Teaching Irish to the Irish. Ulick Bourke’s Easy Lessons in Irish.
About a mile from here, at the Koorie Heritage Centre, the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages has a project to preserve and promote what remains of the indigenous languages of Victoria. They are responding to this situation:
‘Many Australian Indigenous languages have declined to a critical state. More than three quarters of the original Australian languages have already been lost, and almost all of remaining languages are extremely threatened.” (VACL leaflet)
I would like to dedicate this paper to the people working on this project, and wish them success. Their ancestors have been in this land for a long time.
Their situation recalls Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century, where a few people strove to preserve and promote Irish as a language with a distinguished past and with the potential for a revival as a living language. Irish, despite many pressures against its survival, including the education system and the recent Great Famine, was still a living spoken language for many people. But written Gaelic was another matter, as was any kind of Gaelic for many of even the moderately educated classes, especially in the east.
Who was concerned about this and why? Antiquarians looked to the past, but as Ulick Bourke wrily remarked about what was available in the Catholic University, ‘antiquities are not language, and teaching antiquities is not teaching Irish.’ (Quoted in Concannon, p. 412) Bourke commented later on his own experience as a student at Maynooth College where he went in 1849, “In Maynooth, not one student out of a hundred learns, during his course, to spell, to speak, and to write Irish, as a language. There is an Irish class, but the language of the Gael is treated as the language of the Hebrew race, as something foreign, not the language of thought of the country, of life, of business.’ (Quoted in Concannon, p. 411). He dealt with this by producing his own ‘College Irish Grammar’ for use there and at the Catholic University.
Then there were those who could be called ‘nationalist’, but by no means all of them. Charles Gavan Duffy, key figure in The Nation, wrote in the Introduction to his collection of English language works, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland (Dublin, 1845): ‘But it was during the last fifty years that the most valuable and characteristic contributions have been made to our native ballads. Till then the genius of the country had scarcely learned to use the English language for its highest necessities. The majority of the country spoke their native tongue exclusively. The upper classes, connected with them by the ties of kindred, patriotism, or religion, cultivated it with the same care bestowed upon English. The legends and songs of the/ country were scarcely known in any but their native dress; and many of the middle classes who used English in intercourse or business, prayed, sang, and recited the traditions of the land in their dear native tongue. We know many families where this custom prevails among the elder branches to this hour. Unfortunately the youth are letting slip one of the proudest and tenderest ties that bound our people to their country.’
Romantic bourgeois nationalism perhaps, from a man who clearly saw English as the language for the present and future of Irish writing, and hardly a ringing endorsement for Irish, but even this degree of interest leads to interesting results 15 years later, when Gavan Duffy had passed on publication of The Nation to A.M. Sullivan and gone to Australia, where he subsequently served as Premier of this state of Victoria. I’ll return to The Nation later.
Who else? For some of the Catholic clergy, Catholicism was bound up with Irish tradition. However, as we have seen, the training of priests in the most important seminary at Maynooth effectively ignored Irish as a living language. There were regional differences of attitude, accentuated by bishops’ policies. MacHale of Tuam, whom I’ll say more about later, spoke Irish and preached in it every Sunday. And among religious orders, the Franciscans seem to have taken a more practical interest in the Irish language. I would also mention Bible translators, mostly evangelicals described rather darkly by Catholics as ‘proselytisers’ and perhaps an incentive for Catholics, notably MacHale, to bring out their own vernacular versions.
And as for the people who used Irish on a daily basis? By and large, these were not the reading classes, although I must put in a word for the smith later in the century who sold a cow so that he could buy a copy of the early Irish Book of the Dun Cow (Ó Lúing, Seán, Celtic Studies in Europe and other essays, p. ?)
**
[SHOW THE BOOK]
A former LaTrobe University colleague, Norman Gardiner, gave me this book in 1997. It once belonged to J.J. O’Brien, and I would be fascinated to know who he was and why he had it. This is the seventh edition, published 1877, of Easy Lessons, or Self-Instruction in Irish by the Rev. Ulick J. Bourke, President of St. Jarlath’s College, Tuam. It was published to remedy the situation described above, and at least until the fourth edition, appears to have had print runs of a thousand. The preface is dated Feast of All Saints, 1859. O’Leary gives 1863 in The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival (p.7) and Legg gives 1867 in her Newspapers and nationalism. The Irish Provincial Press, 1850-1892. Bourke’s Preface to the fourth edition, dated Feast of St. Catherine of Sienna, 1865, says “In five years this little work has gone through three editions.” With that, I’ll accept 1860, the date given in The Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Bourke.
Bourke’s Preface immediately states:
“The following EASY LESSONS were written to satisfy the repeated demands made on THE NATION by the Irish public to supply them with rudimental knowledge in the language of fatherland.
They are now reproduced in a book form, revised and improved by the writer. His only object, first in composing and now in republishing them, has been, to afford those who are mere nurslings in Gaelic the milk of Irish elementary knowledge at once light and nutritive; and to circulate more widely than ever the language of Old Eire.”
Although the preface refers to “the language of old Eire”, the interest is not simply antiquarian. While Bourke is concerned with restoring Irish as a living language, part of his way of promoting it is to remind readers of its history, both as language of a country with a glorious past, and as the language that has a distinguished place in the Indo-European language family.
Again from the Preface to the First edition:
‘Of the six groups which compose the Indo-European family of languages, the Keltic has been proved by J.C. Zeuss, a native of Bavaria, and is now generally admitted to be, the most important as it is the most ancient.’
What is the point of these remarks?
Bourke has a genuine scholarly interest, but he is also countering a view that, in effect, Irish was a low and contemptible language for peasants, servants and fishermen that should be allowed to die out as soon as possible, and which was certainly unworthy of attention by anybody except philologists and eccentric antiquarians.
Bourke is well informed on recent scholarship. Zeuss, though working well outside the distinguished academies, was one of many continental scholars with an interest in Old Irish. According to Seán Ó Luing’s Celtic Studies in Europe (Dublin, 2000), ‘The origins and lineage of Irish remained in darkness until an unknown Bavarian scholar named Johann Kaspar Zeuss tok to examining the earliest written records of the language. These were miniscule glosses written in between the lines of the Latin scriptural or devotional tracts, by way of comment or explanation. They were to be found in the libraries and archives of central Europe, where Irish missionaries had settled in early mediaeval times to establish and promote Christian teaching’ (p.18). Zeuss’s Grammatica Celtica, was published in 1853. To quote Ó Lúing again, ‘In the very first sentence of the book, in the most celebrated statement in the history of comparative philology, the place of Irish as the most westerly of the group of tongues deriving from the ancient language of India is affirmed.’ (p.19)
This was only five years before the first of the Easy Lessons appeared in The Nation. From an Irish speaker’s point of view, it must be a fine blow against the Anglophone scorners of Irish if a German scholar writing in Latin, traditional language of scholars, shows that your language is in fact the most ancient and important of the group that includes the acknowledged marks of highest civilization. Nobody was saying that about English!
Again from the Preface, ‘From the analogies introduced in the LESSONS between the languages of Europe and Gaelic, the lovers of philology will, it is hoped, derive an additional zest to cultivate a knowledge of Irish, the largest and most extended division of the Keltic group; while the mere learner, being amply supplied besides with easy instructive matter, can, without attending to this foreign element, obtain from them sufficient knowledge of the language of the Gael.’
Bourke is writing for speakers and readers of English, the relatively professional classes, some of whom even have the University education that brings comfortable familiarity with the Latin and Greek classics and an interest in the many discussions of related words and the development of meanings which Bourke offers in his vocabularies, and even to appreciate quotations of cognate words in Greek script (sometimes transliterated), and the Hebrew script, usually transliterated. (The use of fonts in four different scripts is an impressive publishing performance by M.H. Gill and Son, too, despite some misprints.
We can guess a little more about the proposed audience when we look at the sentences offered for translation, as in Exercise 35. (The rather quaint English here gives his readers a clue to the Irish structure, and there are brackets to indicate the apt Irish preposition or idioms.)
‘1. Father, have you leisure at present? 2. I have, my son; what thing is desired by thee? 3. I wish that you will treat of geography. 4. Well, as I said, I just wish to treat of it now with you; who else will be along with you? 5. My cousin Patrick and my sister Harriet; they are awaiting (with) us in the study-room. 6. Say (with) to them to come in; I cannot go to them. And now, is it not better for you to get knowledge on this branch (of science) from the teacher than from me? 7. Dear father, we prefer it (it is better for us) from you, because you are so gentle, and so loving in your speaking with us, and you explain everything that is difficult so plainly to us, that we understand every word you say, and your words are a pleasure to us.’
This idealised family situation, complete with a study-room and a father with leisure to teach, indicates a well-established professional household, one where a daughter is also instructed. The father also becomes a mouthpiece for Bourke’s own tendency to share his knowledge, with explanations that echo many similar ones found in the vocabulary lists. Showing that Irish is a perfectly fit medium for such instruction, the basics of a nineteenth-century geography lesson (the regions of the world, the length of meridian lines) are followed by a question directly to Dermot about the Irish names for the cardinal points. He cannot answer, but Harriet comes to the rescue:
‘27. Oh, I know the reason, father…. When the druids were wont, in the olden time, to adore the sun on its rising, they turned their faces to it, and they called therefore the country before them oir, and that to their back iar (behind), that to which the right (deas) hand was turned deas (or right), and to their country on their left (tuath) hand , tuath, north. 29. Indeed, Harriet, you are good.’ And on it goes with more on druids and the different modern ways of describing directions until their personal professor arrives in Sentence 37, allowing father to go and write his letters. (The vocabulary list for this section, characteristically gives even more detailed discussion of the original meanings of the words. Throughout the book, the original meanings of many place names are also discussed in detail.)
In the next exercise, Patrick and George discuss the date and meaning of Easter.
Other conversations discuss moral philosophy and religion. We have conversations with returning travellers. So we learn that the United States is a very fine place, but the Thames is a fetid stream.
Aesop’s Fables figure prominently and near the end comes this striking use of the ‘Classics’:
‘The exercises of these “Easy Lessons” could not have a more elegant nor a more befitting finish than the dialogue (Homer’s Iliad, Book 6 — translated into Irish heroic metre by Dr. MacHale) between Hector and Andromache. The tenderness and pathos which breathe through the original are infused through every line, nay, through every word, of the simple familiar Irish in which it has been rendered by the great prelate poet.’ (p.372).
This praise takes on an interesting edge in the light of Helena Concannon’s sharp comments: ‘Fortunately for John MacHale, when he came to publish his work in Irish, he had his scholarly young kinsman at hand to correct its grammatical and orthographic solecisms.’ (‘Canon Ulick J. Bourke’, p.408)
Gaelic, then, is a fit language for expressing of the very touchstones of established literature, as well as Aesop’s fables, prayers, passages from the Bible (also in MacHale translations), and then the noblest examples of its own literature. There are many selections from Irish Minstrelsy, by Bourke’s old school teacher at Errew, James Hardiman, and from Moore’s Melodies, worked back into contemporary Irish by MacHale (with a little help from his kinsman), even Irish and English versions of ‘The Minstrel Boy’.
Irish is also repeatedly presented as a fit language for prayer and for moral and theological discussion, as many examples show.
With the eyes of a later time, we could regret that these did not include the items like the poems in An Duanaire 1600-1900. Poems of the Dispossessed, but it did take well over a century for other compilers to take these seriously; as for Irish poems from the Great Famine period like Na pratai dubh , let us recall that even much later, academics were slow to acknowledge that anything composed in their lifetime qualified for study.
With all of my stress on Irish as a fit language for the cultured and educated, we might ask whether he writes as though this is the spoken language of many of his fellow Irish? Yes. In the early chapters especially, he gives much attention to explaining pronunciation and is quite matter-of-fact about its regular use. He has frequent references to how something is spoken in different regions, sometimes quietly suggesting a ‘correct’ pronunciation in contrast to how people say some words in certain regions.
His preface defends his time explaining the philosophic principals upon which the Irish language is founded, and he repeatedly takes the trouble to explain why the more puzzling elements are as they are.
All in all, his pedagogic methods are quite impressive, and much more helpful than what I have found in several other books for the teaching of Irish.
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Who was Ulick Bourke? He was born on 29th December, 1829 at Castlebar, Co. Mayo, son of Ulick Bourke and Cecilia Sheridan who was a cousin of John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam. His early education was around Castlebar, including time at the Franciscan’s monastery at Errew, possibly because it belonged to a different branch of the Franciscan family. This does not feature highly in Patrick Conlan’s Franciscan Ireland (Dublin, c.1978), but it fostered Irish, especially through one of Bourke’s teachers, James Hardiman, historian of Galway and editor of Irish Minstrelsy. (Dublin, 1831). Bourke studied for the priesthood, first at St Jarlath’s, Tuam, then at Maynooth and he returned to Tuam for ordination on the feast of the Annunciation, 1858. He was at Tuam, especially as President of St Jarlath’s, later also a canon of the Cathedral at Tuam, until he became a Parish Priest at Kilcolman in Claremorris in 1878.
He might have been glad of this reward for his labours. Working so close to MacHale does not sound easy. Besides the ‘secretarial’ assistance and sorting out his written Irish, he had a seminary to run, teaching to do, and money was short. Tuam Archdiocese was probably not rich. It certainly felt the strain during during the famine period. Helena Concannon quotes Bourke’s memoir, ‘In April 1847, he [the writer] beheld a boy of about nine years reduced to the appearance of a skeleton. He came to the College, Tuam, where the writer was a student, to beg a crust of bread of the ecclesiastical students, who were themselves almost as starved as the poor child. (p.410)
Referring to subsequent years, Concannon comments “Saddening, too, to remember with what small means he accomplished his work. A passage in the Introduction to Bishop Gallagher’s Sermons has a poignant autobiographical interest, as showing the beggarly salary out of which he had to finance the publication of most of his books.’ (p.406). Bourke in fact published a range of works, some devotional, some philological, and worked on an unpublished Dictionary of the Irish Language.
Among others, Marie-Louse Legg, in her Newspapers and Nationalism, The Irish provincial press, 1850-1892, presents Bourke as an important figure in the local press. He was a frequent contributor of columns on Irish history and language to the Tuam News, which also took a lively interest in political matters. His influence was more than local: Philip O’Leary (The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, p.7) describes Bourke as a founder of the Tuam News and Western Advertiser, whose ‘Gaelic Department’ was the most important forum for new writing in Irish in the 1870s.’
Michael Everson’s History and Classification of Gaelic Type-faces (web-site) lists Ulick Bourke as a probable designer of a Romano-Celtic font.
Bourke was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1872, was a major influence in founding the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, and in 1880 was a founder of the Gaelic Union, which afterwards developed into the Gaelic League. After about 9 years as a Parish Priest, during which time he published A Plea for the Evicted Tenants of Mayo (Dublin, 1883), he died at Castlebar in 1887. (My sources for the life: Catholic Encyclopedia, supplemented by other reading.)
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I’ll return to the late 1850s. Some might be surprised that a newly-ordained Catholic Priest teaching at a Diocesan Seminary wrote for The Nation, associated with the Young Ireland group and regarded by many as a group of fanatics, heretics and infidels. Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, where the paper and the book were published, might have been outraged, but probably not surprised. Ulick Bourke, as we have seen, was closely connected to his great ecclesiastical foe, John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam.
Other links between Tuam and The Nation group already existed. In the 1840s, MacHale and the group were opposed (Lynch, pp.87 ff.), but a realignment took place in the later 1850s. For example, before Charles Gavan Duffy, the most prominent figure of the Nation and Young Ireland circle still in Ireland, left for Australia (Nov. 1855), Archbishop Cullen of Dublin had cause to complain to MacHale about three priests who invited him to a public meeting and banquet in Tuam in January 1855. (Larkin, The Making of the Roman Catholic Church, p.298). I can’t imagine priests in Tuam doing this without MacHale’s consent.
On the Tuam connection with Nationalist activities, I’ll glance forward a little. In Moody’s Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846-82 Bourke appears several times in public association with Land League activities in his area.
When the controversial funeral of Young Ireland exile and Fenian Terence McManus was held in Dublin in 1861, a letter from Father Patrick Lavelle, subsequently posted in Dublin as a broadsheet, begins: ‘Dear Sir, Enclosed I beg to forward you L1, the united mite of the Rev. U. Bourke, St. Jarlath’s, Tuam, the Rev. Peter Geraghty CC, and myself, as our contribution towards the M’Manus Obsequies Fund.’ (quoted in Emmett Larkin, Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church, p. 64)
But back to The Nation and 1858-60. Although Collins (p.93) says that Bourke contributed items on Irish to it during the 1840s, I suspect a misprint and I’d like to check the sources. Bourke was certainly contributing this series by 1858, at the invitation of its new editor, T.J. Sullivan. (Legg, p.96). Why would they want him? The major figures behind the group had not been inward with the language and in some cases were indifferent to it. Bourke was a scholar who had also grown up with the language, and been schooled in it by James Hardiman, who, despite his vigorous Catholicism, was a figure of literary standing. Bourke, I should add, despite many ‘Catholic’ assumptions in this book, seems impressively open and non-sectarian, though he does have occasion to point out the linguistic inadequacy of some non-Catholics who translated the Bible into Irish. Bourke’s was a rare talent for a Nationalist newspaper when the connection of Catholicism and Irish language with Irish nationalism, was possibly looking clearer to a new group in 1858 than it seemed to those of 1848 who had mostly gone, willingly or otherwise, to Australia.
What did the connection bring for MacHale, whose approval I must presume? He was one of the bishops who saw an intimate connection between the language and Catholicism. Collins comments on the importance for some parts of the Catholic Church in looking to a glorious past where Irish-speaking Catholics, despite oppression, were the true glory of the land. And, in his view, ‘The importance of MacHale and the group of nationalist bishops … gathered around him, was that they provide a link between the historic Gaelic-Catholic nation of the seventeenth century and the revivalists/ who would emerge towards the end of the nineteenth century.’ (pp. 94-95). Here is an opportunity, through Bourke, to bring Irish to a wider public and to re-inforce that identification of Irish with the achievements of the past. (It could also be an opportunity to thumb his nose at Paul Cullen, said to be quite obsessive in his enmity towards The Nation, in whose Archdiocese these publications took place.) (Larkin, The Making, p. 386)
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This conference is located in a university whose motto, Postera crescam laude could be very roughly translated as ‘You’ll know how good we were when you see what happens later.’
Helena Concannon in 1950 describes Bourke as unfairly neglected. In a fitting acknowledgement for his work for the language. He is now acknowledged by the Gaelscoil Uileog de Búrca, Loughneman, Claremorris, close to where he served as Parish Priest. There is also a monument in Castlebar.
David Lucy referred me to a mention of the book’s formative influence in Séamus Ó Duilearga, Leabhar Sheáin Í Chonaill. (Baile Átha Cliath, Brún agus Ó Nualláin, 1964).
Douglas Hyde’s Library included several of Bourke’s works, and a more extensive discussion could look at some of the links to the better-known later movements on behalf of Gaelic.
While the Preface to the fourth edition is pleased to observe that earlier copies have made their way to ‘the ends of the earth’, such as the Canadas and the United States, at least one copy of the seventh edition reached Australia, and in indirect ways, through his work that influenced the better-known movements at the end of the nineteenth century, Bourke’s work has had its effect here.
There is a book devoted to Bourke, published in 1981. It is written in Irish and would take me some time to get it and even longer to read it, despite the best efforts of my Irish teachers. But the very fact that I have had Irish teachers, and that the Cumann Gaeilge now flourishes in Melbourne, owes much, ultimately, to the work of Ulick Bourke.
go dtuga Dia suaimhneas dá anam
Publications mentioned.
Bourke, Rev. Ulick J., Easy lessons or Self-Instruction in Irish (7th edition, Dublin, M.H. Gill & Son, Dublin,1877)
Collins, Kevin, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848-1916. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2002.
Concannon, Helena, ‘Canon Ulick J. Bourke (1829-87). (‘Father’ of the Gaelic revival)’, The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Vol. LXXVII, No. 5, April 1950), pp. 405-417.
Patrick Conlan, Franciscan Ireland (Dublin,Mercier Press, c.1978)
Cronin, Michael, Translating Ireland. Translation, Language, Cultures. Cork, Cork University Press, 1996.
Gavan Duffy, Charles (ed.), The Ballad Poetry of Ireland. Dublin, James Dufy, 1845
Larkin, Emmet. The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860-1870. Dublin, Gill & MacMillan, 1987)
_____ The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1850-1860. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
Legg, Marie-Louise. Newspapers and nationalism. The Irish Provincial Press, 1850-1892. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1999.
Moody, T.W. Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846-82. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984.
O’Leary, Philip. The Prose Literature of the GaelicRevival, 1881-1921. Ideology and Innovation. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
Ó Lúing, Seán, Celtic Studies in Europe and other essays. Dublin, Geography Publications, 2000.
Ó Tuama, Seán & Kinsella, Thomas. An Duanaire 1600-1900. Poems of the Dispossessed. Portlaoise, Dolmen Press, 1981.
ITEMS FROM WEB-SITES.
The Catholic Encyclopedia. Entry on Ulick Bourke.
Michael Everson’s History and Classification of Gaelic Type-faces (web-site)