues involved.
The theoretical excavation is all the more necessary in that many debates
conducted around language in Ireland assume that history is more a matter of
opinion than record and that social class is a marketeer’s statistical whim
rather than a ruthlessly enforced aspect of social life. More specifically,
Language from Below, repeatedly shows how language fortunes are bound up
with the political choices and economic positioning of a society. In other
words, language is not only words but is part of or not, as the case might be,
the broader political project in which the society is engaged.
Language from Below is alive to the ironies of a language of the
dispossessed which became the language of possessors while the dispossessed were
encouraged in Seamus Deane’s phrase to stay quaint and stay put. The work
details the manner in which the Free State government and its Fianna Fáil
successors mobilised Irish to copper-fasten the privileges of the Statist middle
class while scrupulously ignoring the more radical political implications of the
restoration of Irish. The situation was not helped by the fact that many
language activists themselves were complicit in this class agenda and were
largely content between dinner dances to pass endless motions in the polite wars
of bureaucratic attrition. As Máirtín Ó Cadhain once observed:
[…] resolutions, delegations and goodwill can no longer billhook their way
through the rank undergrowth of Government subsidiaries, the impenetrable jungle
of semi-Ministries, semi-demi-Ministries, shadow Ministries, state companies,
boards, institutes. [2]
The failure to properly analyze the relation between language politics and power
relations in the society meant that frustrated hectoring rather than direct,
political engagement became the order of the day. It was difficult, in effect,
to look for change if you did not know what needed to be changed. Only when
groups like Misneach and Gluaiseacht Cearta Sibihialta na Gaeltachta
emerged in the 1960s did Irish-language activism finally move from the bar to
the barricade and make the crucial link to political struggles ‘beyond the
billows’. What Language from Below demonstrates, and this is why it is
such an important book in our present age, is the continuing importance of
collective social action. There would be no Irish-language schools, no
Irish-language radio stations, no Irish-language television, no Irish-language
press, if the Irish State had been expected to deliver on any or all of these
things. On the contrary, one of the first, major obstacles systematically
encountered by language activists in all of their campaigns was the obdurate
refusal of the State to take them seriously or to make concessions. It was the
concerted, continuous actions of groups of politically aware activists that
eventually ensured that change came about and that initiatives bore fruit. In
this respect, their actions challenge the more general political torpor of late
modernity with its general suspicion of the value of political solidarity for
social change. It was people acting together taking legal and political risks
(change almost invariably involved breaking the law which in itself says much
about the nature of our laws) that made things happen not polite petitions to
indifferent functionaries. Paradoxically, as Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin
demonstrates, it was by moving away from traditional cultural nationalism that
activists got the State to take part of its avowedly nationalist project
seriously. Rather than simply invoking the house gods of Faith and Fatherland,
the placing of Irish within a global rights dis-course shifted the ground of
argument and wrong footed the doughty warriors of pluralism (which came to mean
everything except Irish).
Commenting on the great upsurge in critical thinking in the 1960s and 1970s,
Terry Eagleton claims that, ‘it seems fair to say that much of the new
cultural theory was born out of an extraordinarily creative dialogue with
Marxism.’ [3] The difficulty is the origins of the dialogue are more often
than not forgotten and ‘culture’ itself, as Eagleton points out, becomes a
substitute for and not a way to explain politics. Language from Below is
therefore refreshingly new and innovative in its re-opening of that dialogue
with Marxist critical writings on language and society. The critical
conversation is all the more important in that the formidable conservatism of
the academy in post-independence Ireland meant that even when the dialogue was
taking place elsewhere, Ireland remained largely silent or contented itself with
philological musings on the copiousness of the copula. A conservative distaste
for theory (other than its own, of course) can be matched by a radical distrust
of theory. Too often, in the Irish-language movement and elsewhere in Irish
civil society, a kind of desperate sloganeering has seduced progressive elements
as if shallow phrases (‘No Blood for Oil’/Ní Tír gan Teanga) could ever become a
substitute for deep thought.
Language from Below is precisely the kind of engaged and engaging
analysis which is necessary if Irish is to play a central role in transformative
and socially advanced politics in Ireland. Unless there is sustained attention
given to the basic concepts that inform political action in the area of
language, then we are condemned to the inarticulacy of the rant or the tragedy
of unwanted outcomes. One outcome, which is generally given rather than desired,
is the post-colonial condition itself. However, as Máirín Nic Eoin has pointed
out, post-colonial criticism has often been loath to address questions of
language except in the most general of terms and in the case of Ireland with one
or two honourable exceptions usually comes to bury Irish rather than to praise
it. In describing the findings of her research, Nic Eoin states:
Féachfar ar an aitheantas an-teoranta a thugann léann idirnáisiúnta an
iarchoilíneachais do thábhacht teangacha dúchais ar nós na Gaeilge agus
scrúdófar easnamh nó ionad fíor-imeallach na Gaeilge i gcuid na hÉireann de
léann an iarchoilíneachais.
[We will
examine the very limited attention paid by international postcolonial studies to
the importance of native languages like Irish and we will examine the absence or
the very marginal position of Irish in the Irish branch of postcolonial studies
(translation).][4]
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is particularly aware of the dangers of a body of
thought which can end up marginalising the very object of its analysis. He draws
parallels with the work of many other writers and thinkers from post-colonial
societies in his bid to think through the implications of colonial influences on
attitudes to language in Ireland and language is, of course, central to how he
conceives of Irish culture, society and economy. There is no sense in which he
sees himself as primarily an Undertaker with Attitude, content to do the decent
thing as Irish is dispatched to the graveyard of the nineteenth century and
Anglophone critics are allowed to enjoy the Gaelic Wake unhindered by anything
as untoward as a living language.
When Herodotus of Halicarnassus told his readers (or rather his listeners) what
was the purpose of his Histories, he said that it was so that, ‘human
achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds –
some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory;
and especially to show why two peoples fought each other.’ [5] In writing
the history of language restoration from a broadly sympathetic perspective, the
tendency can be to dwell on ‘great and marvellous deeds’ and explain away all
language conflict in terms of ‘why two peoples fought each other’ (Outing the
Brits). Neither the obituary mode nor the pieties of propaganda do much to
advance our understanding of how language battles have been fought in Ireland
and more importantly how the internal class dynamic within Irish society itself
in the twentieth century has affected attitudes towards language and policies
designed to promote or further its use in society. To this end, the chapters
devoted to the history of language policy are invaluable in offering the reader
a theoretically informed and politically astute reading of the various forces
which combined to effect changes in public policy. Not only do these chapters
properly contextualise what has happened to date in language politics in Ireland
but they also provide a highly useful framework for any future thinking about
language planning and language in society on the island.
In opening up the language situation in Ireland to theoretical speculation from
elsewhere, Language from Below shows how elsewhere has much to learn from
the experience, for better and for ill, of the Irish. As the world faces into
the prospect of linguacide on an unprecedented scale, the local lessons of Irish
have global significance. As more and more languages are forced into extinction
or are increasingly minoritized by a small clutch of major languages, then how
societies or governments or communities try to deal with these pressures is of
importance to every inhabitant on the planet who sees language as an inalienable
right rather than as an optional extra. The fact that the major language Irish
has to contend with is English further adds to the interest of the specific
linguistic situation as English features prominently in fears about the future
cultural and linguistic diversity of the globe. Analyses that marry detailed
theoretical reflection with extended considerations of actual historical and
current practice are, therefore, particularly helpful in exploring how we might
best ensure that peoples everywhere are allowed to speak their difference.
Our century has started more in terror than in triumph. The ruins of the Berlin
Wall were a cause for celebration, the ruins of the Twin Towers and Fallujah a
reason for despair. The planet continues to go deeper and deeper into ecological
debt. It is thus easy to become despondent in the context of the brutal
authoritarianism of the market and the criminalisation of all dissent but
Language from Below is above all to do with change and possibility. It is a
book which demonstrates how solidarity still matters and how ultimately Babel’s
failure is humanity’s greatest achievement.
Professor Michael Cronin
Director, Centre for Translation and Textual Studies,
Dublin City University
Notes:
[1] William O’Brien, ‘The Influence of the Irish Language’, Irish Ideas (London:
Longman, Green and Co., 1893), p. 65.
[2] Máirtín Ó Cadhain, ‘Irish Above Politics’, Gaelic Weekly, 7 March
1964, p. 2.
[3] Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 35.
[4] Máirín Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus
Nualitríocht na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005), p. 18.
[5] Herodotus, The
Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (London: Penguin, 1996).