THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
RETURN FROM THE WEST: A POETICS OF VOICE IN IRISH
VOLUME ONE
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
BY
STEVE COLEMAN
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
AUGUST 1999
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME ONE
LIST OF TABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
vi
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Chapter
ONE. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The term voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Voice in Irish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Preview of Chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1
3
5
9
13
TWO. RÁTH CAIRN: BEYOND THE BLACK PIG’S DYKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Gaeltacht—beyond geography? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Power and diglossia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Intentional community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The view from the Gaeltacht and the view from the nation-state . . . . .
Dissolution? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Talk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Personalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The kin universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ráth Cairn as a place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
29
29
36
42
52
56
68
71
73
78
81
83
85
THREE. THREE THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE LEARNED . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dreoilín (Wren) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The next day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Entrance to the field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Up the Galties! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My “training” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Learning bilingualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
89
89
92
96
98
102
106
ii
iii
FOUR. THE POET: ELOQUENCE AND VIOLENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A question of character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“The crack” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Irish characters and “the Irish character” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Do something old . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The historical role of poets and poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Medieval Irish antiquarianism: constructing a tradition . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eloquence and violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Modern poetic ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Voice and history: poetry as oppositional discourse in the Gaeltacht
........................................................
Máirtín Mac Donncha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
TEXT: “Oíche Chiún Cheobranach” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hard talk: an old word about a half word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Symbolic violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
TEXT: Beairtlín An Gadaí (Beairtlín the Thief) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Discussion of the text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Cat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Poetry as high register . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Two songs by Máirtín Mac Donncha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
109
109
112
115
118
120
122
128
131
FIVE. REPOSSESSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ur-history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Poetry, prophecy and history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Return from the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Raidió na Gaeltachta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
West and East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“a ring lit out on the ocean” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The ring of light as a dialectical image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“A Cat and a Mouse in a Box” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A scene among ruins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The living and the dead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
181
181
184
187
189
192
195
214
220
224
228
230
134
137
139
142
148
150
155
161
162
170
179
VOLUME TWO
SIX. VOICE: THE NATION, THE STATE, AND THE NEIGHBORS . . . . . . .
Something about a bicycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“We-language” and “they language” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Anxieties of Standard Irish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Demography, regimentation, and neurosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
233
233
236
251
255
iv
Coin of the realm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A discourse of linguistic purity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Full sentence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Language and value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Quotation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Imitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Voice and the social construction of codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
261
264
270
271
272
275
277
284
SEVEN. VOICES OF THE DEAD AND A ‘NEW MEDIUM’: MÁIRTÍN Ó
CADHAIN’S CRÉ NA CILLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
‘A new medium’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ó Cadhain’s realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lack of transcendence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Clay as medium and trope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Clarification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ó Cadhain in the public sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
289
290
295
298
301
305
312
320
EIGHT. JOE HEANEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Joe Heaney as interpreter of a tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Musical form and the act of singing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lyric song as direct discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The song and the story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Singing style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Embodiment: “pulse” and “drone” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Sean-nós” as a genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Laments” and caoineadh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Songs as commodities? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Allegorical lamination of contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Narrative, naming, and dance music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
323
323
326
328
332
338
340
346
348
351
353
355
361
363
NINE. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Constructions of the person and personal constructions . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Language” and community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Irish-speaking communities and the nation-state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Theories of modernity and the ideology of modernization . . . . . . . . . .
366
366
375
376
381
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
LIST OF TABLES
TABLE 4.1: Projected “I” in Beairtlín An Gadaí . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
TABLE 7.1: Cré na Cille, frontispiece (with translation) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am greatly indebted to the members of my committee for their patience,
understanding, and kind support of this project: Paul Friedrich, Jim Fernandez,
Eric Hamp, Ray Fogelson, and William Hanks. Likewise to present and former
colleagues in the Department of Anthropology, National University of Ireland,
Maynooth: Eileen Kane, Abdullahi Osman El-Tom, Séamas Ó Síocháin, Jamie
Saris, Larry Taylor, and Stuart McLean. I have benefitted greatly from
discussions with Irish-language scholars: Angela Bourke, Conchúr Ó Giollagáin,
Eamon Ó Ciosáin, Lillis Ó Laoire, Nancy Stenson, and Gearóid Ó Crualaoich. I
am indebted to my fellow students in the Department of Anthropology,
University of Chicago, for moral support and advice, and to Anne Ch’ien for her
patience and assistance. For years of friendship, advice and support, I am
grateful to Dale Pesmen, Tania Fel, Michael Wasserman, and Amy Kerwin.
I am especially grateful for the kind support of Jimmy Keane and his
relations in Chicago and Ráth Cairn. Above all, I am indebted to the people of
Ráth Cairn. Tá mé fíor-bhuíoch díobh as an bhfáilte groí a chuir siad romham
thar na blianta. Up na Galties!
vi
ABSTRACT
This dissertation centers on a range of practices in spoken and written
Irish involving the construction and transmission of poetic "voice." These range
from quotation and imitation in conversation to a whole range of types and uses
of direct discourse in verbal art, including literature. A range of historical and
political issues are centered around the nature and definition of Irish-speaking
communities, conflicts over genre, code-switching, dialect and standardization,
and the peculiar position of Irish as both a national and a minority language. I
argue that these conflicts also involve "voice," since they center on the nature and
identities of populations, ideological constructions of who the "best" or most
typical Irish speakers are.
On another level, this dissertation explores the connections a local
community makes between cultural forms and persons. Voicing functions
through textualizing various behaviors, making them emblems of particular (as
well as generic) personalities. By studying this process, I show how one tradition
constitutes itself as such, while constituting its own tradition bearers as
recognizable social persons. I also show how unique individuals contribute to
and transform these traditions.
vii
viii
The Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking community) of Ráth Cairn, County Meath,
was founded in 1935 as a result of grass-roots political agitation—Irish speakers
in the West demanding good land in the East. I use the history of Ráth Cairn as a
framework for investigating the use of traditional forms of rhetoric by rural Irishspeakers in their negotiations with the state. Irish-speakers engage in a complex
dialogue with the power and authority of the Irish state, its ideologies, and those
of the wider world beyond. This dissertation is perhaps unique in its attempt to
analyze these dynamics through the medium of voice—the range of practices
and ideologies governing the reception and transmission of reported speech.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
This dissertation centers on a range of practices in spoken and written
Irish that I gather together under the heading of the construction and
transmission of poetic “voice.” These range from quotation and imitation in
conversation to a whole range of types and uses of direct discourse in verbal art,
including literature.
On another level I deal with a range of historical and political issues
centered around the nature and definition of Irish-speaking communities,
conflicts over genre, code-switching, dialect and standardization, and the
peculiar position of Irish as both a national and a minority language. I argue that
these conflicts also involve “voice,” since they center on the nature and identities
of populations, ideological constructions of who the “best” or most typical Irish
speakers are.
I worked in an Irish-speaking community (Ráth Cairn, County Meath)
which was founded in 1935 as a result of grass-roots political agitation—Irish
speakers in the West demanding good land in the East. I use the history of Ráth
Cairn as a framework for investigating the use of traditional forms of rhetoric by
rural Irish-speakers in their conflicts with the state. Thus, I compare political
1
2
speeches from the 1930s with the narrative reminiscences of older Ráth Cairn
people in the 1990s, along with various other genres including poetry, song, and
a novel.
The construction of voice involves speakers’ intuitions about language
and culture, local regional and national ideologies of speaking and of the relation
of the act of speaking to culture, the person, and the world. The present-day
genre known as sean-nós (‘old-style’) song has been influenced greatly by the
intuitions of the singer, Joe Heaney, about singing as a way of speaking, and the
stylistic innovations which he brought to the genre as a result. As I show in
Chapter 8, Joe Heaney’s innovations came out of a complex dialogue with local
and national ideologies and represent an attempt to refigure the politics of style
in Ireland and the meaning of Irish-language tradition as a whole. Sean-nós (“oldstyle”) as a label for a genre of song, is a recent creation; Joe Heaney’s
understanding of it came out of his synthesis and reformulation of existing
genres (“laments” and certain types of song). Due to his own efforts, sean-nós is
now a local genre with its own local styles and contexts. Thus the dynamic
between local and national culture is played out in large part through the
medium of genre.
3
The term voice
My choice of the perhaps overly vague term voice is deliberate. Linguists,
anthropologists and critics have long been interested in reported speech;1 lately it
has been seen as one specific aspect of a much wider question, that of reflexivity
in language (Lucy 1993, Silverstein and Urban 1996). There is what I believe to be
a creative tension within both the common–sense and theoretical meanings of the
term ‘voice’. A well-known paradox of linguistics is that sociolects are typically
studied through analyzing the grammar of a few or even of a single speaker,
while idiolects of individual speakers can only be analyzed with reference to
societal norms of speaking (Anttila 1989). Studies such as Sapir’s Speech as a
Personality Trait (Sapir 1985) show the complexity of the concrete individual’s
voice. For Sapir, the individual was both a microcosm and a unique instantiation
of his or her language and culture, with individual variations built in successive
layers on more generalized social patterns:
...we have the following materials to deal with in our attempt to get
at the personality of an individual, in so far as it can be gathered
from his speech. We have his voice. We have the dynamics of his
voice, exemplified by such factors as intonation, rhythm,
continuity, and speed. We have pronunciation, vocabulary, and
style. Let us look at these materials as constituting so and so many
levels on which expressive patterns are built (Sapir 1985:543-43).
Sapir argued for
the sui generis and equally totalizing and cosmographically valid
character of the language and culture of every individual,
1. to name just a few: Bakhtin 1981, Volosinov 1973, Mertz 1985, Tannen 1989, Rumsey
1990, and Hill 1995.
4
constituted as they are by the individual’s subjectivity and reflected
in the historically-specific complex organization called
“personality” (Silverstein 1986:78-9).
Friedrich and Redfield (1979:403), following Sapir, maintain that “the individual
is the ultimate system of variation” in speech style. The language of the
individual is a “level of organization with its own distinctive processes and
complexities” (ibid. 435). Such complexities may also be approached starting
from the sociocentric pole. The term “voice” is used in Bakhtin’s theory to refer
to the elements of a social system of discourse. Bakhtinian voices represent
particular social-semantic points of view or philosophical positions (Bakhtin
1981, Hill 1995), such that any concrete individual speaks in and through sets of
social voices. Just as Peirce said “we ought to say that we are in thought and not
that thoughts are in us” (Peirce 5.289), we could say that rather than having a
voice, we live in a system of voices:
As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in
language, there are no “neutral” words and forms––words and
forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely
taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any
individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract
system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot
conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession,
a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person,
a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of
the contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words
and form are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones
(generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word
(Bakhtin 1981:293).
Irvine (1990, 1996) has shown the crucial role that consciousness of such “tastes”
or linguistic intentions plays in the mediation of linguistic practice. Stereotypic
5
images of social types of speakers link ways of speaking to social contexts and
economic and cultural values.
Voice in Irish
This project began as an exploration of the cultural role of poetry in the
Irish Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking district). Many poetic genres in Ireland are
maximally voiced––first-person utterances framed as representing the point of
view of one or more protagonists in what are implicitly dramatic scenes, scenes
which may themselves be reported in framing narratives. There is a relationship,
in the linguistic culture of the Gaeltacht, between the forms of these poetic
utterances and local understandings of the nature of poets, poetry and speech in
general. Intuitions of virtuosi like Máirtín Mac Donncha and Joe Heaney
(Chapters 4 and 8) and the abundant folklore about poets and poetry (Ó hÓgáin
1979, 1982) provide important insights into Irish-speakers’ assumptions about the
relation of speech to values, feeling, thought, and action.
Such a study could not confine itself to one genre of poetry alone, or only
to those forms of talk recognized by speakers as ‘poetry’ or as being ‘poetic’.
Performance forms emergent in ordinary conversation, such as ‘yarns’, 2 bear
interesting functional similarities to traditional lyric poems, while voicing
phenomena feature in music and dance performance and even in the use of
placenames (Chapter 5). Furthermore, relatively de-voiced (“third-person”)
2. Jokes, usually narratives which break into direct speech for their punch lines.
6
genres such as traditional storytelling also have reflexive aspects, and are
intimately related to more lyrical forms. Lyric forms must thus be studied in the
context of a more general ethnography of speaking.
In Ireland as elsewhere, voice is culturally represented as an attribute
(sound image) of distinct physical personalities. Through the working of
stereotype, verbal art represents its personae as tokens of cultural types.
Likewise, in some genres, poets use an impersonal voice which stands as the voice
of the community or of the ordinary man or woman. This culturally constructed
voice is underpinned by the working of ‘voice’ in Bakhtin’s sense in which a
literary work or the speech of a single person features the interaction of a
plurality of voices representing various social, semantic, and generic positions––
a level of meaning which is only partially accessible to the speaker. Studying the
interaction between these two levels or types of voice illuminates the imaginative
background of verbal art, as well as the role and meaning of the person.
For Irish-speakers, voices are first of all concrete and immediate––they are
experienced and reproduced in a small-scale human universe of personalized
speech. Between 4 and 5 million people live in the Republic of Ireland, of whom
as few as 30,000 are habitual speakers of Irish (estimates vary widely).3 In the
20th Century the revival movement, increased mobility and modern
communication has drawn these speakers together to a great extent. An
3. According to the 1991 Census of Population, the combined population of the officiallydesignated Gaeltacht areas was 83,268 with a total labor force of 28,500 (source: Údarás na
Gaeltachta).
7
important part of this is the recognizability of individual concrete voices. In my
time in Ireland I have been surprised again and again by this. Things as
apparently impersonal as a computer program for teaching Irish or a dubbed
French film about the birth of Christ contain voices which one can immediately
recognize and “put a name to.” Locally, in “face to face” rural communities or
urban networks, people quote and imitate other peoples’s voices, thickening the
texture of their speech by decentering portions of it, attributing it to some other
person and context. The interanimation of voices is especially prominent in
performance; quotation of others often functions to ‘key’ performance (Bauman
1977) transforming an everyday situation into a performance situation. In Irish,
‘to put a voice to a song’ (guth a chuir le amhrán) is to sing it, as opposed to
reciting the words.4 Verbal art in Irish typically involves the creation and
animation of voices––the use of the directly quoted speech of others, both as
embedded speech of characters in narrative and as lyric poetry and song.
Imitation and other forms of direct quotation are common in many speech genres
and frequently function to key a transition from conversation to performance. A
variety of devices are used to mark direct discourse as the words of another.
As I show in this dissertation, voice is part of a larger process where
surface forms are invested with meaning as indexical icons of persons and
4. Guth and glór are both used to translate the English word voice. Glór has more the sense
of one’s physical voice––the term is used in praising a singer’s voice––whereas guth carries the
additional sense of speaker’s intention––d’aon guth means ‘of one voice’, to express agreement.
The term friotal is used (more technically) to refer to speech, utterance, or way of expressing
something––friotal a chur ar rud means ‘to put something into words’ (Ó Dónaill 1977).
8
narratives. Thus, practices as diverse as dance steps and place-names can
function in the tradition in a manner not far removed from that of direct
quotation or lyric poetry.
Irish practices of quotation and imitation imply an intuitive identification
between a discrete individual and his or her unique “voice.” At the same time
these practices make of individuals living stereotypes of typical social points of
view. A poet may strive for an “everyman’s” voice, speaking on behalf of and in
the accent of his or her local community (Denvir 1989, 1997). But this same poet’s
works may be received and transmitted orally as his or her highly personal
production, embedded in narratives and reminiscences of the poet’s life and the
situations to which his or her creations are responses.
Irish speakers practice forms of quotation (“as x would say”) to mark
stretches of speech as typical of named others, known to both speaker and
addressees (Chapter 6). Quotation of this type reinforces typifying images of
persons and speech styles. Likewise, speakers mark off speech which tastes
stylistically inappropriate by means of what I term anti-quotation (“as you’d say,”
“as the other one would say”), pragmatically attempting to “insulate” (Irvine
1996) a stretch of speech by vaguely gesturing towards other, oblique, contexts.
Such practices are techniques of negotiation through sets of social voices; they
make boundaries within individuals’ speech:
Talk is layered; speakers use a wide variety of device to embed
discourse-fragment within discourse-fragment, creating a textured
whole in which several messages and social claims may be
enunciated simultaneously. Any competent speaker can
9
appropriate multiple socially-situated voices in a single discourse.
In pragmatic terms, any competent speaker is able to hedge
assertions in varying degrees by embedding them in within other
discourses. Obliqueness is both a goal and an outcome of the social
texturedness of discourse (Mannheim 1987:267)
Folk poetry likewise shows a great complexity of voicing, deriving from a range
of practices of authorship: poems often have several authors, explicitly or
implicitly; an other may “complete,” rebut, parody, echo and plagiarize works,5
typically leaving traces of other or contested ownerships and authorships. Rather
than representing imperfection, such traces are central to the aesthetic and
emotional power of much performance, especially of sung lyric poetry (Chapter
8).
Politics
In the analysis of Ó Crualaoich (1989), the Irish language has embodied a
subaltern discourse in opposition to the dominant Anglophone discourse of the
State, both the colonial state and its latter-day successor. It would be a mistake,
however, to read such an analysis as treating the Irish language as a single
independent or self-contained “discourse,” independent from English.6 The basic
fact of social and cultural stratification, which underlies the linguistic situation of
minority languages in European nation-states (Gal 1984, Hill 1985, Fernandez
5. This is true of music, dance and other performance forms also.
6. Although much of linguistics and even linguistic anthropology might habitually do so
(Urciuoli 1995).
10
1986, Ó Giolláin 1993, 1996), ensures that Irish and English are stylistically
interpenetrated in very complex ways.
New nation-states may try to elevate peripheral and “folk” language and
culture to the level of more or less official “national” culture. But combined with
the developmentalist ideology of the nation-state (Errington 1998) this has the
ironic effect of marking off these very sources as marginal, less progressive, tied
to the past and to “tradition.” In Ireland it was the view of conservative
nationalism that Irish be kept “pure.” Douglas Hyde’s “The Necessity for
Deanglicizing Ireland” (Hyde 1986 [1892]) recognized heteroglossia in Ireland as
the negative consequence of colonialism, while looking back on an somewhat
idealized Gaelic past. There has been a great deal of resistance to the project of
standardizing Irish (Chapter 6), motivated (from the predominantly Anglophone
urban center) by such an image of an idyllically class- (and therefore register-)
free Gaeltacht. “The speech of the people” (caint na ndaoine) was held up as a
national treasury of folk wisdom, a source for literature (Chapter 7), the opposite
of urban sophistication––a view parodied by Máirtín Ó Cadhain: “The only
learning is the learning of unlearned old people” 7 (Ó Cadhain 1990 [1950]:138).
Opposition to standardization from within the Gaeltacht (ie., from the rural Irishspeaking periphery) is likewise motivated by the fairly well-grounded
perception that a standard register of Irish would be the property of others. What
both these perspectives ignore is the extent to which Irish and English languages
7. Níl aon léann ann ach an léann atá ag seandaoine gan léann.
11
are increasingly part of the same discourse. Quite typically, forms which are
presented as “standard” or formal-register Irish (especially in the media and in
bureaucratic documents) are transparently modeled on English vocabulary and
grammar, either to satisfy ideological requirements of rigid translation (Chapter
6), or, more typically, because their authors are from urban anglophone
backgrounds and lack the linguistic means to produce more grammatical
utterances in Irish. Rural Irish-speakers who grow up in the Gaeltacht may
conversely use English words as a stylistic element in dialogic opposition to such
purism, while using the term gaeilgeoirí (literally, “Irish-speakers”) to refer
ironically to urban Irish-learners vacationing in the Gaeltacht. Within both Irish
and English speech there is a continuum from what is perceived as maximally
“Irish” to maximally “English” grammar, with the former representing rural
poverty and the latter urban prosperity. Thus the term “Hiberno-English” is
commonly used to refer, not to an Irish national standard register of English, but
to marginal rural or inner-city urban “dialect” speech, relatively more affected by
Irish-language grammar and vocabulary. The only “standard” explicitly
cultivated by state institutions in either language is in Irish, and is merely a
standardized orthography. There are also efforts to encourage a standardized
pronunciation of Irish (Chapter 6), but a spoken standard, as a living speech
register, does not exist. Instead one encounters various styles in the print and
electronic media, in official translations from English, “corrected” versions of
12
dialect novels,8 and so on. It is telling that the only medium which currently
appears to take seriously the creation of formal-register Irish that is acceptable
and understandable to native speakers of Irish is Raidió na Gaeltachta, which
was created as the result of direct action by political pressure groups in the
Gaeltacht, and which is largely run and controlled by Gaeltacht people. Raidió
na Gaeltachta has by and large refused to adopt a national standard as the basis
for its spoken Irish, preferring to let speakers use their “natural” local dialects
(Chapters 5 and 6). As a result, speakers all over Ireland have been exposed to all
three dialects of Irish (southern, northern, and western) to such an extent that
they are much more intelligible to the average Irish-speaker than they were when
the station began broadcasting more than 25 years ago. In a sense, the station is
creating the unified communication community dreamed of by advocates of
standardization from below rather than by imposing an artificial standard register
from “above.”
For Irish nationalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
“national epic,” embodiment of the mythical unity of the nation, was yet to be
written. The task of literature was producing rather than challenging this unity.
Even the Irish-language lyric tradition posed problems for cultural nationalists,
who found in it
a fragmentariness lodged in the artifacts themselves. Thus when
[Thomas] Davis remarks that ‘There are great gaps in Irish song to
be filled up’ he refers not to the state of research but to the nature of
8. Note that almost any novel written by a native speaker is thus a “dialect” novel.
13
the object, a nature that is for him historical and absolutely not
essential (Lloyd 1993:91).
It is the mode of discourse of Irish language lyrics that frustrated cultural
nationalists, who were looking for the symbolic expression of a national essence,
and who found Irish-language texts too allegorical, bound up in their historical
contexts of utterance.
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille played an important role in exploding the
myth of monologic Irish language discourse and the saintly image of the
Gaeltacht. Ó Cadhain’s novel exposed and deepened the heteroglossia of Irish in
order to engage more strongly with the dominant discourses of the new Irish
state. “Internal” voicing in Irish is also directed at “external” English-language
discourses. This is as true for Gaeltacht verbal art as it is for literary and political
writing.
Preview of Chapters
Chapter 2. Ráth Cairn: Beyond the Black Pig’s Dyke
In Chapter 2, I introduce the community of Ráth Cairn, County Meath.
Ráth Cairn is unique—an Irish-speaking community which was deliberately
created in 1935, through migration from the poor West coast to the fertile
Midlands of Ireland. It is also unique in that its creation was the result of
negotiations between the grass-roots political activists of Muintir na Gaeltachta
(People of the Gaeltacht) and the Irish state. Sixty-four years after its creation,
Irish is still the main community language in Ráth Cairn. Less than 500 people
14
live there (depending how one defines “there”), surrounded by mainly monoglot
English-speakers. In its early days, the community aroused a certain amount of
suspicion and open hostility from its neighbors.
In view of the foregoing, Ráth Cairn’s status as a distinct community
might seem unproblematic. But as I demonstrate, it is difficult to define exactly
where Ráth Cairn’s limits as a community are. In fact, these limits have been
contested continually since Ráth Cairn’s founding in 1935. And the very creation
of Ráth Cairn was seen by Muintir na Gaeltachta as a way of breaking out of
“The Black Pig’s Dyke,” the confining limits of state policy towards the
Gaeltacht.
The people of Connemara and Ráth Cairn found themselves resisting both
linguistic segregation, in diglossia, and spatial segregation, as “a separate
people” so classified by the state. In what Ó Ciosáin (1991) terms “the geographic
fallacy,” the state classifies Irish speakers according to their place of residence,
defining the Gaeltacht as “Irish-speaking districts.” This goes against the
categories of Irish-speakers themselves, who historically have seen the Gaeltacht
as the social, cultural and linguistic unity of Irish-speakers, reinforced by
relationships of kinship and exchange, as well as by the institutions of the Gaelic
learned classes (Ó Murchú 1984b).
The state’s need to classify and segregate Irish speakers geographically
arises from its own failure to transform itself after achieving independence from
Britain in 1921. Although one of the principle aims of the anticolonial struggle
15
was to reinstate Irish as a national language, the effort to do so has largely failed.
In spite of economic support for the Gaeltacht and the significant role given to
Irish in the educational curriculum, the state itself has remained the major force
for anglicization since independence. Unless forced from below to do otherwise,
the state, the Catholic Church, business, and the media have mainly functioned
through English, even in the officially defined Gaeltacht areas. The habitual
functioning of these institutions has thus threatened to impose a type of diglossia
on Irish-speakers. But these speakers by and large reject the ideological
implications of such a diglossia—the sense that Irish is naturally appropriate for
certain domains and not for others. In fact, as I show in Chapter 2, Irish-speakers
implicitly reject the very idea of “domains” of language use, seeing language use
as an aspect of specific persons rather than of abstract domains. This ideology of
language use grows out of their historical sense of “the Gaeltacht” as a social,
rather than a geographic category.
Ironically, for more than thirty years, the state denied Ráth Cairn even a
geographic designation as an officially “Irish-speaking district.” Being located in
the eastern part of the country, Ráth Cairn did not fit in to the role assigned to
the Gaeltacht in the imagined geography of the Irish nation-state. This schema
saw the Gaeltacht as a distant reservoir of natural Gaelicness rather than a part of
the “modern” world.
Although he never lived in Ráth Cairn, Máirtín Ó Cadhain played a
crucial role in its inception and survival. Born in An Cnocán Glas in the
16
Connemara Gaeltacht, Ó Cadhain was a life-long radical, republican, and Irishlanguage activist. He was interned in a prison camp during World War II, then
became a Dublin-based writer and late in his life became Professor of Modern
Irish at Trinity College. As a leader of Muintir na Gaeltachta in the 1930s,
Ó Cadhain was directly responsible for Ráth Cairn’s creation. He also intervened
at critical moments in Ráth Cairn’s history in the 1960s.
Beginning with a threatened voting strike against the dominant political
party, Fianna Fáil, in the 1960s, the people of Ráth Cairn, in alliance with urban
Irish-speakers like Ó Cadhain, who likewise failed to fit into the conservative
nationalist schema, undertook a series of struggles with the state. As an outcome
of these negotiations, the people of Ráth Cairn achieved partial control of a set of
local institutions and a degree of political autonomy, through the founding of a
local cooperative, Comharchumann Ráth Cairn. But these gains have come at the
cost of acquiescing to the logic of the state, which will dictate future directions of
growth and struggle.
Chapter Three: Three Things Which Cannot Be Learned
Beginning with an impressionistic vignette, in this chapter I try to situate
myself as an ethnographer in the social and linguistic life of Ráth Cairn. I
describe my somewhat unusual entry into the field as well as the role I was
expected to play there as performer in, imitator of, recorder of, and witness to the
social life of the community. I give a brief account of my initial bewilderment in a
17
bilingual situation, which led to a tendency to exaggerate the distinctions I found
between languages and cultures, as well as the more profound distinctions
between the world as it appears in (what is constructed locally as) “everyday
life,” and the very different world that emerges in performance and occasions of
heightened sociability.
Chapter Four. The Poet: Eloquence and Violence
This chapter begins by considering the role of the rural Irish “character,”
stereotypically a marginal figure who is empowered by his or her own
marginality to play a critical role vis-a-vis the unquestioned strictures of
everyday life. The “character” effectively challenges the opposition between
ordinary life and its heightened performative extensions.
In Irish-speaking communities, however, I argue that the figure of the
“character” has deeper roots. His or her role often coincides with that of another
more venerable social institution, the poet. In the present-day Gaeltacht, poetry
and poetic speech are the distinguishing features of a set of prestigious registers
that underlie the value of the Irish language itself in opposition to English. Poets
have thus played a critical social and cultural role in preserving a role for Irish as
the texture of sociality. Poetry functions most saliently as the carrier of “voice” in
first-person lyric and dialogic forms: song, dramatic dialogue poetry and satirical
verse. These forms emerge from everyday practices of quotation and imitation.
18
To contextualize the forms and social functions of present-day Gaeltacht
poetry, I give a brief sketch of the historical forms and roles of poetry as they
developed under the medieval Gaelic political order. I explore the construction of
textuality in the medieval manuscript tradition through the transmission of
archaized “oral” voices. This helps reveal the complexity of the linguistic
ideology of Irish—the social construal of the grounds of the effectiveness of
various forms of speech as social action.
There is a fair amount of continuity between these medieval constructions
and present-day “folk” beliefs and practices involving poetic eloquence and the
figure of the poet as a social type. Most salient is the continuing belief that the
two social functions of poet are to “praise and blame.” The perceived ability of
poetic speech to manipulate the very ground of sociality, including a person’s
name and social reputation, was expressed in a variety of beliefs about the
magical efficacy of poetry. Practices and beliefs surrounding poetry challenge
our predominant intellectual distinction between “real” and “symbolic” violence.
Even in medieval Ireland, poetry and poetic speech were socially
construed as occupying the dividing line between historical epochs and politicalcultural regimes. But poets were at the center of power, first acting to legitimize
the institutions of kingship, then, as the Gaelic order disintegrated, acting as foci
of rebellion and resistance to colonization. From the eighteenth through the
twentieth centuries, Gaeltacht poets have likewise articulated positions critical of
both the colonial order and that of the independent nation-state.
19
Chapter 4 concludes by situating a few works of the Ráth Cairn poet,
Máirtín Mac Donncha, in this tradition. As is typical of present-day Gaeltacht
poets, Mac Donncha is very aware of his place in a tradition which he traces back
to the nineteenth-century Galway poets, Colm de Bhailís and Antaine Raiftearaí.
I illustrate his place in this tradition by presenting Mac Donncha’s performance
of a satire composed de Bhailís, along with his explanation of how and why the
work was composed, and of the basis of its poetic power. I maintain that
Máirtín’s transmission of this work helps constitute his own power and authority
as a poet in Ráth Cairn, 120 miles away from De Bhailís’ home community and
80 years after the his death.
Both de Bhailís’ original poem and Máirtín Mac Donncha’s performance
of it mobilize and transmit the voices of named local persons, as do Máirtín’s
satirical poems composed about local events in Ráth Cairn. Rather than to
directly present the texts of these satires (which Máirtín thought would be
inappropriate for a work circulated outside of the community), I present instead
two songs of praise. One is a lament for the great Ráth Cairn singer, Darach Ó
Catháin; the other a poem in commemoration of the community’s 50th
anniversary. In both songs, Mac Donncha presents images of ideal sociality,
bound to specific named persons, critically contrasting these with the reality of
the social and political situation in Ráth Cairn and Ireland as a whole. The poem
for Ó Catháin has the additional aspect of embodying (through its textual
constructions and performance conventions) the very form of sociality it
20
celebrates. Thus the poem itself is self-consciously constructed as a link through
time between the sociality of Darach Ó Catháin and potential future occasions.
The tradition itself is constituted in terms of these links. “Voice” is the
master trope through which textuality is constructed; it binds texts to specific
times and images of persons. As I show in Chapters 5 and 8, Irish texts are
fundamentally indexical and allegorical in that they bind disparate and
incommensurable times, places and persons together.
Chapter Five. Repossession
In Chapter 5, I reexamine the poetic mythology of sacral kingship,
showing how, after the collapse of the Gaelic political order, these tropes were
refigured and democratized in response to utopian hopes and the new forms of
political organization that came to the fore from the eighteenth to the twentieth
centuries. Present-day Gaeltacht poets take the community itself as their patron,
but this community is imagined in ways fundamentally different than the
“imagined community” of the nation-state. I show how the verbal art of poets,
storytellers, and a novelist take elements of the medieval poetic topos and
refigure them to critically intervene in twentieth century politics.
In a 1934 political speech agitating for land in County Meath, Máirtín
Ó Cadhain drew on the tropes and worldview of traditional folklore. In Walter
Benjamin’s theory, folktales dramatize the victory of ordinary people’s cunning
over powerful mythic forces. Ó Cadhain’s speech identifies these monstrous
21
archaic forces with the modern anglophone nation-state, neatly reversing the
state’s own construction of Irish-speakers as relics of the past.
In a public lecture given in 1950, Ó Cadhain developed this motif further,
arguing that the very idea of “folklore” propagated by the Irish nation-state
amounted to the preservation in living death of Gaeltacht sociality. He
contrasted “the dead clay” of the archived remains of Gaelic culture with “the
living clay” of Irish-speaking people, who as a result of state policy, were forced
to emigrate. In this imaginative intervention, the state itself is an archaic space of
death, founded on the entombed remains of a Gaelic culture which Ó Cadhain
reveals as in fact being very much alive.
The founding myth of Ráth Cairn was that Connemara people are the
original inhabitants of, and rightful heirs to, the lands of County Meath, driven
west by Cromwell’s seventeenth-century conquest and plantations. The move to
Ráth Cairn was thus constructed as a return from the West. In opposition to the
mythology of conservative nationalism, which sees Gaeltacht people as relics of a
glorious national past, the settlers of Ráth Cairn saw themselves more as arriving
from an alternate world, having their own history which was grounded in a
fundamentally different set of social relations and cultural values than those they
found in County Meath.
I analyze a conversation broadcast on Raidió na Gaeltachta in 1992 in
which a few of Ráth Cairn’s original settlers relate memories of their first
Christmas in County Meath. This conversation utilizes some of the formal
22
features of traditional storytelling to explore the different natures of wealth and
poverty in Connemara and County Meath, finally locating these differences in
different forms of sociality. The social relations and ritual practices of “the Meath
man” are thus contrasted with those of “the Ráth Cairn man.”
The conversation’s participants make these points through an argument of
images in which Ráth Cairn itself appears as an Otherworld apparition to the
Meath men. Quite similar images appear in a contemporary poem about Ráth
Cairn and a film made by Máirtín Ó Cadhain about his native townland in
Connemara, an Cnocán Glas. I argue that these images are dialectical images in
the sense propounded by Walter Benjamin, “historical indexes” which exist in
the margins of time and embody the experience of loss, historical transformation
and utopian hope.
Chapter Six. Voice: The Nation, The State, and The Neighbors
In this chapter I explore a few of the consequences of the unusual status of
the Irish language as both a minority language and the official national language
of Ireland. I contrast three different discourses about the language: the discourse
of national development, the discourse of purity, and the discourse of
personalism. Underlying the debates about the ideal form of the Irish language
are conflicting conceptions of community—of what kinds of people speak Irish
and what types of social relations ideally underpin the Irish state. Each discourse
constitutes a particular set of ways for locating social value in linguistic forms.
23
The discourse of development maintains that, to be effective as a national
language, Irish must throw off its “seventeenth-century trappings,” modernizing
both its orthography, pronunciation, and vocabulary. In doing so, however, the
standardizing institutions of the nation-state would make a decisive break with
the forms and functions of the language in surviving Irish-speaking
communities. In contrast to the hodge-podge of local dialects found in Gaeltacht
areas, this discourse locates the socially unifying function of a standardized Irish
in its purported uniformity and semiotic transparency. A major problem of this
discourse is that by its own reckoning, English already fulfills these functions in
Ireland. Thus the main rationale for constructing a new, “modern,” Irish would
be to reinforce the symbolic identity of Ireland as an independent nation-state.
But Irish already serves this purely symbolic function, even while performing a
minimal role in the national arena.
The contradictions between the linguistic ideals of the Irish state and its
actual practices underlie a continuing sense of anxiety as to the state’s legitimacy.
I explore the manifestations of this unease in two sets of “myths” about the
state’s relationship to the language.
The discourse of linguistic purity sees local Gaeltacht communities as
transformative spaces where urban Irish people can come into contact with
“genuine” local speech communities, immersing themselves in the idioms and
values of local social life. An outgrowth of Romantic nationalism, in its more
revolutionary incarnations this discourse is rooted in techniques of the self which
24
ultimately aim to transform the urban Irish state. The discourse of linguistic
purity had its historical origins in the revolutionary movements which gave birth
to the Irish state itself. Thus, many urban Irish speakers place a higher value on
controlling the dialectal nuances of a single poor rural townland than they place
on the possession of a national Standard form of the language.
In contrast to the first two discourses, I argue that the discourse and
practice of “personalism” predominates in Gaeltacht communities. In this
discourse, the value of linguistic forms is felt to derive from their social and
personal provenance. Language is apperceived in terms of voice, a quality in
which individual character is seen to emerge from concrete sociality (kinship,
locality, and commensal relationships). This explains the seemingly odd fact that
Gaeltacht people are quite tolerant of “horizontal” variation between local
dialects, but have tended to reject “vertical” variation in the form of a
superposed “standard” Irish register. In everyday practices of quotation and
imitation, as well as in satiric verbal art, the trope of “voice” is used by Gaeltacht
people to critically examine the social bases of speech styles.
Gaeltacht people have been quite tolerant of borrowing from, and codeswitching with English, in contrast to the linguistic ideals propagated by the
discourses of development and linguistic purity. In opposition to these
discourses, a certain self-consciousness of hybridity has developed in the
Gaeltacht. I conclude the chapter by exploring this consciousness in a satirical
sketch written by a Connemara poet, Joe Steve Ó Neachtain.
25
Chapter Seven: Voices of the Dead and a ‘New Medium’: Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s
Cré Na Cille
In this chapter I examine a single artistic work, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s
modernist novel Cré na Cille. Although Ó Cadhain wished to “develop” Irish as a
modern literary language, the continuity of Irish literary tradition had been
broken by centuries of colonization and the destruction of the native Irish ruling
classes. Twentieth-century Irish-language writing had tended to follow narrowly
“folkloric” themes, sticking to “traditional idioms” of Gaeltacht speech and the
traditional themes of the oral folktale.
Although Ó Cadhain was raised in these traditions and had a superb
command of the idioms and themes of local speech, he refused to directly adopt
them as the basis of his literature. Instead, as I argue here, he took the basic
technique of Gaeltacht poetry, the construction of voice in direct discourse, and
adapted it to the form of the modern novel. Cré na Cille contains nothing but the
direct speech of its characters, a community of corpses buried in an unnamed
graveyard in the Connemara Gaeltacht.
The result was a satiric polylogue which functioned on several levels. On
one level, the novel exploded the romantic national myth of the Gaeltacht as a
place of spiritual, cultural, and linguistic purity. The novel appeared to its
conservative critics as an encyclopedic compendium of invective and obscenity.
These linguistic riches were marshalled by the novel’s characters for the
furtherance of a mind-numbing series of amazingly petty local feuds and
26
rivalries, powered by an inexorable process of class formation, false
“modernization” and anglicization of the Gaeltacht.
On another, potentially more disturbing level, the community portrayed
in Cré na Cille looked quite similar to the national “community” that was 1940s
Ireland. The textual history of Cré na Cille, serialized in a national newspaper,
enabled it to function, in part, as a subterranean commentary on daily life in Ó
Cadhain’s adopted city, Dublin. At a deeper level yet, the novel reflected
Ó Cadhain’s life-transforming experience as the guest of a national institution,
the Curragh concentration camp in County Kildare, where he and other
republicans were interned for most of the Second World War.
Cré na Cille also functioned directly as satiric verbal art in the Gaeltacht.
Ó Cadhain was proud of the fact that the novel was bought and read in
Connemara and the Aran Islands. It was read out loud in nighttime gatherings in
visiting-houses. On this level, the book found a place within Gaeltacht verbal art,
recognized by Ó Cadhain’s neighbors as a new extension of poetic satire. Cré na
Cille thus operated, through the construction of voice, as an internal critique of
false “modernity” and social climbing, dramatized in terms of the characters’
conflicting speech styles.
Chapter Eight. Joe Heaney
My initial interest in the Irish language and the Gaeltacht was first
inspired by my acquaintance with Joe Heaney (Seosamh Ó hÉinniú), the famous
27
sean-nós singer from the vicinity of Carna in the Connemara Gaeltacht. Joe was
an exceptionally articulate spokesman for Irish language traditions as he
understood them. Among the points that he forcefully made to his American
students were that songs had “stories,” and that singers of sean-nós songs sang
the actual words of the poets. In a way, my entire fieldwork and dissertation
represents an attempt to fully understand the significance of these assertions.
Thus it is fitting that I end the dissertation with a look at the person who began
it.
Although Joe Heaney died in 1984, I was able to work with archived tapes
of (English-language) interviews that Joe did with a few of his American
students. I argue in this chapter that, in response to their questions, Joe Heaney
was forced to articulate a theory of the relationship between musical form and
social and personal value. It will be evident from the preceding chapters that
Joe’s “theory” was fully grounded in the linguistic ideologies and practices of
poetic speech in the Gaeltacht. I argue that nonetheless, Joe Heaney’s ideas about
musical form also represent the fruits of years of reflection (as an emigrant in
Britain and the U.S.) on the philosophical basis of his own tradition.
These reflections underlie Joe Heaney’s own role in Ireland as one of the
single most important transformers of the Irish song tradition. He played a part
in the contemporary elevation of the Irish-language song tradition into a new
genre on the national scene, sean-nós (old-style) singing.
28
Although aiding and abetting the transformation of local verbal art into a
symbol of national identity, Joe Heaney’s view of what it means to sing a song
directly contradicted many of the new roles destined for sean-nós as a genre. In
order to show this, I situate Joe’s strictures about singing in the context of
Gaeltacht performance in general.
Joe Heaney understood the act of singing to involve a joining of the points
of view of the singer and the song’s protagonists. This is in keeping with the
nature of the Irish-language poetic tradition—the creation and transmission of
direct voice. As with the Irish tradition in general, the sean-nós tradition is built
upon a sense of poetic speech as a transparent, visionary medium. But in Joe
Heaney’s view, musical form emerges from the calibration of the singer’s and
audiences life histories of suffering with the “secret” narratives condensed in the
song’s lyrical poetic form . Thus, there is an allegorical (and an allegorically
opaque) relation between the experiences of a song’s protagonists and those of its
present day performers and audiences. The emotional power of sean-nós song
lies in these allegorical relationships to meaning, which are predominantly
indexical, as much as in the referentially symbolic relationship of a song to its
“story.”
CHAPTER TWO
RÁTH CAIRN: BEYOND THE BLACK PIG’S DYKE
[F]or Ráth Cairn in this period [1939-1967] was like a river. Coming
from the hills in Connemara in its youth, growing to middle age on
the plains of Meath, and in its old age flowing into the ocean of
English-language ways [béarlachas]... 1
(Seoighe 1986:88)
As Máirtín Ó Cadhain said, it was as if a box of matches were
thrown out of an airplane.
(Ó Méalóid and Mac Cóil 1997)
Boundaries
Ráth Cairn is a unique community, founded in 1935 when Irish-speakers
from Connemara’s rocky shores were relocated to the prosperous rich soil of
County Meath.2 It is not far from the Hill of Tara, the mythic center of Irish
sacred kingship.3 Although County Meath is located at the conceptual center of
ancient Ireland, the imagination of Meath’s English-speaking rural poor is
crisscrossed with boundaries, consciousness of periphery. The area of Ráth Cairn
1. [M]ar go raibh Ráth Cairn sa tréimhse seo ar nós abhainn. Ag teacht óna cnoic i gConamara ina
óige; ag fás go meánaois ar mhachaire na Mí agus ina sheanaois ag dul amach i bhfarraigí an Bhéarlachais...
2. 27 families (182 people) moved to Ráth Cairn in 1935, followed by 13 families (105
people) who moved to Lambay (Kilbride parish) in 1937 (Sammon 1997:157).
3. Ireland is divided into four “provinces:” Leinster, Munster, Connaught, and Ulster (the
eastern, southern, western and northern provinces). The Irish term for province is cúige (fifth);
“Meath” (An Mhí in modern orthography) was considered to be “the fifth province” the
transcendent center of sacred kingship.
29
30
is on the edge of the historic “Pale,” the region surrounding Dublin which
underwent the earliest and most intensive colonial transformation. Some say that
fragments of a wall crossing nearby fields are remnants of actual walls around
the Pale––thought of as a physically-bounded entity as much as a zone of
political and social influence. Physical reminders of warfare and conquest
abound in the area––castle ruins dot the landscape alongside still-inhabited
colonial “big houses;” the Yellow Steeple in the nearby town of Trim, halfdestroyed by Cromwellian gunpowder, still stands, as do hump-shaped
“mottes,” early Norman earthen fortifications. Ancient ringforts (raths) are
common; Tlachta (on the Hill of Ward between Ráth Cairn and Athboy), once an
important ritual center, is rumored to have been the site of human sacrifice.
There are 5,000 year-old passage tombs at Newgrange, Lochcrew and elsewhere.
Meath people talk of haunted places, buried treasure unearthed, golden
chalices, bog butter,4 of battles between native kings, of Cromwell, the Penal
Laws, the persecution of the Plunketts (native Catholic landlords), the misdeeds
of foreign landlords, events of the Famine, the locations of ancient roads, holy
wells, miracles.
One very unreliable source claimed (incorrectly) that the Black Pig’s Dyke,
a wall built to hold back the tribes of ancient Ulster, was a local feature, and even
claimed to have seen the pig! But Slieve Gullion, a mountain on the border of
present-day Northern Ireland, is visible from the area.
4. Ancient butter buried for preservation and presumably forgotten.
31
The poor people of Meath might imaginatively possess or be possessed by
the landscape, but for a very long time most of the county’s property has been
legally owned by a relative few. Class divisions are complex in County Meath,
and combine with cultural and political differences, but the county as a whole
nonetheless portrays itself (and is portrayed by others) as the domain of wealthy
“ranchers.” In present-day Meath the holdings of the county’s “large farmers”
are among the largest in the European Union (Wilson 1988:680). In a pattern
established in the 19th Century, calves from the West of Ireland are sold to
farmers in East Galway or the Midlands and then resold as mature animals to be
fattened in Meath for the Dublin or international markets.
For the people of Connemara in the 1930’s, “Meath” was synonymous
with wealthy farmers in the East––the fat of the land belonged to others. In 1934
Máirtín Ó Cadhain referred to Meath as “Éire na mBullán” (Ireland of the Bullock)
as opposed to “Éire na nDaoine” (Ireland of the People). In actual fact, Meath had
(and still has) many poor and landless people. Areas of broad level fields with
few houses are bounded by marginal land with many small cottages—Land
Commission and council houses in which lives a rural proletariat. Migrants to
Ráth Cairn in the 1930s were impressed by Meath’s class inequalities,5 and
defined themselves as “Ráth Cairn people” in opposition to the poor “Meath
man” and his apparent subservience to the rich (Chapter 5).
5. although the Western Gaeltacht has always had class divisions, a fact often overlooked
by outsiders (Ó Ciosáin 1991).
32
Meath’s invisible boundaries include the those of the officially recognized
Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking district) of Ráth Cairn. The geographical and
administrative Gaeltacht does not correspond to locations of either Irishspeakers, Connemara migrants and their descendants, or people who identify
themselves as Ráth Cairn people or as connected in some way with Ráth Cairn.
Early on in my stay there (in 1992) I was taken on a tongue-in-cheek guided tour
of “Bosnia”—the latest handy metaphor for confusion, tribalism, and
contestation of space—the point being the impossibility of drawing boundaries
between “Ráth Cairn people” (which in this case meant both Irish-speakers and
those assimilated into Gaeltacht culture) and “Meath people.”
Ráth Cairn itself forms part of two ecclesiastical parishes, that of Kilbride
and Athboy, corresponding to the area known as Ráth Cairn (proper) and
Lambay, which was settled in 1937, a few years after Ráth Cairn. In true
segmentary fashion, the distinction between Lambay and Ráth Cairn is mainly
for internal consumption. Drinkers in the pub make wisecracks to those going
home to Lambay: “Be sure to close the gate!” This nonexistent gate lent its name
to a local newsletter, An Geata.
Signs saying “Fáilte go dtí an Ghaeltacht” (Welcome to the Gaeltacht) greet
the traveller on two roads leading into the place, but these are resented by some
and seem to be down as often as they are up. Nor do they mark the actual
boundaries of the administrative Gaeltacht. Consciousness of difference, of being
singled out by the State, is not always desired; the term “[Indian] reservation” is
33
sometimes used bitterly by Gaeltacht people, deprecatingly by outsiders. I was
told once that at a wedding in Connemara, the couple, who were about to move
to Ráth Cairn, were toasted as being headed “from the West Bank to the Gaza
strip.”
All Ráth Cairn people are bilingual, but many of the first generation had
little knowledge of English, and several older people alive today are clearly not
comfortable speaking English, except for basic transactions such as buying
groceries, etc. Other Gaeltacht areas are surrounded by areas of transition and
assimilation,6 but usually located within the generously-drawn boundaries of the
officially-recognized Gaeltacht. Ráth Cairn has no geographical transition zone.
In Connemara, especially in the 1930s, although shopkeepers and others living in
towns were culturally and linguistically more assimilated to English,7 they were
basically from the same stock as everyone else. In the first several decades of
6. Assimilation can go both ways. In my time in Ireland I have seen at least two areas
apparently increase their use of Irish (An Spidéal and the island of Árainn in Co. Galway), both
seemingly in response to perceived economic advantage in the language. In both cases what may
be happening is more public use of the language, ie., its use in new public domains.
7. A study group headed by Pádraig Ó Ríagáin (Foras Forbartha 1971:58-59) found it
“quite striking” that the use of Irish as an everyday vernacular was confined to the most marginal
parts of the officially-designated Gaeltacht areas, which are themselves geographically and
economically marginal to Ireland as a whole. Individual pockets of Irish speakers tended to be
“more closely related to an English-speaking village” than to each other.
Even in Gaeltacht towns which are largely Irish speaking, I have often seen fluent native
speakers of Irish working in hotels refuse to speak Irish to customers who are also fluent native
speakers of Irish. This seems to happen most when such customers are not from the immediate
area or otherwise well-known to or related to the speaker. Typically customers’ Irish-language
questions are answered in English. It may be that in such cases English is being used as an Hregister to keep the customer at a social distance from the staff member.
34
Ráth Cairn’s existence, there were no shops8 and most commercial business was
transacted with people who had no relation to Ráth Cairn people and often little
knowledge of Irish. Taking the three-mile walk into Athboy to go to Mass, the
pub, or shops meant negotiating an absolute transition between languages and, to
a great extent, cultures. There is an entire genre of anecdotes about hilarious
linguistic misunderstandings between Ráth Cairn people and Athboy
shopkeepers (Chapter 5). Such anecdotes are told in Connemara as well, but
there the zone of confusion is farther from home—even a 25-mile journey to
Galway City would only have involved gradual changes in the 1930s. Ráth Cairn
people were further isolated in the early years by hostility and misunderstanding
between themselves and the English-speakers of County Meath. This isolation in
the early years, along with shortages of land and limited opportunities at home,
meant that the younger generation in Ráth Cairn (those who were in their teens
in 1935) made relatively fewer marriages than their peers in Connemara would
have. Much of this bachelor generation matured into “characters” (Chapter 4),
uncles and aunts who had the time to perfect and pass their very rich store of
verbal and musical talent on to the next generations.
In spite of its early isolation, as a community Ráth Cairn is unbounded.
The original Irish-speakers came from several parts of the Connemara Gaeltacht.9
8. One family ran a small shop for a while; the local cooperative finally opened a shop in
Ráth Cairn in 1993.
9. mostly from various places in Ceantar na n-Oileáin, a group of islands joined to the
mainland by a series of causeways and bridges.
35
Ráth Cairn people thus have different networks of relations, “local” loyalties to
specific places in Connemara, and dialectal differences in their Irish-language
speech. Intermarriage among migrants and their descendants has caused these
networks of affiliation to overlap considerably; in- and out-migration to England
and America and intermarriage with local Meath people has added further layers
of connections. Boundaries, distinctions between persons or places, taken from
another point of view, are connections, lines of exchange and commensality, sites
of hybridization.
Such negotiations are personal in Ráth Cairn, running through families
where Irish-speakers have married English-speakers. The latter may become
perfectly fluent in Irish, the former may abandon the language. Couples meet
abroad and return to raise children; older siblings speaking English with London
or Manchester accents, younger ones with Meath accents, all sounding more or
less the same in Irish. Irish-speakers from Dublin move to Ráth Cairn and raise
children in exclusively Irish-speaking households, then send them to the local
school, where they acquire Meath-accented English. Grandmothers, living in the
family house or in the remodeled 1935-era house nearby, pass their language and
traditions on to grandchildren. Families who spoke English at home a generation
ago speak Irish at home now, or the other way around. Although less than 700
people live in the officially defined Gaeltacht of Ráth Cairn, networks of
relatives, “friends,” and former residents extend nationally and internationally.
36
There is always a significant number of people passing through, who live
there for a few years, attracted by the language, job opportunities, and the social
life. One particular house, which belonged to a Ráth Cairn person who had
relocated to England, was rented by a man from India, his wife from Connemara,
and their (trilingual) children. When this family left, the house was rented by an
Irish-speaker (not of Gaeltacht origin), his Russian wife, and children. The house
was eventually bought by a Dutch couple.
The Gaeltacht—beyond geography?
The relocation, in the 1930s, of Irish speakers from Connemara to County
Meath was only a small part of a massive reorganization of land-holding which
began well before Irish independence.10 The Land Commission, founded in 1881,
facilitated the transfer of millions of acres of land from large landowners as
estates were broken up or went bankrupt (Ó Conghaile 1992:614). Many large
estates in the Midlands of Ireland were divided up among the poor of the west
coast in the 1930s. Ráth Cairn and the two other “Gaeltacht Colonies” in County
Meath were created by the Land Commission as a result of a directive from the
Taoiseach (prime minister), Eamon De Valera, following discussions between De
Valera and the Gaeltacht activist organization, Muintir na Gaeltachta (People of
the Gaeltacht). This unusual origin—in response to pressure from below rather
10. Through a series of land reforms, “[m]ost Irish farmers became the effective owners of
their holdings before 1921” (Lee 1989:71).
37
than grand developmental strategies from above—may explain why the Meath
colonies were the only Land Commission project that involved creating
communities rather than relocating individuals, and the only one where
language was a consideration.
The British Government had created the Congested Districts Board
(C.D.B.) in 1891 to organize development and relief projects along Ireland’s west
coast. Most of the areas the C.D.B. was responsible for were areas where Irish
predominated, but it saw its goals in terms of the well-being of individuals and
families rather than community or language preservation. The Irish Free State set
up the Gaeltacht Commission in 1925 to survey and report on the condition of
the language in the West of Ireland; among the Commission’s recommendations
was the division of large estates among small Gaeltacht farmers. Like the C.D.B.,
the Gaeltacht Commission seemed to identify the Gaeltacht’s problems mainly in
terms of “congestion” and underdevelopment. The Commission recognized
language and community as essential elements for development (Ó Tuathaigh
1986:16-19), but arguably it still took these for granted as something “natural”
rather than as the deliberate products of human agency. Thus for the
Commission, “the problem of maintaining Irish was seen as one of stabilizing the
population and the economy of the area” (Ó Riagáin 1992:4), the assumption
apparently being that the language would take care of itself.
Although the Gaeltacht Commission did recommend that government
services and education be provided to Gaeltacht areas in the Irish language, little
38
was done in this regard. When De Valera’s Fianna Fáil government came to
power in 1932 and introduced social welfare programs such as the Dole and the
“Free Beef,”11 even these services were often conducted in English in the
Gaeltacht. In fact only 14 or 15 of the Gaeltacht Commission’s 80
recommendations were put into effect; as an Irish-language newspaper asked, “Is
this the Magna Carta of the Gael—15 recommendations out of 80?” (Ó Ciosáin
1993:31). The Gaeltacht Commission did not remain in operation as a state body
(in the manner of the Congested Districts Board); its recommendations remained
to be carried out (or ignored) by other government bodies.
One lasting legacy of the Gaeltacht Commission was its survey of Irishspeaking areas, which it classified as either “Fíor-Ghaeltacht” (True Irishspeaking District) or “Breac-Ghaeltacht” (Partly Irish-speaking District; literally
‘speckled’ or ‘spotted’). Areas were labelled as “Fíor-Ghaeltacht” if over 80% of
the population was found to have an “ordinary conversational ability in Irish;”
for the “Breac-Ghaeltacht” the figure was 25% to 80% (Ó Riagáin, 1992:4). These
boundaries were generously drawn, however, perhaps telling more about the
state’s hopes for these areas than about their actual condition.
11. When De Valera stopped the payment of land annuities to Britain in 1932, Britain
retaliated by imposing import duties on Irish livestock. In the “Economic War” that resulted,
Ireland imposed duties on British coal in turn. The cycle of sanctions and counter-sanctions
continued until 1938, depressing the Irish economy, especially the beef industry (Lee 1989:178).
The Government responded creatively to this crisis by, among other things, buying unmarketable
beef and distributing it along with the Dole, an act that made De Valera quite popular in
impoverished areas of the West where people otherwise could afford very little meat in their
diets (cf. Ó Ciosáin 1993:32).
39
But the most profound effect of this survey was that in it, the bureaucratic
logic of the state and the romantic ideology of the nation worked hand in hand to
define the Gaeltacht in terms of physical space, in what Ó Ciosáin (1991:7) calls
“the geographic fallacy.”
In 1956 the Department of the Gaeltacht was set up; it redefined the
official Gaeltacht, retaining mainly areas that had been classed as “FíorGhaeltacht” and dropping the “Breac-Ghaeltacht” designation (it did not grant
any kind of recognition to the Meath communities). Although the official
categories changed, the basic thinking behind them did not; thus maps of the
Gaeltacht tend to represent “true” Irish-speaking areas in solid color and
“questionable” (Hindley 1990) or “breac-” Gaeltacht in spots or cross-hatching.
Implicit in all this is an invidious linguistic ideology which conflates
language use and geographical space. In fact, the Gaeltacht Commission had
originally used the term “Fíor-Ghaeltacht” to refer to areas “in which the Irish
language may and should be restored at once in matters of education,
administration, and for general purposes” (Quoted in Ó Riagáin 1997:31). As Ó
Riagáin points out, the term designated an area’s potential rather than actual
language use. In other words, the Commission’s classifications were directed at
the state, urging it to change its own language use in these areas. The work of the
Commission was subsequently inverted and effectively became a quasi-moral
judgment of the areas themselves, rather than a directive aimed at the state. Thus
“purity” came to be seen as an unbroken state of solidity (many or all residents
40
being fluent speakers; most or all talk in Irish) and any kind of “mixture” as a
sign of a fall from grace. The spatializing metaphor is then available to project
back onto language use, when visitors to the “Fíor-Ghaeltacht,” expecting to hear
nothing but Irish, hear English spoken and thereby assume that “the Gaeltacht”
has weakened somehow. This appears more ironic when one considers that the
same state that underwrites these distinctions has been imposing Englishlanguage domains and speech events (church services, media and school books,
interactions with bureaucrats, etc.) in these communities, contrary to the
recommendations of the Gaeltacht Commission.
A geographical definition of the Gaeltacht makes it much more difficult to
understand the functional aspect of language or phenomena such as bilingualism.
Sociolinguistic theory itself propagates spatial metaphors with terms like
“domain,” which imply at least the possibility of boundary-like divisions
between different types of language use (Urciuoli 1995). Thus, the Committee on
Irish Language Attitudes Research (CLAR 1975), the first large-scale
sociolinguistic research project in Ireland, assumed that
the choice of one language in preference to another equally
accessible language is made more or less consciously and
consistently with reference to situations and topics, these being
possibly centered around institutional settings (or domains) such as
home, work, or public administration (CLAR 1975:233; quoted in Ó
Riagáin 1992:8).
National language policy in Ireland has to some extent been aimed at producing
a bilingualism rooted in a stable diglossia, a linguistic division of labor between
Irish and English (Ó Murchú 1970, Ó Ciosáin 1988), but seems to have failed to
41
produce any functional “domains” that are felt by most Irish people to be truly
more proper for Irish than English. On a national level, “there is no diglossia.
Both languages occur over the full range of social domains, though the use of
Irish in many of them is, of course, minimal” (Ó Murchú 1988:248). Not an inch
of functional territory has been yielded to Irish and Irish alone. Hence the
importance of geographical territory in Irish language policy.
Irish-speakers themselves, however, have tended to feel things differently.
Even the term Gaeltacht itself was used originally (as an abstract noun) to refer to
the general community of Irish-speakers (which included speakers of what is now
known as “Scots Gaelic”) rather than a place or a bounded geographical entity;
there was only “the Gaeltacht,” not this one or that one.12 It was formed in
opposition to the earlier term galltacht which originally denoted “foreignness” or
the adoption of English language and culture (Ó Murchú 1984b; McCaughey
1989:106-7). “Gaeltacht” was a quasi-national concept, but one which predated
the nation-state, since Irish-speaking communities shared common cultural and
legal institutions long before there was a modern state or any degree of political
unity.13
12. The geographic sense of the term originated in Scotland, where the geographical,
cultural and linguistic opposition between Highlands and Lowlands was already well formed by
the 14th Century (Dorian 1981:16).
13. Cf. Leerssen 1996, Ó Buachalla 1996. Gaelic society had little political unity, but a fair
degree of cultural and linguistic unity, owing to the presence of a learned class (poets, religious,
and legal professionals) which moved relatively freely between political domains. The existence
very early on of Gaelic-speaking ‘national’ consciousness and a well-developed idea of cultural
unity makes Ireland problematic for Anderson’s (1983) analysis of the rise of nationalism.
42
Irish is now perhaps unique in Europe for being both a “national” and a
“minority” language. The Irish State (along with, to a lesser extent, associated
hegemonic institutions like the Catholic Church and large-scale business capital)
sponsors Irish through a variety of very different means, such as giving it a
constitutional status and a a major position in school curricula, grants to Irish
speakers in the Gaeltacht, and the occasional dramatic gesture such as assistance
in the creation of Ráth Cairn. But at the same time, on a much larger scale but in
a much less obvious way, the State and virtually all of the dominant forces in
society, in their habitual routinized functioning, constantly undermine the
language, so that the great language shift in Ireland, which was already well
underway at the beginning of the 19th Century, is still going on.
One consequence of this unique situation is that, as I argue here, the State
can generously sponsor the language, but cannot create linguistic
community—this can only be achieved by the people themselves on a local level.
But doing so frequently requires them to fight the state, to break with the
reasonable habitual surface of everyday (anglophone) business as usual—in
other words, to be “language fanatics” (see below)––and to seek out the help of
fellow “fanatics” from within the power structure.
Power and diglossia
Eckert (1980) argues that in European minority language situations,
“language shift has been a means as well as a result of social change” (Eckert
43
1980:1058). She points out that (in France) new majority-language domains and
types of speech events were created by state penetration into minority-language
communities, while older ones, associated with the minority language, gradually
lost status and were abandoned in response. In such processes, the social
significance of domains and speech events associated with a particular language
is projected onto the language itself, and then onto its speakers. Every gain or
new domain occupied by the majority language effectively redefines the entire
complex relationship felt to pertain between the two languages and their
speakers. Fernandez (1986) has shown a similar process in Asturias, where
“Bable” and Castillian exist in a complementary relationship with regard to the
emotions, senses and intellect: since Castillian has become the dominant
discourse of education, news, etc., Bable is conversely felt to be the language of
emotion, locality, and the body. There is an ideology of modernization at work
here, based on assumptions that are often shared by both the state and speakers
of minority languages. The centralizing nation-state imposes a regime of cultural
and social stratification in which elements of language and culture are classified
as “traditional” or “modern.” It might be assumed that all new domains and
speech events are thereby “modern,” but in fact many of these are felt to be
“traditional” as well. The state classifies certain aspects of culture as “folklore”
(Ó Giolláin 1989, 1993; Ó Crualaoich 1989), and this leads to a revaluation of this
material in local communities and the redefinition or outright creation of new
genres and types of performance events.
44
The history of the Gaeltacht in the 20th Century shows that with a certain
degree of support from the state and members of the state class, speakers of
minority languages can regain ground for their languages. In Ireland every such
gain has been at the cost of direct action. Direct action breaks, or threatens to
break, what the state sees as a social contract between itself and Irish speakers.
But the state, acting alone, purely on the basis of its own logic and habitus, seems
unable to provide real gains for a minority language insofar as this involves
ceding some of its own power and control over communities.
In Ráth Cairn such struggles have been first and foremost about access to
and local control of the basic things of life: land, a chance to make a living,
church services, a pub, a shop, schools, infrastructure. The language question is
not separate from these basic things—it runs like a thread through all of them.
People agitating for them are then quite right to do so in the name of their
language. In many ways such struggles are quite different from language politics
on a “national” scale as described by Anderson and others, where language is, so
the argument goes, taken as a relatively abstract object and a symbolic badge of
identity. This is very much the view from the nation-state. I am suspicious of
these arguments even at the national level. In fact, for almost all of the many
“gaeilgeoirí” (Irish learners) I have met, the Andersonian model does not fit; they
are engaged in very complex, intricate and personal acts of cultural translation, if
not transformation.
45
It is the view from the nation-state that sees the Gaeltacht as a
geographical, bounded entity. By conflating the social life of language and
geographic space, such a view naturalizes language use and even community,
denying self-consciousness or intention as qualities of the “natives” themselves
and a failure to see community as the outcome of human action and struggle.
Thus “linguistic geographer” Reg Hindley, in his book The Death of the Irish
Language (Hindley 1990:132-33) labels as “language ‘fanatics’” those who agitated
for recognition of Ráth Cairn as an official Gaeltacht area. At the same time he
praises the “dedicated head” of Ráth Cairn’s primary school and the “sensitive
and intelligent local leadership” of its cooperative, apparently failing to realize
that these were some of the same people he labels “fanatics.”
Basing grant decisions solely on the question of who actually speaks Irish
would present a bureaucratic nightmare—would the gaeilgeoirí (Irish-learners) of
Dublin be entitled to grants? Who would determine who speaks Irish, or even
how “speaking Irish” would be defined? A geographical definition of the
Gaeltacht solves these problems and avoids embarrassing questions about actual
language use.14 In addition to satisfying the logic of the state, such a definition
serves deeper needs. The Irish language is felt by most people to be a symbolic
14. Currently, school age Gaeltacht children are tested for competence in Irish; families
receive a small grant for each child who passes the test, and these grants enable them to apply for
further grants, ie., for improving their houses. These grants are tremendously resented by English
speakers, though an English-speaking poor or lower middle class household is entitled to almost
the same amount of grant money. I was always amazed when “large farmers” in Meath (who can
get small fortunes in E.U. grants and subsidies) complain about Ráth Cairn people and “all the
grants they get.”
46
cornerstone of Irish identity, and thus of Ireland’s autonomy as a nation-state
(CLAR 1975). But English has nearly absolute hegemony as the language of
commerce, education and government, and is the only language spoken by most
Irish people.
The state finds a way out of this dilemma by preserving the Gaeltacht
areas as exemplary centers 15 of Irishness. The fact that they are rural, and (except
for Ráth Cairn) located in the West, remote from urban centers, enables them to
be taken up in a historical narrative of development. History is spatialized, so
that by driving from Dublin out to the Gaeltacht one can experience the national
past, and one can send the children to be steeped in the national essence. This
kind of situation is common enough in European nation-states (eg, Karelia for
Finland, urban excursionistas in rural Catalonia; cf. Ó Giolláin 1993). The symbolic
elevation of the Gaeltacht was originally intended by language revivalists as the
first step in reconstituting Irish as a national language; it meant taking
communities and areas that were despised and disadvantaged and revaluing
them as transformative spaces for the re-gaelicization of the nation. Thus the
more radical nationalists saw the Gaeltacht as holding the key to the future of
Ireland as well as to its past. Unfortunately the Gaeltacht could also serve a
narrowly “symbolic” function as the spiritual homeland of a nation whose
material interests lay elsewhere. As Johnson (1993:158) observes, “the separation
of the economic and the cultural, the symbolic and the material led to a
15. I have stolen this term from Geertz (1980).
47
contradiction between theory and practice in the maintenance of the defined
cultural heartland of the country.” These separations lie at the cold spiritual
center of another sacred space: that of the ideology of modernization.
From the point of view of conservative nationalism, English is easily seen
as embodying the metropolis, and thus as more “modern” and even as the
inevitable end of progress and development; the great English-language ocean
into which the Gaelic river flows. Such a view entails the ideological erasure
(Irvine and Gal, to appear) of Irish in the city—more native speakers of Irish now
live in Dublin than in the Gaeltacht—as well as of the many “modern” attributes
of the rural Gaeltacht and its people.
Another related ambiguity stems from the fact that Irish society has no
enduring pattern of diglossia involving Irish and English. For many people
whose primary language is English, having spaces designated as “Irish-speaking”
offers a solution to the question “when and to whom shall I speak
Irish/English?”16 Spatial segregation of Irish is an ambiguous manifestation of
the symbolic power of English. On the one hand it removes the language from
everyday life (where English holds sway in every domain). On the other hand,
given the hegemony of English, creating spaces for Irish ensures some limited
rights for Irish-speakers. College campuses in Ireland thus have designated
16. Since Irish is a mandatory subject for most of first and second-level education, very
few people in Ireland are denied the chance to become fluent Irish speakers, or at least to become
fairly competent in Irish grammar and vocabulary. Many basically anglophone Irish people have
told me they do speak Irish, but only when in the Gaeltacht or while abroad on holidays! People
speak Irish abroad so they won’t be understood by strangers and so they won’t be mistaken for
English.
48
rooms, buildings, and dormitories as places for Irish. This is seen as necessary
because, as many Irish-speakers have said to me, the use of Irish in everyday
public situations is often apparently felt by non-Irish speakers to be an intrusion
at worst and exceptional or remarkable (marked) at best. But non-Irish speakers
rarely seem to feel that their speaking English is similarly intrusive or marked, in
any situation. It could be argued, therefore, that the lack of diglossia in Ireland
indicates a situation of conflict,17 and is experienced by Irish-speakers as such.
The Irish speakers I am acquainted with in Ráth Cairn and Connemara
tend to speak “Irish” all the time with other Irish-speakers, switching to
“English” mainly when non-Irish speakers are participating in a conversation.18
This is the generally accepted norm and ideological ideal in these communities,
not always borne out in actual practice. For these speakers, “speaking Irish” may
include plenty of code switching to English (usually within the sentence) no
matter what the situation or who is participating. The use of large numbers of
English lexical items 19 and even entire phrases or even sentences in English is
often seen by outsiders and speakers of other dialects of Irish as a sign that
17. Martin-Jones (1989) and Eckert (1980) argue that diglossia itself is perhaps never an
equal relationship in European societies; cf. Gal (1987).
18. Similar patterns of use were noted by Dorian (1981) for East Sutherland (Scots) Gaelic.
19. Borrowing is only partly motivated by a lack of lexical resources in Irish; as was often
said to me, Irish “has words for everything” (due to the work of lexicographers and terminology
committees) but these words are unknown to or sometimes known to but rejected by native
speakers. In Chapter 6 I discuss what I call (after Irvine 1996) strategies of insulation in codeswitching.
49
Connemara Irish is “polluted.” But this borrowing enables speakers to construct
the entire speech event as an “Irish-language” speech event, which is
symbolically and perhaps psychologically important. This type of borrowing of
the resources of English within an overall “Irish” context could perhaps be seen
as an act of possession or incorporation of English by Irish speakers rather than as
the “pollution” of their dialect (cf Hill 1985).
Such strategies are sometimes read by outsiders as an attempt to avoid
speaking English at all; at a music festival in the Rinn Gaeltacht in Waterford in
1993, two youths expressed amazement to me that the visiting Connemara
people (including the Ráth Cairn contingent) “spoke Irish all the time.”20 Thus
speakers of Connemara Irish do not readily recognize diglossia or even a regime
of separate “domains” of speaking. Cape Breton (Canada) speakers of Scots
Gaelic refused to typify codes and domains in the abstract for Mertz (1993:168).
Their use of language was rather a creative response to “the complex social life of
the community, a life that is not primarily understood as a series of segmented
‘domains.’”
20. Teenagers and youths in Ráth Cairn often speak English to one another, seemingly as
a matter of fashion. As with teenagers everywhere, their speech practices change frequently. In
four years in Ráth Cairn I noticed several such changes. Sometimes the addition or subtraction of
influential peers tipped the balance one way or another, e.g. a youth from Connemara shows up
to work in a local factory and precipitates a shift towards Irish. Sometimes it seemed to me that
the main motivation for speaking English was resentment at elders’ attempts to regiment
language use. On a trip to perform at a festival on the Isle of Man in 1993 the sizable group of
young people present began speaking mainly English to one another the moment the boat left the
dock. As far as I know none of the older people made any fuss about this, and by the end of the
week almost all of the youths were back speaking Irish to one another again.
50
For Connemara and Ráth Cairn people as well, language use is felt to be
embodied in concrete personal relationships: language is an aspect of persons. This
is part of a much wider approach to life that one could call, for lack of a better
term, “personalism.” Thus, in an article titled “The Gaeltacht—Myth and
Reality,” Donncha Ó hÉallaithe (1993:3), an Irish language activist who settled in
Connemara, mentions that Gaeltacht people often answer in English when
addressed in Irish by gaeilgeoirí:
Gaeltacht people in the main are not language enthusiasts,
language pushers or language lovers, nor could they ever take
seriously the idea of restoring Irish as the major language of
communication all over Ireland. I can’t remember, in my 20 years
living here, ever hearing anybody say: “Tá grá mór agam don
Ghaeilge” [I have a great love for Irish]. For most Gaeltacht people
Irish is simply and solely a local language of communication for
use when communicating with people from their own language
community, whether on a building site in Boston, at a striptease
show in a pub on Holloway Road [in London], at a disco in
downtown Gaoth Dobhair, in a factory in Conamara or on the ferry
from Ros a’ Mhíl to the Aran Islands .
This statement is true as far as it goes—Gaeltacht people tend not to take their
language as an abstract object of contemplation, in everyday conversation at any
rate. But verbal art in Irish is full of sentiments toward the language which imply
that it more for its speakers than “a local language of communication for use...”
This ranges from explicit lyrical praise of the language and its beauty to subtle
mocking of béarlachas (English-speaking ways) in humorous folk drama. Such
works have a great historical depth in the Irish literary and folk traditions, and
are a pervasive presence in the everyday lives of Irish speakers. Any discussion
of speakers’ attitudes to their language should properly pay attention to their
51
own use of language in verbal art (as well as in answering survey questions or
responding to outsiders’ questions). As Friedrich (1979, 1986) has argued, poetic
language plays a central role in constituting the imaginations of speakers and
shaping their views of and responses to “everyday life” itself.
Taken too literally, Ó hÉallaithe’s statement offers an excellent rationale
for the abandonment of Irish: in semiotic terms, it says that language use is merely
a reflection of presupposed social (“community”) relationships, rather than a
way of negotiating or even creating such relationships.
The poetics of despair that Ó hÉallaithe evokes is certainly present in the
western Gaeltacht. With a nod to Stewart (1988), we could call it the view from
the emigrant ship: it sees community itself as an ever-receding nádúr (“nature”),
now limited to the confines of individual human beings. Floating atomistically
on the tides of modernity, when meeting they speak Irish to reaffirm their insider
status (as a small gesture of resistance), then go on to raise their children (in
Boston or London) in English. This is a sense that community is an origin-point
we can only look back on nostalgically, rather than a project or a possibility. Such
attitudes exist. It is not clear to me, though, that one can always infer them from
practices such as the refusal to speak Irish to non-native-speaking outsiders
(which is much more common in Connemara than in Ráth Cairn) or a wider
refusal to take “Irish” as an abstract object of affection. Ó hÉallaithe, ostensibly
debunking myths while speaking in the name of Gaeltacht people, seems
52
ultimately to take the point of view of romantic nationalism, naturalizing
language use and denying intention to the natives.
Intentional community
Removed from the stony seashores and meager soil of Connemara, Ráth
Cairn’s Irish-speakers traded their homes for a place in a utopian project. Ráth
Cairn calls into question the naturalization of community, the invidious
assumption that it is somehow places that speak Irish rather than people. But
Ráth Cairn was originally created in response to the agitations of an organized
grass-roots group from the Gaeltacht, that appealed directly to the Taoiseach (the
Irish Prime Minister), Eamon De Valera (Chapter 5). And the community was
founded by people from a geographically limited area, some of whom knew each
other, and some of whom were politically organized and agitated for the move.
In all these ways, Ráth Cairn has a much stronger basis for community than did
other groups of migrants to the East,21 and more than most communities in
Ireland. It has maintained and strengthened its identity as an Irish-speaking
21. Two other Gaeltacht “colonies” were created in the 1930s, most notably the one in
Baile Ghib (Gibbstown), about 10 miles to the north of Ráth Cairn. Baile Ghib was populated by
Irish-speakers from widely separated areas, including speakers of quite different dialects of Irish,
who were mixed in with English-speaking families. English soon became the community
language, although Irish is still spoken in many households and by the older generations there.
Another tiny group went to Allenstown, Co. Meath but were quickly assimilated. There are
several other places in the Midlands of Ireland where individuals or small groups of Irishspeakers were given land in the 1930s and after, but Ráth Cairn, Baile Ghib and Allenstown were
the only attempts to create Gaelic “colonies.”
53
community, now the only one in the province of Leinster, and the only one
which was deliberately created.
Ráth Cairn’s continued existence as an Irish-speaking community
challenges a deeply held assumption that speaking Irish is a purely “natural”
rather than an intentional activity. Implicit in this point of view (shared by many
academics) is an association of urbanity with modernity: rural people who speak
the language are “Irish-speakers” or even “native speakers,” while urban Irishspeakers are “language activists,” if not “fanatics.”
For both romantic revivalists and native speakers themselves, Irishspeaking often seems to be a property of places rather than of communities. 22 It is
commonly believed that Irish was always spoken in present-day Gaeltacht areas
(except of course Ráth Cairn). One is born speaking the language, and one speaks
it because one lives in a place no one else wanted. The extent of the present-day
Connemara Gaeltacht mirrors very closely the distribution of granite rather than
sedimentary rocks in West Galway: the poorest, rockiest, boggiest land speaks
Irish. It is easy for people to whom their language is a badge of poverty to resent
or mock others who wish to learn it.23 Romantic nationalism offers an easy refuge
in the form of a nativism that sees “tradition” as an uncritical, unconscious and
22. But the ‘indigenous’ semiotic of place is quite different than that of the nation-state.
23. The often derogatory use of the term gaeilgeoir (literally, ‘Irish-speaker’) to refer to a
non-native speaker who is speaking Irish illustrates the ambivalence of the situation.
54
inalienable property. This attitude is not far removed from the concept of dúchas:
a quasi-genetic ‘nature’ that can neither be acquired nor gotten rid of.
Although their immediate economic gains proved to be fairly minimal, the
settlers of Ráth Cairn were blasted out of such “traditions” in 1935, and forced to
take a more deliberate stance towards their own community and its language
and culture. Of course, all speakers of minority languages must (as individuals
or collectively) actively “choose,” at some level, to continue speaking the
language and especially whether or not to pass it on to their children, but most
people, everywhere, prefer to clothe such decisions in an ideological cloak of
inevitability. Few such garments are available for Irish speakers these days, other
than the mystique of the Gaeltacht as a place apart. Ráth Cairn, as a section of
ordinary Meath farmland, has resisted such mystique, focusing attention more
on Irish as a social product than as a natural attribute of place. Like any language
or culture, Irish has always assimilated outsiders, claiming or reclaiming
territory; as a symbolic system in Peirce’s sense, it has the power to “create
defenders and animate them with strength” (Peirce 1976 4:243-4).
Ráth Cairn is an intentional community, but one which continues to defy
all intentions: a compromise between utopian dreams of the Gaeltacht radicals of
the 1930s, De Valera’s exercise in nation-building, the dreams of language
enthusiasts in Dublin and elsewhere, and those of individuals and families in
Connemara who simply wanted land and a chance to get ahead.
55
It is often repeated about the oldest generation that the day they were
removed from the open spaces, ocean, and shore of Connemara “they were lost.”
I have heard similar sentiments even from those who were in their early teens or
younger when they came to Ráth Cairn. Even though they moved only about 120
miles to the East, Ráth Cairn was a world away from Connemara, especially in
the 1930s. Seremetakis (1994:8) uses the term “sensory landscape” for a
community’s physical “repository and horizon of historical experience, emotions,
embedded sensibilities and hence social relationships.” The migration to County
Meath radically altered the sensory landscape of the people of Ráth Cairn.
Exposure to new production techniques (plowing, intensive farming) and social
relations of production (commodity crop production, wage labor, the increasing
importance of the cash economy) threatened to further dissociate and fragment
the social worlds of the migrants.
The people of Ráth Cairn have countered and in large part successfully
resisted this fragmentation of experience, typical of both (post-) modernity and
marginality. Although Ráth Cairn was fairly isolated until the 1960s, the oldest
currently living generation (who were in their teens in 1935) have maintained or
reestablished contacts with Connemara while holding onto much of its place-lore
and traditions, and are truly multilocal (cf. Rodman 1992).
56
The view from the Gaeltacht and the view from the nation-state
Symbolic capital that becomes official, as in the case of official
languages, is often embedded in histories and ideologies that may
challenge the hegemony of the state.
(Haeri 1997:795-96)
A cheerful term like “multilocalism” might seem cruelly ironic in the
context of the history of Irish emigration, which even through the 1970s was, for
many people, forced economic migration often without hope of return. To the
present day the population of most of the rural West is declining through
migration to Irish cities and abroad. For up to half of Ráth Cairn’s original
migrants the move to County Meath was only the first stop on the way to Dublin
and overseas. By the early 1960s, according to Micheál Seoighe (1986:98), 50%
were still in Ráth Cairn, 20% were working in other places in Ireland, another
20% working in England, 9% in America and 1% in Australia.
In both Connemara and Ráth Cairn, the 1960s brought a revival of grassroots political activism. It was only when increasing prosperity in the 1960s
allowed more people to remain in or return to Ireland that this type of activism
gained strength.24 In the 1960s and early 1970s, groups such as Cearta Sibhialta na
Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Civil Rights) were founded in Connemara to demand fair
treatment of Irish-speakers as a minority language community. At about the
same time a coalition based in Ráth Cairn and Dublin was pressuring the
24. The generation of the 1930s had been the last previous generation to not emigrate in
large numbers—in that case it was the depression which “closed” America and Britain to Irish
emigrants.
57
government to grant official Gaeltacht status to Ráth Cairn. As far as I know
these groups were the first Gaeltacht-based groups since the 1930s to take an
explicitly rights-based stand on language issues.
One common denominator in all these events was Máirtín Ó Cadhain,
who had been a leader of the 1930s movement in Connemara. In a pamphlet
published in 1964, Ó Cadhain urged Irish-language activists to threaten to
abstain from voting25 to protest the government’s complacency in its Irishlanguage policies. This tactic was successfully used in the local elections of 1967
to get Ráth Cairn and Baile Ghib officially recognized as Gaeltacht areas.
Recognition was desired partially because it would entitle residents to state
support such as grants for housing. The main motivation, though, seems to have
been a desire to expand Ráth Cairn’s uneconomically small farm holdings.
The fact that Gaeltacht status had not been granted by the Department of
the Gaeltacht in 1956 perhaps shows that the Government saw the Ráth Cairn
project more in terms of land reform and “relief” than of language maintenance.
Another problem was that its Irish-speakers were no longer confined to the
initial “colony”—more families had arrived in the 1950s and settled in adjacent
townlands, and members of the original families had expanded their holdings
25. Ó Cadhain saw this as the only response to the complacency of the Fianna Fáil party,
which otherwise could count on the loyalty of Gaeltacht people as well as urban Irish-speakers.
Fianna Fáil, the dominant political party, was founded by the remains of the anti-Treaty side after
losing the Civil War of 1921-22. The party first came to power in 1932, led by Eamon De Valera,
and is still the largest political party in the State. It is in many ways reminiscent of Mexico’s P.R.I.
in that it commands the loyalties of the rural poor due to its populist policies and clientelist
practices.
58
outside of the original colony (Ó Gadhra 1986:115), presenting a sociolinguistic
situation potentially too complicated to untangle.
The creation of spaces or domains for Irish is always a political act at some
level. It is also contrary to most Irish speakers’ own norms, an imposition on and
a reification of their everyday speech practices. Irish speakers live in a set of
wider domains that belong to an aggressively hegemonic anglophone society.
The history of Ráth Cairn bears this out. Take, for example, the provision in the
original colony of a site for a (Catholic) church. People told me that the intended
function of this small piece of land (near the primary school) had been a mystery
for several decades. It eventually came to light that it was intended for a church,
which the parish priest in Athboy (some say the Bishop of Meath) had decided
against building. This may have been nothing but an ordinary ecclesiastical
power-play (keeping all of the flock under one roof), but it meant that Ráth Cairn
people, in addition to walking three miles into town to go to Mass, had to make
confessions and otherwise deal with priests mainly through the medium of
English, depending on the abilities and inclinations of whatever priests
happened to be stationed in Athboy. In Athboy the Irish-speakers formed a small
minority at Mass, but in a church in Ráth Cairn the language question would
have to be addressed.
The seminary in Maynooth, established in the mid-19th Century, played
an important role in anglicizing the country, introducing a new regime of civil
Catholicism that was conservative, middle-class and anglophone (Larkin 1984;
59
Taylor 1995). Even after the reforms of Vatican II introduced the vernacular
Mass, the church as an institution did not readily embrace Irish; in Athboy, Mass
was said in English (except on St. Patrick’ s Day!). The demand for Irish-speaking
priests and Irish language church services became a cause celebre in the 1960s; a
pamphlet produced in 1964 by Dublin activists (including the ubiquitous Máirtín
Ó Cadhain) used the plight of Ráth Cairn to highlight the situation in the
Gaeltacht as a whole.26 The headmaster of the primary school, Seán Ó
Coisdealbha, had been one of the original members of Muintir na Gaeltachta
involved in the creation of Ráth Cairn. He and his wife Ide had made the school
the center of public life—the only public institution in Ráth Cairn. They made use
of traditional verbal art in the classroom and taught through the medium of Irish,
including the Catechism. When they retired in the 1960s, the Bishop of Meath
“took the opportunity” to introduce the teaching of catechism through English
(Ó Méalóid and Mac Cóil 1997). The children of Ráth Cairn were told that they
had one week to prepare themselves and be ready to make confession in English.
The authors of the pamphlet stated in response:
Ráth Cairn, County Meath is a true Gaeltacht community [pobal
Fíor-Ghaeltacht]. The people came from Connemara thirty years ago
and many had little or no English. They never heard the Word of
God in Irish in Ráth Cairn—except in the school. [...] Even if we are
Irish-speakers that is no reason for us to be second-class citizens in
the Kingdom of God. God is not an English-speaking God to us. It
is not to an English-speaking God that the little children of Ráth
Cairn should be expected to confide the loneliest secrets of their
26. This was many people’s first introduction to Ráth Cairn (Ó Gadhra 1986:111-12); the
pamphlet was entitled “Chuala tú faoi Ráth Cairn?” (Have you heard about Ráth Cairn?).
60
hearts. Christ asked for the little children to be let unto Him. Or did
He say that they had to be English speakers?27
This is a rejection of diglossia, and takes the form of an appeal to the
personal nature of the interaction between a child and God. Speaking style is
here seen (ideally) to reflect concrete personal relationships; and this is seen as a
matter of civil rights (“second-class citizens”).
As a result of the agitation, a young Maynooth priest, Tomás Ó Fiaich,
began driving out to Ráth Cairn to perform Irish-language Masses. This is a good
example of how Ráth Cairn has acquired influential allies within the power
structure; typically people who play roles as activists or reformers within their
own organizations. Ó Fiaich was active in the Irish-language movement in
Maynooth, and revived Cumann na Sagart (The Priests’ Society) as a national
organization promoting Irish among the clergy (Ó Doibhlin 1995). He would
later become Cardinal Ó Fiaich and a crusader for civil rights of Catholics in
Northern Ireland.
The drive to establish linguistic rights for Ráth Cairn led to the
establishment of locally controlled spaces for the language. A branch of the Gaelic
League, “Craobh Cearta Ráth Cairn” (the Ráth Cairn Rights Branch) was
founded in 1971. Construction began on a community hall, and this led to the
27. Is pobal Fíor-Ghaeltacht é Ráth Cairn na Mí. As Conamara a tháinig na daoine deich mbliana
fichead ó shoin agus a lán acu ar bheagán nó d’uireasa Béarla. Níor chuala siad Briathar Dé ariamh i
nGaeilge i Ráth Cairn—ach amháin sa scoil. [...]Má’s Gaeilgeoirí féin muid ní shin fáth ar bith gur
saoránaigh de’n dara grad a bheadh ionainn i Ríocht Dé. Ní Dia Béarlach linn Dia. Ní le Dia Béarlach is
cóir iarraidh ar pháistí beaga Ráth Cairn na rúin is uaigni in a croí a ligeann. D’iarr Críost na páistí beaga
a ligeann Chuige. Nó arbh éard a d’ordaigh Sé gur lucht Béarla a chaithfeadh a bheith ann? (pamphlet
reprinted in Ó Conghaile 1986:150-51).
61
creation of a community co-op, Comharchumann Ráth Cairn. This co-op is
locally controlled—local people buy shares, ownership of which gives them
voting rights in elections to the governing committee. The hall became the site of
Irish-language Masses, a drama club, and eventually an Irish-language
secondary school. An important addition to the community was the pub,
originally in the hall and then moved to a new building attached to it. Previously
drinkers had to make the trek to pubs in Athboy, where there were sometimes
conflicts between Ráth Cairn people and others. Ráth Cairn’s pub largely
replaced nighttime gatherings in houses as the locus of performance. As a semipublic28 place, it brought performance further into the public realm and acts as
an interface between local people and outsiders.
Eventually a church was built, Áras Cuimhneacháin Naomh Phádraig,
completed in 1985. The co-op also helped farmers expand their holdings,
organized a project to bring in piped water, and bought land for a housing estate
(not yet built). It is by far the most important institution in Ráth Cairn, and
functions in a variety of ways as the go-between in local peoples’ dealings with
the State.
The struggle for official recognition of Ráth Cairn followed a pattern
typical of the relationship between Irish-speakers and the state. The state makes
“symbolic” gestures to the language, which it has to be forced into upholding.
28. It is organized as a private club, open to non-members; this gives the Co-op more
control over who uses it. The threat of being barred is a powerful sanction.
62
Protest consists of embarrassing the state with adverse publicity through the
threat or actual practice of autonomous action (e.g., not voting).29 Members of
Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Civil Rights) set up an illegal radio
transmitter broadcasting in Irish in Connemara in 1970, an action which led
directly to the creation by the state of Raidió na Gaeltachta (Ó Glaisne 1982), a
Irish language Gaeltacht-based radio station which broadcasts nationally. Raidió
na Gaeltachta was the first national institution to function through Irish only,
and the first to be largely controlled by Gaeltacht people. Another result of the
agitation of Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta was the setting up in 1980 of Údarás
na Gaeltachta, which took over responsibility for industrial development in the
Gaeltacht, previously the responsibility of Gaeltarra, a state board, and GaelLinn, a private organization.30 Údarás na Gaeltachta is unique in that a majority
of its board of directors are democratically elected by Gaeltacht residents.
The actions of Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta reflected a new
understanding among Gaeltacht activists that increasing local autonomy was the
29. A few times in Ráth Cairn I heard local wits express dissatisfaction with the
government by proposing that “we might as well all speak English now.”
30. These organizations had focused on developing “traditional” crafts and industries
such as knitting and fishing, although Gaeltarra went so far as to set up two industrial estates in
Connemara and Donegal in 1965. In the 1960s and 1970s Gaeltarra increasingly followed the
model of the Industrial Development Agency (I.D.A.), which was founded in 1949 and attempted
to attract foreign industrial capital to Ireland. Údarás na Gaeltachta has followed the same model.
Both Gaeltarra and Údarás na Gaeltachta have been criticized for lacking a coherent cultural and
linguistic policy, making it hard to distinguish them from the I.D.A. (Johnson 1979:70). According
to Údarás na Gaeltachta, “the population of the Gaeltacht is more than 86,000 according to the
1996 Census of Population and the total labour force is 28,500... [Údarás na Gaeltachta sponsored
industries] account for 7,880 full-time jobs and 4,000 part-time/seasonal jobs” (Údarás na
Gaeltachta FAQ). For comparison, the current (1998) population of Ráth Cairn is about 450,
according to the head of the local Coop (Foinse, 2/22/98).
63
only means to preservation of their communities (Ó Gadhra 1988:258). They
represent a fundamental shift in attitudes towards the Irish language. The State
has always claimed the language as a “national” language, the birthright of all
Irish people, a perspective that makes problematic any special treatment for
Gaeltacht people.31 The Gaeltacht-based social movements of the 1960s and 1970s
sought to redefine the language as a “minority” language, seeking “civil rights”
for Gaeltacht people (and for urban Irish speakers) as an oppressed minority in
search of increased autonomy.32
Such struggles increasingly take place on the terrain of the state and
according its logic. By fighting for recognition as a Gaeltacht area the people of
Ráth Cairn effectively redefined themselves (in certain contexts) as a
geographically-bounded community. In the same way, the creation of Údarás na
Gaeltachta strengthened the geographical definition of the Gaeltacht by turning
it into a set of electoral districts. In a dialectic similar to that identified by the
Comaroffs (1992) in processes of colonization, the logic of the state has
increasingly informed not only the responses of the powerful but also the
expectations, actions and achievements of local resistance.
31. Many monoglot English speakers in Ireland have insisted to me that Irish is “their”
language, often in the context of objecting to compulsory Irish in the school curriculum, grants
for Irish-speakers, etc.
32. Diamond (1974:278) argues that such struggles are a response to the expansion of the
state and civil law, and the “drastic changes in the socioeconomic structure” which result.
64
Once new local institutions are created, the struggle is not over; in fact it is
often only the beginning. The minority rights perspective on Irish language
communities, once accepted by the State, is available to the latter as a means of
containing Gaeltacht communities and limiting their demands for autonomy.
Gaeltacht cooperatives exemplify the fine line that separates locally autonomous
structures from instruments of the state:
In most cases the Gaeltacht cooperatives are merely structures
through which government aid may be channelled into the
Gaeltacht regions, structures which involve planning at a more
local level. A significant point here, however, is that the momentum
comes from within the Gaeltacht itself. The planners are in this case
local people living in small rural communities who actually
experience the conditions they are striving to improve... (Johnson
1979:71).
As an example of this, there has been constant tension within Raidió na
Gaeltachta, and between the station and its listeners, over who controls the
station (the State or local people) and over the station’s mission or target
audience—Gaeltacht people or a national audience (Ó Drisceoil 1996). The
station was set up under the auspices of Raidió Telefís Éireann (the national
broadcasting authority), which directly appoints top management. There is also
an appointed advisory committee of representatives of the different Gaeltacht
communities. The first committee did not include any of the activists who had
campaigned for the establishment of the station; most of its members were also
members of Fianna Fáil, the party then in power. (Ó Glaisne 1982:73-77).
Paradoxically, it has often been the national organization (R.T.É.) which
has attempted to impose a “local” definition of Raidió na Gaeltachta’s coverage,
65
while “local,” Gaeltacht-based staff wanted the station to cover national and
international news (Ó Glaisne 1982; Ó Drisceoil 1996; Watson 1997:218). The
question is one of autonomy for Irish and Irish speaking communities, an
autonomy which is outward-looking, versus a protected status as an inwardlooking reserve. Thus Raidió na Gaeltachta has built up an international network
of Irish-speakers for use as correspondents (Watson 1997:218), and is well-known
for its ability to cover national news, especially political news, and has forced
politicians to be able to account for themselves through the medium of Irish (Ó
Ciosáin, 1998:20). The case of Raidió na Gaeltachta—a “local” station with
national and international reach—shows that perhaps the “local” is not merely a
geographic entity; locality is not a physical container for people but a wider set of
concrete social relationships.
There was similar pressure to establish a national Irish-language television
channel, including experiments in pirate broadcasting in Connemara in 1986.
Ráth Cairn people were actively involved in this campaign; the community
boasts its own independent production company, Scun Scan. These efforts led to
the creation of Telefís na Gaeilge (T. na G.) which began broadcasting in 1996.
Interestingly, the most determined opposition to T. na G. came from Ireland’s
largest private media conglomerate, Independent Newspapers. Although T. na
G. has headquarters in the Gaeltacht, it defines itself as a “national” service and
is much more firmly under the control of R.T.É than Raidió na Gaeltachta. Thus
the name of the station, Teilifís na Gaeilge, which is Television “of Irish,” that is, of
66
“Irish” as the official national language and property of all Irish people, rather
than Teilifís na Gaeltachta, Television “of the Gaeltacht,” the voice and point of
view of the habitually Irish-speaking community (however that community is
defined). This shows in T. na G.’s programming, most of which features simple,
standardized (and English-subtitled) Irish comprehensible to learners and nonnative speakers. Very little of its programming seems to present a Gaeltacht
point of view. In a way this may a good thing—in Ráth Cairn the night of T. na
G.’s first broadcast, one of the things that most impressed some of the older
people were the Toyota ads in Irish! But T. na G. has a quality of placelessness
that R. na G. lacks, a quality that manifests itself in its journalists’ apparent
attempts to avoid “Gaeltacht” accents.
As with other institutions, the point of view projected by T. na G. closely
reflects its own power structure. Seosamh Ó Cuaig, a member of Cearta Sibhialta
na Gaeltachta who has been an elected member of the board of Údarás Na
Gaeltachta and is now a journalist with Raidió na Gaeltachta, put the matter like
this:
But it is the people coming in from outside that are on top in the
Údarás [na Gaeltachta]. The things we helped create, said T.P. Ó
Conchubhair [another Gaeltacht activist] to me once, are managed
by outsiders now. There are four or five grades in the Údarás, I said
to John Lowry. In the lowest grade, 90% of the people are Gaeltacht
people. There is nobody from the Gaeltacht in the highest grade.
T[elefís] na G[aeltachta] is that way because it is coming
from the outside. ‘We’ll go West and save the Sioux Indians’, that’s
the mentality there. You couldn’t put a Sioux Indian in charge of
the Sioux Indians. It isn’t that way with Raidió na Gaeltachta, yet.
Raidió na Gaeltachta is the only Gaeltacht institution we ever had.
R.T.É. is in charge of it, but it is the mentality of the Gaeltacht that
67
was in it [from the beginning]. This is under severe siege with a lot
of people trying to put an end to it. There is pressure on Raidió na
Gaeltachta to emphasize the national aspect. But what does that
mean? It isn’t [a case of] local and national but local and universal.
That’s what I say.33
“The mentality of the Gaeltacht” (meon na Gaeltachta), in its particularity as a
locally grounded perspective, not only can speak for itself, but has something to
say to the world. As with the Sioux Indians, only autonomy can safeguard such
perspectives. A flyer issued by Ráth Cairn’s production company to present
proposals for T. na G. makes this point very clearly:
The Gaeltacht regions are the centers from which one will see the
world. The service must be located in the Gaeltacht and in the
hands of Gaeltacht people and Irish speakers (Scun Scan 1993, my
translation).
The most insidious threat to the Irish language and Irish speaking
communities is the reasonable habitual surface of everyday anglophone business
as usual that characterizes Irish society as a whole. This everyday habitus is often
seen to manifest itself as “market forces.” Thus as Watson (1997:214-17) shows, it
was a shift towards a “market-driven” policy based on an American-style ratings
system that led R.T.É. to drop much of its Irish-language broadcasting in the
33. Ach is iad na daoine thar teora isteach atá in uachtar san Údarás. Na rudaí ar chuidigh muid
leo, arsa T.P. Ó Conchubhair liom uair, is eachtrannaigh atá ina mbainisteoirí orthu. Tá ceithre nó cúig
ghrád san Údarás, a dúirt mé le John Lowry. Maidir leis an ngrád is ísle, 90% de na daoine atá ar an ngrád
sin, is de mhuintir na Gaeltachta iad. An grád is airde, níl duine ar bith as an nGaeltacht air.
Tá TnaG ar an gcaoi sin mar gheall gur ón taobh amuigh atá an rud ag tíocht. ‘Gabhfaidh muid
siar agus slánóidh muid na Sioux Indians’, sin é an meon atá ann. Ní fhéadfá Sioux Indian a chur i
gceannas ar na Sioux Indians. Níl sé sin ann le Raidió na Gaeltachta, fós. Is é Raidió na Gaeltachta t-aon
institiúd Gaeltachta dá raibh againn. Tá RTÉ i gceannas air, ach is é meon na Gaeltachta a bhí ann. Tá anléigear air sin agus go leor daoine ag iarraidh deireadh a chúr leis. Tá brú ar Raidió na Gaeltachta béim a
chur ar an ngné Náisiúnta. Ach céard is brí leis sin? Ní áitiúil agus náisiúnta ach áitiúil agus uilíoch. Sin
é a deirimse (Seosamh Ó Cuaig, interviewed in Foinse, 5/3/98).
68
1960s, which provoked a civil rights-based response from Gaeltacht activists. In
Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, this reflects a political struggle to define the outlines of
“linguistic markets” for Irish—are they national or local?
Dissolution?
Another manifestation of this problem is the current housing crisis in the
Gaeltacht—real estate prices are booming in Ireland and Gaeltacht people often
cannot afford to buy houses in their own communities. Local co-ops like
Comharchumann Ráth Cairn are unable to control who buys and sells land in the
open market, and have no power to regulate the housing market according to
language. The very improvements provided by Ráth Cairn’s co-op in its struggle
for autonomy have made the area attractive for English speakers who are looking
for a vibrant stable community to settle in. In response to this, the co-op is
attempting to incorporate Ráth Cairn as a town with a town council, in order to
have the resources to buy and sell land and to directly make decisions about land
use. If this succeeds, the co-op will, in effect become part of the state.
Making language a criterion for membership in the community goes
against the mentality of many in Ráth Cairn who have come to rely on
cooperative networks with Meath people. Thus, the issue of whether or not
“Ráth Cairn welcomes English-speakers” has been debated in local newspapers.
This points to a fundamental problem in the “minority rights” perspective
regarding Irish: separation from the larger community in Ireland, whether
69
linguistic, political or geographic, is often seen as part of the problem rather than
part of the solution. Most Irish speakers feel that, for better or worse, the fate of
the language in the Gaeltacht is tied to its fate in the nation as a whole. This, for
members of Muintir na Gaeltachta in the 1930s, was the whole point of
demanding land in County Meath. As Máirtín Ó Cadhain put it in a speech in
1934 (Chapter 5):
Irish will survive in the Gaeltacht to the degree that it succeeds in
the Galltacht [English-speaking areas]. We, the people of the
Gaeltacht, are not willing to be made into a separate people or to
have any Black Pig’s Dyke put around us to entrap us.
When Ráth Cairn was created in the 1930s, children from several poor local
English-speaking families attended its primary school, becoming fluent in Irish.
But these children were not eligible for the “£2 grant” for Irish-speaking
children34 because they were not “from Irish-speaking families.” I have heard
older people in Ráth Cairn express resentment at this, saying that it had
artificially separated them from the other children who were their playmates and
confidantes. Many of these same children turned against the language in later
life. This shows the intimate scale on which the “Black Pig’s Dyke” worked. It
also shows the extent to which it was officially imposed upon, and resented by,
both Ráth Cairn and Meath people.
34. The infamous grant “for speaking Irish,” much resented by English-speakers, was
administered through the school system, and it was decided that Ráth Cairn children were
eligible, even though the area was not officially recognized as a Gaeltacht until much later. The
amount of money involved was economically significant in the 1930s.
70
Like Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Ó Riagáin (1997) makes the argument that the
“survival” of Irish as a minority language requires its “revival” and
reinvigoration on a national scale. But this is because, in his view, the Gaeltacht
has ceased to be a geographically grounded entity:
Bilingualism in Ireland always had a territorial or regional
dimension. But it would seem that the linguistic distinctions
between the Gaeltacht and the rest of the country are disappearing.
This is due to the effect of changing occupational patterns in the
areas. The move towards non-agricultural work, participation in
second and third-level education, and changes in shopping and
recreational patterns have all brought about an expansion of social
networks beyond the boundaries of the Irish-speaking community.
To these changes may be added increased flows of in-migrants and
returned emigrants. ‘In the Gaeltacht the historical process of
language shift is progressing to the point where Irish is ceasing to
be a community language and becoming instead the language of
particular social networks’ (APC 1988:xxvi). In this respect,
bilingualism in the Gaeltacht is converging towards the pattern
found elsewhere in the state. [... ] [Outside the Gaeltacht] Irishspeaking networks have never been large enough or sufficiently
numerous to form an Irish-speaking community, even in the urban
centres. Rather, they appear to have been characterized by a
marked degree of impermanence, openness, and instability (Ó
Riagáin 1997:278).
This description may be more of a reflection of ideological changes in the urban
observers and their theories, and changes in Government language policy, than
of changes in the rural Gaeltacht. “Impermanence, openness, and instability”
would seem to have characterized both the consciousness of Irish speakers and
the realities of their lives in the rural Gaeltacht for a very long time.
What is the difference between “a community language” and “the
language of particular social networks?” Taking “networks” as an object of study
undoubtedly represents a theoretical advance over more strictly spatializing
71
definitions, but much of the old baggage slips back in as researchers attempt to
quantify “density,” “openness,” or “closedness” of social networks. As Ó Riagáin
(1997:35-37) acknowledges, the social composition of social networks is
insufficient in itself to predict or explain their linguistic behavior (cf. MartinJones 1989, Gal 1987).
Sociolinguists aren’t the only ones who worry about these things. Images
of dissolution or scattering come up in local talk, as this chapter’s epigraphs
show. What constitutes a community? How do ways of speaking command
loyalty?
Authority
We need to look at ideologies of speakers as implicated in their their
speech practices. A research report published by Bord na Gaeilge, a state “board”
(organization) for the promotion of Irish, assumes that “a clear, convincing,
authoritative ideological rationale” is an alternative to what it sees as a lack of
“overt pragmatic reasons for using the language” (APC 1988:xxxiv). In this view,
ideological rationales are alternatives to practical reasons (cf. Sahlins 1976). The
very separation of these two “alternatives” belies a point of view from which
Irish can only play a “symbolic” role—the point of view of the state, founded on
the separations of the economic and the cultural, the symbolic and the material
worlds.
72
In response to these distinctions one could suggest that “pragmatic
reasons” (however overt) are the very texture of lived worlds, and lived worlds
are the homelands of “ideological rationales.” My gut feeling that I have no overt
pragmatic reason for getting out of bed in the morning is certainly going to color
(and be colored by) my ideological rationale for doing so.
Bord na Gaeilge lives in a different world than did Máirtín Ó Conaire, a
late lamented raconteur in Ráth Cairn. According to legend, he loved to talk to
visiting gaeilgeoirí and offer helpful English glosses to Irish phrases. “Bord na
Gaeilge,” Máirtín insisted, meant “The Irish Table.” Bord (pronounced baurd in
Connemara Irish, bo:rd in Standard Irish) is used for tables, borders or edges,
banks of bodies of water, loads (of turf or seaweed), “boarding” ships, and in a
bureaucratic register for state “boards.” Máirtín’s exercise in cultural translation
from below was “making fun of the English-speakers” (ag magadh faoi na
Béarlóirí), interrupting official discourse to reveal its English-language voice.
Máirtín Ó Conaire’s pun works to remind his neighbors in Ráth Cairn of
the difference between “our” and “their” ways of speaking (Chapter 6). It is
grounded in a different sense of linguistic authority than that promoted by the
state and its “centripetal” (Bakhtin 1981:270) institutions of standardization.
Gaeltacht culture in general has been resolutely local; authority and value are
grounded in locality and community. Hence the relative lack of enthusiasm from
Gaeltacht people for standard Irish, and their high tolerance for, and even
indifference to, dialectal variations within their own Gaeltacht areas.
73
This concept of locality is grounded in a sense of commensal social
relationships, as opposed to location in a spatially-defined geographical area.
Thus it underwrites the other distinctions I have discussed between Gaeltacht
people’s understandings and those of the nation-state at large—differences in the
sense of the term Gaeltacht, the rejection of diglossia, taking language as an entity
in itself or as an aspect of persons, etc. The personalism implicit in it is
manifested in a variety of ubiquitous speech practices involving quotation and
transmission of reported speech (Chapters 6 and 8). An example of this is the
statement by Seosamh Ó Cuaig that I discussed above, which features instances
of reported speech in which Ó Cuaig grounds his views in dialogues with named
others.
Talk
Máirtín Ó Cadhain once said that he remembered his father’s and
mother’s wedding. He had heard so many stories about it he
believed that he was there. It is the same with me and the founding
of this Gaeltacht.
(Mac Donncha 1986:120, my translation).
Ráth Cairn’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 1985 were immensely
important as a collective event that focused national attention on the community
and inscribed a collective history (cf. Ó Conghaile 1986). The event spawned
what was almost a genre of personal reminiscence (Chapter 5; cf. Ó Giollagáin
1996, 1997), building on the forms of traditional historical narrative (seanchas).
74
Social memory in Ráth Cairn continually reassembles fragments, wilfully seeking
continuities; as elsewhere in Ireland, old people use each other and younger
people to help them remember in a collective play of musement. A story or
fragmentary thought, the name of a person or place, a line from a poem calls
forth other fragments (like “starting a hare”); lone individuals go back35 on “the
road of thoughts” (bóthar na smaointe). This activity fascinated me because it
resonated with that of folklorists, linguists, and anthropologists like myself: the
gathering of fragments to create ordered (if temporary) wholes.
Before I began research there was already a set of expectations in place
about myself and my research. I was expected to be interested in “old” things,
like information about life in Connemara before the move to Ráth Cairn, and the
move to Ráth Cairn itself. The older people would complain that they couldn’t
remember things, but they did this when talking to each other also. This is the
rationale for fragmentation, underlying which is the implicit assumption that
there was or should be a whole, complete story. I would make short visits to
people, and if I mentioned something it might come up again later, on another
visit or in the pub or in a chance encounter on the road. I was invited to
participate in a process of assembly which was thought of as a retrieval of the
past. But this retrieval was at the same time an act of re-creation of Ráth Cairn as
a community. The dissolution and disintegration alluded to in the epigraph to
35. Siar means both ‘back’ and ‘westward’.
75
this chapter is countered by these acts of remembering, which form the basis for
collective political action.
There is more to it, though, than an endless doomed effort to recreate a
lost world. Fragments come to mind because they relate to here and now issues
and have something to say to them. But these objects—memories, songs or bits of
songs, proverbs, people, words, places, things—exist in their own right as well,
having their own voices and their own histories. Their histories are only partially
known or remembered, but are discoverable. They speak to the present
allegorically, in the manner understood by Walter Benjamin (Buck-Morss
1997:228-29), as “the mode in which not the subject, but the objective world
expresses meaning.”
The original creation of Ráth Cairn was authorized by a narrative: when
De Valera asked representatives of Muintir na Gaeltachta how he should explain
the Ráth Cairn resettlement scheme to the people of Meath, Máirtín Ó Cofaigh
answered “Abair leo, gur chuir Cromail siar muid agus anois go bhuil muid ag teacht
aniar.” “Tell them that Cromwell sent us west (literally ‘set us back’) and that
now we are returning (from the west).” As I show in Chapter 5, this narrative
locates Ráth Cairn by superimposing an older spatial framework upon a
“national” ideology of modernization. In the sociocultural framework encoded in
the grammar of Irish, the west is both conceptually “back” and the place of
ancestors in mythology—the land of the dead. In the national discourse of
modernization, Ireland develops out of its Western, rural, traditional past
76
towards an urban future (usually assumed to be “European”).36 This discourse
sees eastward movement as escape from a culturally and materially narrow past.
The founding narrative of Ráth Cairn expresses this movement as one of
repossession. The phrase “go bhfuil muid ag teacht aniar” represents motion from
the West towards the East, taking the point of view of the Meath people (who are
in the East). Teacht aniar also means ‘making a comeback’, and, understood as the
nominalized form of the verb, means ‘recuperative power, stamina’ (Ó Dónaill
1977:1214). The phrase claims primacy for the Connemara people; in the words
of the Connemara poet Seosamh Ó Donnchadha,37 “the Leinsterman” will
understand “that it was they who were banished across the Shannon in the
beginning/When Saxons were planted from Britain over the sea.” In this
understanding, Connemara is only a temporary abode for its people, a refugee
camp:
It is time for us to awaken, the whistle is blowing,
And the clear path is prepared for us eastward though the land,
‘Till we leave the hard wild lands of Connemara,
To thorns, heather and trees again.
But older people in Ráth Cairn are greatly saddened if they see their original
home places38 left “to thorns, heather and trees again.” In their seanchas they
36. James Joyce was an articulate, if uneasy, exponent of this point of view, e.g., in his
short story The Dead (Chapter 8).
37. in his 1934 poem Contae na Mí [County Meath] (Ó Donnchadha, 1983).
38. Migrants to Ráth Cairn had to turn over their holdings in Connemara to the Land
Commission, which redistributed them among neighboring families. For this reason, old people
could not be left behind in Connemara and had to be brought to Ráth Cairn. Hence their
77
preserve detailed memories of the customs and place-lore of Connemara, as well
as accounts of life, customs, and people in County Meath—in a way, they inhabit
the sensory landscape of both places. These stories are related to younger people
with moral import, but also have a wider function, forming the basis of collective
political action—the deliberate (re-)creation of Ráth Cairn as a community. Thus
Máirtín Ó Cadhain, in what was possibly his only visit to Ráth Cairn after its
founding, gave a long oration at the crossroads in front of the primary school
during the agitation for Gaeltacht recognition in the mid-1960s. Various people
have told me how a local man challenged Ó Cadhain’s authority to speak for
Ráth Cairn, since he didn’t live there. The answer he got was, “maybe it’s not
always the same people who cut the seaweed who bring it home.”39 (Mac
Donncha 1986:133).
Ó Cadhain’s speech greatly impressed the young Pádraig Mac Donncha, a
native of Ráth Cairn who had moved to Dublin: “He told me where I was from,
who we were, and what we should do;”40 Mac Donncha returned to help found
Ráth Cairn’s cooperative.
Most people in Ráth Cairn consider the campaign for recognition and the
founding of the cooperative as a crucial turning point which “saved” the
lamenting in Ó Donnchadha’s poem.
39. Bh’fhéidir nach iad na daoine a bhaineann an fheamainn a thugann abhaile i gcónaí í
(quoted in Mac Donncha 1986:133).
40. Dinis sé dhomsa cé as mé, cé muid fhéin, agus céard ba chóir dhuinn a dhéanamh (Ó
Méalóid and Mac Cóil 1997).
78
community. It is significant that this and other such events are remembered as
marked by acts of narration—acts which averted the threat of dissolution.
Personalism
People narrate each other as well, living in each others’ talk. It was as if in
Ráth Cairn I was surrounded by characters who were slightly larger than life,
because these personalities included the quoted presence of others. Quotation
and imitation are common in speech forms ranging from everyday gossip to the
loftier reaches of verbal art. These mimetic practices reinforce the salience of
personality in a variety of ways. Gossip, everyday humor, proverbs, and some
types of topical songs reify their victims, making them tokens of social types. This
type of consciousness “finalizes” (Bakhtin 1984; Pesmen 1998). It bears the ironic
and cynical awareness of people as hidebound with habit, victims of their own
“nature” (nádúr) or “heritage” (dúchas).
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s novel Cré na Cille is saturated with this typifying
consciousness, and exemplifies its use in moral and political contexts (Chapter 7).
Ó Cadhain self-consciously developed the discursive techniques of Irish to
sharpen his writing’s satirical edge:
17th Century poetry […] taught me certain things about style: to
make use of adjectives instead of nouns for example—the greedy
instead of the greedy person, the lying, the envious, and so on. I
79
could have learned that [as well] from proverbs[41] in common
speech... (Ó Cadhain 1969:16-17).42
Talk not only reduces or finalizes others; it also can open up or explore
their personalities, or even express their inchoateness (Fernandez 1986, Ch. 9).
Satirical verbal art makes persons stand in for political, social or moral positions.
In talk, conversely, these issues can be apprehended concretely as embedded in
personalities, as opposed to discussion of bare issues in the abstract. 43 Seeing
issues as they are manifested in the real dilemmas of one’s neighbors or of
characters in verbal art may contribute to the feeling that there are two sides to
every story.
In the Gaeltacht one is likely to encounter one’s neighbors and possibly
even oneself as characters in verbal art. In spite of the decline in the language,
local poet/song-makers are fairly ubiquitous (Denvir 1989, 1997). The threat of
satire reinforces a strong egalitarian ethos, backed by what Schneider (1990) calls
“equity consciousness” regarding cooperation and exchange.
41. An example of such a proverb would be: Is minic ciúin ciontach (Partridge [Partridge]
1978:4); “The silent [person] is often the guilty [one].” An example from Ó Cadhain himself
(1967:256) is Ní airíonn an sach an seang — “The satisfied [person] does not notice the emaciated
[one].”
42. Mhúin filíocht an 17ú céad déag […] rudaí áirid faoi stíl dhom, leas a bhaint as an aidiacht i
leaba an ainmfhocail mar shompla, an santach in áit an duine santach, nó an santachán, an bréagach, an
formadach agus mar sin. D'fhéadfainn é sin a fhoghlaim, cuir i gcás, ó sheanfhocla ar bhéal na ndaoine… .
43. Irvine (1990) discusses how stereotypic images of persons in Wolof society function
schematically to ground the Wolof system of registers. Images of typical “Noble” or “Griot”
persons combine a variety of behavioral, social and psychological attributes which are felt to be
naturally expressed in their respective speech styles. These image-complexes are immediately
available to speakers as concrete social “voices” in their own speech.
80
Dialogue is often directly represented in songs. Lyric song is almost
always dialogic, consisting of the direct speech of one or more characters in a
dramatic encounter (Chapters 4 and 8). Lúibíní, (the word derives from lúb, a
loop or turn) are ironic or insulting extempore rhyming songs sung between two
or more persons. Agallamh Beirte (“dialogue of two”) are often composed by
individuals but represent dramatic encounters or debates and are more
philosophical. Quite often the protagonists are the poet and a personage from the
past. A well-known example was composed by the Connemara poet Johnny
Chóil Mhaidhc (Ó Coisdealbha 1987). It represents an encounter and verbal
contest between himself and Raiftearaí, the wandering early 19th Century
Galway poet. These poems are life-changing dialogues in the sense that Attinasi
and Friedrich (1995) explore, but often the protagonists come from different
places, social positions or historical epochs. Their meetings invoke world
transformations of one kind or another, as in the medieval Irish dialogues
(acallam) between Oisín (a character from the Fenian story-cycle) and St. Patrick.
These dialogues dramatically bring together the ancient pagan and new
Christian worlds (Nagy 1983, 1989). An agallamh beirte, composed by Máirtín Mac
Donncha, for example, is a debate between members of two generations in Ráth
Cairn. Invoked in it are generational differences, the historical transformation of
the Gaeltacht in the post 1940s period (sometimes called an t-athrú saoil, the “lifechange”), the difference between the Irish and English languages, and the
difference between Ráth Cairn and Connemara as places.
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As with Western Apache imitations of the Whiteman (Basso 1979), representations of others could serve to mark off an ironic or disapproving
distance from them, using them as stereotypic embodiments of alien or obsolete
ways of being in the world.44 Imitations of Meath men sometimes seemed to
serve this function. Far more often, imitations (even of Meath men) were positive
in intent and seemed to represent a claiming of the other, the construction of a
polyphonic we-ness. The dead are especially present in discourse; they are
mentioned and reanimated by the interjection of their words, phrases, or special
ways of saying things into everyday talk.
The kin universe
When I arrived in Ráth Cairn, I was immediately given various
nicknames. One of the funniest was an ainm baile, a ‘local’ or ‘home’ name––these
are called “string names” in the anthropological literature (Fox 1963:153). String
names consist of a person’s christian name (optionally followed by a nickname or
epithet, i.e., Tom Rua, “Red [-haired] Tom”) followed by that of a parent,
grandparent, or other close relative. This is most commonly the father, but any
memorable or easily identifiable person can be used. The basic logic is to use a
person’s first name qualified by another name which allows one to most easily
44. Gumperz (1982:34) mentions the work of Mitchell-Kernan on “mimicking, or
marking” in Black communities, where a speaker takes on an exaggeratedly “black” speaking
style, “acting out a stereotypical black role rather than being himself. By implication, then, the
speaker is distancing himself from his own words...”
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“place” that person. The second name is often itself a string name, so that string
names lengthen over generations until the older parts wear off.
My nickname was made of my first name in Irish (Stiofán) followed by the
string name of an original inhabitant of the house I lived in, a formidable woman
(and near-monoglot Irish speaker) who raised a dozen or so children in it. Her
name was followed by that of her husband, making me “Stiofán Mháire Jim.”
This name assimilated me into “the Jims,” the wider collectivity of Jim’s
descendants. 45 Mockery aside, recent “blow-ins” like myself do not have string
names, since new arrivals are not locatable in the local kinship universe. Their
children often do, and are.
String names are variable. One Ráth Cairn person is known away from
home as “Máirtín Chóil Neaine Pháidín” (after his father, who was born in and
well known in Connemara), but as “Máirtín Sheáinín” (after an uncle) inside
Ráth Cairn. Young people’s local names seem to change as they enter adulthood;
a child may be called after a parent, then later in life be called after the apical
ancestor of that extended family.
Use of surnames, i.e., “Máirtín Mac Donncha,” is limited mainly to
dealings with the Church and officialdom. Such names are fairly useless for
identifying individuals (there are several Máirtín Mac Donnchas in Ráth Cairn).
The postal system gave numbers to houses in Ráth Cairn (a rare practice in rural
Ireland) in an attempt to clear up confusions resulting from unrelated families
45. I was also known for a while as “Professor Jim.”
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sharing surnames. Using string names on correspondence would have worked
better, but I suppose this would have violated the spirit of officialdom as well as
that of the names themselves. They index intimacy as well as functioning very
well to “place” individuals in terms of both identity and location in the local kin
universe.
It is possible to use a string name along with a surname, i.e., “Máirtín
Chóil Neaine Pháidín Mac Donncha,” which is occasionally done in formal Irishspeaking contexts. Some people are known locally by English or anglicized
surnames (e.g., “John Chonraí”) 46 but on official documents by their full Irish
names (“Seán Ó Conaire”).
Ráth Cairn as a place
I was struck first by the closed-in feeling of County Meath, where the
roads and fields are surrounded by high lush hedges that limit one’s view. The
landscape is essentially flat, with low hills one climbs gradually until, reaching
the top, a view is afforded of fields (4-50 acres), more hills, sky. Otherwise the
horizons are close. My house seemed to float on the thick soil and would shake if
a heavy truck drove by. It took me a year to not feel sunk into this landscape,
until my senses adjusted to the place and I began to appreciate its beauty.
Ráth Cairn is physically undifferentiated from the surrounding
community, except for some Irish-language signs on roads. One could pass
46. Ó is frequently dropped from surnames, which are then lenited.
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through without ever realizing that one was in a community where the principal
language was Irish rather than English. Houses are scattered along the roads
rather than nucleated in any central ‘village’. There is, however, a recognizable
focus for the community—the co-op, with its community hall, offices, a
secondary school, church, pub, and shop. There is also a small industrial estate,
built in the 1970s by Údarás na Gaeltachta. The main factory, Turmec Teo., is a
metal fabrication plant which mostly hires English-speaking people from the
surrounding communities. Other smaller companies come and go. Other than
the occasional clanging sound or loudspeaker voices, the industrial estate makes
little intrusion or impact on the rural landscape.
In 1935 the newly-built houses were scattered among their holdings (22
acres originally). Around these houses new bungalow-type houses were built by
descendants of the first families. This process has led to a nucleated settlement
pattern as groups of related households cluster together. The original houses are
“massed concrete” structures with a central kitchen, one large room behind the
kitchen fireplace, and two small bedrooms on the other side of the kitchen.47 The
kitchen has outside doors on either side. The conceptually “back” door leads out
into the “street” (sráid) an area surrounded by outbuildings (chicken house, barn,
and pig pen), while the “front” door may lead through a manicured front lawn to
the road. Except on formal occasions, guests would typically enter though the
47. A few are two-story houses with the bedrooms upstairs.
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“back” door, often without knocking. This is the classic rural Irish house layout
where the kitchen is an extension of outer public space.48
Such houses and regimes of exchange were found all over rural Ireland
among the lower classes, and contrast sharply with life in the towns and the life
of rural elites. Towns49 were points of penetration of both the market economy
and a “modernizing” mentality (including speaking English) that defined itself
in opposition to the rural periphery. This spatial organization of linguistic and
cultural difference is still very pervasive. Ráth Cairn people often told me they
felt much closer to the rural poor of Meath than to townspeople; the rural poor
were gaelach (“gaelic” or traditional), “were just like us,” and “had the same
crack (fun) as us.”
Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to show the problematic nature of boundaries
for sociolinguistic theory, the nation-state, and for Irish-speakers. Boundaries
between languages, people, situations, and spaces can be imposed from above or
below; they can be flexible and dialogic or rigid and bureaucratic. They can act as
sharp divisions or as sites of hybridization. I have suggested that understandings
and practices in Gaeltacht culture imply conceptions of personhood, space,
48. Glassie (1982) documents the functional integration of the social and private spaces
established in such houses with an entire regime of reciprocity involving the exchange of food,
labor, talk, music and verbal art.
49. often a sráidbhaile (“street town”) with only one street.
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locality, language, and history that are oblique to the ideologies and practices of
the state.
The remaining chapters explore in detail various ways of speaking Irish:
song, satiric poetry, narrative, conversation, radio talk, and a novel. All of them
function in various ways to negotiate cultural, personal, and linguistic
boundaries, acts which Bakhtin (1990:274) maintains are at the heart of culture
rather than on its margins:
However, a domain of culture should not be thought of as some
kind of spatial whole, possessing not only boundaries but an inner
territory. A cultural domain has no inner territory. It is located
entirely upon boundaries, boundaries intersect it everywhere,
passing through each of its constituent features. [...] Every cultural
act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it derives its seriousness
and significance from this fact.
We have seen how Ráth Cairn people constitute themselves as participants in
local community life through a variety of speech practices. Many if not all of
these are saturated with the consciousness of boundary that Bakhtin refers to
above. As Silverstein (1998:404) argues, language communities such as the Irish
Gaeltacht can only constitute themselves as “local” in opposition to wider-level
processes such as national and transnational language communities:
In relation to such global and national language communities,
language communities are thus “local” only to the extent that
within a group of communicating people there is a process that
produces a contrastive and positive sense of their participation in
their own language community. “Locality” of language community
is only a relationally produced state in a cultural-ideological order.
We have seen how the values and definitions of “the Gaeltacht” are
dependent on its political construction as one kind of geographic territory as
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opposed to others within the confines of the nation-state. But these are only
oppositions between two different and interdependent types of geographical
space. Running counter to this entire social construction, which projects
geography onto language use, are other discourses, which see language and
sociality as inextricably linked. From this locally grounded, oppositional point of
view, spatial distance is not a limiting factor at all—commensal bonds extend
over space to the maximal degree possible. From this point of view, “the
Gaeltacht” may exist in Chicago, Dublin, or Manchester as much as it does in Ros
Muc or Ráth Cairn.
This opposition, between two very different ways of connecting language,
identity, and social value, should give us pause when considering simplistic
analyses of the “imagined” nature of national communities. Anderson’s (1983)
influential work gathers much intriguing evidence of the “anthropological”
nature and functioning of the nation-state as a sociocultural entity. Much of this
evidence is vitiated, however, by a simplistic theory of collectivities which sees
the nation-state as essentially a geographically-defined container for people, who
then have to be hypnotized into a sense of belonging to each other through the
use of literacy and modern media. The sense of nation-ness as Anderson
imagines it, is ultimately founded on an imagined mechanical solidarity. As
Errington (1998) and Silverstein (to appear) have shown, this ideology of
nation–ness is founded on notions of the efficacy of standardized and
regimented national languages to mechanically join human consciousnesses. As I
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show (with tongue in cheek) in Chapter 6, the Irish language tragically lacks,
from this point of view, not only regimentation, but also the word
“regimentation.” And, as Chapters 4 and 5 suggest, the roots of Irish
“nationality” are both older and more twisted than Anderson’s theory accounts
for. In fact, the nation-state itself relies on other constructions of the relationship
between language and identity, constructions that are closer to the way that
Gaeltacht people habitually think about language.
CHAPTER THREE
THREE THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE LEARNED
Dreoilín (Wren)
A bell on the door! There was never a door bell in Limbo. That’s about the
only comment I heard about a newly built bungalow on a road so named either
for its formerly terrible mud and potholes or else as “the Irish for cul-de-sac.”
Limbo is where Coil’s house is, the door to which is more open than most
“always open doors.” Everyone’s house is underlyingly the same—front door,
back door, kitchen, bedrooms. Complete hegemony of indoor toilets was
achieved only a few years ago, but not before the President of Ireland had to go
out the back like everyone else. The teacup he drank out of has a special place in
that particular house—not that everyone else doesn't drink out of it too.
The kitchen is public space entered through the back door. Knock on the
front door, instead of just walking in the back like everybody else. Go ahead,
turn the house into private space and yourself into some kind of big shot by
knocking. It’s clear where this leads. The front door on the house where I live has
completely atrophied, rotted into permanent closure, blocked up with junk on
the inside and overgrowth outside. I never thought about its former identity
until the police sergeant tried to use it one day. I had to go out and around to
greet him.
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90
The only other guest I had there was some animal that chewed its way in.
I blocked that hole with a piece of board, carefully avoiding two hanging bare
wires, possibly formerly connected to some kind of doorbell. There’s a sort of an
entrance-way there, added along with the bathroom. Someone had stepped
through the roof there, “from the inside,” said the landlord. Rain poured in until
I threw plywood on top, but it still leaked. It leaked a wren one day, which got
into the kitchen. A tiny bird that I chased into a closet. It fainted dramatically
every time I shined a flashlight on it, hanging by one claw in some kind of
victorian swoon until I shut off the light.
I heard a story about the old days here, the wild days. A singer, famous, a
real devil and crazy, was walking past a certain house where there was a party
going on. The man who told me this story met him on the road and asked him if
he was going in too. Well I don't know he said, the last time I went there I
stabbed one of them. So what said the other man. They both went in and were
welcome.
I also heard that the same singer broke a leg once in a bicycle race, dressed
in women’s clothing on St. Stephen’s day.
This doesn’t happen any more, if it ever did. And most houses have door
bells, front entrance hallways and everything. Doesn’t mean people use them.
There are houses I never went in the front doors of. Except, oddly enough, on St.
Stephen’s Day, and then only when accompanied by children and a wren. Well,
not a real wren. Some kind of fake Christmas tree robin on a stick, fixed up with
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shoe polish. “And a wire up its ass” said our ringleader. Last year this stick was
carried by the Polka Girl. That’s what I called her when I first came here. She
always carried a tin whistle, larger than herself almost, and played the same
polka, first half only. The Limbo crowd are all fearless performers. An older
brother had a dress on with two footballs inside, and a wig. Our leader had a hat
made of straw rope, oddly Balinese-looking. The thing about going on the Wren
is, Christmas night is every family by itself at home. Candles in the windows “to
welcome Joseph and Mary,” but nobody goes around visiting. The roads are
empty. Except for Mass. Same for Christmas Day. But Stephen’s Day every house
is assaulted by the Wren people. At least, most houses. It should be every house.
Some houses, the television keeps the upper hand even after everyone has burst
through the front door into the kitchen or sitting room, playing music or dancing
or singing or whatever. “God bless you, woman of the house!” Usually they’re
delighted. Especially the old and young. We have a hunk of plywood for dancing
on, stamped “Tara Mines.” It gets thrown onto wet concrete and stomped on,
then at another house, right onto the sitting-room carpet. House after house. Old
people. Dogs. Drinks. Homemade whiskey.
Things start their slow dissolve. We move on to the town, try a few pubs,
switch languages. Some people are old friends. Some are suspicious. In one pub
there are Travellers. They listen to the music quietly, intently. Then we’re
somehow back in our own pub. It continues—we have drawn people out from
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the houses. What follows is a night, well, just like any other good night, except
for the disintegrating costumes.
The next day
Once, a Ráth Cairn person asked me what I was studying for my
dissertation. I usually said “the talk,” “the language,” “Ráth Cairn’s history,” and
things like that. This time, I said that I was trying to find out if it made any
difference that people spoke Irish instead of English here. She immediately
responded that she didn’t think so, that it was the same life in either language. It
was patently obvious that it didn’t make a difference, in the midst of daily life as
we were at that moment—kids watching T.V., husband home from work, bills to
pay, errands, shopping to do. And many if not most of these activities take
involve dealing with people through English. Irish is for talking to the kids,
neighbors (though not all the neighbors), most relatives, many friends and the
occasional Irish speaking scholar like myself.
No matter what language is spoken, everyday life in Ráth Cairn is very
much like everyday life elsewhere in Co. Meath. Ráth Cairn people are Meath
people after all. Practical conversations are practical conversations in either
language. The differences are interesting to linguists, but hardly noticeable to the
speakers. Children grow up speaking both languages. In houses frequented by
an English speaking parent, relative or neighbor, the children seem to learn from
the very start that certain kinds of talk attach to those people and other kinds of
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talk attach to other people. Children grow up not thinking too much about when
they speak Irish versus when they speak English. Even in houses where English
isn’t spoken much at all, and where children rarely encounter English speakers,
they seem to their amazed parents to effortlessly pick it up from the television.
Language is an aspect of persons—who you’re talking to, who’s in the
conversation. Even in the pub run by the Coop, five or six strategically placed
English speakers can ensure that virtually all of the talk (except service calls to
the bar) is in English. This can scandalize outsiders looking for the “true
Gaeltacht” but it seems perfectly natural to the people themselves. People do get
nervous sometimes that a critical mass of English speakers will build up, to the
point that Irish retreats for good from this semi-public sphere, into a diminishing
number of homes and the conversations of the elderly.
In everyday life there is no boundary between Ráth Cairn and anywhere
else, just networks of people, errands and transactions. But many of these
personal contacts, errands and transactions would not be happening if Ráth
Cairn was not Irish-speaking, and especially if it wasn’t an officially designated
Gaeltacht community. Thus there is the local Coop (Comharchumann Ráth
Cairn—cf. Chapter 2), its shop and pub, and the schools to which Englishspeaking children are bussed in from outside to reap the benefits of an Irishmedium education. Many houses put up gaeilgeoirí (Irish-learners)—usually
children attending the secondary school or teenagers attending the summer Irish
college. There are other economic advantages to living in the Gaeltacht, but these
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are not that significant. A £10/year grant per Irish-speaking child made a big
difference at one time, but it doesn’t any more in an economy where casual
unskilled labor makes at least £4 an hour.
The differences that make a difference seem to happen on two levels,
performance and prejudice. Performance occasions weren’t always thought of as
such by Ráth Cairn people. Sometimes after an spontaneous occasion, people
would say that it was “a good night” or “there was great crack” (bhí an-chraic
ann).1 Other occasions would be more or less planned and official, such as the
two annual music festivals. In either case, a sense of collectivity was brought to
the foreground. People would use first person plural forms to refer to Ráth Cairn
and even to Irish-speakers in general. Heightened talk and verbal art in Irish
would draw increasingly on deeper symbolic understandings and linguistic
forms unique to Irish, making present a symbolic world, a history, and and
allegorical texture that were not immediately present in either English-language
talk or everyday Irish-language talk. On such occasions, people were obviously
proud to have me there as a witness. Once I was asked if “the Cree have crack as
good as we do!”
Ráth Cairn might not be Irish speaking at all nowadays if it weren’t for the
prejudice of many local Meath people in the 1930s. When the community was
established there was a certain degree of resentment at “Galway people” getting
1. Craic (from the English word “crack”) means fun or heightened sociality—see Chapter
4.
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good land instead of “Meath people.” Some threats were made, slogans painted
on houses, fights happened in the pubs of Athboy. Although this hostility was
limited, it contributed to the community’s isolation and the feeling of being a
people apart. Ráth Cairn also had many friends in the surrounding community,
but many of these friends and allies liked Ráth Cairn precisely because it was
different, so their friendship tended to reinforce that difference.
In the 1990s prejudice plays very little part in everyday life, and Ráth
Cairn is fully integrated into the surrounding community. Prejudice against Ráth
Cairn still exists, though, and I was astonished at what Meath people, even
youths in their teens and twenties, were willing to say to me about Ráth Cairn
people, calling them animals, savages, wild untamed people and so on. Older
people, both inside and outside of Ráth Cairn, told me many tales about actual
wildness and savagery in the old days (1930s-1950s), but those were wilder times
all over Ireland—there was nothing particularly unique about Ráth Cairn.
I did encounter something akin to feelings of superiority over Meath
people, but only among the oldest generation in Ráth Cairn, and only in a form
which seemed to me to be a reflection on the experience of being ostracized by
Meath people in the early days (see Chapter 5).
Younger people viewed themselves as being Meath people, so there was
no room for prejudice. People of all ages were able to simultaneously see
themselves as Galway and Meath people—due to family connections in
Connemara.
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Entrance to the field
I arrived in Ráth Cairn in the summer of 1992, never having been there
and knowing no one there. I had originally planned to do my research in the
Connemara Gaeltacht and had done a fair amount of travel and preliminary
research there, but I failed to get a major research grant that would enable me to
support myself through long-term fieldwork. In response to this, I arranged to
get some work in the Anthropology Department at St. Patrick’s College,
Maynooth, 25 miles away from Ráth Cairn. Eileen Kane, the head of the
department in Maynooth, suggested I do my research in Ráth Cairn instead of in
Connemara. As it happened, word got out in Chicago in the spring of 1992 that I
would be teaching in Maynooth the following autumn. I knew most of Chicago’s
traditional Irish music community, since I was learning the Uilleann pipes (an
Irish variety of bellows-blown bagpipe) and played at sessions in Chicago.
A Chicago musician, James Keane, whose father was a sean-nós singer
from Ráth Cairn (born in Tír an Fhia in Connemara) heard that I would be in
Maynooth and approached me, offering to let me use a house in Ráth Cairn that
he owned. His aunt lived next door, but the house was unoccupied, he said, and
I was welcome to use it.
This extremely generous offer, along with the generous help of my new
neighbors, James Keane’s aunt and her family, was my introduction to Ráth
Cairn. My entrance to “the field” was thus due to the overlap between Ráth
Cairn’s overseas social networks and Chicago’s traditional Irish music networks.
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It essentially gave me another identity over and apart from that of a researcher.
Although I told everyone (ad nauseam) that I was in Ráth Cairn to do research, I
always seemed to have another identity as a performer that probably seemed
more real both to the other people (who pushed it on me), and to myself as well.
In the end, the two identities seemed to converge, since performance of various
kinds became my main field interest.
Living on my own, effectively in charge of a household, gave me an
almost equal status with other people in Ráth Cairn. Not having a wife or family,
I seemed to be accepted as a “character”—a slightly eccentric male bachelor type.
Being on my own also limited my experience as an ethnographer, since I
didn’t live in a household with local people. Although I did spend quite a lot of
time visiting, especially in my first year in Ráth Cairn, I had relatively less
contact with the female, domestic realm of life, and the world of children. Thus,
my research is abnormally male and adult oriented. My own research interests,
and other people’s expectations of those interests, led me to focus my attention
on older, retired, tradition-bearers, rather than younger people raising families,
professionals, and farmers—people who wouldn’t have much time for an
anthropologist at any rate.
My research focus was also narrowed by the unique nature of Ráth Cairn
as a community. It is internationally known as the unique example of an
intentionally created Gaeltacht community. It is also quite small and intimate.
There is no way I could follow the usual anthropological practice of changing the
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names of the community and individuals in my writing. To do so would only be
an insult, and couldn’t possibly protect anybody except perhaps myself. I have
tried in this thesis to avoid writing about matters deemed by local people to be
personal. I always made it clear what I wasn’t interested in, and in turn, people
let me know what was and what was not an acceptable area of inquiry. What
resulted is this study, which is not really a community study, but a study of Irishlanguage discourse in general, grounded in, but not confined to, my own
experience in four years of life in a Gaeltacht community.
I feel very lucky to have gotten to know the people of Ráth Cairn, the
warmest and most generous people I’ve met anywhere in my life. In a way, they
have the status of culture-heros. They deliberately created their own community
in the 1930s, keeping it going and strengthening it ever since. In doing so, they
broke several ideological molds formed by other people’s preconceptions about
language, tradition, and community. This experience sets them apart from even
their contemporaries in Connemara.
Up the Galties!
Almost immediately after arriving, I got to know the other musicians in
Ráth Cairn, and they became my closest friends and associates. The Connemara
musical tradition focuses on solo performance, but group sessions are the norm
in County Meath. My arrival became part of a local effort to start regular sessions
in Ráth Cairn, but it took a long time before we learned to play as a group.
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Eventually a regular group did form with myself and three other people, and we
even began playing “gigs” away from Ráth Cairn, as far away as Paris. Mostly,
we provided the music for events in the local pub, and formed the musical core
of more formal events and special occasions, such as when groups of performers
from Ráth Cairn travelled to festivals in Connemara or elsewhere.
Being a “performer” was not really a separate identity in Ráth Cairn, since
most people “perform” in some way or another—singing, dancing, playing
music, storytelling, and even artful conversation. My own ability to play music in
a sense helped me to blend in rather than to stick out or be different. In some
situations, like house parties or late night sessions performance of some kind is
virtually mandatory for all present.
Performance occasions, both impromptu and highly organized, were the
difference that made a difference—the times when the separate identity of Ráth
Cairn, and the symbolic universe of Irish language discourse became palpably
obvious to all present. They became as obvious to all as their absence was
obvious in the midst of day-to-day life. Everyday life and performance seem to
be culturally opposed to one another in Ireland. Part of performance involves a
show of reluctance to perform, and once achieved, there is a similar resistance to
ending a performance occasion and returning to everyday life. These resistances
dramatize the two realms as being in opposition, invoking different sets of
cultural values. In Ráth Cairn, a small minority of people seemed to cast their lots
entirely with one world or the other. Thus there were “characters” who were
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permanently at odds with everyday life, as well as hard-headed realists and
loners who worked all the time, kept to themselves, and didn’t seem to care for
“the crack.”
Performance was first and foremost for people’s own entertainment. But
an important secondary function was to manifest Ráth Cairn’s cultural and social
identity for the benefit of outsiders. The role of the Coop was crucial in this. The
Coop was directly responsible for almost every public space in Ráth Cairn—the
church, pub, and schools. As I showed in Chapter 2, the creation of these spaces
made a huge difference for the prestige and value of the Irish language in Ráth
Cairn. Even when the presence of English speakers meant that most conversation
was in English on a given occasion (e.g., in the pub), the unspoken
understanding of all was that Irish had the upper hand. Before the founding of
the Coop, such understandings were much rarer.
In keeping with its role as an interface between local people and wider
collectivities, the Coop organized performances both in Ráth Cairn and
elsewhere. One could seemingly be summoned to contribute to these events,
sometimes with little advance notice. I was usually glad to do so, feeling that it
was a way of giving something back to the community. The Coop ’s manager,
Pádraig Mac Donncha, mentioned to me several times how important musicians
and other performers were to Ráth Cairn. This is in keeping with a general
feeling that Ráth Cairn needed all the resources it could get, especially new
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people (who spoke Irish) coming in, and people who could represent the
community in its relations with the wider world.
For the people close to the Coop, Ráth Cairn was truly an intentional
community, a “cause” that had to be upheld. Many other Ráth Cairn people
didn’t see things this way, were cynical about the Coop, had personal or family
issues with officers of the Coop, or else just weren’t interested. But almost
everyone seemed to share at least a vague sense of the fragility of Ráth Cairn as a
community, especially about the situation of Irish in so small a place.2
In the pubs in Athboy, performative occasions could lead to conflict with
local Athboy people. If the mood was right (i.e., wrong), so I was told, one had
only to shout “Up the Galtees!” in a crowded Athboy pub and generalized
fighting would break out. “Galtees” was the nickname given by Meath people to
Ráth Cairn people, based on Meath people’s “inability” to pronounce the word
Gaeltacht.3 By the time I appeared in Ráth Cairn, the poison had gone out of this
nickname (except in the memories of older people), and it was sometimes used
proudly and humorously by Ráth Cairn people as a self-designation. Once,
contemplating the survival of the language in Ráth Cairn, someone said to me
that “it must have been because the Meath people called them (older Ráth Cairn
people) Galtees for so long.”
2. The image of Ráth Cairn as an island came up several times; see Chapter 5.
3. Ráth Cairn people were also called “Gaelcocks.”
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As it happened, the other members of our band decided to name it Na
Galties, that is, “The Galtees” but “in Irish” (using the Irish definite article). This
was an inspired bit of bricolage, taking the derogatory nickname and re-voicing
it as a Ráth Cairn person’s utterance.
My “training”
My interest in talk and performance met with a sympathetic reaction from
almost everyone in Ráth Cairn. But the things I was most interested in were not
things that people were very able to verbalize, theorize, or talk about in the
abstract. People were much more interested that I learn to do them myself. As
Briggs (1984) discovered in his fieldwork with New Mexican wood-carvers,
direct participation is often the only way to get access to the understandings of
those members of a community who are “most traditional”—that is, least
acculturated to a theoretical perspective in Bourdieu’s (1977) sense.
A preference for the concrete extended to linguistic matters as well. I
collected stories from a local man, Seán Ó Conaire (locally known as John
Chonraí—see Chapter 5). In one story the hero meets a giant, who utters the
words “And I don’t know what I’ll do with him, whether I’ll grind him up
between my palms, or send him blowing up in the air.” 4 It was a fine summer
day, and after talking in John’s kitchen for half an hour, mostly about the
meaning of a few obscure words in the story, we strolled outside to inspect a
4. Agus níl a fhios agam céard a dhéanfas mé leis, mara meilfidh mé idir mo bhosa é nó é a chuir le
seideadh thuas san aer.
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field of ripening barley across the road. John took a few heads of ripe barley,
ground them up in his palms, and blew the chaff into the air, repeating the
Giant’s words from the story.
A well-known proverb goes: “Three things that cannot be learned: a tune,
hospitality, and poetry” (Trí nithe nach féidir a fhoghlaim: fonn, féile agus filíocht). I
mentioned this to Máirtín Mac Donncha once during a discussion of step
dancing, and he immediately retorted that there are things which can be learned,
but can’t be taught. Then he explained that he began learning to dance by
watching other dancers and picking up steps from them. In other words, one
must learn immediately (in the full sense of the term), by imitation. 5 Lillis
Ó Laoire, in his research on Tory Island (part of the Donegal Gaeltacht), noted
that people made a distinction between “learning” something (rud a fhoghlaim)
and “lifting” or “taking” something (rud a thógáil). This is a distinction between
acquiring something conceptually, through effort and analysis, versus acquiring
it through imitation, out of desire (Ó Laoire 1996).
I was expected to learn by imitation, and to imitate perfectly, before
moving on to produce something original. The practice of imitation did not
contradict the deeply held view that all cultural forms “belong” to specific
people or collectivities—imitation was a form of acknowledging that ownership,
paying due respects. This created something of a problem for me, since I came to
Ráth Cairn already knowing Irish, even if I didn’t have much experience using
5. Iconicity is immediate in Peirce’s semiotic schema (Peirce 4.447).
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the language in day-to-day life. While people were very impressed that I came
knowing the language, it meant that I already had my own “accent” and ways of
speaking already, and it took me longer to pick up the local versions. Part of my
problem, especially in my first year there, was ordinary learner’s mistakes—one
man, introducing me to someone from Connemara, said “He has his own
dialect” (Tá a chanúint fhéin aige)! In fact, a few different types of things
happened. People began to accept my own “accent” as my own. Also I became
much more fluent, and, in hundreds of hours of conversation, my speech became
much closer to the general norm. And I became more aware of the variations in
local ways of speaking.
Much later, in the summer of 1998, I was struck by the way that a Ráth
Cairn man, Micil Chonroí, “trained” a visiting scholar from France (Manon
Capo) who spent the summer learning Irish in Ráth Cairn. Micil, who cannot
read or write Irish very well, had spent more than 10 years tape-recording
reminiscences of his life. These tapes were transcribed and edited by Conchúr
Ó Giollagáin, forming the basis of a doctoral dissertation (Ó Giollagáin 1996).
Micil kept a copy of the dissertation in his house, and although he couldn’t read
it himself, he had Manon read it out loud to him for an hour a day, in the
evenings. By the end of the summer Micil pronounced himself quite satisfied
with Manon’s Irish! I was struck by the directness of the ventriloquism involved
in this—the French scholar animating Micil’s voice, recalling to him the story of
his own life.
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My own “training” was mainly by Máirtín Mac Donncha, a poet, singer,
dancer, and “character” in Ráth Cairn. We agreed early on that I would do my
dissertation work with him, but any kind of formal research seemed impossible.
Máirtín seemed too shy in front of a tape recorder, in great contrast to his
demeanor while performing in company. I found it much more rewarding to just
drop in for a chat in the afternoons, and to be present at evening sessions in the
pub, and the occasional house party or special occasion. In the first year of my
fieldwork especially, I travelled a fair bit with Ráth Cairn people to various
festivals around Ireland, and spent a week in the Isle of Man at a celtic festival in
the summer of 1993. On most of these occasions, I participated as a musician.
Having a “natural” reason to be present helped me a lot to overcome shyness,
nerves, and a general unwillingness to impose my presence on others.
In a way, though, being involved as a participant lessened my abilities as
an “observer.” Instead I suppose I gradually learned about performance from the
inside. Although my main interest was in the song tradition, I soon gave up on
trying to learn songs or sing in public, despite encouragement. I did spend many
many hours at singing sessions, and had many conversations, with both singers
and non-singers, about specific songs and about the styles of various other
singers, including Joe Heaney. In Chapter 8 I try to give a schematic impression
of how singing sessions develop.
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Learning bilingualism
Long before I came to Ráth Cairn, it was suggested to me that I must enter
the field already fluent in Irish, or else people would be “on English” with me for
the duration of my stay. This is due to the association, described in Chapter 2,
between languages and persons. But in fact, Ráth Cairn turned out to be an ideal
place to learn Irish—people were genuinely pleased to have learners around, and
would speak Irish all the time to them once they became fluent—effectively
treating them as members of the community.
One thing I had never considered was the difficulty I would have learning
to negotiate between the two languages. Initially I made several kinds of
interesting mistakes. Since I didn’t know people, I often spoke Irish to nonspeakers or semi-speakers (Dorian 1981). Since the main way of signalling
language preference is simply to initiate conversation in one language or
another, I was effectively bullying these people into speaking the Irish.
Eventually I got most people’s linguistic habitus sorted out and learned which
language was appropriate to use with them. But the experience left a lasting
impression on me, a sense of the difficulty of objectively researching something
like language choice in a finely nuances sociolinguistic situation such as that
found in the Irish Gaeltacht.
My identity an outsider acquiring fluency in the language was enough to
mark me as having a strong preference for Irish. But if I had entered the field not
knowing Irish and had spent little effort learning the language, I would know
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even less about the linguistic situation, since the presence of a monoglot Englishspeaker heavily influences interactions involving 3 to 6 people in the direction of
English.
Even after four years of continuous residence in Ráth Cairn, a tiny place
where one could easily get to know most people, I would be reluctant to make
generalizations about any ongoing language shift in the community. This has
made me doubly suspicious of the impressionistic ethnographic data collected by
Hindley (1990) to bolster his statistical analysis of the decline of Irish.
Another strange phenomenon for me was learning how to use English
loan-words in Irish. There were certain English words that everybody used in
their Irish-language speech (Chapter 6). But it didn’t take me long to realize that
if I were to do likewise, I had to use the “Irish” rather than the “American” forms
of these loan-words if I were to have any hope of being understood. It seemed to
me that I was learning two languages, Irish and “English.”
All of this increased my own consciousness of the distinctions between
codes, to the point where these distinctions were much more salient for me than
they would have been to anyone else in the community. In my first year in Ráth
Cairn I worked one day a week in Maynooth, basically speaking nothing but
English. The rest of my time I spent in Ráth Cairn, speaking mostly Irish. To live
like this, an hour’s drive from the city center of Dublin, seemed quite
astonishing, not only to me, but to English speakers in Maynooth.
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I was amazed at the invisibility of the language, outside of the Gaeltacht,
in Ireland. I met many people in Maynooth who simply refused to believe that a
community of Irish speakers was so close by, and that I lived there and spoke
Irish most of the time. A few times, Ráth Cairn people told me similar stories. A
young woman told me how she was talking to English speaking acquaintances in
a town about 30 miles away from Ráth Cairn. She was telling these people about
some hilarious episode that had happened at home, in Ráth Cairn, when one of
the people stopped her, and in full seriousness, asked if people had been
speaking Irish during the events she was describing to them. As she related to
me, these people seemed to find it hard to believe that anyone could enjoy
themselves or “have a laugh” in Irish.
This shows something of the gap between the experiences of those who
have Irish as their home language and those whose only experience of Irish is as
a (hated) subject in school.
All of these things combined to give me the overwhelming feeling, in my
first year in Ireland, of living in two different worlds. It took a long time for me
to learn to fluidly negotiate between these worlds, to stop even noticing when
the medium of communication was one language versus another. When I started
doing that I felt like I might have achieved something vaguely similar to a sense
of a Ráth Cairn person’s point of view.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE POET: ELOQUENCE AND VIOLENCE
A question of character
The star stands in the center. Any consideration of a work of art, a
story or a song, in Ballymenone leads you to an exceptional
individual. Individuals lead through conversation to the human
type he or she exemplifies, and artistic personalities lead from
genre to genre, from bid to pant, from story to song, from item to
culture. The District’s culture is not something apart from the
particular individuals who are the force of its coherence, the reason
for its existence.
(Glassie, 1982:681)
In April 1998 I heard an interview on Radio na Gaeltachta with Johnny
Chóil Mhaidhc Ó Coisdealbha, a poet, actor, playwright, former blacksmith, and
brilliant humorist from Cois Fhairrge in the Connemara Gaeltacht. He told a joke:
a man without much English goes to a doctor without any Irish and she
prescribes suppositories, instructing him to take a certain number per day and
“to leave them in the back passage” (iad a fhagáil sa mback passage). He goes
home and consults his wife, the problem being that their house doesn’t have
such a structure. They decide to put them “under the table in the back kitchen”
(sa mback kitchen faoin mbord). His health deteriorates until finally he goes and
confronts the doctor: “Bheadh sé chomh maith agam iad a chur suas mo thóin!” (I
might as well have stuck them up my ass!). This is an example of a more general
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110
type of joke featuring confrontations between rustics and urban sophisticates (eg,
Kerryman jokes). In his particular retelling, Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc added a
linguistic element to the confrontation. Usually when Irish-speakers tell jokes like
these, English-language speech is reported in English, but here the teller reports
the doctor’s speech in Irish, effectively projecting us, the listeners, into the
consciousness of the patient. Having little English, the patient hears the doctor in
Irish. His language difficulties are only compounded by the (female) doctor’s
circumlocution (“leave them in the back passage). In the punch line the patient
shatters this surface of genteel respectability by rephrasing the doctor’s
prescription in more direct terms.
The patient in this story exemplifies a rural Irish “character”––a wellestablished and immediately recognizable type in Ireland, both a literary figure
and a social role. In telling the story, Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc animates the
patient’s voice, and by doing so, also reaffirms his own identity as a character.
Characters seem to contain other characters; part of a character’s transformative
power is the ability to summon up these voices, while the brilliance of his or her
own performances ensures that they in turn will be talked about and quoted.
Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc is also a poet. Especially in the Gaeltacht, this
implies a social role that is wider and has deeper, more historically self-conscious
roots than that of the “character.” This chapter explores the affinities and
tensions between these two figures; local Gaeltacht poets are located somewhere
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in between, and their ambiguous position may illuminate the similarly
ambiguous position of the Gaeltacht and the Irish language as a whole.
Taylor (1989:176) describes “the character” as a rural Irish social
institution, “one of the critical communal roles open to a talented bachelor––a
wildly amusing [person] whose exploits, real and apocryphal, [are] favorite
topics of local talk.”1 Characters are especially endowed with an ability to
transform ordinary social situations into performance situations. Grounded in
loyalty (by necessity or choice) to the less modernizing strata and discourses of
society, “[p]oets are poor because they are local farmers. ...Poets are also poor
because they are too brilliant to attend closely to their work” (Glassie 1982:679).
Such a gift is often understood in terms of “wildness;” because characters are
less “civilized,” in Elias’ sense of the term, they stand at the center
of––and thus can stand for––the occasions and styles of sociability
not successfully contained and tamed by the middle class
Catholicism of Church and proper household. [...] Perhaps
ironically, it is a collectivity based on the celebration of peculiar
individuality (Taylor 1989:184).
Characters tend to be socially marginal and thus relatively immune to the force
of “respectability” (Silverman 1989) which constrains expression in rural Ireland.
Regardless of their social position, gifted performers––musicians, poets,
wits––gain temporary poetic license (rationalized in terms of their “wildness”)
and relative freedom from constraint. Performance suspends and brackets norms
of respectability. Thus, I have heard the term “character” used to describe men
1. Saris (n.d.) discusses the role of characters in 1980s rural Sligo. Glassie (1982) studies
the importance of local “stars” to rural communities in Fermanagh in the 1970s.
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and women, single and married, from all walks of life (including judges,
solicitors, and priests), but their interventions are circumscribed by their other
responsibilities; the ideal type of the character is the male bachelor, for whom
being a character can become a full time job.
“The crack”
“The crack” has become a general term in Ireland for a mode of sociability2
often claimed to be uniquely Irish, not be found elsewhere in Europe. Although
most Irish-speakers seem to treat the term as a loan-word, the media, engaged in
the manufacture of “Irish Identity” have taken more and more to using the term
in Irish-language orthography, as craic. The English-speakers with whom Glassie
(1982) worked in the 1970s in County Fermanagh used the term in a way that
now at least is fairly general in Ireland, to indicate a progressive step–like
transformation in everyday conversational communication as it reaches higher
levels of intensity and more overtly takes on the character of performance. As Ó
Crualaoich (1992:96) puts it, referring to Glassie’s study:
Humor and keenness of intellect is the nature of this “crack” and as
it is fully underway, the people themselves feel a transformation of
the speech event, as evidence of an extra intensity in the
communication, taking it to yet another level.3
2. “What’s the crack?” has the sense of “What’s happening?,” while “How’s the crack?”
calls for an evaluation of the entertainment quality of the proceedings.
3. Greann agus géire intinne agus sarú is nádúr don chraic seo agus, le linn do seo a bheith faoi
lánseol, áiríonn an mhuintir féin go dtarlaíonn casadh san ócáid urlabhra mar léiriú ar dhéine bhreise eile
bheith tagtha sa chumarsáid a thógann go leibhéal eile fós é.
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The talents of “characters” are primarily but not exclusively verbal. They
produce memorable actions and statements—songs, poetry, jokes, repartee,
“bids” (as Glassie’s informants called witticisms), in timely response to their
interlocutors:
A witticism [i.e., a ‘bid’] is an original crowning statement that is so
artful and authoritative that it will live in the memory of the
assembled company, and they will mention it the next day or at the
next occasion of visiting they take part in (e.g., “Didn’t x put it well
last night” [Nach maith mar a dúirt x aréir],...). A witticism is not a
proverb or any formal ready-made statement but an artistically
creative verbal summation that increases the life and intensity of
the communication of which it is both the ornament and the
temporary closure (Ó Crualaoich 1992:96-7).4
Witticisms represent and summarize stages in the development of the social
interactions out of which they emerge. They are social in both inception and
reception: they answer to immediate conversational needs and are ratified by
being reproduced in the social group.5 At the same time, they are personal
statements and are reproduced as such: “Didn’t x put it well last night?”—the
image of x is reproduced along with x’s statement. Representing a collective
process, witticisms are at the same time the most individual type of expression.
As I discuss in Chapters 6 and 8, not only speech, but other types of performance
4. Is é an Carúl ann ná ráiteas bunúsúil mullaigh a mbeidh údáras agus ealaíonn ag baint leis
ionas go bhfanfaidh sé beo i gcuimhne na ndaoine sa chomhluadar agus go mbeidh siad ag tagairt dó an lá
dár gcionn nó sa chéad chumarsáid airneánach eile an mbeidh siad páirteach ann (e.g. “Nach maith mar a
dúirt x aréir, ...”). Ní seanfhocal é an carúl ná aon chaint fhoirmiúil réamhdhéanta eile ach toradh
cruthaitheach ealíonta urlabhra a spreagann beocht agus déine na cumarsáide ar a bhfuil sé féin mar ornáid
agus mar clabhsúr sealadach.
5. An ironic story-ending formula used by Joe Heaney went “...and however well I told it
tonight, may you not tell it half as well tomorrow night!”
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are understood and transmitted this way. “Tradition,” on both a local and a
national scale, is constituted by similar practices of entextualization (Bauman
1992; Silverstein and Urban 1996).
Herzfeld (1985:10-11) refers to a poetics of social performance in rural Crete
which foregrounds personal identity:
A successful performance of personal identity concentrates the
audience’s attention on the performance itself: the implicit claims
are accepted because their very outrageousness carries a revelatory
kind of conviction. It is in this self-allusiveness of performance, and
in the concomitant backgrounding of everyday considerations, that
we can discern a poetics of social interaction. The self is not
presented within everyday life so much as in front of it.
Wit is likewise poetic in that it calls attention to form––to the form of language
and also to the form of social action. As in Jakobson’s (1987 [1960]:69) definition,
the poetic function, the “set to the message,” foregrounds the form of the sign,
which stands out from its context.6 This provisional separation of sign and
context has various consequences. It makes a slice of verbal or other interaction
more text-like, reportable, and transportable to other contexts.7 By distilling the
gist of a particular social and personal situation, it “increases the life and
intensity” of that situation, as in Ó Crualaoich’s formulation. As a poetic act, it is
6. “The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant,
determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory
constituent” (ibid.) Poetry resembles a rhetorical argument, in Peirce’s scheme: “an Argument is a
Sign which is understood to represent its Object in its character as Sign.” “[E]very fine argument is
a poem and a symphony -- just as every true poem is a sound argument” (Peirce 1931-1958:2.252,
5.119; my emph.).
7. Redeployment in other contexts gives the possibility of linking the two contexts––cf.
Chapter 8.
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a reflection and comment on the situation, on language, and on the meanings of
and possibilities for social action. 8 As wit in public performance, the crack is
experienced as transgressive, breaking the surface of sociality. This is its paradox:
that which most powerfully constitutes and defines sociality, its most powerful
tool of mimesis, gets its redeeming social value from rupturing the very social
relations from which it springs.
Irish characters and “the Irish character”
At the funeral of a noted Donegal character, Taylor (1989:178) observed:
There seem to have been two distinct individuals involved––Conny
the gap and Conal O’ Beirne––and more subtly, two quite different
communities of both the living and the dead. In fact, the wake and
funeral seem to some extent less like stages in the same rite of
passage than separate rites dealing with different aspects of the
deceased. This is perhaps what Herzfeld (1987) calls “disemia”: a
tension between formalist and intimate readings of individual and
event.
Disemia is Herzfeld’s generalization of the concept of diglossia (Ferguson 1982
[1959]) to encompass culture as a whole; it is “a model of ideological tension”
between “self-presentation and self-knowledge” (Herzfeld 1988:112). The
8. Poetry can also be deliberately created in maximum opposition to any kind of context or
social situation, as form seemingly free from context, conveying general personal or human
truths. Such poetry exists in its own genres, usually spoken rather than sung. In the Gaeltacht
these poetic genres are less common and less valued; even maximally “general” poems are often
transmitted with context. Joe Heaney (Chapter 8) valued songs which were more “general” as
opposed to those which were confined to local issues, but still insisted that these songs have
“stories” that must be remembered and learned with them. Here is perhaps the strongest
difference between popular Irish-language poetry and modern academic European poetry,
including much English-language poetry in Ireland. Ó Crualaoich (1986) has controversially
argued that much of Irish-language academic poetry has been more indebted to English and
European models than it is to older Irish ones––functioning as an Irish register within an Englishlanguage discourse.
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character thus represents the heterogenous, shifty, “inner face”––the nonstandard side of cultural consciousness as opposed to official national culture.
Herzfeld’s model takes into account the realities of cultural stratification and the
self-consciousness of the actor (or the character).
As Eckert (1980) has argued, however, when diglossia features two
languages, i.e., a minority and a majority language in a modern nation-state, their
relationship is much more one of outright political struggle than a question of
formalism versus intimacy, or even of “power” versus “solidarity.”9 Ireland has
two more or less official cultures and languages, each of which has its relatively
formal and informal registers. Although performance is transformative, arguably
because of its links to the transcendent, in Ireland the “other worlds” invoked by
performance are often different and non-congruent histories, political systems,
languages, or even modes of production. Arguably this is what gives Irish crack
its critical edge. Part of why it might be difficult for outsiders to get clear on the
nature of the crack, of characters and poets, is that this critical edge is founded on
the incongruity of different cultures of speaking— different ways of construing
the nature of speech as social action.
Irish ethnography has tended to follow Anglo-Irish literature (the work of
William Carleton [1830] for example) in portraying the character’s incongruity or
ex–centricity in terms of an opposition between intimacy and formality, Eliasian
9. An opposition originally theorized by Brown and Gilman (1982 [1960]) for differing
styles of pronomial address.
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wildness and civilization, organic peasant community and modern alienation,
and so on. These terms are ideologically loaded, and arguably represent the
point of view from the center much more than that from the periphery, failing to
do justice to the consciousness of the character himself. Leerssen (1996:164)
identifies these terms with Tönnies’ opposition between Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft––organic “community” versus bureaucratic “society.” In Ireland it
was a conservative Romanticism which portrayed the peasantry exclusively as a
Gemeinschaft, lovingly erasing its history, politics, and self-consciousness. The
stage-Irish “character” comes from such a community, just down the road from
the “pleasant peasant”––the quaint character of the pastoral idyll (Leerssen
1996:170). Seen from a historically Anglo-Irish point of view, both Irish history
and “the Irish character” had a formless quality, a quality which existed mainly
in the eye of the beholder. Not being able to discern the codes by which the
“native Irish” operated, it was assumed that they operated by no codes at all.10
Conservative nationalism took up the celebration of unreflective peasantness in
its folklorization of the Gaeltacht, as if (in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s parody) “the only
learning is the learning of an old man without learning” (Ó Cadhain, 1990
10. Kiberd (1995:115-29) argues that Oscar Wilde, John M. Synge and W. B. Yeats found
in this “formlessness” the possibility of inventing a “new man” and hence a “new nation.” Such
creation was to happen on the terrain of “form,” i.e., personal and artistic style. Rather than being
created ex nihilo, however, style emerged, in Synge’s words, “out of the shock of new material”
(quoted in Kiberd 1995:120). In Synge’s case this confrontation came out of his immersion in the
life and discourse of the western Gaeltacht, i.e., his discovery of and dialogue with the codes of
the “native Irish.” This dialogue crossed class, ethnic, religious, linguistic and regional
boundaries. Thus, certain strands of Irish literary and political nationalism have been grounded
in more complex social and cultural relationships than that described in Anderson’s (1983) model
of the imagined community (cf., Bourke 1995; Kiberd 1993; Lloyd 1993).
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[1950]:138; cf. Chapters 5 and 7). But reflexivity is built into the character’s role;
as Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc and his story show, the joke is on the outsider. As
Taylor (n.d.) points out, “self-irony” slides into critical scrutiny of the other: “the
‘self’ being treated to ironic definition may be not only Irish, but (in some
measure) British and, laterally, American.” The character’s trickster-like
informality may be a mask provided by his enemy, which serves to hide his
rejection of an alien system. This is not to deny the element of what Herzfeld
(1997) calls “rueful self-recognition” in our laughter. As Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc
said in the same radio program, if Ireland were Irish-speaking, “we’d be
millionaires.”
Do something old
For Gaeltacht people, the word sean (“old”), used in terms like sean-nós
(“old-style”) connotes not just “the way it was done in the past” as “the way we
do it”—the natural, unregulated, “gaelic” (gaelach) way.11
The term “sean-nós dancing” brings to mind older people in the West of
Ireland, especially in the Gaeltacht, dancing loosely with the upper body relaxed,
to live traditional music in pubs and at house parties. It is unregulated step
dancing, supposedly representing the form of dancing before it was
appropriated by rules, competitions, and Dancing Commissions.. The term itself
11. Sean- is also used for the best, the strongest, or the healthiest human action or
condition.
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is new (based on the similarly new term for traditional singing; see Chapter 8). It
dates from the 1970s, when Gaeltacht activists staged an “alternative” stepdancing competition at the annual Irish-language cultural festival, An tOireachtas. Now sean-nós dancing is recognized as a performance genre, with an
official slot at the Oireachtas. Máirtín Mac Donncha and others from Ráth Cairn
have often won this competition.
A Ráth Cairn man, introducing children who are going to do some solo
step dancing, said “This is sean-nós, that's something that comes from your heart.
From the heart down to the legs.” 12 By using the term sean-nós, he identified the
performance as something other than the institutionalized form of Irish dance
that his audience would have been familiar with—step dancing as taught to
school children in dancing academies and strictly regulated by a national
organization which sponsors competitions.13 The other point of comparison was
the newly fashionable (in the mid-1990s) commercial dance extravaganza,
combining traditional, jazz, tap dance, and european “ethnic” elements,
popularized by the touring production, Riverdance. Both of these forms inhabit
the national arena, in a way that sean-nós dancing does not. National
commentators hailed the Riverdance phenomenon as “making traditional culture
12. We were performing in a nearby village.
13. Much has been made by outsiders of the “stiffness” of this variety of Irish dancing as
reflecting sexual repression. Officialized step-dancing seems to me to be more a relic of
regimentation than repression, the victim of the bureaucratic zeal of its regulatory organizations.
The argument that “The Irish” are sexually repressed is most famously advanced by
anthropologists Messinger (1969) and Scheper-Hughes (1982); one hilarious rebuttal is Pádraig
Standún’s (1993) Irish-language novel, Na hAnthropologicals.
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sexy again”—opposing it to formalized step dancing and ignoring sean-nós
dancing, which had never stopped being sexy.
The term sean-nós is generally used in public performance or when talking
to outsiders. Otherwise generic terms like “step” or “damhsa” (for dancing) or
“amhrán” (for singing) are used. This use of the term sean-nós when performing
for outsiders looks like an example of Herzfeld’s disemia, a distinction between
self-representation and self-knowledge. There is more to it than that; calling it
“old” amounts to a claim of priority, undercutting the dichotomy of national
dancing styles (traditional, rigid, and boring versus modern, commercial and
sexy). More importantly, the term captures one of the most important things
about sean-nós dancing for insiders, the fact that it is a local tradition based on
transmission and quotation, just as verbal art is. Dance steps are aspects of
persons, just as language is (Chapters 6 and 8). The oldness of sean-nós thus
relates to a different kind of community and time than that of the nation-state as
described by Anderson (1983).
I have made this detour into dancing because Gaeltacht poetry has the
same qualities, both of looking back (an tsúil siar—“the backwards look;” cf.
Denvir 1998), and as a way that people live in other people’s talk and actions.
The historical role of poets and poetry
Speech has always been regarded as a type of action in Irish-language
traditions, and poetic speech as the most powerful type of speech. In the Lebor
Gabála or “Book of Invasions,” the first poet, Aimhirgin, setting foot on the
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island for the first time, utters verses which effectively speak the land into being;
in them, he claims identity with, and hence control over, the forces of nature (Ó
hÓgáin 1982:378). In what Ó Buachalla (1996:470) terms a political charter myth,
the Sons of Míl encounter three supernatural women: Éire, Banba, and Fódla.
Éire announces that the island is destined to belong forever to the Milesians. In
return, Aimhirgin gives the island all three of their names, with Éire as its main
name.
Medieval court poets mediated between nobles and the sacred landscape.
In the ideology of sacral kingship, the concept of “truth” characterized the
relationship between a just ruler and the cosmos. Under a just ruler, it was
believed, the earth would prosper. The poet’s social role was to mediate the
union between the king and the land, personified as a sovereignty goddess.14 In
an ancient poetic topos (Carney 1967), praise-poetry made the king beautiful in
the eyes of the goddess of sovereignty, who embodied the physical landscape
and controlled its fertility. Praise-poetry accomplished this both directly through
its magical efficacy, and indirectly by inspiring the king to right behavior and
bravery in battle. Good kings were symbolically wed to the landscape through
the mediation of praise-poetry, their reigns marked by fertility and prosperity.
14. Simms (1987) points out that the nature of kingly power and legitimation had been
evolving toward a more typically European model even before the Norman conquest in the
twelfth century. By the seventeenth century, “although the concept of inauguration as marriage
with the goddess of sovereignty continued to be set forth by the bardic poets in a surprisingly
detailed and articulate form ... it had long since become a mere poetic conceit” (Simms 1987:32).
Ó Buachalla’s (1996) work shows, however, that the ideas underlying this “mere poetic conceit”
had tremendous political and intellectual consequences in Irish society into the eighteenth
century.
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Substantial payments to poets reflected the ideology of honor and exchange with
the sacred realm which underpinned the Gaelic political system.
Satire was believed to have the power to blemish the king physically,
“burning” and raising blisters on his face. Poets were morally obliged to satirize
unjust kings, breaking their union with Sovereignty. Poetic satires were felt to be
dangerous, able to kill or disfigure their victims directly. In the type of satire
known as “Glám Díchenn” (Breathnach 1988:14), poets could perform a ritual
and utter verses upon which, if the poets were guilty of falsehood the earth
would swallow them, whereas if the king was guilty, he would be swallowed,
along with his wife, son, horse, weapons, clothing and hound! The power of
poetry was associated with the earth, perhaps due to the poet’s role in mediating
society’s relationship with Sovereignty. Thus, annals for the year 1024 describe
how, in a “poetic wonder” (firt filed), a chief poet’s murderers rotted within an
hour of his death (Ó hÓgáin 1982:344).
Medieval Irish antiquarianism: constructing a tradition
In medieval Ireland, within the newly literate monastic regime, older
narrative, poetic, and legal traditions were reinterpreted under the influence of
Latin learning and christian doctrine. “Pagan” court poets and “christian” monks
were on intimate terms in medieval Ireland, often members of the same families;
occasionally they were even the same people (McCone 1990). The chthonic
power of poets coexisted with that of the clergy, which derived from God and
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the saints, as well as from the practice of literacy and the textual authority of the
Bible.
Monastic textual traditions were seen as inherently power-laden. One
basis of textual power was the inscription of poetic voice. Manuscript sagas
featured passages of what are commonly called “rhetorics”—the direct poetic
speech of characters in an archaic lexical and metrical style. Both retoiric and rosc
were used as labels for this type of speech.15 The term rosc is apparently a
lexicalization of a quotation frame, ro-seched “it was pronounced” (“used of a
judge, physician, etc”—Thurneysen 1980:472). Rosc is thus “an extremely apt
expression for a rhetorical speech within a narrative context” (Mac Cana
1966:72). The reinterpretation of rosc as a genre or type of poetic speech reflects a
tendency to extrapolate from function onto form, locating essential rhetorical
power in the formal properties of certain types of speech.
Watkins (1970) notes that several Indo-European traditions share similar
notions of the nature of poetic language as being the “language of the gods” in
contrast to the ordinary “language of men.” Medieval Irish linguistic theory
made a general distinction between gnáthbérla (ordinary language) and bérla na
filed (language of the poets), This latter is exemplified in
the language of the “rhetorics” in Old Irish sagas, passages of verse
or rhythmical prose clearly valued for precisely their obscurantism
and their bold contrast with the surrounding and transparent prose
narrative. Bérla na filed relied for its effect partly on poetic devices
15. Scholars have debated which term is original—rosc or retoiric (Mac Cana 1966,
McCone 1990, Corthals 1996).
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like alliteration, partly on perturbations of normal Irish word order,
but mostly on obscure lexical items that were otherwise lost in the
ordinary language; in other words, archaisms. [...] Thus the most
highly marked form of discourse in Irish is that which is archaic,
uniquely poetic, and obscure: precisely the characteristic of the socalled “rhetorics” in Irish saga (Watkins 1970:14-15).
Passages of directly quoted poetic speech were occasionally marked with
marginal .r. in manuscripts. “[S]uch passages ... tended to preserve or to imitate
traditional models ... which, at least in part, had sprung from the [poet] in his
capacity as seer rather than as man of learning” (Mac Cana 1966:74). The formula
Co cloth ni (“it was heard”), sometimes used to frame mantic utterance, presents
it as if it emanates from speaker’s body; here the poet is only a vehicle for a
Otherworldly voice.
The use of retoiric as a metalinguistic term reflects a process where older
notions of the effectiveness of poetic speech were reinterpreted in the light of the
linguistic ideologies, terminology and some of the forms of late antique Latin
poetry (Corthals 1996). Christian doctrine required that the older ritual basis of
poetic power be de-emphasized; the focus seems to have shifted to the forms of
poetic speech itself. Thus, terms which appear to have originally denoted types
of (ritualized) speech acts are later “treated as titles of distinctive poetical forms
or metres, though we may suspect that this development is due in some measure
to the schematization of Christian antiquarian learning” (Chadwick 1935:110).
Carey (1997) maintains that these medieval antiquarians exaggerated the mantic,
ritual aspects of pagan culture, for the purpose of emphasizing the differences
between them and the newer Christian culture.
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Parallel to this is a shift in emphasis from the chthonic, bodily basis of
poetic power to a foundation in divine grace. An example of this transformation
is found in the saga Aided Chonchobuir. The christian author/compiler of this text
“composed [a] difficult, obscure, and archaic-seeming rhetoric which Conchobar
was supposed to have uttered when he heard of the Crucifixion” (Carney 1955,
quoted in McCone 1990:43). In Corthals’ (1989:41-42) summary of the event:
... Conchobar, king of Ulster, was slain twice. The account of his
first slaying, told in the fashion of a typical Ulster story, relates how
he was struck by Mess Gegra’s brain which, having been hardened
by an admixture of lime, was treacherously thrown at him by Cet
mac Mágach from the Connachta, so that it entered his head. It was
stitched over, and Conchobar was kept alive -- on the condition,
however, that he avoided any kind of agitation. The second and
final slaying of Conchobar was a consequence both of his first
slaying and of Christ’s death. On hearing about the crucifixion of
Christ he got excited to such a degree that Mess Gegra’s brain
sprang forth from his head. He bled to death and subsequently
went to heaven. [...] The poem is spoken by Conchobar as he
becomes enraged because of the death of Christ.
This is an example of poetic rage, which represents for speech what the battlefrenzy of the hero represents for action.16 Aided Chonchobuir transforms such
notions in a deliberately christianizing framework: The hero, Conchobur, utters
his poem in a spasm of anger brought on by the inability to act to prevent Christ’s
crucifixion. In his poem he laments that his words are likewise ineffective.
Ultimately he accepts divine providence as the basis for both his words and
actions.
16. Máirtín Ó Cadhain used the term for Cú Chulainn’s battle- “contortion” (riastara,
from Old Irish ríastartha, “contorted”) to describe the public rage that came over him during his
political interventions (Mac Aonghusa 1978:87). Cf. Chapter 7.
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The power and authority of medieval writing was thus founded in part on
its framing of archaic “oral” voices in Christian/literate texts. This functioned in
part to preserve the bases of pagan power within a Christian context—in this
case, offering a prospective charter for Christianity. There is a parallel here to the
glossing activity of medieval scribes, in which archaic forms are presented with
marginal or interlinear expansion. Such glossing also takes place within sagas
themselves as narrator/witness figures explain passages of obscure speech
(Sayers 1992:128).
Such activity reflexively enacts Irish-language discourse as a tradition, one
designed to be read through to arrive at an originary voice. These principles also
guide the collection and use of folklore by the modern Irish state (McLean 1999,
Moore-Quinn 1998), and, as I show in Chapter 8, performers’ understandings of
the sean-nós song tradition as well. The preponderance of direct discourse in the
poetic and narrative traditions indexically projects the listener into the “I” of
characters who are culturally as well as temporally quite distant.17
One of the main quasi-ritual aspects of poetry in the tradition is its
connection to visionary powers, especially the ability to see and enter the
Otherworld and understand and speak to its inhabitants. Many stories tell how
hero-figures, especially Finn Mac Cumhail, receive the gift of poetry, vision and
prophecy in the form of imbas forosnai, “knowledge which illuminates” (Quin
17. Urban (1989) examines the variable uses of direct discourse in native South American
ritual.
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1990:381). Imbas is portrayed as both a ritual practice and as a supernatural
ability, in which the subject may go into a trance-like state, speaking in poetic
“rhetorics” upon emerging.
Medieval Irish literature took the idea of the hero’s “visionary voice” (Ó
hÓgáin 1979) as a revelatory medium and transformed it to act as a charter myth
for the literary transcription and recovery of an “oral” tradition which has/is
being “lost.” In Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Sages), Saint Patrick
meets up with Cailte and Oisín, the last surviving members of Finn’s band of
warriors. They set out on a series of adventures together as the pagan warriors
relate tales of their past adventures to the Christian saint, who, along with his
assistants, commits them to writing.
Patrick’s two guardian angels, Aibelán and Solusbreathach, came to
him there, and he asked them whether it was alright with the King
of Heaven and Earth that he, Patrick, was listening to stories of the
fían The angels responded with equal vehemence: “Dear holy cleric!
No more than a third of their stories are these old clerics able to tell
you, because of their forgetfulness and senility. Record them on the
tablets of poets and in the words of arch-poets [i támlorguibh filed i
mbriathraibh ollamhan], for listening to these stories will gladden
throngs and nobles for the rest of time” (quoted in Nagy 1983:133).
In this genre, as Joseph Nagy (1983:134-35) shows, the christian saint is the
“translating medium” between two different space-times: the oral, pagan
otherworld and literate, christian historical time:
The stories that they tell Patrick and company (who are eagerly
asking for them) are stories of the heroes’ personal experiences of
an otherworld incongruous with or at least irrelevant to the
christian otherworlds (Nagy 1983:134).
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Eloquence and violence
Medieval Ireland was a highly stratified society in which knowledge,
including knowledge of various types of poetic form and the ability to use them,
was the property of certain social classes and lineages. A text, “The Cauldron of
Poesy” (Breatnach 1981) compares poetic ability to a series of cauldrons, from
which knowledge and fine speech overflow. These containers are either upside
down, lying on their sides or right side up, depending on a person’s social
position and training.18 The text states, however, that the cauldron of poesy can
be turned right side up by sorrow or joy. Emotion is felt literally to increase one’s
capacity to produce poetry. In a theme that continues through modern folklore as
well, poetry is felt to be simultaneously the product of birth, knowledge, craft,
and strong emotion.
Medieval saga literature is full of both representations of and discussions
of the nature of verbal discourse. In the saga Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of
Emer), both Emer and Cú Chulainn “test each other and promote themselves
through the arts of speech, and by comment on the relation of speech acts to
other deeds and on the record of such deeds in the speech and song of others
(Sayers 1992:126). Heroic speech was considered coterminous with action. In a
“word—deed—word continuum,” intentions are announced and then a
memorable deed is done, which increases the hero’s fame—other people’s future
18. Cauldrons represented culture and the culturing process; chieftains were said to be
cauldrons which “cook together every raw thing” (McCone 1990:174).
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talk about his actions. Thus, the hero Cú Chulainn vows that his deeds will be
praised (Sayers 1992:129). This directly parallels the activity of the court poet,
whose praise and satire both incites and judges the actions of the king.
Medieval eloquence was “the ability to encode information, even personal
history, in traditional riddling fashion through allusions to both mythological
and historical lore.” Powerful utterance contained sedimented narratives. This
knowledge was partially encoded in the landscape itself in the form of
dindshenchas— “indexical circumlocutions, synopses of stories which determined
the names of prominent landmarks” (Sayers 1992:128-9). Movement through the
landscape was a type of poetic action as characters related stories associated with
particular places, sometimes encountering the stories’ otherworldly protagonists.
The landscape was often a character in its own right, engaged in riddling
dialogue with the hero.
Court poets were carriers of legal, historical and genealogical knowledge,
and advised kings both directly and allegorically, through the medium of
historical narratives which drew analogies to the present situation. Poetic praise
compared the chieftain or king to legendary kings of the past and to those
prophesied to come in the future (Ó Buachalla 1989, 1996).
Poets took an active political and even military role; one seventeenth
century poet styled himself “the prime minister of Fermanagh” (Carney 1967).
The rhetorical skills of the medieval Irish court poet were based in the great
genealogical, mythical, historical, linguistic and poetic knowledge which he
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brought to bear on current political issues in the form of allegorical fables and or
condensed symbols. Poetic texts were objects of value, composed “orally,” then
written down, often in the form of letters to distant chieftains (Carney 1967;
Ó Cuív 1973), ultimately collected in poem-books. These books were the state
papers of Gaelic Ireland.
In the colonial era poets were a focus of conflict between the Irishspeaking and English-speaking worlds (Leerssen 1996; Caball 1992; Ó Buachalla
1996). Early colonists blamed poets for stirring up resistance among local
chieftains and their armed followers. In the words of Edmund Spenser (1596),
whomesoever they finde to bee most lycentious of lief, most bolde
and lawles in his doinges, most daungerous and desperate in all
partes of disobedience and rebellious disposicon, him they sett up
and glorifie in their rymes, him they prayse to the people, and to
younge men make an example to followe.
Poets could apparently also strike directly. Annals for the year 1414 record
that the Viceroy of Ireland, Sir John Stanley, was killed by a satire uttered by the
poet Nial Ó hUiginn:
John Stanley, the Deputy of the King of England, arrived in Ireland,
a man who gave neither mercy nor protection to clergy, laity, or
men of science, but subjected as many of them as he came upon to
cold, hardship, and famine. It was he who plundered Niall, the son
of Hugh O'Higgin, at Uisneach, in Meath. Henry Dalton, however,
plundered James Tuite and the King's people, and gave the
O'Higgins out of the preys then acquired a cow for each and every
cow taken from them, and afterwards escorted them to Connaught.
The O'Higgins, with Niall, then satirized John Stanley, who lived
after this satire but five weeks, for he died of the virulence of the
lampoons [neimh na naor]. This was the second poetical miracle
performed by this Niall O'Higgin, the first being the discomfiture
of the Clann-Conway the night they plundered Niall at Cladann;
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and the second, the death of John Stanley. (O’ Donovan 1990; cf. Ó
hÓgáin 1982:344-45). 19
Ó hUiginn’s “poetical miracle” [fiort filidh]—the killing of Henry V’s Viceroy of
Ireland—is justified in the manuscript in the same terms that would justify a
poet’s satirizing a native ruler. The satire is also revenge for Stanley’s
“plundering” of Ó hUiginn.
Modern poetic ideology
Under the Gaelic political system, several types of “poets” were ranked
according to their function, degree of learning, and the social level of their noble
patrons. Contractual relationships of poets and patrons were carefully defined in
the legal system. In the modern Gaeltacht, the forms of poetry (genres, meters)
have changed, and the legal status of poets has disappeared. While many
Gaeltacht poets are respected and even feared by their neighbors, they do not
occupy a higher social and class level––the reverse is more often true. What has
remained, to some extent, are certain fundamental cultural notions about the
nature of poetic language and the way it functions. As Ó hÓgáin (1982) shows, in
spite of the destruction of the native political order at the beginning of the 17th
19. Text (quoted in Ó hÓgáin 1982:344): John Zanlae .i. fear ionaid righ Saxan, do theacht i
nÉrinn, fear na tucc cadhus nó tearmann, do thuaith, ná d’eacclais, ná d’ealadhain an mhéd gus a ráinicc
acht a ccur fri fuacht, faighdhe, occus gorta. A sé ro airg Niall mac Aodha Uí Uigind i nUisneach Midhe,
ocus ro hairgeadh Semus Diúit ocus muintir an righ la hAinri Dalatún, ocus tucc bó sa mboin dona
hoirgnibh sin do mhuintir Uiginn, ocus ro iodhlaic i cConnachtaibh iad airsin. Ro aorsat iaramh muintir
Uiginn im Niall John Zanlae, ocus ní raibhe beó iar sin san aoír sin acht cúicc seachtmhaine namá an tan
fuair bás do neimh na naor, ocus asé sin an dara fiort filidh do ronadh for Niall Ua nUiginn .i. clann
Conmhaigh do lethadh aidhche creiche Néill hÍ Cladaind. ocus John Zanlae do écc. [Annála Ríoga Éireann
IV (ed. John O’ Donovan), 819]
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Century, the decline of Irish-language learning, and the transformation of almost
every aspect of Irish life and culture in the last few hundred years, there is a
great deal of continuity between ancient and modern views of the nature and
power of poets and poetic speech. An example of this is the definition of poetry,
from the earliest texts to modern times, as consisting of “praise and blame”
(moladh agus cáineadh). This reflects its fundamentally moral, religious and social
orientation (including much “love poetry”).
Modern folklore is replete with lore about poets, often in the form of
stories which accompany and frame quoted poetic texts. Supernatural aspects of
poetry which were quite possibly taken as figurative tropes in medieval Ireland
are often represented as literally true in twentieth-century folklore. Folklore
portrays poetry and poets as being a bit Otherworldly, the result of a
supernatural gift or even of a physical difference in the poet’s body. One of the
most enduring legends of poetic power has it that a hazel tree at the well of
Segais, the source of the river Boyne, dropped nuts into the river, which were
eaten by salmon; anyone eating the Salmon of Knowledge would receive
inspiration, knowledge, and poetic ability (Chadwick 1935, Carey 1997, Patton
1992:96-7). This legend is related to other legends about supernatural cows
(connected with the name of the river Boyne) which have Indo-European roots
(Mac Cana 1983; Leavitt 1998). There is a version of this legend, known to
virtually every Irish person, telling how the hero Finn Mac Cumhail got
inspiration by accidentally burning his thumb while cooking this Salmon. It is
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paralleled by modern folk stories of the legendary poet-hero, Cearbhall Ó
Dálaigh. Ó Dalaigh was a typical good-for-nothing until he accidentally tasted
the first milk of a cow which had been impregnated by a magical bull that
emerged out of a rock. Upon tasting the milk, he was overwhelmed by
knowledge, and henceforth became a skilled smith, shoemaker, mason, and
mastered “whatever trade he put his hand to.”20 A tradition going back to the
mythical poet Aimirgin (Ó hÓgáin 1982:30-32) compares smiths and poets, both
makers of durable and valuable objects.
Although these stories highlight the seemingly accidental nature of
inspiration, there is an element of predestination as well—it is no accident that
these particular people are chosen by the Otherworld as the recipients of
wisdom. In both literary and folk traditions, poets mirror and stand in for
(super)nature, in a moral relationship that echoes their (former) role in the
institution of sacral kingship. Poets are portrayed as knowing the languages of
nature; they enter into dialogue with the landscape (see below) and can control
the behavior of rats,21 waves, wind, schools of fish, etc. (Ó hÓgáin 1982).
The stories about Finn and Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh emphasize how the
supernatural gift of poetry transforms the poet physically. Folklore portrays
20. Joe Heaney told me a version of this story in 1983; c.f. also Ó hÓgáin 1985.
21. “Plagues of rats could be banished by poets who wrote a charm on a piece of paper
that was then laid at the entrance to the hole where the rats lived. Soon after, according to the
many stories about it, the leader of the rats emerged from the hole, bearing the paper in its
mouth, followed by all the other rats, and all made their way to the location indicated on the
paper—usually the farm of somebody against whom the poet had a grudge. This custom was
also known in the United States...” (Ó Súilleabháin 1966:279).
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poets as uncannily fluent speakers; poetic wit is produced “without thinking,” as
a direct bodily emanation. Poetry is felt to be physically different than ordinary
speech. Poets were sometimes said to have a special “vein of poetry” (féith na
filíochta) which produced verse when agitated.22
Voice and history: poetry as oppositional discourse in the Gaeltacht
Throughout Irish history, poetic voice has been construed as a conduit to
an immanent “past” which functions as an otherworld, active in and on the
present. Poets and poetic speech bring into dialogue “pagan” and “Christian,”
“oral” and “literate” worlds (cf. Nagy 1983, 1989). During the defeat of the Gaelic
political order in the 17th and 18th Centuries, Irish-language poets began to
identify their loyalties on a religious, cultural and linguistic basis rather than
with particular individual nobles (Leerssen 1996, Ó Buachalla 1996, Caball 1998).
Poets then represented the Gaelic order in conflict with the anglicizing sectors of
society. From the 17th century to the present, the political, cultural, and economic
transformation of Ireland strongly coincided with linguistic conflict and change
as Irish was abandoned in most areas.
In Ireland, as in European bilingual situations generally (Gal 1984, 1987;
Martin-Jones 1989), there has been a high degree of consciousness of the political
and economic grounds of language choice. In the linguistic culture of the
22. The term is also used non-literally to say someone has a talent for poetry (Ó Dónaill
1977:535), just as one says in English that someone “has a flair for poetry.” In Irish, however, the
etymology is much more apparent.
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Gaeltacht, verbal art, especially poetry and folklore, is partially grounded in the
cultural system of the vanished Gaelic political order. Its symbolic universe lives
on in those aspects of society which are grounded in the exchange economy, the
sacred landscape, the “occasions and styles of sociability not successfully
contained and tamed” by self-consciously “modernizing” classes (Taylor
1989:184). The ideology of modernization, grounded in the Andersonian
perspective of linear time, would relegate these various Otherworlds, embodied
in poetic discourse, to an absolute temporal past. Within the modern nation-state
the conflict is thus, not between the past and the future, but between two
opposing and incompatible senses of time.
In Jameson’s (1981:74) theory, “the ideology of form” of a literary tradition
consists of “the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of
various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of
production.” In Irish-language tradition, discursive form itself embodies these
contradictions, and is thus a site of resistance to the linear time of modernity.
This seems to explain a lot about the nature of rural “characters” as
well—performance itself threatens to dredge up elements of the past which
threaten the respectable order.
Ó hÓgáin (1982) gives many examples from folklore of “duels” or
confrontations between filí and priests. Keening women (mná caointe) are
similarly remembered in folklore, not surprisingly given both their verbal gifts
and the Church’s unceasing opposition to their trade (Partridge [Bourke] 1980,
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1983, Bourke 1993). Women are also “characters” (although the term is not often
used for women), as well as poets. Priests themselves, however, have often
played the role of file or “character.” They are almost always so remembered in
contexts involving either the oppressed Church under colonial rule, or as
charismatic “fallen” or disgraced priests23 who play an oppositional role viz-aviz civil Church and society (Taylor 1995, Ch. 5).
In general, the Irish-language tradition has carried with it a point of view
that is different from that of the English-language traditions in Ireland. One
example of this is that older Irish-speakers in the 1990s possess traditional
knowledge of the names and histories, not only of their own districts, but often
of others which have been English-speaking for one or several generations. They
thus have the point of view and authority to, when necessary (or convenient), see
all of modern English-speaking Ireland as, fundamentally, a recent and shallow
imposition. Such a point of view has been tremendously encouraged by the
nationalist project which portrayed Irish and the Gaeltacht as the most “real”
Ireland. As I argue throughout this dissertation, however, the linguistic culture
of the Gaeltacht has been problematic for, and largely inassimilable to, the
nationalist project as well. While “characters” in English-speaking parts of
Ireland tend to be socially marginal, the linguistic and cultural marginality of
Gaeltacht poets gives wider scope for their subversions.
23. One of the most famous such priests in the Irish-language tradition is Tomás Ó
Caiside of Co. Mayo (born around 1700), who abandoned his vows for love and authored an
autobiography in Irish as well as the fine song, An Caisideach Bán (Kenny 1993).
137
Máirtín Mac Donncha
I first met Máirtín Mac Donncha in 1992, at a concert in the local hall in
Ráth Cairn, soon after I arrived to do my field work. I had seen so-called sean-nós
dancing before in Connemara, but nothing like Máirtín’s, which seemed
infinitely fluid as he moved from one “step” to another. This fluidity is present in
Máirtín’s poetry, singing, dancing, and artful conversation,24 in contrast with his
demeanor at other times, which is fairly quiet and reserved. Máirtín is one of the
most skilled tellers of “yarns”25 I have met, a frequent and skilled imitator of
others, a character’s character. But calling Máirtín a “character”, while true, is
hardly sufficient––he is also a renowned dancer, singer, actor and poet or songmaker. In his mid fifties, married and separated with two grown sons, he is not a
bachelor but occupies a similar social position. Both his father, Cóil Neaine
Pháidín Mac Donncha (cf. Mac Donncha 1993) and sons showed the same talents,
however, suggesting a more permanent and inheritable talent and social role. His
social role and self-identification is best compared to the role of the file (poet) in
the Gaeltacht.26 The file has a fairly well-defined role in Irish-speaking society,
24. His ideolect is discussed by Stenson (1986-7) in her dialectal survey of “The Irish of
Ráth Cairn.”
25. The english term (
) is often used in Irish as is scéilín (“story”[dim.]).
26. There are of course many English-speaking “folk” poets and balladeers who play very
similar roles in the Galltacht.Their works are enthusiastically learned and performed by Gaeltacht
poets and singers.
138
and furthermore there is widespread awareness of the ancientness of this role,
and traditional knowledge of the identities, compositions, lives and personalities
of poets going back a few hundred years (not counting more mythical heroic
figures). At the same time, people are all too aware that their language and
culture has been increasingly marginalized in modern Ireland. Modern Gaeltacht
poets have neither the social power nor the education and linguistic resources of
their ancient counterparts.
Most local Gaeltacht poets seem to deny the title file (poet) out of modesty.
In Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s words, Gaeltacht poets, if they are worthy of the name,
must have “a public and a function” (see below). Máirtín Mac Donncha has
these, and it is interesting to see to what degree it is in terms of “character” that
he “functions” for his public. A perusal of Ó hÓgáin’s (1982) survey of the
folklore of poets and poetry in the Gaeltacht shows a similar fascination by the
public with the personality of the poet. Stories about poets often take the form of
small dramas, describing confrontations between poets or between poets and
others, framing their (directly reported) utterances (see Chapters 6 and 8 ). These
framing stories are not very different than the reporting of witticisms in
everyday “crack.”
What is the point of reporting “context” along with speech? As I argue
throughout this dissertation, this very common Irish discourse form, in addition
to making reported speech intelligible, functions to interpret (or as the current
jargon goes, to “construct”) the power of speech as social action. It does this by
139
presenting examples of speech along with narrative descriptions of situations to
which the speech is a response and descriptions of the effects of these utterances.
It carries exemplary images of persons, which model the relation of personality,
the emotions, etc. to utterance. Framing stories associated with poetry (Ó hÓgáin
1979, 1982) comment on the nature and power of poetic utterance. Máirtín has
told me many of these, both in the form of anecdotes and as more formal
introductions to poetry and songs. 27 An example is this story Máirtín told me to
illustrate a point he was making about the power of poetry:
TEXT: “Oíche Chiún Cheobranach”28
{MMD] Ah, seod é an chaoí a chuala mise ná bean, agus bhí an fear pósta
an darna huair ag an mbean seo an dtuigeann tú. Agus bhí mac aige leis
an gcéad bhean. Agus ansin, an leasmhathair, ní raibh sí ag breathnú in a
dhiaidh ceart agus, bh’fhéidir go dtarlíonn sé go minic, ní raibh an meas
céanna agus a bheadh aice roimh a mhac fhéin. Agus, ní raibh sí ach ag
tabhairt cúil buí––bhí molt [wether] maraithe acub. Ní thuigim fhéin cén
áit a raibh an fheoil chúil bui, is dóigh thart ar an muineál an, an molt, nó
feóil bhán a bhí ann, nó, drochfheóil, mar a déarfá. Agus, ní mhaith leis an
gasúr, bh’fhéidir nar raibh sé ach naoi nó deich de bhlianta, níor mhaith
leis tada a inseacht dhá athair. Ach, uh. dúirt an t-athair leis an oíche seo,
“go amach agus breathnú céardós oíche amuigh í, féach céardós oíche
amuigh í.” Agus chuaidh sé amach ar an tsráid agus thánaig sé isteach
agus dúirt sé, “Cén sort oíche amuigh í” a dúirt sé “a mhac?” Agus dúirt
sé
27. Most Irish-language poetry is sung, although song texts are sometimes recited. The
use of the term filíocht to refer to spoken poetry as opposed to singing (amhránaíocht) may be a
recent phenomenon (cf. Ó Madagáin 1985). The “recitation” is a popular English-language genre
in Ráth Cairn as well as in Co. Meath in general. I have heard the (English-language) term
“recitation” used for spoken poetry in Irish as well. “Recitations” seem to tend to be dramatic
monologues with narrative content, as opposed to the more strictly dialogical agallamh beirte (see
below). See Chapter 8 for the relation of music to speech in sean-nós song.
28. All quotations from Máirtín Mac Donncha were recorded in an interview in July,
1997, in Ráth Cairn. He first told me this story in 1994.
140
[MMD]: Ah, the way I heard it was a woman, and her husband was
married for the second time to this woman you understand. And he
had a son by the first wife. And then, the stepmother, she wasn’t
looking after him properly and, maybe this happens often, she
didn’t have the same respect for him that she would have for her
own son. And she would only give him “cúil buí”––they had
slaughtered a wether [a castrated ram]. I don’t understand myself
where the “cúil buí” meat was, probably around the neck of the
wether, or the fat that was there, or poor meat, as you’d say. And
the child didn’t want, maybe he was only around nine or ten years
old, he didn’t want to say anything to his father. And, eh, the father
said this night “Go out and see what kind of night it is outside, see
what kind of night it is outside.” And he went out on the “street”
[the paved area in front of a house] and he came back in and he [the
father] said, “What sort of night is it out there,” he said “son?”29
And he [the son] said:
“Oíche chiun cheobranach, stoirm réaltógach,
gaoith aneas, braon as, agus é ag sioc.
An gheallach ar aon taobh agus í ag goil soir.”
“A quiet misty night, a starry storm,
a south wind, a drop from it [raining] and frost.
The moon on one side [?] and going [to the] East.”
Agus dúirt an t-athair “ní fhéadfadh sé sin tarladh.” “Bhuel, bheadh sé
chomh cóirthe dhó ag tarlachtáil” a deir sé, “leis an molt a mharadh tú an
tseachtain seo chaite, agus gan ann ach cúl buí uilig.” Agus bhí a fhios ag
an athair ansin, chuimreadh sé air. Níor inis sé díreach ar a leasmhathair,
ach, ...
And the father said “that couldn’t happen!” “Well, it would be just
as likely [lit. “proper”] for that to happen” he [the son] said, “as the
wether you slaughtered last week, to be nothing but cúl buí.” And
the father understood then, he realized it. He didn’t tell on his
stepmother directly, but ...
[SC] B’fhearr mar sin ná é a rá...
29. Double framing of directly quoted speech is a common feature of storytelling.
141
[SC]: It was better that way then...
[MMD] B’fhearr mar sin é. Agus, by God, rinne an t-athair siúireáilte go
bhfaighfeadh sé a dhinnear ceart uaidh sin amach. Ach, nach iontach an
chaoí a raibh sé, go raibh sé curtha le chéile aige? Clisteacht, an dtuigeann
tú. An clistíocht.
[MMD]: It was better that way. And by God, the father made sure
that he’d get the right dinner from then on. But wasn’t it wonderful
[iontach––“strange, amazing”] the way it was, the way he had put it
together? Cleverness, do you understand. The cleverness of it.
There are many similar stories illustrating the first poetic utterances of
children, when their “gift” (bua) is revealed.30 In this story the child gets himself
out of a difficult situation by constructing an enigmatic utterance that the father
must decode himself. Rather than directly confronting the stepmother or father,
which would be inappropriate for a young child, his utterance edifies by
puzzlement (Fernandez 1986, ch. 7). The child gives a series of impossible images
of disordered nature, weather at once hot and cold, wet and dry, quiet and
violent. The incredulous father challenges the child and in response is given the
frightening image of the slaughtered animal being nothing but cúl buí. In the
manner of riddles in general (as Fernandez observes), natural and human (dis-)
orders are brought into contiguity, the natural order standing for the human. It is
up to the father, when given the enigmatic description of the night outside, to
make the connection to the disordered and unjust state of social relations in his
own household. When he fails to do this, the child presents him with the final
30. Ó hÓgáin (1982:137-38) reports a nearly identical story from Co. Kerry, in which the
child is a girl. In this case the father is a poet and the child’s utterance confirms for him that she is
his own offspring. The appearance of feith na filíochta in a girl meant that the “gift” of poetry
would pass out of the family’s lineage (Nic Eoin 1998).
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image in which the mutual product of human labor and nurture proves on the
inside to be false and sterile. Arguably this represents a natural sanction against
the human order--nature becomes disordered and infertile, withdrawing its
support from the human community. The ultimate power of poetic satire (aor) in
the Irish tradition is the magical revelation (and perhaps the facilitation thereby)
of a natural sanction against the human.31
Hard talk: an old word about a half word
Like the Western Apache (Basso 1990), Irish-speakers value enigmatic and
allusive speaking. Proverbs are seanfhocail––”old words.” In structure they are
miniature poems, and they function like the “crowning statements” Ó Crualaoich
mentions (see above), that originate as “artistically creative verbal
summations”of social truths and predicaments. Proverbs are valued because of
their conciseness: the ability to condense a great deal of experience, knowledge,
emotion or opinion into as economical a form as possible.32
In the words of a common proverb, Tuigeann fear léinn leathfhocal––”A
learned man understands a hint [literally, a half-word]”. In the linguistic culture
31. Compare Blake's “Oh Rose, thou art sick...”
32. Characters in a novel , Connemara emigrants, meet in London:
“How are things back in the west [thiar, ie, at home in Connemara]?” he said.
“In a mess,” I say.
“You’ve said it all in one word [Tá lán do bhéil ráite agat, lit. “you’ve said the full
of your mouth”],” he said. “They’ll never change.”
“It’s a little too late” I say (Ó Ceallaigh 1990:35; my translation).
143
of the Gaeltacht, poetic utterance creates an incomplete scene or set of images
which the recipient must complete for himself in a way that connects the world
evoked in the utterance with the real world in which he or she lives. Much of the
effectiveness of poetry derives from its ability to coordinate points of view.
Máirtín mentioned that the songs of Tom an tSeoige, a Connemara poet, greatly
impressed an older local man; tears came to his eyes when he heard “Ar Bord an
Princess Maude” (On Board the Princess Maude). The same things were in the
song that this man saw himself on the Princes Maude––as a young man he often
made the crossing to England. The process of filling in a picture is the same for
singers as well as listeners. Joe Heaney described ornamentation in these terms,
and mentioned that listeners could see the events of songs about the Passion of
Christ, because they had lived through sadness in their own lives (Chapter 8).
Incompleteness or allusiveness in a song invites imaginative participation.
Hidden reference also accomplishes this in allegorical songs which “they used to
compose ... in such a way that they (the authorities and the English) wouldn’t
know what the song was about.”33
In Máirtín’s story of the stepchild, the fact that such an utterance came
from a young child, and the spontaneousness of its composition made it
“wonderful.” “The way he put it together”––the poetic form of the child’s
utterance––also makes it memorable. Alliteration, end-rhyme, internal rhyme,
33. Máirtín said this of the allusive and clever song “Ócam an Phríosúin” [“The Prison
Oakum”], composed by Tom Neaine Choilm Ó Lochlainn from An Trá Bháin, who was jailed for
making poitín (illegal whiskey). Máirtín has this song from his father, who met Tom Neaine
Choilm when he was a child.
144
poetic meter, the choice of unexpected, “old”, rare or difficult words, are valued
aspects of poetry as well as of the speech of artful conversation. Such speech is
“hard” (cruachaint––“hard speech”), in the sense of being difficult as well as
physically enduring. 34 In the preface to his edition of the poems of Seosamh Ó
Donnchadha35 (who was known as “The Poet of Baile na mBroghach”), Peadar
Mac an Iomaire writes:
There is no doubt that the Poet believed that poetry was more
important if listened to than if left aside written on paper. He never
wrote any of his poems down, but the cruachaint that was in them
caused people to learn them by heart from him, and they would not
easily forget them (Mac an Iomaire 1983:28).36
The formal “hardness” of poetry is here felt to contribute to its endurance in
social memory, which is the most powerful attribute of poetry. This same poet
ended a satire on an unpopular road-building foreman with the words “And as
long as the [Irish] language remains among the Gaels of Connemara/ there will
be talk in every house of this sport” (Ó Donnchadha 1983:102; cf Denvir 1989).37
Poetry is thought of as a craft like smithy or masonry. These traditional
crafts are believed to require inherited skills which are slightly supernatural in
34. Seán Ó Conaire said of a highly alliterative, ornamented story that it had cruachaint in
it and was “like poetry.” The prefix sean- (old-) is also used to describe such speech.
35. His poem about Ráth Cairn was discussed in Chapter 2.
36. Níl aon aimhreas nár chreid an Filí gur tábhachtaí an fhilíocht le n-éisteacht léí ná í a bheith
fágtha ar leataomh ar pháipéar. Níor scríobh sé aon cheann dá dhánta riamh ach chuir an chruachaint a bhí
iontu daoine á bhfoglaim de ghlanmheabhair uaidh le nach ndéanfaí dearmad orthu go héasca.
37. Is an fhad is seasfas an teanga i measc Gaeil Chonamara,/Beidh trácht i ngach teaghlach faoin
spóirt seo.
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origin. People do not lightly identify themselves as poets, and when they do,
they often justify their claim by mentioning ancestors or other relations who
were recognized as poets. Máirtín Mac Donncha rarely if ever calls himself a
poet, as opposed to a person who composes songs or verses (duine a bhíonns ag
cumadh amhráin nó véarsaí). In the interview, when Máirtín had to refer to his own
talents, he did so while referring to relatives whose talents had been recognized
in their communities:
SC: is dóigh gur b’shin an rud atá i gceist i bhfilíocht ar fad, rud a rá ar
bhealach eile...
SC: That must be what all poetry is about, to say something in
another manner...
MMD: Bhuel ‘sé. Ach tá go leor [...] clistíocht ag baint leis an dtuigeann
tú. Níl chuile dhuine atá in ann é a dhéanamh. A deir siad. Tá rhythm ag
baint leis, tá gach eile líne an dtuigeann tú, chaon dárna líne, go
mbéarfadh an chéad líne––agus go mbéarfaidh an tríú líne ansin ar an
gcéad líne. Ach sin é an dtuigeann tú, a deir siad, b’fhéidir, b’fhéidir é, níl
mé ag rá go bhfuil mise go maith ag cumadh ach dúirt duine eicínt—Ó bhí
Bríd [unclear] ann anocht, “nach bhfuil gaol a’d le Tom Neaine Choilm?”
Agus tá. An bhfuil a fhios a’d. Muintir na Trá Báine, an dtuigeann tú.
Jóín Sheáin Taim bhíodh sé ag cumadh amhráin––col ceathrar do m’athair.
Agus Tom Neaine Choilm bhíodh gaol aige le m’athair––sean-uncail
nó rud eicínt mar sin.
MMD: Well, it is. But there is a lot of ... cleverness involved do you
understand. Not everyone can do it. So they say. There is a rhythm
to it, every other line do you understand, that every second line
would catch the first line—and that the third line would catch the
first line. And that’s it you understand, [that’s what] they say;
maybe, maybe so— I’m not saying I’m good at composing but
someone said—Ó, Bríd [unclear] was there tonight, “aren’t you
related to Tom Neaine Choilm?” And I am, you know. The Trá Bán
[a place in Connemara] people, you understand. Jóín Sheain Taim
used to compose songs—my father’s cousin. And Tom Neaine
Choilm was related to my father—a great uncle or something like
that.
146
Máirtín Ó Cadhain criticized the practice of Irish-language literary poetry
(Ó Cadhain 1969; see Chapter _) because, being based on the pragmatics of
English language high literature, it was divorced from its immediate social
context. Anybody could be a “poet” by sitting down and occasionally writing a
few insubstantial verses describing their private inner states.38 In Irish-speaking
society, however, being a “poet” (file) has always meant assuming a public social
role which is ascribed, a responsibility not taken lightly. As Johnny Chóil
Mhaidhc Ó Coisdealbha said (1987:9), “There are people these days who call
themselves poets, but it was other people who called me a poet”39 He may have
been referring to Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1969), who had said of him:
there is one poet––if you allow me to call him by that name––who
has a function and a public, Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc, or Seán Ó
Coisdealbha. He has them, like poets have always had in the Irish
language.40
The vocation of poetry earned Seosamh Ó Donnchadha fear as well as
respect from his neighbors:
There are people who believe that the Poet has [supernatural]
knowledge because of some of the things he has mentioned in his
poems. Others believe that he has some kind of supernatural power
38. Joe Heaney was scathing in his condemnation of song-makers who made up their
subject matter instead of telling “true stories” (Chapter 8).
39. Tá daoine ann inniu a thugann file orthu fhéin, ach is daoine eile a thugann ormsa é.
40. Tá file amháin--má cheadaíonn sibh dhom chor ar bith an t-ainm a thabhairt air--a bhfuil pobal
agus feidhm aige, Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc, nó Seán Ó Coistealbha. Tá, ar an gcaoi a raibh sé ag filí ariamh sa
nGaeilge.
147
owing to the way he is able to put together the talk in his poems.
Anyone of his kind would be treated with respect, and so is the
Poet. [A]nd, although Joe would be seen as a very good
neighbor—as an obliging person—as a poet, he would be as feared
as a parish priest or a wise woman would be (Mac an Iomaire
1983:9).41
The formal properties of poetic speech, the mythological charter for the
social standing of poets, and stories of poetry’s supernatural origins all
contribute to the respect people feel for poets and their compositions. Perhaps
the most powerful aspect of poetry is its quality as visionary medium. From the
earliest times poets functioned as seers, and prophecy is an important aspect of
poetry to this day. Gaeltacht people emphasize that verbal art makes people see
things (Chapter 8); the visual immediacy of poetry contributes to its effect as
much as its sonic texture.
Gaeltacht poets actively seek knowledge of current events and local and
national, as well as mythological, history. In communities where literacy was not
common, 42 poets were an important part of the network of oral transmission of
written knowledge. The Galway poet Antaine Raiftearaí (1779-1835), blinded by
smallpox as a child, nonetheless mentions written sources in his long historical
poem, “Seanchas na Sceiche” (The Lore of the Bush). In this poem, Raiftearaí,
41. Tá daoine ann a chreideann go bhfuil fios ag an bhFilí de bharr cuid de na rudaí atá luaite aige
ina chuid dánta. Ceapann tuilleadh go bhfuil cumhacht osnádúrtha éigin aige de bharr an chaoi a bhfuil sé
in ann an chaint atá sna dánta a chur i ndiaidh chéile. Duine ar bith dá leithéid, bheadh ómós dó agus tá
ómós don Fhilí agus, freisin, cé go bhféachfaí ar Joe mar chomharsa an mhaith—mar dhuine
oibleagáideach—ach mar fhile, bheadh an scéin chéanna roimhe agus a bheadh roimh shagart paróiste nó
roimh bhean feasa.
42. Literacy in Irish is still fairly rare among older Gaeltacht people.
148
taking shelter from a rainstorm under a decrepit bush, curses the bush for
leaking rain on him, whereupon the bush answers him. The poem consists of a
dialogue (agallamh beirte) in which the bush relates the history of Ireland from
the Flood to the seventeenth century (Ó Coigligh 1987:15-16, 137-48).
Seosamh Ó Donnchadha, believing in the 1930s that war was imminent,
composed a long poem, “Lá na Fola” (The Day of Blood) graphically describing
the coming war. This prophetic poem included detailed descriptions of the use
and effects of modern weaponry, based on the poet’s own research
(Ó Donnchadha 1983:22-25; 67-71).43
The perceived power of poetic speech as a representational medium may
have something to do with the widespread belief in the modern Gaeltacht that it
is unlucky to be named in a poem, even if the poem is in one’s praise. It was
believed that a woman praised by Raiftearaí died young as a result (Ó Coigligh
1987:21).
Symbolic violence
Poetry is dangerous because of its endurance as memorable utterance.
Poetic satire dramatizes both a natural and a social sanction against wrongdoers.
Believed to cause physical harm to its victims, satire more obviously destroys
their social standing by “putting a name” on them. Satire is often called cáineadh
43. He later composed another poem, “An Treas Cogadh Domhanda” (The Third World
War).
149
(censure) or sciolladh (scolding or abuse). Máirtín Mac Donncha believed that
there was more satire than praise in the old days:
SC: Meas tú b’in faoi dhaoine is mó a bhí déanamh rudaí mícheart, nó a
bhí aisteach ar bhealach, atá...
SC: Do you think it was mostly about people who were doing
wrong, or were strange in some way [that poetry is composed?]
MMD: ba ‘ea, agus ar ndóigh, déanadh amhráin ag moladh daoine freisin.
[...] Cumadh ar an dá thaobh iad. [...] Ba mhó cáineadh a déanadh fadó.
MMD: It was, and of course, songs were made in praise of people
also. They were composed in both ways.44 ...There was more satire
[than praise] long ago.
As an example of satire, we can look at a song/poem and its accompanying
narrative story as told by Máirtín Mac Donncha. It is a mocking satire that the
Connemara poet, Colm de Bhailís (1796-1906; cf Denvir 1996) composed against
one of his neighbors, Beairtlín Dhomhnaill. The accused had inverted community
norms of neighborly cooperation and exchange by allegedly stealing seaweed
(used for fertilizer) from the poet’s own strand. 120 miles away from and 80
years after De Bhailís’ death, Máirtín recited the poem to me, telling me when
and where it was composed, and described how De Bhailís first performed it at a
house party, in the presence of the unfortunate Beairtlín.
44. Literally, “on both sides.” This calls to mind a saying that poets had two sides to their
tongues, a rough side and a smooth side.
150
TEXT: Beairtlín An Gadaí (Beairtlín the Thief) 45
[MMD] yeah, bhuel, faoí Choilm de Bhailís. An bhfuil sé ag imeacht a’d?
Yeah, about Colm de Bhailís. Do you have it going [the tape
recorder]?
[SC] Tá, anois.
Yes, now.
[MMD] Ó, sea. Bhuel, mair sé céad agus deich mbliana, bhí sé dhá mhí
gann as céad agus deich. Sin é atá scríobhta sios. ‘S rugadh é seacht déag
naocha sé, agus fuair sé bás naoi déag agus a sé. Chuaigh sé thríd an Ocht
Céad Déag ar fad. Thrí aimsir an ghorta.
Oh yes. Well, he lived a hundred and ten years, he was two months
short of a hundred and ten. That is what is written down. And he
was born in 1796, and he died in 1906. He lived through the entire
eighteenth century. Through the Famine.
Agus file a bhí ann agus saor cloch a bhí ann a deir siad, agus bhíodh sé ,
ag goil ó áit go háit, ag obair, agus chum sé go leor amhrain–chum sé píosa
faoi, faoi, Beairtlín Ó Domhnaill, Beairtlín an Gádaí a thugadh air. Bhíodh
sé goid––ní goid, ní goid uasach tabhachtach a bhí ann ná an-dona a bhí
ann mar a déarfá ní coir an-mhór, ní raibh sé ach goid feamainne an
dtuigeann tú. Agus rinne sé píosa spraoí ansin. Oíche a raibh... bhí ceol i
dteach. Seod é a chuala mise m’athair a rá. Agus, bhí Beairtlín ann agus
bhí a fhios aige gurb’é a bhí ag goid an fheamainn. Agus, thosaigh sé.
Agus, Tá seans gurb’é [an choí?] ar dhúirt sé [na linnte?], an dtuigeann
tú?
And he was a poet, and a stone mason, they say, and he used to
[pause] go from place to place, working, and he made a lot of
songs––he made a piece about, about Beairtlín Ó Domhnaill,
Beairtlín the thief they called him. He used to steal––it wasn’t that
important of a theft, or very bad as you’d say. It wasn’t a very great
crime, he was only stealing seaweed, do you understand. And he
[de Bhailís] made a bit of fun then. One night there was music in a
house [i.e., a party]. This is what I heard my father saying. And
Beairtlín was there and he knew that it was him that was stealing
45. Recorded 7/97; Máirtín speaks the words to the song rather than sings them here;
there is a transcription of this song from Máirtín’s singing in Denvir 1996: 77-79.
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the seaweed. And he started. And, maybe this is how he said the
lines [? unclear] do you understand?
[SC] Uh huh
[MMD] Agus dúirt sé, eh,
And he said, eh,
I
Scéal atá mé a aithrist i dtír is i dtalamh
A story I am relating to country and to land [ie, everywhere]
Dhá inseacht do lag is do láidir
Telling it to weak and strong
Dhá chuir ag an sagart, ‘is as sin go dtí an easpaig,
sending it to the priest, and from there to the bishop
Agus é sin dhá scríobh ag an bPápa.
And he is writing it to the Pope.
II
Salm na mallacht dhá léamh ar an altóir
To read a cursing psalm [anathematize] from the altar
Ar aon duine a dhéanfadh coir náireach
On anyone who would commit a shameful crime
‘Sé Beairtlín an gadaí is ciontach ar fad leis
It is Beairtlín the thief who is to completely blame for it
Nuair a robáil sé Bhailís gan ábhar.
Since he robbed Bhailís without cause.
III
Chuaigh sé lá Sathairn ag Colm ag baint chreathnaí
He went on Saturday to Colm [‘s place] picking dulse
Is ag dul siar dhó ag theach (?) Pheadair Mháirtín
And as he was going back to Peadar Mháirtín’s house
Bhíodar dhá dhearcadh is dhá thabhairt faoi deara
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They were watching and noticing him
Agus ceaptar gur fear a bhí i mbád é.
And they thought it was a man in a boat.
IV
Ansin labhair Micil Thomáis is dúirt sé le Peadair
Then Micil Thomáis spoke and he said to Peadar
Gur cosúil le fear é gan náire
That he seemed like a man without shame
Fagaim ar mo shláinte nach ligfidh mé isteach é
‘I declare by my health that I won’t let him in
Mara bhfaighfinnse teagasc níos fearr air.
Unless I hear better of him.’
V
hÁrdaíodh an fiach roimh is taobh thiar,
The hunt was raised before and behind him
‘Is caitheadh é anuas le fána
And he/it was thrown downwards
‘Sé a deir Pádraic Ó Bia, ‘Nár fheice mé Dia
What Pádraig Ó Bia said: ‘May I not see God
Má ligim thar Chuigéal go brách é.’
If I ever let him past Cuigéal again.’
VI
‘Sé a deir mac rua Sheáin Bhreathnach, nuair a d’éirigh sé ar
maidin
What Seán Bhreathnach’s red-haired son said when he arose in the
morning
Is dúirt sé le mac Bheairtlín Phádhraic
And he said it to Pádhraic Bheairtlín’s son
Gur olc an rud gádaí a bheith i measc daoine cneasta
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That it was an evil thing for a thief to be among honest people
Nó titim i bpeaca mar gheall air.
Or falling into sin because of it/him
VII
‘Sé a deir Páidín Sheáin Bhreathnach ná é a cheangal den
tairseach
What Páidín Sheáin Bhreathnach said was to tie him to the
threshold
‘Is é a choinneáil ansin go dtí amárach
And to keep him there until tomorrow
Go dtagach muintir Chamais, Ros Muc is Ghlinn Chatha
Until the people of Camas, Ros Muc and Gleann Catha come
Is nach mbeadh a fhios cé chuirfeadh [chun] báis é.
And it wouldn’t be known who would kill him.
VIII
‘Sé a deir Caitlín Úna, na beir air ‘s é a phlúchadh
What Caitlín Úna said was to catch him and suffocate him
Nó é a thabhairt ag an gCrumpán is é a bháthadh
Or to take him down to the Crumpán and drown him
‘Ach breathnaigí romhaibh, beidh an costas an-trom
‘Look out, the cost will be very great
Is ní íocfaidh an dúiche go brách é.’
And the estate will never pay it.’
IX
Bhí Pat Ó Conghaile amuigh ag faire na hoíche
Pat Ó Conghaile was out keeping watch all night
Go bhfaighfeadh sé aon aifric amháin air
So he would get [even] one look at him
Ach tá mé ríbhuíoch go Mháirtín Chaitríona
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But I am very grateful to Máirtín Chaitríona
Gur chuir an diabhal críoch is a bhathadh é.
That he finished off the devil and drowned him.
MMD: [Agus dúirt sé ansin:]
MMD:[And then he said:]
X
Dhá ngéilfeá don teagasc a d’ordaigh Naomh Peadair
If you would obey the teaching that Saint Peter ordained
Ní bheifeá chomh bradach is atá tú
You wouldn’t be as thieving as you are
Ghabhfá ar an altóir ‘is ghéillfeá don tsagart
You would go up to the altar and submit to the priest
Is b’fhéidir go gcuirfeadh Dia an t-ádh ort.
And perhaps God would give you prosperity/luck.
XI
Ach bhí do dhá shúil ag dearcadh ‘s iad ag faire ar Bhailis
But your two eyes were looking and watching Bhailís
Is muintir an bhaile a bheith trácht ort
And [even though] the people of the locality [were] discussing you
Scread mhaidne ar an bhfeamainn a ghoid tú ó Bhailis
A curse [lit. a morning scream] on the seaweed you stole from
Bhailís
‘Sí a d’fhág Beairtlín Gadaí go brach ort.
It has left [the name] “Beairtlín the Thief” on you forever.
Ach bhí sé ráite an dtuigeann tú, nuair a thánaig sé chomh fada le
Beairtlín Dhomnaill an dtuigeann tú sa darna véarsa, gur, gur sheas sé
suas agus shiúil sé amach. [laughing] Agus, bhí sé ag tabhairt an scéil, ag
inseacht an scéil air fhéin an dtuigeann tú. Dhá bhfánfadh sé ina shuí, bhí
Colm de Bhailís chomh cliste an dtuigeann tú agus, agus níor lig sé air
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fhéin cé a bhí ag togáil an fheamainne an dtuigeann tú? Nuair a luadh
ainm, eh, ‘Sé Bheairtlín Ghádaí go brach ort’––shiúil sé amach. Ach níl
ansin ach rud beag.
But it was said, do you understand, when he got as far as “Beairtlín
Dhomnaill” you understand in the second verse, that, that he stood
up and walked out (laughing). And, he was giving the sign, telling
the story on himself, do you understand. If he stayed seated—Colm
de Bhailís was so clever do you understand, and, he never let on
[that he knew] who was stealing the seaweed, do you understand?
When he said [the] name, eh, “It’s Beairtlín Gadaí on you
forever”—he walked out. But that is only a small thing.
[SC] But he was able to, he was certainly able to give him a bad
name.
[MMD] Oh he was, and he put it fairly civilized compared to other
things. He wasn’t the worst—they say that Raifterí [‘s satire] was
more biting.
Discussion of the text
Although Máirtín tells a framing story, the song itself frames itself in a
complex way, with frames inside frames. In the first verse, the poet, speaking in
direct voice, identifies his utterance as a “story” (scéal) which he is projecting out
to all the land, and up the ecclesiastical hierarchy all the way to the Pope. The
poet explicitly bases the power of his satire on its transmissibility and endurance
as a memorable utterance. The utterance is to take the form of writing in the
future, returning to the locality as an episcopal letter to be “read from the altar,”
pronouncing the guilt of “Beairtlín the Thief.” According to Máirtín’s
explanation, it is at this point that Beairtlín stands and walks out of the house
where de Bhailís is singing the poem.
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Verse III begins the embedded “story” proper, shifting into the past tense.
This long section presents the imaginary judgment, pursuit, and destruction of
Beairtlín. It is this section that establishes the genre of the poem as a whole: the
type of satire known as the “hunt” (fiach). The term fiach sometimes appears in
titles, e.g. Fiach Sheáin Bhradaigh (The Hunting of Thieving Seán), a satire
composed by Raiftearaí against the poet Seán de Búrca (Ó Coigligh 1987:122-28;
Denvir 1997:295-96). In this and many similar folk satires, the landscape itself
participates in the destruction of the accused, who is “hunted” through various
named local places and finally killed. Use of the past tense establishes the
“obliqueness” (Mannheim 1987) of this embedded “story” as a virtual scene
being shown to the poet’s audience. This audience presumably consists of the
poet’s (and Beairtlín’s) neighbors, the very people whose words and actions are
represented in the “story.” In it, collective action is mobilized through the spoken
judgments of these neighbors; motion through the landscape is represented by a
succession of their voices.
The poet’s “I” reappears at the end of verse IX to announce Beairtlín’s
death by drowning.46 It marks the end of the embedded “story.” Máirtín Mac
Donncha’s narration breaks in at this point: “Agus dúirt sé ansin” (“And then he
said”). This marks a pragmatic break and transition to the narrated “present” of
the poem’s original performance situation. In these last two verses the figure of
the poet speaks directly to Beairtlín.
46. These lines could alternatively represent the words of Pat Ó Conghaile.
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In verse X, the poet speaks to Beairtlín in the counterfactual conditional: if
he had “obeyed the teaching that St. Peter ordained” he wouldn’t have
committed his crime. The last verse, while still addressed to Beairtlín, refers to
“Bhailís” in the third person. One effect of this is suggest that these words project
the inner voice of Beairtlín himself, addressing himself and cursing “the seaweed
you stole from Bhailís. /It has left ‘Beairtlín the Thief’ on you forever.” In the
poem Beairtlín is named as a thief (gadaí) by the clergy, by his own community,
and finally by nature, in the form of the seaweed. The seaweed stands for both
Beairtlín’s action in stealing it and de Bhailís’ action in satirizing Beairtlín.
Satirical poetry lexicalizes its victims. A hundred years later, the Seán
Bradach of Raiftearaí’s poem lives on in the speech of Connemara as a byword
for banishment or eviction: “I warned them... that she’d put Fiach Sheáin Bhrádaí
on them out to the bog” (D’fhuagair mé oru ... go gcuireach sí fiach Sheán Bhradaí oru
gon phortach; De Bhaldraithe 1985:194).
As Mannheim (1987) demonstrates, poetic form in popular song can be
structured in part by regular changes in footing—the alignment, set or projected
self of speakers and other parties to interaction (Goffman 1981). In Beairtlín an
Gadaí, the last two lines of most verses are relatively voiced compared to the first
two lines.47 The first lines are narrative introductions which describe the scene
and introduce the speaker(s) of the last lines. This is in keeping with Irish
47. Verses IV, VII, and VIII progress from narrative through indirect and then direct
speech.
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language discourse as a whole, where direct discourse is embedded in narrative,
and typically functions as its relatively marked punch line.48 Relative voicing of
lines is thus a constitutive principle for the verse organization of the text.
Changes in footing are also changes in the functional orientation of
language.49 Through such changes, a series of different discourses, situations and
interpretive frames are embedded within a single work (Mannheim 1987:268-69).
Thus Beairtlín an Gadaí takes the listener through a series of subjective
orientations, shifts in point of view. Added to this are the additional layers of
discourse in the performance situation, in this case a conversation between
Máirtín Mac Donncha and myself. Table 4.1 diagrams shifts in the identity of the
projected “I”—just one aspect of the changes in footing in this speech event.
48. This is probably a common discourse phenomenon cross-culturally; Hill (1995) finds
that relatively voiced utterances mark dramatic peaks in individual episodes of a Mexicano
narrative.
49. E.g., Jakobson’s (1987 [1960]) distinction between the referential, poetic, expressive,
conative, metalinguistic and phatic functions of language, in which the dominant focus is
towards, respectively, the narrated events, message form, the speaker, the addressee, the code, or
the channel of communication (see Mannheim 1987:268).
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TABLE 4.1: Projected “I” in Beairtlín An Gadaí
‘I’ = MMD, SC: conversation
[I]
‘I’ = Colm de Bhailís addresses gathering in the house.
[II]
impersonal clerical voice; refers to de Bhailís in the third person.
[III]
beginning of narrative (“scéal”).
[IV]
‘I’ = Micil Thomáis
[V]
‘I’ = Pádraic Ó Bia
[VI]
‘I’ = mac Sheáin Bhreathnach
[VII]
‘I’ = Páidín Sheáin Bhreathnach
[VIII]
‘I’ = Caitlín Úna
[IX]
‘I’ = Colm de Bhailís or possibly Pat Ó Conghaile; refers to de
Bhailís in the third person.
(end of “scéal”)
‘I’ = MMD “Agus dúirt sé ansin:” (reframing the utterance)
[X]
‘I’ = Colm de Bhailís (addresses Beartlín Dhomhnaill)
[XI]
‘I’ = Colm de Bhailís (or possibly inner speech of Beartlín Dhomhnaill)
‘I’ = MMD, SC: conversation
Lability of the subject, shiftiness of pronouns (Fernandez 1986), has been a
feature of Irish-language discourse from medieval bardic poetry to modern
novels (Ó Baoill 1990; Ní Annracháin 1994). Although local satirical songs like
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“Beairtlín an Gadaí” are notable for actually naming speakers within the songtext itself, the more lyrical genres often leave their protagonists completely
unnamed. Identities of speakers and their interlocutors, if known at all, are
established by accompanying narratives rather than within the songs themselves,
leaving much room for allegorical projection of identities (Chapter 8).
Songs are sometimes composed by several people. Since a line’s
authorship and its speaking voice need not coincide, there is room for great
complication of voice within these relatively simple songs. Irish-speakers
regularly associate this quality of old songs with the fact that they were
composed under the colonial regime when identities and true topics of talk had
to be concealed. But this quality in fact predates the colonial era and seems to
always have been highly valued. Such poetry creates virtual worlds; in Peirce’s
terminology, they are symbolic, and it is up to the listener to make the (indexical)
connection to their “true” referents. Some satire works like this; in the case of
Beairtlín Dhomhnaill, his own walking out of the performance showed that he
had made such a connection, condemning himself.
In both medieval and modern poetic traditions, there is a strong
relationship between notions of the power of poetic speech and strategies for
framing and transmitting poetic voice. Poems are embedded in narratives, and
narratives are embedded in poems. This relationship still holds. In performing
the poem for me, Máirtín Mac Donncha’s discourse quotes both the voice of the
19th Century poet, De Bhailís, and the voices quoted by De Bhailís. The poem is
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an object of value not least because it acts as a model and charter for the power of
Mac Donncha’s own poetic compositions. Poets are full of other people’s words
and voices, and have the power to project these voices into the past and future.
The Cat
Local satire works by reification, as I discussed in Chapter Two. Objects
stand in for persons, as the seaweed stood for de Bhailís in “Beairtlín an Gadaí.”
Usually they substitute for the victim rather than the author of a satire. Máirtín
Mac Donncha’s best loved composition in Ráth Cairn is a satire on a local man
whose cat went missing. The song details the fantastic journey of this cat
throughout the country. The cat’s owner had grandiosely claimed it was a
“hunting cat” (he used the phrase in English), and Máirtín’s satire exaggerated
this quality to the point of absurdity. The cat escapes after breaking its chains in
the quarry where it is tethered, the police are sent for, and so on.
People love the song not the least because it represents them to
themselves. Local people are mentioned and quoted; local places are named. The
cat’s journey maps out many of the places a typical Ráth Cairn person would go:
Dublin, Navan, Galway, as well as places in Ráth Cairn itself. The intrepid cat is
a bit like a Ráth Cairn Everyman, except that its absurdly exaggerated powers
are antisocial—it goes joyriding in Navan rather than shopping, for example.
This is where the song’s satirical bite comes in, since these qualities of the cat
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indirectly index those of its owner, who was also a bit antisocial; he seemed to
many people to regard himself as being a bit above his neighbors.50
Poetry as high register
In France in the summer of 1997, a group of musicians from Ráth Cairn
were being treated to a traditional Parisian dinner. We filled ourselves with what
we assumed was the main course, only to find that another course followed, and
another, and so on, until we were ready to burst. Surely this latest wave of food
must be the last. We made an extra effort to show our appreciation of the fine
hospitality, the wine and the cooking. Then the first series of desserts appeared.
We had been entertaining them all weekend, so it was only fair that they return
the favor.
The singing started. Eventually one of the hosts, a school teacher by trade,
began to occupy center stage. He sang Brel, Piaf, bits of comic opera, and
humorous songs he had composed about his friends and colleagues. As we
reeled under the assault of food and alcohol, X---- incited our other Parisian hosts
to join in a tremendous evening of merriment. Our limited knowledge of French
began to fail us. Finally, one of the Ráth Cairn people leaned over to me and said,
“I reckon that man has excellent French!” (Tá mé ag ceapadh go bhfuil togha na
50. The song text itself seems quite innocuous to an outsider, but out of respect for the
man’s privacy, Máirtín did not want me to name him or include the song text in this dissertation.
In fact, the man in question claimed to like the song. His discovery of the song coincided with a
remarkable change in his personality and attitude towards others in the community. This
transformation may have been caused by certain other factors not related to having been
satirized.
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Fraincise ag an bhfear sin). We laughed, not least because this was such an
idiosyncratically Irish notion of “good speech” which includes competence in
much more than is usually thought of as “language.”
Our hosts predictably failed to comprehend this observation when we
translated it to them. Were we complementing X’s grammar? His accent? His
command of Standard French? Another reason why we laughed is that My
friend’s crack about “excellent French” was “something Máirtín Sheáinín would
say” (rud a déarfadh Máirtín Sheáinín). Máirtín Mac Donncha, Ráth Cairn’s poet,
would surely have recognized X as a fellow virtuoso.
In Irish-speaking communities, poets are said to have “the best Irish”
(togha na Gaeilge), an all-encompassing if not supernatural knowledge of the Irish
language. In contrast to the Chomskian notion of the ideal speaker-hearer as the
embodiment an abstract system of formal grammar, one of the main measures of
this knowledge is a poet’s rhetorical ability to create and transform communal
social relations in performance, as X was doing for us in Paris that night.
Poetry emerges out of everyday speech through a series of gradual
transitions. The classical and Celtic scholar George Thompson wrote that on the
Great Blasket Island off the coast of Kerry, “and likewise throughout the fíorGhaeltacht,”
poetry was spun into the people’s speech. There were three levels
of speech—everyday speech, poetic speech and poetry per se. Prose
poems [in the literature written by Blasket people] are examples of
poetic speech. They used to move from everyday speech to poetic
speech without effort or reflection. They wouldn’t often go so far as
to compose a new extempore poem, although they did so, if they
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were moved to do so; and of course, some were better speakers
than others (Mac Tomáis 1977:14; my translation).
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s novel Cré na Cille contains many representations of such
“poetic speech” (Chapter 7). Ó Madagáin (1985) gives several examples of what
he maintains is a formerly widespread practice whereby, with increasing
emotion, speech becomes more rhythmic and melodic, taking the form of
extempore song in extreme cases.
A variety of techniques are used to give poetic texture to speech. Proverbs,
widely known and used in everyday speech (Ó Máille 1948; Bourke [Partridge]
1978), are often miniature poems and embody many qualities which are valued
in poetry—compression, irony, alliteration, rhyme, etc. Many originated as lines
of poetry (de hÍde n.d.) and in turn are quoted in poems. Similar are the variety
of everyday formulaic greetings, prayers blessings and charms (Ó Fínneadha
1993), and so on, along with children’s verbal games and riddles. At a simpler
linguistic level are alliterative, rhyming, or onomatopoeic couplets which are
often metaphorical. An example is the phrase fite fuaite,51 meaning “woven into;”
phrases like this are themselves woven into speech. More basic is the expressive
lexicon which includes many locally coined words as well as common words
with additional local meanings (Ó Máille 1974). Poetic epithets, like “Ráth Cairn
Glas na Mí,” are also common in heightened speech. The phrase “Ráth Cairn
Glas na Mí” comes from a song composed by the Connemara broadcaster, Ciarán
51. f’it’∂ fu∂t’∂, literally “woven-bound.”
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Ó Fátharta (Ó Conghaile, 1987:46), and is almost untranslatable, meaning
something like “Ráth Cairn, the green [i.e., the pride, secret, most precious part]
of County Meath.”
During heightened social occasions in the Gaeltacht I have often heard,
and haltingly participated in, a style of conversation in which both the poetic
element and a certain agonistic impulse develops among the participants. This
style is sometimes called cruachomhrá (“hard conversation,” based on the term
cruachaint). It develops from individually heightened expression to the direct
answering with rhyming comebacks or witty summations of the other’s words.
The next step is the exchange of insult poetry, usually in the form of lúibíní (the
term means small turns or loops). Verses have fixed, repeated lines, sometimes of
“nonsense” (raiméis) syllables, which frame one or more unique, improvised
lines. Much of this poetry is associated with women in the tradition, originating
as improvised work-songs with the fixed lines sung in chorus (Nic Eoin 1998).
Singers can direct verses at innocent bystanders, attempting to draw them in to
the fray:
Agus óró a mhíle grá,
nach bhfeiceann tú an fear sa gclúid agus ribín ar a cheann.
Agus óró mhíle mhíle grá is óró a mhíle grá.
And oh, my thousand loves,
Don’t you see the man by the fire with a ribbon on his head.
And oh, my thaousand thousand loves and oh my thousand loves.
This was from a performance occasion in Dublin and referred to a man wearing a
ponytail.
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Often these verses have salacious or obscene lyrics. An entire series of
them was composed, over a few months’ time in Ráth Cairn, about the Bishop of
Galway, after he admitted in 1992 to having an illegitimate son as a result of a
long-term affair with an American woman.
á baba bú agus á baba búna,
bhí bod Éamon Casey chomh mór le fód móna
is á baba bú agus á baba búna.
á baba bú agus á baba búna,
Éamon Casey’s prick was as large as a sod of turf
is á baba bú agus á baba búna.
á baba bú agus á baba búna,
Rith sé ina diaidh thar timpeall an seomra
is á baba bú agus á baba búna.
á baba bú agus á baba búna,
He ran after her around the room
is á baba bú agus á baba búna.
The most developed form of poetic duel involves an exchange of entire
poems—a process that could be extended over days or even years. Famous
examples of this were the very nasty satires exchanged by Raiftearaí and his
rivals, the Ó Callanáin brothers (Ó Coigligh 1987). Máirtín Mac Donncha
maintained that even though they were far harsher than modern satires, most of
them were nothing more than harmless “pastimes:”
MMD: Bhuel is dóigh gur caitheamh aimsire a bhí ann, an dtuigeann tú.
Agus ag freagairt a chéile. Níos mó ná tada eile. An dtuigeann tú. Bheadh
amhrán––deir siad go raibh na Callanáin, Peatsaí Ó Callanán agus
Raiftearaí, go mbíodh siad ag sciolladh ar a chéile. Agus ag cumadh
amhráin faoina chéile. Chumadh tusa cupla vearsa fúmsa inniu, agus ag
sciolladh ormsa faoi rud ecínt, agus chumainnse an tseachtain seo
chugainn píosa fút arís, rud ecínt a chuala mé fút agus, “go mbítheá ag
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dul thart agus do mhála ar do dhroim” nó rud ar bith, an dtuigeann tú, a
d’fhéadfá a rá fút an dtuigeann tú... go mbítheá ag goid bainbh, nó rud a
bhfaighfeá, deis ar bith an dtuigeann tú. Ach, bhí sé go maith mar sin
fhéin.
MMD: Well it was probably just a pastime, do you understand.
And answering one another. More than anything else. There would
be a song—they said that the Callanáins, Peatsaí Ó Callanáin and
Raiftearaí, that they used to berate each other. And compose songs
about each other. You would make a few verses about m e today,
scolding me about something, and I’d compose something about
you next week, something I heard about you and, that you used to
go around with your pack on your back or anything, do you
understand, I could say about you you understand... that you were
stealing piglets or anything I could get [on you], any chance at all
do you understand. But, it was good all the same.
Máirtín often told me that it was important in performance was to connect to
people in the audience, to look around and see who’s there and make reference
to them in some way, to draw them in. In this bit of conversation he uses
mention of “going around with a pack” as an example of something a poet could
use in a satirical poem. One of Raiftearaí’s satires, “Fiach Sheáin Bhradaigh”
(Ó Coigligh 1987:122), used exactly this image, which connotes poverty,
rootlessness and suspect morals, e.g.,
Níl maith á cheilt ná ag déanamh rúin air
ós caint í a dúradh is a chuaigh i gcosard,
gach ní dá ngoidtear ó Áth Cinn go Tuamhain
go bhfaighfeá a thuairisc in ualach Sheáin .
There’s no use hiding it or making it a secret
since it is talk that was spoken openly
everything that is stolen from Headford to Tuam
you’d discover its tidings in Seán’s load.
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“Going around with a pack” is exactly what I was known for doing, since I
carried my set of Uilleann pipes in a decrepit backpack, much to the amusement
of people in Ráth Cairn. By mentioning this, Máirtín was both making reference
to the tradition and picking up on a readily accessible bit of my own public
image. Irish satire works very much like Asturian satire as described by
Fernandez (1986:85): through “what we might call ‘metonymic
misrepresentation’—by moving to take the part of the person for the whole.”
Related to the exchange of satirical poems is the highly regarded genre of
verse-dialogue, the agallamh beirte. Raiftearaí’s dialogue with the bush and
indeed Oisín’s poetic conversation with Saint Patrick (based on the medieval
text, Acallam na Senórach, mentioned above) live on in the tradition. In these
works the personal, agonistic impulse is often transcended in the course of the
poetic conversation, making them “life-changing dialogues” (Attinasi and
Friedrich 1995) on high philosophical, historical and religious topics. They can
also take the form of humorous sketches representing encounters between
stereotypically portrayed local characters.
The image of two persons conversing or arguing in verse lies behind the
agallamh beirte genre. It is often said of legendary poets that “they only spoke in
verse” (Ó hÓgáin 1982). This reflects a belief in their supernatural powers of
speech, and also a feeling that poetry is the highest form of discourse. Lyric
songs, even monologues, are commonly represented in the tradition as having
been composed extemporaneously (Ó Madagáin 1985). The association of verse-
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forms with the highest registers of speech is still very strong among Irishspeakers.
Poetic texts function as high register not only in their composition, but
also in their remembrance and performance. Ó Coigligh (1987:35) mentions two
intriguing comments about Raiftearaí, made by people in the poet’s locale, that
demonstrate this:
There used to be great talk of the Fianna; and everyone had the
poems about them till Raftery came, and he put them out. For when
the people got Raftery’s songs in their heads, they could think of
nothing else: his songs put out everything else.
This is very high praise, since the poems and stories of the Fiannaíocht were
typically a storyteller’s most prized possessions (Delargy 1945).
Not just texts but poets themselves are living examples of valued forms of
speech. Local people credited poets like Raiftearaí with maintaining the prestige
of the Irish language:
[Ba ‘é Raiftearaí] an fear ab fhearr a bhí sa tír seo a choinnigh an Ghaeilge
ar fáil i gcónaí riamh agus ó shoin. Is iomaí sin duine a gcloisfeá caint aige
i dtaobh Raiftearaí agus i dtaobh an chaint a bhí aige ag gabháil thart na
bóithre. Bhí an chaint go maith aige agus bhí an chaint go holc aige agus
bhí se go barrúil.
[Raiftearaí was] the best man ever in this country for keeping Irish
going. You would hear many people talking about Raiftearaí and
about the talk that he had, going along the roads. He had the good
talk and he had the bad talk and he was witty (Quoted in Ó
Coigligh 1987:35).
Here, Raiftearaí is thought of as the complete speaker of Irish, having both
“good” and “bad” talk (praise and satire). Not only did he “have” the talk but he
knew how to use it socially; Raiftearaí was witty (barrúil). Irish speakers seem to
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concur with linguists and anthropologists (Jakobson 1987, Friedrich 1979, 1986;
Mannheim 1986; Sherzer 1987) who locate the social life of grammar in verbal art,
rather than seeing verbal art as an extension or distortion of grammar. Irish
speakers also locate both grammar and verbal art in persons. And grammar (i.e.,
language in its canonical and normative form), being embodied in specific works
of specific persons, is felt to survive those persons as a living presence in the talk
of today’s speakers. As we have seen, the poetic tradition as well as the
composition of poetic texts themselves encode situations and points of view. The
tradition transmits culturally valued forms embedded in culturally salient social
contexts.
Two songs by Máirtín Mac Donncha
It is commonly said that songs have údair—stories, reasons and occasions
for their composition (see Chapter 8). Gaeltacht poets often compose in response
to what the Russian poet Mayakovsky (1985:29) described as “[t]he presence in
society of a problem which can only conceivably be solved through a work of
poetry. A social command.” Satires like “Beairtlín an Gadaí” or Máirtín’s own
song about the cat are both responses to trivial events which had non-trivial
implications for the local communities in question. They use humor and irony to
foreground and exaggerate the triviality of the events, and also create an image
of the community itself.
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Poetry is also socially required on occasions of death and commemoration.
Two of Máirtín’s poems are responses to such occasions. Darach Ó Catháin was a
well-loved sean-nós singer, one of the original founders of Ráth Cairn who
emigrated to Leeds. He became nationally prominent through his performances
with Seán Ó Riada, a classically-trained composer who used traditional
musicians and musical forms. Ó Riada’s band, Ceoltóirí Chualann, led the
revival of traditional Irish music in the 1960s.
Máirtín regards “Caoineadh Dharach Uí Chatháin” (Lament for Darach Ó
Catháin) as a “sean-nós” song, because of its style: a poetic elegy sung slowly
with ornamentation to a traditional air. The same air is used in Ráth Cairn to sing
Raiftearaí’s lament for Tomás Ó Dálaigh (Ó Coigligh 1987:130-32); a line of
Máirtín’s song echoes a line of this earlier song.
Caoineadh Dharach Uí Chatháin52
I
Is a Dharach Uí Chatháin, tá tú imithe ag ligean do scíth’.
Bhí meas i chuile áit ort, i Ráth Cairn, in Éirinn, is i Leeds,
Thú fhéin is an Riadach thug sibh ceol dúinn a chroch suas ár gcroí,
Ach anois, táimid brónach ó síneadh do chnámha sa gcill.
Darach Ó Catháin, you are gone to your repose,
You were respected everywhere, in Ráth Cairn, in Ireland, in Leeds,
You and Ó Riada, you gave us music that lifted our hearts,
But now we are sorrowful since your bones were laid in the
graveyard.
52. Text published in Ó Conghaile 1990:148; my translation.
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II
Nach muid a bhí cráite an lá ar tháinig an scéal sin as Leeds,
Mar choinnigh tú ag caint linn cén chás ach bhí tú an-tinn,
Anois tá tú in éineacht le na hAingle i bhFlaitheas na Naomh,
I gcathair na ngrásta i lár Pharthais go mbeidh tú i do shuan.
Didn’t we grieve the day that story came to us from Leeds
For you kept talking to us even though you were very ill,
Now you are together with the angels in the saints’ heaven,
in the city of graces in the middle of paradise where you will rest.
III
Is má tá sean-nós sna flaithis beidh coróin ort is tú a bheas i do Rí,
Beidh na hAingle i do thimpeall, Naomh Peadar, Naomh Pádraig, ‘s
Naomh Bríd,
Casfaidh tú stéibh dóibh go hálainn amach ó do chroí,
Is dá mbeadh Corn Uí Riada ann, is tú an chéad duine a gheobhfadh as
braon.
And if there is sean-nós in heaven you’ll wear the crown and be the
king,
The angels will surround you, Saint Peter, Saint Patrick and Saint
Bríd,
You’ll sing them a verse beautifully from your heart,
And if Corn Uí Riada were there, you would be the first to get a
drop from it.
IV
Agus bíonn mise ag smaoineamh ar an saol a bhíodh againn fadó,
Mar shásódh tú daoine nuair a shiúilfá isteach i dteach ceoil,
Chas tú go binn agus tugadh an chluas do do ghlór,
Is nach dtabharfaí anois mílte dá bhfanfá ar an saol.
And I am thinking about the life we had long ago,
For you would stand people [a drink] when you walked into a
music house [a session],
You sang sweetly and your voice was listened to [an ear was given
to your voice],
And wouldn’t they give thousands if you would stay in this world.
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V
Is nach aisteach an saol seo is nach mairg nach mbaineann as spóirt,
Ní mhaireann éinne ach píosa is dúirt Darach é go minic go leor,
Mar b’fhearr leis fhéin oíche ag siamsaíoch, casadh amhrán is ceol,
Ná saibhreas na Ríthe, ná málaí a bheadh lán suas le hór.
And isn’t this life strange and isn’t it a shame it isn’t enjoyed,
Nobody lives but a while and Darach said that very often,
For he would rather have a night of entertainment, song and music,
Than the wealth of the Kingdoms, the sacks that would be full up
with gold.
VI
Anois críochnóidh mé an caoineadh, tá sé brónach is tá Darach faoin
bhfód,
Dhá bhean is dhá chlann dhílis ó lasadh tú soilse go leor,
Nuair a thiocfas an lá cairde beidh muide in éineacht leat fós,
Cuirfidh tú romhainn míle fáilte agus imeoidh an t-uaigneas ‘s an brón.
Now I will finish the lament, it is sad with Darach under the sod,
To his wife and his faithful family, oh you would light many lights,
When the day of reckoning comes we will still be with you yet,
You will give us a thousand welcomes and the loneliness and
sadness will go.
In this very affecting lament Máirtín uses shifts of voicing to make
statements that are both immediately personal and represent a general
community point of view. He frequently shifts between first person singular and
plural pronouns and between directly addressing Darach Ó Catháin and
speaking of him in the third person, especially in verse VI. In the first three
verses the poet speaks for Ráth Cairn as a whole, very formally praising him and
announcing our sorrow at his death. Verse I contrasts the image of Darach lifting
our hearts with song with that of his bones being stretched in the grave. This
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juxtaposition of vivid images of life and death is typical of laments in Ireland and
in Europe in general (cf. Seremetakis 1991). Verse II praises Ó Catháin for
keeping in touch in spite of emigration, fame, and illness. This establishes Ó
Catháin as a true member of the community in Ráth Cairn.
The last line of verse directly echoes a line in Raiftearaí’s lament for Tomás
Ó Dálaigh. Although such phraseology appears in many poetic laments, the fact
that the air is the same and that both songs lament musicians seems to indicate a
real connection to the older poem. Such echoes are a valued feature of the poetic
tradition.
At this point the scene shifts to Ó Catháin’s new community in Heaven
with the saints and angels. In verse III Máirtín adds a personal touch to the
standard invocations of a place in heaven after death, by imagining Darach
leading singing sessions there! This continues the trope of parallels between Ráth
Cairn and heaven.
In the next two verses the song shifts into the first person to address the
philosophy of life behind the sean-nós tradition. Generosity with drink and
performance, and especially with one’s own time are the guiding principles of
this philosophy. Verse IV sharpens the contrast between such a life and worldly
concerns into a matter of principle—the comparative value of (heavenly) sociality
versus the mundane worth of this world. It is here that Máirtín first mentions
Darach Ó Catháin in the third person, implicitly changing his footing to address
his here and now audience, the people of Ráth Cairn for whom he has composed
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the song. The terms of the lament are widened; now Máirtín laments that even
worldly life is not enjoyed as it should be.
Verse VI begins with a variation on a conventional poetic ending, where
the poet addresses the audience and complains that the song would be longer or
better if he or she was younger, more knowledgeable, a better poet, “more able
with a pen,” and so on. In Máirtín’s case, he must finish because, with Darach
freshly buried, the song is too sad. This sadness by now stands both for the loss
of Darach and for the painful fissure between this world, which people do not
know how enjoy, and the otherworld, where Darach waits to greet us and lift our
spirits on the Day of Reckoning.
Amhrán Ráth Cairn (The Song of Ráth Cairn)53
I
Beidh clú is cáil is caint go brách ar Ghaeilgeoirí na Mí,
Nuair a osclaíodh an t-Áras istigh san áit agus séipéal lena thaobh,
Bhí an beár go breá is na piontaí lán is na leads dhá scaoileadh síos,
Bhí an ceol go hálainn ag fliúit ‘s ag cairdín, Jimmy Nana ag daimhsiú ríl.
There will be fame and talk forever on the Irish-speakers of Meath,
When the Hall was opened there in the place and the church by its
side,
The bar was fine and the pints were full and the lads were drinking
them down,
The music of flute and accordion was beautiful, Jimmy Nan was
dancing a reel.
53. Published in Ó Conghaile 1990:150; my translation.
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II
‘S anois ó tháthar caoga bliain san áit an taobh eile seo den tír,
Tá an talamh an-bhreá is d’fheicfeá an féar ag fás, níl raithneach ann ná
fraoch,
Níl caint ar asail ná ar chapaill, slabhraí nó aon ní,
Tá an t-earrach déanta in aon lá amháin le tractor is machine.
And now that they are fifty years in the place on this other side of
the country,
The land is very fine and you can see the grass grow, there are no
ferns there or heather,
There is no talk of asses or horses, harnesses or anything,
The sowing is done in just one day with a tractor and a machine.
III
Is nach mór an spórt le cloisteáil fós an Ghaeilge ann go binn,
Ag sean is óg ag beag is mór, ag catach, rua is maol,
Thuas i bhflaitheas Dé tá go leor den té a choinnigh an Ghaeilge beo ina
gcroí,
Is ní daoine móra ná lucht eolais Airí Gaeltacht’ ná T.D.’s.
And isn’t it great to still hear the Irish spoken sweetly,
By old and young, by small and large, by curly-haired, red-haired
and bald,
Up in God’s heaven are a lot of the people who kept Irish alive in
their hearts,
And they aren’t famous people or the learned, Ministers of the
Gaeltacht or T.D.’s.
IV
Tá uisce go leor imithe le sruth ó thánadar don Mhí,
Aniar na bóithrí ar lorries móra agus busanna thar maoil,
Bhíodar ann as chuile cheard, ón Spidéal go Tír an Fhia,
Tá duine amháin fágtha fós den seandream ann, sin í Máire Jim Mhicí.
A lot of time has gone by [lit, a lot of water has gone down stream]
since they came to Meath,
From the west on the roads in great lorries and overflowing buses,
They were there from everywhere from Spidéal to Tír an Fhia,
There is one of them still left of the old crowd, Máire Jim Mhicí.
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V
Is dá bhfaighinnse am ‘s spás ón mbás ó chuirfinn orthu síos,
D’inseoinn scéalta agus chumfainn véarsaí faoi Ghaeltacht bheag na Mí,
Tá súil le Mac Dé ag ceiliúr an chéid go mbeidh an tír seo ar fad saor,
Is go mbeidh an té tá Gallda, imithe thar sáile, is í fágtha ag na Gaeil.
And if I had the time and the place from death [if I lived long
enough] I would describe them,
I would tell tales and compose verses about Meath’s small
Gaeltacht,
I hope to God’s Son at the celebration of the hundredth
[anniversary] that this country will be completely free,
That the person who is Gallda [foreign] will have left across the
ocean, and it [the country] will be left to the Gaels.
This song was composed for Ráth Cairn’s 50th anniversary celebrations in
1985.54 The poet assumes a narrator role and celebrates the achievements of Ráth
Cairn’s people and the fine life “this other side of the country.” Máirtín’s poem
goes beyond conventional celebration of place, though, taking pointed issue with
the self-congratulatory rhetoric of government officialdom which is a standard
feature of official commemoration. He focuses on the people’s celebration
instead, pointing out that the people who kept the language alive weren’t
“famous people or the learned, Ministers of the Gaeltacht or T.D.’s (Teachtaí
Dála, members of the Dáil, the Irish parliament).” The last line of the poem refers
most immediately to the ending of British rule in Northern Ireland, but there are
other references as well. The phrase “na Gaill” is used in most Gaeltacht areas to
refer to Protestants, but “gallda” functions as the opposite of “gaelach,” and
54. Raidió na Gaeltachta held a competition for the best song commemorating Ráth
Cairn’s anniversary.
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refers to those who are not Irish speaking or sympathetic to traditional or Irishspeaking ways. Thus “an té atá gallda” can also refer to English speakers—to the
same “famous people or the learned, Ministers of the Gaeltacht or T.D.’s”
mentioned earlier as not keeping the language alive. Máirtín’s song is a fairly
pointed response to the general milieu of Ráth Cairn’s 50th anniversary
celebrations. This is in keeping with an observation I heard expressed fairly often
in Ráth Cairn, that it was the people themselves—the members of Muintir na
Gaeltachta, who agitated for the project, and those who gave up their places in
Connemara to move East—who created Ráth Cairn.
Both of these songs do what Irish poetry has always done, to hold the
actual up to the ideal. This comparison is not a Platonic one, but comes out of a
sense of time and history (Hanssen 1998:44). The ideal is manifested in a social
order which existed and will exist again. Elements of it can be discovered in the
here-and-now, revealing themselves in signs, in moments of high sociality and in
exceptional individuals. Máirtín’s song for Ráth Cairn shows these elements
revealing themselves in images of harmony between people, nature and
technology, and then very pointedly reminds us that these elements, enjoyable as
they are, pertain to a future society that has not yet been achieved.
The lament for Darach Ó Catháin both describes and embodies the social
and emotional order of sean-nós (Chapter 8). In its poetics of loss, we are
stranded in history between past and future reunions, and “as Darach often
said,” our emotional duty is to come together and “get enjoyment out of life”
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(spraoí a bhaint as an saol). Máirtín’s song itself acts to recreate the image of
Darach and the sociality that Darach helped create, because it will be sung in
future gatherings, along with the sad songs of loss that Darach himself sang.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to show the historical complexity of Irish ways
of construing the effectiveness of poetic speech as social action. I have suggested
that these ideologies are intimately related to practices involving the construction
of voice, first as an archaized “oral” stratum in the medieval manuscript
tradition, then as embedded direct speech in the compositions of nineteenth and
twentieth century Gaeltacht poets. The Irish poetic tradition is constituted as
such through the construction of particular personal voices.
As is demonstrated by (among others) Bauman (1992), Friedrich (1986,
1996, 1997), Hanks (1996), and the writings in Silverstein and Urban’s (1996)
collection, the use of direct voice is a typical constitutive principle, not just of
poetry but of textuality in general. On the most mundane level, this amounts to
saying little more than that “texts” are typically associated with “authors.” But
particular cultures go far beyond this in their elaborations of specific practices
and beliefs about authorship and textual authority in general. As I show in
Chapter 8, these practices and beliefs about authorship have their counterparts in
practices and beliefs involving the performance of poetic texts. As a whole, these
textual practices engage with a felt sense of the material or substantial nature of
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language as constitutive of human sociality (Jakobson 1987). This dissertation
thus contributes, in a small way, to a better understanding of the historical
development of what Jameson (1981) termed “the ideology of form” in Irishspeaking culture.
Such a felt sense of the essential nature of human speech is coordinate
with what Friedrich (1986:39) identifies as the master trope of poetry: the creation
of “felt consubstantiality between music, language and myth.” In Irish-language
poetry, these elements are strongly identified with particular voices which
function as sound-images of persons. We should consider this in the context of
practices of quotation and imitation (Chapter 6) and beliefs about the corporeal
origins of poetic speech and its power as a visionary medium. As I show in
Chapter 8, participants in Irish performance traditions thus feel themselves in the
immediate presence of a series of other selves who are otherwise removed in
space and time from the occasion of performance. Study of Irish performance
traditions should thus help answer Fogelson’s (1982) call for the systematic crosscultural examination of ethno-theories of the self and personality.
CHAPTER FIVE
REPOSSESSION
Now my ancestors was born living in Meath, in the richest part of
Ireland, when Cromwell came. And because they wouldn’t give in
to his whims, he said “to Hell or Connacht.” That means, at that
time he thought that anybody who went to Connacht would die of
starvation. So instead of killing them, he reckoned he could give
them a slow death, while sending them to Connacht. So they put all
their belongings on their back—that’s all they were allowed to
take—and made their way to Connacht and built their houses near
the sea, because their only hope was the sea and fishing.
(Joe Heaney, 78-15.1)
Ur-history
Throughout its many historical transformations, the Irish sovereignty
myth has had aesthetic, historical/political, and ritual functions. It had a great
influence on modern Irish nationalism through the works of Synge, Yeats,
Pádraig Pearse and many others in the years immediately prior to the Easter
Rising of 1916. Originally associated with the discourse of court poets, it lives on
in the popular imagination of Irish-speaking communities. Independently of the
long-dead institutions of kingship, it animates rituals of community
reproduction and imaginative correspondences between images of ideal sociality
and images of the otherworld. The agitation for land and the move to Ráth Cairn
in the 1930s reanimated many of these images. As we saw in Chapter 4, they
continue to recur in the poetry of Ráth Cairn.
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182
In Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, popular consciousness weds
such images to hopes for the future: “In the dream in which every epoch sees in
images the epoch that follows, the latter appears wedded to elements of urhistory, that is, of a classless society” (quoted in Buck-Morss 1989:114). Popular
consciousness is thus engaged dialectically with the ideological uses of these
same images for the legitimation of domination. The ideology of sacral kingship
in medieval Ireland, as expressed in the sovereignty myth and elsewhere, created
idealized images of hierarchy rather than of equality, an imagined social order
which was justified and made sacred by its resemblance to and harmony with
the otherworld (síd). We have no direct access to popular (non-elite)
consciousness under the Gaelic political regime, and thus no real way of
knowing to what extent images of the otherworld may have allowed these
classes to imagine a life free from domination. In the modern folklore that we do
have access to, there is plenty of evidence that the otherworld performs such
functions for the Irish rural subaltern classes (Bourke 1997).
Benjamin traced the life of utopian “wish-images” in popular
consciousness in modernity. He saw in the popular consciousness of urbanity a
continuation and revival of medieval and folk consciousness. In Ireland it is not
wise to artificially separate rural from urban life, or “folk” from “modern”
consciousness. For a long time, Gaeltacht people have moved between these
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worlds fairly freely.1 An example is the great storyteller from Carna (in the
Connemara Gaeltacht), Éamon a Búrc (1866-1942), who spent time in Minnesota
as a teenager, returning after breaking his leg while hopping a freight train. His
experiences were refracted in his telling of traditional tales, including one where
he “aims sly digs at city people, their credulity, dependence on money, and
standards of hygiene” (Bourke 1998:89-91).
The creative imagination of Gaeltacht people belies the role assigned to
them in the discourses of the Irish nation-state, as people living in the past, as the
embodiment of Ireland’s heritage rather than its future. In the Irish Gaeltacht, an
allegorical aesthetic analogous to that of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
European Baroque collided headlong with the modern phenomena of
colonialism, political economy and the nation-state. The aesthetics of Irishspeaking discourse lives on, not as a holdover from a less developed past, but as
an alternative way of imagining and confronting European modernism, a
different mode of “imagining” the social order.
In this chapter, I trace the social life of utopian imagery in popular images
of Ráth Cairn and in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s political oratory. Ó Cadhain’s rhetoric
turned this imagery in on itself, developing a critique of the discourse of the
nation-state that was rooted in his experience as an Irish speaker from the
Gaeltacht.
1. In 1954 Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1998:133) maintained that due to a hundred years of
continual migration, the people of the Gaeltacht were far more “modern” than those of any other
rural community in Ireland.
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Poetry, prophecy and history
As we saw in Chapter 4, poetry in Ireland has historically expressed what
Ó Buachalla (1996:461) calls a “native ideology of kingship” based on the ideas
“that the prosperity of the land and its people depended on the institution of
kingship and that there was a direct correlation between public welfare and the
person of the king himself.”2 This ideology is grounded in myths of a golden age
of right rule, and in messianic prophecies of savior-kings who will restore the
social and natural order of Ireland.
The reign of the mythical king Cormac Mac Airt is portrayed in poetry
and folklore as a golden age which is immanent in the present, felt by man and
nature as a lack, the presence of an absence:
...there was no king of Ireland like him before or since, and there
won’t be again until the country is free and gaelach like it was
when the man I am going to tell this story about was alive... When
a cow lies down she always sighs. They say the reason that she
sighs is that she is lamenting the life led by cows in Cormac’s time...
When people here say that life is good, they say, ‘It’s the life of
Cormac’ (quoted in Ó Buachalla 1996:467).3
The ideal order of Mac Airt’s reign “replicated the paradisal bliss of the
síd/otherworld” (Ó Buachalla 1989:214). The cosmologically immanent Irish
otherworld was equated in medieval thought with the biblical Promised Land
2. My translation.
3. agus ní raibh a leithéid de rí ar Éirinn roimhe ná ina dhiaidh agus ní bheidh arís go mbeidh an
tír saor Gaelach mar do bhí sí nuair a bhí an fear a bhfuil mé chun an scéilín seo a inseacht faoi beo... Nuair
a luíonns an bhó i gcónaí ligeann sí osna. Deir siad gurb é an t-ábhar a ligeann sí an osna ag caoineadh an
tsaoil a bhíodh ag ba in aimsir Chormaic... Nuair atá muintir na háite seo ag rá go bhfuil an saol maith
ann, ‘tá saol Chormaic ann’, aderid.
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(Tír Tairngire). A whole range of prophecies developed, as Irish fortunes
declined, about future savior-kings such as Aodh Eanghach, a figure who
appears in Irish literature from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries (Ó
Buachalla 1989:200).
Court poets used prophecy to glorify their kings, discovering signs linking
them to prophesied hero-kings. Thus, “bardic poetry from the thirteenth to the
seventeenth century repeatedly and continuously identified different personages
as Aodh Eanghach” (Ó Buachalla 1989:220).
The course of the siege of Limerick in the late seventeenth century was
altered by the appearance of Aodh “Ball Dearg” Ó Domhnaill, a military leader
who was popularly believed to be the incarnation of a prophesied hero-king, Ball
Dearg, identified by a red mark on his body. On the basis of this belief he
accumulated thousands of followers. As Ó Buachalla (1989:223) observes, in this
case the myth of the savior-king had an immediate political as well as an
aesthetic import:
In the totality of sources pertaining to Ball Dearg
(contemporaneous reports, state papers, contemporary poetry,
folklore), myth and history, literature and politics, mesh
indistinguishably. We are no longer dealing with a mythological
topos or a literary conceit but with myth being actualized as history,
with the prophetic ‘word’ becoming flesh and dwelling among the
chosen people. In him past history, present reality, and future
hopes conjoined as he transcended the present and invoked the
past to lead his followers to a new dispensation.
The historical Aodh “Ball Dearg” Ó Domhnaill failed to live up to the prophecy
and died in Spain in 1904 after selling out to the Williamite forces. But popular
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tradition has it that he didn’t die at all, but remains sleeping in a cave, and when
he wakes from his sleep he will free Ireland once and for all (Ó Buachalla
1996:451-52).
Prophetic longing for the hero-king was complemented by poetic visions
of the goddess of Sovereignty, the other half of the sacred union. Such visions
were the staple of the political aisling (dream-vision) genre, which flourished in
the 18th Century and was associated with the Jacobite movement. Typically in
these poems the poet gives a first-person account of meeting a woman from the
otherworld. He meets her while wandering in a lonely place and/or while
dreaming. He describes her beauty and reports a conversation with her in which
he tries to guess her name. She reveals to him her true identity, i.e., Ireland (Éire),
lamenting her distressed condition at the hands of foreigners and in the absence
of her true king. Finally she prophesies his coming, or the arrival of relief for
Ireland from overseas (Ó Buachalla 1996:528-30).
The aisling genre is very important to this day in Irish-speaking discourse.
Not only are many of the songs still sung in the Gaeltacht, but the genre is
fundamental to singers’ understandings of the song tradition as a whole
(Chapter 9). On the other hand, although Gaeltacht poets still occasionally
compose within the framework of the aisling genre, other ways of imagining the
ideal social order seem to be more vital. Rather than summoning hero or goddess
figures as embodiments of idealized sociality, poetry and heightened discourse
come up with images of the community as an otherworld, or with otherworldly
187
qualities. In a sense this reflects the democratization of utopian hopes in the
framework of the Irish nation-state. In Benjamin’s view, changes in imaginative
images of the ideal social order are motivated by changes in political and
technological history. Thus the decline of the native aristocracy, colonization,
processes of “modernization,” and the achievement of an independent nationstate were all analyzed (and sometimes anticipated) in the imagery of popular
culture. Throughout its changes such imagery has consistently drawn on tropes
of the native Irish otherworld (síd). This chapter will explore a dialectical tension
between popular consciousness and dominant ideologies in modern Ireland—a
tension that is played out in popular political movements.
Return from the West
On the afternoon of Good Friday 1934, more than a dozen men from
Connemara in the west of Ireland set off on bicycles towards the east. Traveling
at night to avoid interception by the police, they headed for Dublin, where they
demanded to meet with the Taoiseach, Eamon De Valera. The cyclists, members
of Muintir na Gaeltachta,4 presented a set of demands, one of which was that
good land in the wealthy eastern part of the newly created Irish state be given to
poor Irish-speaking inhabitants of the Connemara Gaeltacht. This demand was
eventually met, in part. Connemara people were allocated land as part an
ongoing redistribution in which large estates were divided among the rural poor.
4. The Connemara-based radical political organization—see Chapter 2.
188
Ráth Cairn in County Meath became the first and most successful of three
Gaeltacht “colonies” created by the Land Commission in the 1930s. From the
Government’s point of view, Ráth Cairn was part of a national effort to revive
the Irish language, which, although spoken only by a small minority of Irish
citizens, was widely regarded as a foundation stone of Irish national identity.
The cyclists on Good Friday, however, saw things differently. According to a
story that is often mentioned in Ráth Cairn (Mac Donncha 1986), when De Valera
asked representatives of Muintir na Gaeltachta how he should explain the Ráth
Cairn resettlement scheme to the people of Meath, Máirtín Ó Cofaigh answered
“Tell them that Cromwell sent us west and that now we are returning.”5 They
were claiming a right to the place as descendants of the original inhabitants of
the east, driven west across the Shannon by Cromwell’s plantations in the 17th
Century.
Although they traveled only about 150 miles, the settlers of Ráth Cairn
found themselves in an entirely different world. Many had not been further east
than Galway city and some, from offshore islands, had never set foot on the
mainland. They traded one kind of isolation for another, for the new community
was surrounded by English-speakers. One old woman is said to have been
worried that after she died she wouldn’t have enough English to be able to speak
to her fellow corpses in the Athboy churchyard. A few families chose to return
almost immediately. Each household was given a house, outbuildings, stock, and
5. Abair leo, gur chuir Cromail siar muid agus anois go bhuil muid ag teacht aniar.
189
22 acres of some of the best farmland in Ireland, this in place of a few acres of
rocky ground in Connemara. This apparent richness proved illusory, however. In
the economy of the 1930s, 22 acres was not enough to support a medium-sized
family. Soon many of the children of Ráth Cairn began to emigrate to England,
and later, America.
The irony of this situation, of the ultimate relativity of wealth and poverty
in a market economy, underlies discussions that took place in a radio show
recorded in Irish for Radio na Gaeltachta during Christmas week 1992.6
Raidió na Gaeltachta
The conversation was taped as part of a series of holiday broadcasts on
Raidió na Gaeltachta (R. na G.). Every year at Christmas, the station creates
programs that transpose local holiday rituals into the broadcast medium.
Producers travel to various Gaeltacht localities, and to gatherings of Irishspeaking emigres abroad, and record conversational reminiscences of the old
people, along with music, song (even dance!), and storytelling from young and
old alike. The atmosphere created in these programs directly recreates that of the
usual pre- and post-Christmas gatherings in pubs, parish halls, and houses.
Christmas is when members of extended families reunite, returning from other
parts of Ireland and further afield. R. na G.’s programs sometimes
metaphorically extend these gatherings by broadcasting live telephone
6. Broadcast on Raidió na Gaeltachta on January 5th 1993.
190
conversations with friends and family unable to come home for the holidays. The
station thus participates in an annual ritual reunification of various social
segments: individual family groups, extended families,7 local communities, and
the nation itself.
Raidió na Gaeltachta thus represents these collectivities to themselves in
the manner described by Anderson (1983). For Anderson, print media in
particular (the newspaper, the novel) create a sense of the simultaneous
occupation of a shared national space, an imagined community. There are some
important and interesting differences between R. na G. and Anderson’s model,
however. As we saw in Chapter 2, it is a matter of dispute exactly what
“community” R. na G. serves—the Gaeltacht or the nation as a whole. Gaeltacht
activists often work as if the “nation” they serve is the greater community of
Irish-speakers, a subset of the Irish nation as a whole. “The Gaeltacht,” in the
sense of the collectivity of Irish-speakers, is not territorially contiguous. R. na G.,
through its network of local studios, respects this specificity of locale (as far as
limited budgets allow). Listeners anywhere in Ireland thus hear “local” news,
talk, and “crack” from various specific places, spoken in the local accents of these
places. Everything from the sublime to the ridiculous is included. Sitting in
Maynooth writing a chapter of my dissertation, I hear on the radio that one Ráth
7. This level of social organization corresponds to the overlapping collectivities identified
by the names of apical ancestors, surnames (when they are unique in the community) or the
oldest segments of string names in Ráth Cairn, e.g., the “Jims,” the “Cofaighs,” the “Seáiníní” and
so on. See Chapter 2.
191
Cairn person has acquired a mobile phone and that another composed satirical
verses on the topic.
A deliberate effect of R. na G.’s organization as a network of local studios
is that people everywhere are exposed to all the local dialects of Irish, and are
now much more able to understand them than people were when the station
began broadcasting in 1972. In this sense R. na G. functions in the opposite way
to how Andersonian “print-capitalism” is supposed to function. Rather than
creating a standard register to symbolically unite an imagined community,
“assembling” a unitary “national language” from a variety of local dialects, R. na
G. presents only “local” dialects. People continue to speak their local dialects
rather than subordinating them to other dialects or a standard register.8 Since R.
na G. encourages listeners to phone in and speak and perform live on the air,
listeners become familiar with the talk and personalities of a wide range of
ordinary people. R. na G. thus projects an imagined community, but an imagined
community of discrete local communities, and of persons whose voices are
immediately recognizable. Rather than projecting an abstract “national”
community, R. na G. projects a community of local voices. Much of its
programming is dedicated to broadcasting traditional verbal performance in a
relatively unaltered state, allowing listeners to overhear local intimacies.
8. Bliss (1981:82) mentions this phenomenon in support of his argument against
standardizing Irish (see Chapter 6).
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West and East
In the radio conversation under discussion, speakers make use of what
Hanks (1990:303) terms a “sociocultural frame space,” “a greater ‘map’ that is not
all currently engaged on any given occasion but that is nevertheless the source
and necessary horizon of the more limited frames that are engaged.” I will sketch
out some of the salient aspects of this space for speakers of Connemara Irish. I
omit terms relative to north and south since they are not salient in this
conversation. Of terms relating to East and West, the westerly terms are more
marked and carry additional connotations.
Non-deictic geographical terms include An t-Iarthar (The West [of
Ireland]) and An t-Oirthear The East [of Ireland]). The referents of these terms are
geographical areas and thus relatively independent of the context of speaking.
Spatial deictics of direction include thiar, “in the west” and shoir, “in the east.”
Thiar is also used in the relational sense of “back” (i.e., taobh thiar, “back side”).
Motion is classified according to cardinal directions as well as towards or
away from the indexical ground.9 Thus siar denotes “movement westward, away
from the conversational locus;” it also denotes movement “back.” Aniar refers to
movement from the west towards the locus of speech. It is also useed in the sense
of “coming back.” Thus the noun phrase teacht aniar, “come–back” is used in the
sense of “stamina, recuperative power” (Ó Dónaill 1977:1214). Soir means
9. Hanks’ (1990:39) term for “the utterance framework in which... reference is produced.”
Indexical grounds can be transposed, as in reported speech.
193
“movement eastward away from speaker,” while anoir means “movement
towards speaker from the east.”
The -IAR series is used for orientation in corporeal space: “Bhí mo bhéal
iompaithe SIAR ar mo mhuineál, agus [...] cúl mo chionn ANIAR.”—“My mouth
was turned BACK on my neck and [...] the back of my head turned
FORWARD.”10 This provides the ground for using the -IAR series in the senses
of both “back” and “in the west,” which allows various metaphorical extensions
of cardinal terms.
In general, the West of Ireland carries cultural connotations of
“backwardness” in the sense of poverty, but also of simplicity, purity, nádúr
(essential human “nature”), and dúchas (heredity, tradition). These connotations
are based partially in the formal properties of deictic usage, as I describe here,
but are also highly motivated by relations between East and West in Irish history.
The colonial-era expulsion of non-loyal Catholics to the West (expressed in
Cromwell’s legendary phrase, “to Hell or Connacht”), the role of the East as a
zone of colonial transformation, and the roles assigned to the West in the various
strands of nationalism (both Romantic and “modernizing”), all contributed to the
construction of the cognitive map of Ireland as a highly differentiated spatiotemporal frame space in Hanks’ terms. As with Mexico (Lomnitz-Adler 1992),
Indonesia (Errington 1998), and elsewhere (Fabian 1983), social dynamics in the
Irish nation-state reinforce a legacy of ethnic, class, linguistic and regional
10. Spoken by a character in a story who mistakenly put his head on backwards.
194
stratification which is mapped onto the temporal framework of “progress.” Irish
speakers are aware of these dynamics and respond to them creatively when
using deictic terms like the –IAR series.
The radio conversation plays on the various senses of –IAR to create a
framework (an emergent formation; Hanks 1990:79) in which cultural values
associated with the West and the East of Ireland are brought into play. Such a
framework is already implicit in the sociocultural space encoded in Irish
language deixis. It was the basis for the political rhetoric of Muintir na
Gaeltachta. Thus Máirtín Ó Cofaigh’s 1934 statement to De Valera, quoted above,
that “Cromwell sent us SIAR, but now we are coming ANIAR.” carries the
additional message that “we have been set back but now we are making a
comeback.”
Participants in the radio conversation use this framework to develop an
argument of images (Fernandez 1986) based on the basic opposition set up by the
show’s host, Máirtín Ó Fátharta (MJS) between an áit thiar (the place in the West,
i.e., Connemara) and anseo, the locus of the conversation. At a crucial point in the
conversation, the reference of anseo is shifted from the relatively unmarked sense
of “here in this place in County Meath” (as opposed to back in Connemara) to
the marked sense of “Ráth Cairn (as a community)” as opposed to County Meath
(as another type of community).
MJS also refers to Connemara as sa mbaile (at home), reinforcing the idea
that the people of Ráth Cairn are essentially Connemara people and share the
195
same nature. One of the main tasks for participants seems to have been shifting
the various connotations of thiar (the West) from their negative to their positive
senses. By demonstrating that physical poverty is not the main issue, the
conversation implicitly shifts its focus to questions of customs, habits, and
essential “nature.” It thus becomes a formal working out of differences between
the essential nature of the “Ráth Cairn Man” versus that of the “Meath Man.”
This “Meath Man” occupies a problematic position in this conversation:
proletarian, having his own traditions, a descendant of both Cromwellian
conquerors and their dispossessed conquered. The upper classes of Co. Meath,
both ascendancy and the “500 acre farmer,” are taken for granted as not
belonging to the same world. Interestingly, the conversation does not focus on or
even explicitly mention linguistic difference. By the end of this conversation, the
underlying argument has become quite explicit, and the topic returns to that of
“poverty.” However, this poverty is now to be understood in a different light, as
more than just physical poverty.
“a ring lit out on the ocean”
The show consists of the host, MJS, conversing with several of the
surviving original colonists, who were in their teens when they came to Ráth
Cairn in 1935. I was asked to come to the taping to play music (music and song
were recorded in addition to talk). During the taping of the spoken segment, the
196
speakers sat around a large table in the offices of the local cooperative
(Comharchumann Ráth Cairn).
The show begins with the segment I analyze here, where MJS converses
with Seán Ó Conaire (SÓC) and Cóilín Phádraic Choilmín Ó Conghaile (CPC);
they came to Ráth Cairn as young men with their families.
In the opening sentence, MJS addresses the radio audience. He has come
from Connemara to Ráth Cairn to make this program, and in this first sentence
he moves the listeners, and the center of the discourse, aniar, “from the west,”
anseo—“here,” i.e. to Ráth Cairn, County Meath. He describes the interviewees to
the audience, then changes footing and initiates conversation with SÓC.11
(MJS): Sciorramid aniar go Ráth Cairn anois, ach fanfaimid ag
cuimhreadh ar an áit thiar. Cúigear den chéad dream a tháinig aniar anseo
atá os cionn leathchéad bliain ó shin. Agus tá mé cinnte go bhfuil cuimhre
mhaith acub—siad atá go maith ag caint bail ó Dhía orthu agus iad
roinnte go breá a'inne idir fhir agus mhná. A SÓC, is dóigh go bhfuil
cuimhre mhaith a'dsa ar an difríocht a bhí idir Ráth Cairn agus an
Máimín den Chéad Nollaig úd í.
(MJS) We’ll scoot back [from the West] to Ráth Cairn now, but we’ll
keep the place [in the] West in mind. Five of the first people who
came here more than fifty years ago. And I’m certain that they
remember it well, they’re good at talking, God bless them, and we
have them nicely divided here, the men and women. SÓC, surely
you remember well the difference between Ráth Cairn and An
Máimín on that first Christmas.
(S.O.C.): Ó, tá, bhuel, cuimhrím maith go leor, mar a déarfá. Bhí mé óg go
maith ag an ám. Bhí mé ag tarraingt idir, idir, aon bhliain deag ‘s dhá
bhliana déag, nuair a thán’ mé anseo, ach, ∂, cuimhrím, an dtuigeann tú,
an chéad Nollaig. Tháinig muid aniar an dtuigeann tú, an dóú lá deag
11. Goffman (1981:234-35) calls this “three-way” announcing, where an interviewer sets
up the radio audience as ratified participants in an ongoing conversation.
197
d’Aibreáin, agus bhí muid anseo mar a déarfá ar fad na blíana amach go
Nollaig . Ach ansin mar a déarfá faoin Nollaig, ∂, bhí muid ∂, na gasúir
mar a déarfá ag iarraidh a bheith ‘goil thart agus, ‘breith ar an dreóilín.
Ach chaitheadh an dreóilín a bheith ag chuile dhuine, an dtuigeann tú,
b’in a n-iarradh chuile dhuine ach chaithfeadh an dreóilín a bheith ‘ad mar
a déarfá le haghaidh goil thart Lá Stiofáin an dtuigeann tú, le haghaidh
a bháilliú. Agus caithfeadh an dreóilein a bheith beo. Agus bhí
muid ag ceapadh an dtuigeann tú go raibh sé ar nós, mar a déarfá, thiar i
gConamara, b’fhéidir go raibh sé sach deacair a’ bhreith ar an dreóilín, in
áit ar bith. Ach bhí sé seacht n-uaire níos measa a bhreith air i gcondae na
Mí. Mar, ∂, bhí na, na claíochaí seo, na sceach, agus chuile short an
dtuigeann tú agus a bhíodh an dreóilín agus |12
(SÓC) Oh, well, I remember it alright, as you’d say. I was young at
the time, going on around, around eleven or twelve years old when
we came here, but, uh, I remember, you understand, the first
Christmas. We came east, you understand, the twelfth of April, and
we were here as you’d say the whole year until Christmas. But then
as you’d say at christmas time, uh, we were, uh, the children were
as you’d say, going around and trying to catch the wren. But
everyone had to have the wren, you understand, they all said you
have to have the wren do you understand, in order to go around on
St. Stephen’s Day you understand, and collect the pennies (?). And
the wren had to be alive. And we thought, as you’d say, that it
would be like, as you’d say, back in Connemara, maybe it was hard
enough (just as hard?) to catch the wren anyplace. But it was seven
times as hard to catch him in Co. Meath. Because, these hedges, the
bushes, and everything you understand where the wren was and |
(MJS) | Ní raibh portach ar bith anseo an raibh?
(MJS) There wasn’t any bog here was there?
(SÓC) eh, bhuel, bhí portach ann ach ní raibh sé chomh gearr dhuinn, mar
a déarfá, bhí sé, an portach, bhí sé trí mhíle uainn amuigh ar an Ráth Mór
|
(SÓC) Well, there was a bog but it wasn’t that close to us, as you’d
say, it was, the bog, it was three miles away out in Ráth Mór |
(MJS) Ní raibh aon tithe ceann tuí anseo, ní raibh?
12. The symbol | indicates latching between speakers.
198
(MJS) | There weren’t any thatched houses here, were there?
SÓC begins by attempting to describe the differences in Christmas
customs—the parading of the wren on St. Stephen’s Day in Connemara versus
the “strawboys” in Co. Meath. But he mentions that although it was hard to catch
a wren in Connemara, it was seven times harder in County Meath. But before he
can explain this, MJS interrupts to ask if there were thatched houses or bogs in
Co. Meath, good places to catch a wren but also associated with poverty and the
west. SÓC reacts by inverting this argument:
(SÓC) Ó bhí. An bhuil a fhios a’d cén chaoi an bhfhuil sé anois mar a
déarfá, tá muid ag caint anseo ar rudaí, ach, nuair a tháinig muid i
gcondaé na Mí, bhí muid ag ceapadh go raibh muid féin bocht i
gConamara. Ach bhí tithe i gCondae na Mí seacht n-uaire deag ‘is fiche
níos boichte, agus daoine i gCondae na Mí níos boichte ná a bhí i
gConamara.
(SÓC) Oh there were. Do you know how it is now as you’d say,
we’re talking here about things, but when we came east to County
Meath, we thought that we ourselves were poor in Connemara. But
there were houses in County Meath that were thirty-seven times
poorer, and people who were poorer than anyone in Connemara.
There were.
(MJS) muise
(MJS) really.
(SÓC) Bhí. Sin í an fhirinne. Bhí tithe ceann tuí ann, agus, ∂, an teach
thiar i gConamara, an dtuigeann tú, bhí balla breá cloch faoí. Ach na tithe
i gcondae na Mí, bhíodar déanta as créafóg. Agus, ∂, |
(SÓC) That’s the truth.there were thatched houses there, and the
house (back) in Connemara, you understand, had fine stone walls.
But the houses in county Meath, they were made of sod. And, uh |
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Whereas thatched houses in Connemara had fine stone walls, in Meath they were
made of sod. Here poverty becomes the idiom in which MJS suggests that Meath
people couldn’t have the same fun or spend as much at Christmas time as people
in Connemara, thus explicitly marking the comparison as being between Meath
people and Connemara people (as they were in Ráth Cairn). SÓC backpedals but
then tells a story about the difference between the gifts given by shopkeepers to
customers in the two places: in Connemara they gave a sack of flour, but in Co.
Meath they only gave a small sweet-cake or a calendar. This praise for a
Connemara shopkeeper introduces the basic issue of this conversation:
Connemara is poorer than Co. Meath, but more generous, at least at Christmas
time:
(MJS) | ‘Bhfuil tú á rá go raibh sé níos measa as ∂ |
(MJS) | Are you saying that they were worse off, eh, |
(SÓC) | I bhfád Éire níos measa as.
(SÓC) very much [literally, “the distance of Ireland] worse off.
(MJS) Agus nach raibh siad in ann an oiread spraoí na caitheamh a
dhéanamh aimsir na Nollaig agus a dhéanfaí sa mbaile.
(MJS) And that they weren’t able to have the same fun or spend as
much at Christmas time that they would at home [i.e. back in
Connemara].
(SÓC) Bhuel, níl mé anois á rá tada mar gheall air sin an dtuigeann tú,
ach an taobh anois mar a déarfá, ∂, an chéad Nollaig an dtuigeann tú,
agus, mar a déarfá, mo mháthair, go ndeana trócaire uirthi, agus, m’athair
200
agus, i gConamara thiar, an dtuigeann tú, cuimhre liom uair amháin
anois, b’fhéidir don Nollaig sula tháinig [?] muid anseo, nó an Nollaig
roimhe sin, fuair muid mala plúir ó Dick, de bhronntanas, agus b’uafasach
an rud é sin, mar a déarfá i naoí déag tríocha cuig nó tríocha ceathair,
mala plúir mar bhronntanas ó siopadóir. Ach ansin i gCo. na Mí, a.d.t.,
b’fhéidir nach bhfaighfeá, b’féidir go bhfaighfeá cáca beag milis, agus
calendar. Sin a raibh le fáil air. (?) le siopadóireacht ann ar feadh na blíana
uilig.
(SÓC) Well, I’m not saying anything now about that you
understand, but, as far as the first Christmas is concerned, you
understand, and, as you’d say, my mother, may God have mercy
on her, and, my father and, back in Connemara, you understand, I
remember once now, maybe for the Christmas before we came here
or the christmas before that, we got a bag of flour from Dick, as a
present, and that was an awful lot, you understand, in nineteenthirty five or thirty-four, a bag of flour as a gift from a shopkeeper.
And then in County Meath, maybe you wouldn’t get, maybe you’d
get a little sweet cake, and a calendar. That was all it was worth
[unclear] to be shopping there for the whole year.
(MJS)Bhí an gnás sin anseo? go dtabharfaí beagán eicínt?
(MJS) Was that custom here (also)? That they’d give little
something?
(SÓC) Ó bhí. Gheóbhfá rud ecínt beag ecínt mar sin mar a déarfá,
calendar, agus is dóigh go raibhadar le fáil [?] gan tada, an dtuigeann tú?
Agus b’féidir go bhfaighfeá an cáca beag a dtabhairfidis brack air no rud
ecint mar sin an dtuigeann tú. Ach, ∂, bhí diofraíocht mór idir é féin agus
Conamara i dtaobh bronntanais. | Ach i dtaobh an dreóilín agus i dtaobh
an obair sin an dtuigeann tú, ach ansin mar a déarfá ní raibh caint ar bith
ar an dreoilín seo i gcondaé na Mí an dtuigeann tú, ach theagadh na
daoine thart agus iad gléasta mar a déarfá bhíodh, bhídís peinteáilte suas
an dtuigeann tú agus éadaí diofráilte orthu agus ragannaí agus /ro:s/ an
dtuigeann tú ag bailiú airgid agus ag gabhail fhoinn |
(SÓC) Oh, it was. You’d get some little thing like that, as you’d say,
a calendar, and probably they didn’t cost anything, do you
understand? And maybe you’d get the little cake they call brack, or
something like that you understand. But there was a big difference
between that and Connemara as far as presents are concerned. But
about the wren and that business, do you understand, but then as
you’d say there was no talk about the wren here in county Meath
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do you understand, but the people used to go around dressed up,
you understand, they’d be painted up do you understand and
wearing different clothes, and rags and (?) do you understand,
collecting money and singing songs |
(CPC) |ag casadh ceoil |
(CPC) |playing music |
(SÓC) |ag casadh ceoil, agus rudaí den tsort sin, an dtuigeann tú?
(SÓC) playing music, and things like that, do you understand?
(MJS) Sin iad na strawboys is dóigh.
(MJS) Those were the strawboys, surely.
At this point SÓC returns to the topic of the wren and brings up the Meath
custom of “strawboys.” CPC breaks in to the conversation, and SÓC yields the
floor to him.
When CPC gets his chance to talk about the difference between his native
Inis Treabhair, a small island in Connemara, and Ráth Cairn, he has a bit of
playful banter with the other two, then enthusiastically contributes to the
ongoing argument, building on the theme of generosity and spending at
Christmas:
(SÓC) Sin iad na strawboys. Agus, ∂, sin é an chaoi a raibh sé. Bhuel, a
CPC, b’fhéidir go raibh |
(SÓC) Those were the strawboys. And, eh, that’s the way it was.
Well, CPC, maybe |
(MJS) | Tá mé cinnte go bhfuil cuimhre mhaith ag CPC ar an diofraíocht
a bhí idir Inis Trabhair (ar a thaobh?) agus an taobh seo nuair a |
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(MJS) | I’m sure that CPC remembers well the difference between
Inis Treabhair on his side and this side when |
(CPC) | Ó tá cuimhre mhaith agam air mar a raibh.
(CPC) Oh, I remember well how it was.
(MJS) Cén aoís a bhí tusa a CPC, nuair a, nuair a|
(MJS) How old were you CPC when, when |
(CPC) | Bhí mé seacht mbliana déag, i m’fhear óg, nó, bhí mé a’ déanamh
fear óg dhom péin ar chuma ar bith! Bhí mé déanamh fear óg dhom péin ar
aon bhliain deag.
(CPC) I was seventeen years old, a young man, or I was making a
young man of myself anyway! I was making a young man of
myself at eleven years of age.
(MJS) Bhí tú tosaithe ag goil amach an raibh?
(MJS) You’d started to go out, had you?
(CPC) Bhuel, sin an chaoi a raibh sé an bhfuil a fhios a’d,
chaithfeadh tú á dhéanamh i gConamara i d’fhear óg mar, mar a
bhi muid thiar ar an oileán. Bhí sclábhaíocht go leor |
(CPC) Well, that’s the way it was, do you know, you had to do it in
Connemara as a young man, the way we were back on the island.
there was plenty of hard work |
(SÓC?) | Tá tú déanamh d’fhear óg i gcónaí |
(SÓC?) | you’re still playing the young man |
(CPC) |Bhí sclábhaíocht go leor ar an oileán. Agus chaithfeadh tú, do,
...shreang a tharraingt ar an oileán an bhfuil a fhios a’d, mar, ní hionnan é
fhéin agus anseo, bhí inneal anseo, nó bhi capall ag déanamh an obair ach
chaithfeadh tú é a dhéanamh le do lamha thiar. Ach bhí an t-oileán go
hálainn faoin Nollaig, nuair a ngeobhfadh tú anois thar Eanach Mheáin
soir go dtí Ros Muc go d’feicfidh tú an t-oileán lasta uilig le coinnle.
B’íontach an radharc é istigh i lar na farraige mar a déarfá. An rud céanna
a tharla anseo anois. Nuair a imigh muid aniar anseo i dtosach,
chaithfeadh chuile dhuine bheith istigh oíche Nollaig. Sin uimhir a h-aon.
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Uimhir a dó, chaithfeadh na fataí a bheith a’d ag a sé a chlog tRáthnóna,
agus breac. Agus an doras a fhagáil oscailte go mbeadh sé in a dó dhéag
san oíche. Sin í an gnás.
(CPC) |There was plenty of hard work back on the island. And you
had to, ... pull your own weight on the island you know, not like
here, there was a tractor here, or there was a horse doing the work
but you had to do it by hand there. But the island was beautiful at
Christmas time, when you’d go out by Eanach Mheáin to the east to
Ros Muc you’d see the whole island alight with candles. It was a
wonderful scene out in the middle of the sea. The same thing
happened here now. When we came here from the west at first,
everyone had to be in on Christmas eve. That’s number one.
Number two, you had to have the potatoes at six o’clock in the
evening, and fish. And to leave the door open until twelve o’clock
at night. That was the custom.
(MJS) anseo?
(MJS) Here?
CPC’s narrative about hard work and Christmas customs is a fairly traditional
didactic pastime, describing the old ways for the benefit of the young. He
portrays life on Inis Treabhair as being very difficult compared to life “here”
where there is farm machinery to help with the work.13
He alludes to the lighting of candles in the windows of houses on
Christmas Eve, and the beautiful image of the island lit up “in the middle of the
sea.” This image becomes the master trope of the conversation, an otherworldly
image created by human sociality. “The same thing happened here”—in Ráth
Cairn—when Connemara people moved to the new community. In what could
13. Later in the show another man contradicts this assertion by recalling how as a young
man he had to work for £1 a day breaking rocks after coming with his family to County Meath.
But this point only reinforces the general argument made in this conversation, that in the 1930s
and 40s, wage labor in Meath amounted to worse slavery than working the land in Connemara.
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be termed a reported ritual, CPC describes Christmas Eve customs, at which
point MJS breaks in with Anseo? (“Here?”)—“here” in Ráth Cairn as opposed to
Connemara.
This is the point where anseo begins to be used in the restricted sense of
“Ráth Cairn” as opposed to “County Meath.” Differences in customs caused Ráth
Cairn to appear as an otherworldly apparition to the Meath men on that first
Christmas in 1935:
(CPC) Anseo. Agus, rud eile, ní raibh a fhios ag muintir an chondae seo,
an bhfuil a fhios a’d, faoi na coinnle a bheith lasta ins... insna fuinneóigí ar
chor ar bith. Ach, nuair a bhíonn na soilse lasta uilig, na coinnle i chuile
fhuinneóig agus, bhí fear chondae na Mí ‘breathnú, ní raibh a fhios aige
sa, sa domhan brách céard as a d’tháinig na soilse uilig. Bhí an cnoc le
feiceáil acub sa lá, agus nuair a thit sé in a oíche, bhí sé lasta thimpeall
fáinne, mar a bheadh fáinne lasta amuigh sa bhfarraige. Agus dúirt siad,
“tá rud ecínt tarlaithe” a déir siad. Lá inar mharach ansin an bhfuil a fhios
a‘d, bhí sean.... ndaoine a bhí i Ráth Cairn, bhí siad ag inseacht dhóibh an
bhfuil a fhios a'd sé an gnás a bhí thiar, go lasfaí coinneal i chuile
fuinneóig. Dhá mbeadh ar an teach ach fuinneoig amháin ‘s dhá mbeadh
míle fuinneóig air, lasfaí coinneal i chuile fuinneóig. D’fagfaí an doras
oscailte go mbeadh sé in a dódhéag san oíche. Agus chuile dhuine istigh,
oíche Nollaig. Cuma céanna dhá mbeifeá, dhá mbeifeá thar lear fhéin,
bheithfeá ag iarraidh a bheith sa mbaile oíche Nollaig. Meirceá nó Sasana,
[cuma diabhail áit]? bheithfeá ag iarraidh a bheith sa mbaile oíche Nollaig.
Sin an gnás a bhí anseo.
(CPC) Here. And, another thing, the people of this county didn’t
know at all about, do you know, the candles being lit in the, in the
windows. But, when the candles were all lit, the candles in every
window, and, the County Meath man was looking, he didn’t know
in the, in the whole world where all the lights came from. They
could see the hill during the day, and when night came, it was lit all
around, like a ring lit out on the ocean. And they said “something
has happened,” they said. The next day, do you know, old people
who were in Ráth Cairn, they were telling them do you know, that
that was the custom (back) west, that a candle would be lit in every
window. If the house only had one window, or if it had a thousand
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windows, a candle would be lit in every window. the door would be
left open until twelve o’clock at night. And everybody would be
inside, Christmas eve. Even if you, if you were overseas, you’d
want to be home Christmas Eve. America or England, whatever
devil place you’d be trying to get home Christmas Eve. That was
the custom here.
(MJS) Bhí muintir na Mí scantraithe faoin méid coinnle a bhí lasta
agaibh, an raibh?
(MJS) The Meath people were frightened by the number of candles
that were lit, were they?
(CPC) Bhí siad scantraithe, mar ní raibh a fhios acub cén fath an solas a
bheith thimpeall an chnoic uilig. Bhí siad á fheiceáil glas sa lá ‘gus san
oíche bhí an fáinne las timpeall air. Ní raibh a fhios acub sa domhan brách
cé as a dtáinig an solas. Cineál |
(CPC) They were frightened, because they didn’t know why there’d
be light all around the hill. They saw it green during the day and at
night there was a ring of light around it. And they didn’t know in
the wide world where the light came from. A kind of |
CPC here develops an argument of images relating to the inability of the Meath
people to perform, much less to comprehend, Christmas ritual as performed in
Connemara. These utterances are simultaneously a description of and an
embodiment of the re- creation of a community—both ritually, at Christmas, and
historically, in the move from Connemara. CPC’s narrative imaginatively links
his native Inis Treabhair to Ráth Cairn. The image of Inis Treabhair as a ring of
light, which is recreated in Ráth Cairn from one Christmas to the next, comes in
the context of a reported ritual; description is interlaced with prescription, on how
Christmas ritual is properly performed. This is a ritual in which the Meath Man
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acts as a witness, and here the narrative breaks into direct speech: “And they said
‘something has happened’.”
Returning to the theme of shopkeepers, CPC tells another anecdote. A
Ráth Cairn man, buying two sacks of flour for Christmas, is accused of planning
to start his own shop by the shopkeeper in Athboy, who cannot imagine such an
outlay for Christmas feasting. Such a quantity could only be for selling. A
breakthrough to direct speech marks the crux of this particular piece of talk:
(MJS) | Seód é an cnoc taobh thiar anseo i Ráth Cairn?
(MJS) | This is the hill in back here in Ráth Cairn?
(CPC) Sea, Cnoic Ráth Cairn, mar a bhí na tithe uilig thimpeall ar a
gcnoc, mar a déarfá, agus, bhí tí Chóilín Uí Chatháin agus, an teach an
raibh mé fhéin ann, uimhir a seacht Ráth Cairn, agus sin dhá theach ard
mar a déarfá agus, ceann eile, bhí, Cóilín Ó Catháin, go ndéana Dia grásta
air, athair, Dharach Ó Catháin go ndéana Dia grásta uilig orthu. Agus,
bhí sé istigh in Áth Buí agus bhi se istigh sa siopa beag seo, Dan Reilly a
chuir muid i mBéarla air, Domhnaill Ó Raghallaigh ach, bhí sé ‘ceannacht
[unclear]. Agus, bhreathnaigh fear an siopa (sic) air. “Ceard tá tú a
dhéanamh” a deir sé, “cén diabhal atá tú a dhéanamh?” Shil sé go raibh sé
ag goil a’ tosaigh siopa, thuas i Ráth Cairn. Mar b’ é an gnás a bhí thiar ag
ceannacht an oiread seo an dtuigeann tú? [unclear] Deir sé, céard tá tú
deanamh a deir sé an bhuil tú ag goil ag tosaigh siopa thuas ansin a deir
sé. Bhí sé ag ceapadh go mbainfeadh sé an trade ó fhéin [laughter]. Ní
raibh a fhios aige sa diabhal cén fáth.
(CPC) Yes, the hill of Ráth Cairn, because all the houses were
around the hill, as you’d say, Cóilín Ó Catháin’s house and, the
house that I myself was in, number seven Ráth Cairn [a postal
address] and the two tall houses as you’d say, and [unclear] Cóilín
Ó Catháin, may God give grace to him, the father of Darach Ó
Catháin, may God give grace to all of them. And he [Cóilín Ó
Catháin] was in Áth Buí and he was in this little shop, Dan Reilly
we called him in English, Domhnaill Ó Raghallaigh but, he was
buying [unclear]. And the shopkeeper looked at him. “What are
you doing?” he says, “what the devil are you doing?” He thought
he was going to start a shop, up in Ráth Cairn. Because it was the
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custom in the West to be buying so much, do you understand?
[Unclear] He said “what are you doing” he said, “are you going to
start a shop up there then” he said. He was thinking he’d take his
trade from him [laughter]. He didn’t know in the devil why.
Here are two more contrasts, in terms of quantity and in terms of giving versus
selling.
Deceased members of the community are named and remembered in this
type of talk. It is customary to bless the dead when mentioning them in
conversation in this manner.
While the Ráth Cairn man bought two sacks of flour, the Meath man, by
contrast, would only buy 1/2 a stone of flour (7 pounds). Likewise, the custom in
Ráth Cairn was to slaughter a pig for Christmas, whereas the Meath man would
only slaughter a rabbit. Everyone laughs when CPC suggests that the rabbit
didn’t have much in the way of chops compared to a pig:
(MJS) Chaithfí ualach, chaithfí ualach maith a thabhairt abhaile sa Nollaig
sa mbaile |
(MJS) One had to bring a good lot, a good lot home at Christmas at
home [i.e. back in Connemara] |
(CPC) | ualach maith.ualach maith |
(CPC) |a good lot. A good lot |
(SÓC) | Ní cheannófaí, ní cheannófaí, áit an bhuil muid i gcondae na Mí
an dtuigeann tú, ach puint. Puint phlúir an dtuigeann tú? Agus nuair a
cheannaigh an fear seo... cheannaigh sé dhá mhala plúir ...dhá mhala plúir
|
(SÓC) |They’d only buy, they’d only buy, where we are in County
Meath you understand, pounds. Pounds of flour, do you
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understand? And when this man bought ...he bought two sacks of
flour, two sacks of flour |
(CPC) | Sea leathphunt plúir, sin an méid ‘s builín, punt ím, leathchloch
plúir, builín, sin a raibh acub, sin an méid. Ach an bhfuil a fhios a’d
mharófaí muc ansin faoin Nollaig, an dtuigeann tú anois, sin gnás maith
a bhí i Ráth Cairn anseo. Bhi muc maraithe faoin Nollaig. Fear anseo, a
dtugadís Colm Ó Curraoin air, as, as ∂, |
(CPC) | Yes half a pound of flour, that’s enough for a loaf, a pound
of butter, half a stone of flour, a loaf, that’s all they had, that’s all.
And do you know they used to slaughter a pig then at
Christmastime, that’s a good custom that was here in Ráth Cairn.
There was a pig slaughtered at Christmas time. A man here, they
called him Colm Ó Curraoin, from, from, eh |
(SÓC) |as an Trá Bhán |
(SÓC) | from An Trá Bhán |
(CPC) | as an Trá Bhán, táthar caillte uilig, deartháir de Sheán Curraoin
agus de, Phádraig Curraoin agus de Mhícheál Ó Curraoin agus de Nioclas
iad seo uilig, agus, sin é an búistéara. Bheadh Colm Ó Curraoin ag goil
thart a’ marú na muc ansin an bhfuil a fhios a’d agus, bhíodh gríscíní ann
agus bhíodh an t-an-chraic ann le haghaidh na Nollaig an dtuigeann tú.
Bhuel. Ní raibh ag fear an chondaé seo ach coinín le marú, ghabhadh sé
amach ‘s chuirfeadh sé snares ‘s bhéarfadh sé ar choinín, ‘s diabhal blás a
bhí aige ach, bhí diofraíocht mór idir coinín agus muc!
(CPC) | From An Trá Bhán, they’re all dead now, a brother of Seán
Curraoin and of, Pádraig Curraoin and of Mícheál Ó Curraoin and
of Nioclas, all of them, and, he was the butcher. Colm Ó Curraoin
used to go around slaughtering the pigs then and, you know,
there’d be chops and there’d be great crack for Christmas do you
understand. Well. The man of this county only had a rabbit to
slaughter, he’d go out and put (out) snares and he’d catch a rabbit.
And devil a taste he had (i.e., he had nothing) but, there was a great
difference between a rabbit and a pig!
(person) | D’fhéadfá a rá! |
(person) | You could say that! |
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(CPC) | D’fhéadfá a rá go raibh. Ní raibh mórán griscín ar an gcoinín!
(laughter).
(CPC) | You could say there was. there weren’t many chops on the
rabbit! (laughter)
(MJS) Ní raibh go deimhin.
(MJS) There certainly weren’t.
(CPC) Ní raibh go deimhin, ach sin scéal eile mar a déarfá. Ach bhí siad
cairdiúil go leor, feara condaé na Mí. Ni raibh, bhí siad an-chardiúil linn
anois.
(CPC) There certainly weren’t, but that’s another story as you’d
say. but they were very friendly, the men of County Meath. There
wasn’t, they were very friendly with us now.
But with this final reduction of the Meath man to a mere rabbit catcher, CPC
gives a word of praise: “they were very friendly to us, the people of Meath,” with
the further explanation of how the Meath Man was reduced to his miserable
state:
(MJS) Ach ni móide go raibh an féasta mór acub le haghaidh na Nollaig,
dhá laghad a rabhadar á iarraidh ann ach an oiread,∂ agus a bhiodh thiar.
(MJS) But they hardly had the big feast for Christmas, as much as
they wanted, that they used to have back in the West.
(CPC) An bhfuil a fhios...sea an bhfuil a fhios a’d seard a tharla d’fear an
chondae seo an bhfuil a fhios a’d, ni raibh ach an feilmeoir mór cúig chéad
acra. Agus bhí an fear bocht ag obair aige. Agus mura ngoidfidh sé ón
bhfeilméara é ní raibh sé ar fáil aon chaoi eile uaidh. An dtuigeann tú. Ní
raibh sé ag fáil ach cupla, ní raibh aon neart acu orthu an dtuigeann tú
chaithfeadh sé á ghoid ón bhfeilméara |
(CPC) do you know...Yes, do you know what happened to the man
of this county d’ye know, there was only the big farmer with five
hundred acres. And the poor man was working for him. And if he
didn’t steal it from the farmer he couldn’t get it any other way. Do
210
you understand? He was only getting, they couldn’t help it do you
understand, they had to steal it from the farmer |
Thus, the opposition has now become one of giving versus stealing, and SÓC says:
(SÓC) | B’in an fáth go raibh mé á rá an dtuigeann tú nuair a shíl muid
mar a déarfá, go raibh muid fhéin bocht. ach bhí daoine i gcondae na Mí
seacht n-uaire nios boichte.
(SÓC) | That’s why I was saying do you understand, (unclear) we
thought, as you’d say, that we ourselves were poor, but there were
people in County Meath who were seven times poorer.
The conversation makes a series of metaphoric predications, in Fernandez’
(1986:8) sense of metaphor as “a strategic predication on an inchoate pronoun (an
I a you, a we a they) which makes a movement and leads to a performance.”
There are two sets of movements involved here. First, there is the emergent
conversational framework, set up by MJS and built upon by the others,
consisting of an evolving set of oppositions:
(A) an áit thiar :
anseo
(B)
anseo : Condae na Mí
What begins as an opposition between the old place in Connemara (an áit thiar,
the place west/back) and the new place in Meath (anseo, here) develops into an
opposition between Ráth Cairn specifically (as an extension of Connemara
customs and sociality) and “County Meath” in general (the native Meath man,
his customs and sociality). There is a shifting of inchoate places as the
metaphoric argument finds its object. The continuities argued for between
Connemara and Ráth Cairn form the basis for the opposition between Ráth Cairn
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and County Meath, a movement facilitated by the inchoateness of the deictic
anseo (here), which is shifted from an inclusive to a marked, restricted sense.
Likewise the term sa mbaile (at home), used by MJS is extremely slippery,
referring indeterminately to Connemara and/or Ráth Cairn.
The other movements, in what Fernandez terms dimensions of cultural
“quality space” (1986:11-14, 39-43), enable and are enabled by these shifts in the
deictic framework. Thus the opposition between shopkeepers’ gifts of a sack of
flour in Connemara versus a small cake in Meath, sets the scene for the
opposition between the Ráth Cairn man’s purchase of 2 sacks of flour versus the
Meath man’s miserable “pounds” of flour. The argument of images continues
with the opposition between pigs (the most highly regarded meat in medieval
Ireland, incidentally) and rabbits.14 Even the rabbits had to be stolen by the poor
Meath man, and this brings out the fundamental moral opposition between
giving and stealing. This is revealed as an opposition between two social systems
rather than a matter of personal character.
Let us return to the first contrast mentioned by SÓC, between the fine
stone walls of poor people’s houses in Connemara and the mud walls of landless
laborers’ houses in Meath.15 The stones that make Connemara farms poor and
14. Before land reforms gave them them title to their own holdings, small landholders
often raised pigs, which they sold or bartered to pay the rent. Slaughtering and feasting on pigs
may carry an association to liberation from rent after land reforms.
15. SÓC was deeply impressed by this difference, and brought it up several times in
conversation with me, telling me where the ruins of local mud houses were so I could see for
myself.
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the soil that makes Meath farms rich, on another level make Connemara society
rich and Meath society poor. Nature becomes anti-nature under an unjust social
and political order, in a trope which goes back to the medieval Irish sovereignty
myth, with its goddess/hag figures.16 As I discussed in Chapter 4, one of the
tasks of poetry is to reveal, mediate and correct this relationship through offering
moral guidance to society.
These stories are the reflections of people who have encountered a new
economy and social relations, a new kind of alienation.17 The concepts of wealth
and poverty held by the settlers of Ráth Cairn did not correspond to the realities
of the economic, social and cultural system they found operating in County
Meath in 1935 and after. From my portrayal so far of this conversation, it might
appear as an expression of “equity consciousness” (Schneider 1990) encountering
that of a more developed capitalism, or even as a conscious discussion of or
response to modernity. But the ring of light that astonished the Meath men was
an apparition, not from the past, but from an alternative world where “wealth”
and “poverty” were revealed to stem from a more fundamental generosity and
meanness of custom. The point explicitly made in these stories is that in the 1930s
16. Carney 1967; Mac Cana 1983:119; Ó Crualaoich 1989; Ó Buachalla 1996; Nic Eoin 1998;
Leavitt 1998. On the trope of soil as essence of sociality, see below and Chapter 7. Taussig (1980,
1987) explores South American peasants’ use of images of nature and anti-nature in the discourse
of devil pacts as their means of analyzing and resisting commodity capitalism.
17. Emigration is the usual milieu for this experience, and much of modern Irishlanguage literature contains similar attempts at coming to grips with these issues cf. Deoraíocht
(Exile) by Pádraig Ó Conaire (Ó Conaire 1980 [1910]) and more recently, Sclábhaíocht (Slavery)
by Colm Ó Ceallaigh (Ó Ceallaigh 1990).
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it was the social order of County Meath, and not of Connemara, that was “backwards”
and feudal. It was in Meath that penniless laborers worked for “the 500-acre
farmer.” In Ó Cadhain’s words, it was “Éire na mBullán” (Ireland of the Bullock)
as opposed to “Éire na nDaoine” (Ireland of the People). In the 1930s, in large
parts of County Meath, a feudal system of land ownership was encompassed by
a market economy, whereas in Connemara a market economy was encompassed,
in part, by relations of reciprocity. This is the point, I believe, of SÓC’s emphasis
on the “generosity” of Connemara shopkeepers.
The arguments of images in the stories and conversations reported here
can also be seen as making a claim to Ráth Cairn, and as a further enactment of
the kind of ritual upon which such a claim is based. The argument made in the
radio conversation acts to constitute Ráth Cairn as a place apart from other places,
at once part of Connemara and part of County Meath but distinct from both.
It was explained to me that the custom of lighting candles signified that
Joseph and Mary would be welcomed into the house, and several people asked
me if I was lighting candles, mentioning that it was the custom in Ráth Cairn. In
another version of the story about the candles, Meath people cycle out to look at
them, and upon their return to a neighboring town are asked where they had
been, and answer, Bhí muid sna Flaithis—“We were in heaven.” The creation of
Ráth Cairn as a kind of heaven on earth involved the assembly of the people,
generosity and feasting. Indeed the telling of these stories themselves, in the
context of a radio show or anywhere else, is part of Christmas ritual. Stories of
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this kind name the dead, bless them, and sometimes make them present by
quoting them. Having a generation of ancestors in Athboy churchyard also
makes a very significant claim (cf. their mention in Máirtín’s song about Ráth
Cairn, discussed in Chapter 4). The ritual importance of this talk on important
occasions of social reproduction is certainly not unique to Ráth Cairn or modern
Irish-language culture in general. For example there is a parallel here to a theme
in Old Irish culture and literature in which, as John Carey (1987) and others have
shown, the local tribal group (tuath) became ritually unified with the Otherworld
at its major gathering, the oenach. This ritual of social reproduction requires the
assembly of all the people, feasting, peace, the presence of the ancestors, and
“acts of truth”—the telling of true stories and the narration of laws and
judgments.
The ring of light as a dialectical image
At the time the radio show was broadcast, I asked a few people in Ráth
Cairn about the story of the candles, and they suggested that was that it was
something made up (rud a cumadh) by CPC and Máirtín Ó Conaire—SÓC’s
brother, now deceased, who also used to tell the story. This of course made the
story more, not less, interesting to me: why would they make up such a story? At
the same time, everyone said that putting candles in the windows was a custom
that set Ráth Cairn apart from other places, something “we” do. Of course,
people burn candles on Christmas Eve all over the world and all over Ireland
215
(including Co. Meath). Mary Robinson, elected President of Ireland in 1991,
made the image into a cliche by keeping a candle constantly burning in her
official residence, to symbolically “welcome home the Irish diaspora” (the Ráth
Cairn stories predated her presidency, however). In CPC’s story, what made
Ráth Cairn unique was the burning of candles in every window of the house. A
few people told me laughingly that the correct thing to do was to put two candles
in every window. There is also a small problem of perspective—how something
can look like a ring of light when seen from below. Máirtín Ó Conaire’s version
of the story solved this problem by having one of the Meath men view it from an
airplane!
Ráth Cairn got its name from a rath on the same hill that the Meath men
saw as a ring of light. This hill used to be crowned with a ring-fort (ráth,—they
are called “raths” in English also).18 Raths are earthen ring-shaped ramparts
marking ancient sites of habitation. They are very common in County Meath, and
local people tend to treat them with respect as otherworld (fairy) dwellings. The
rath on the hill of Ráth Cairn was plowed under, however, presumably by
Connemara migrants who didn’t know what it was.19 SÓC showed me a bronze
brooch (he called it a “Tara brooch”) found at the site.
18. A cairn is a cairn, i.e., a heap of stones. Presumably the original rath featured such a
cairn, which might have marked a burial place—or might have just been a heap of stones. The
place name long predates the community, of course, and Ráth Cairn people learned the name
from local English-speakers. Because of this, many older people pronounce the name using
English phonology (
) rather than Irish phonology (
or
).
19. Raths don’t exist in Connemara, although there are similar stone structures and the
remains of circular lake-dwellings (crannógs) which are associated with the otherworld.
216
Is our dodgy otherworld apparition a pun on the name “Ráth Cairn?”
There is another pun at work here—in Connemara Irish the word ráth (ringfort)
is a homonym of rath (bestowal, gift, prosperity, abundance; Ó Dónaill 1977:987).
This false etymology mirrors a true etymological relation (Ó Cathasaigh 1979;
Carey 1987) between the various senses of síd (otherworld, peace, prosperity).
The pun on rath is the basic trope of a poem by the Connemara poet, Joe Steve Ó
Neachtain (1990:32-33), which commemorates Ráth Cairn’s 50th anniversary:
RATH
[PROSPERITY/BESTOWAL]
Goirm is coisricim
Gach mac máthar dhíbh,
Dár ruaig an ganntan
Bhur sliocht aniar;
A séideadh thar teorainn
Mar chlúmh na bhfeothannán;
Ar ghort ár fónamh
A bhí bhur dtriall.
I acclaim and I bless
Every mother’s son of you,
For whom scarcity banished
Your breed from the west;
Blown over boundaries
Like thistle-down;
The field of our recovery
Was your destination.
[...]
Chuir sibh rútaí i dtalamh,
Níor loic is níor leáigh sibh;
Bhí bhur sprid chomh láidir
Is gur mhaolaigh an phian;
Inniu is creidiúint sibh
Don tír is don náisíun,
Tá Ráth Cairn slánaithe
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Tar éis leathchéad bliain.
You put roots in the ground,
You never shirked or faded;
Your spirit was so strong
That the pain subsided;
Now you are a credit
to the country and nation,
Ráth Cairn is saved
After half a century.
Tá oidhreacht i dtaisce agaibh,
Is luachmhar an tseoid í;
Tá sibh spraíúil, spóirtiúil,
Carthanach is fial;
I lár an dorchadais
Is sibhse an lóchrann
Atá dár dtreorú
Ar an gcultúr fíor.
You have saved your heritage,
It is a valuable jewel;
You are playful and sporting,
Friendly and generous;
In the midst of darkness
You are the shining light
That is guiding us
To the true culture.
Tá an teanga ag tanaíochan
I mbroinn a máthar;
Tá an leamhnacht truaillithe
Ag tál ón gcíoch;
A shliocht Ráth Cairn,
Ná tréigí an páiste;
Má tá slánú i ndán dhúinn
Is sibhse an síol.
The language is wasting away
In the womb of its mother;
The corrupted beestings [first milk]
Is flowing from the breast;
Descendants of Ráth Cairn,
Don’t abandon the child;
218
If salvation is in store for us
You are the seed.
Ó Neachtain’s poem contains an image of Ráth Cairn as an otherworldly shining
light in middle of darkness—an image very similar to CPC’s ring of light. The
poem’s title plays on the semantics of rath and ráth, connecting the prosperity of
Ráth Cairn with the positive moral qualities of its people. At the same time it
places a moral burden on the people of Ráth Cairn to look after their bestowal
(an additional sense of rath). The poem also features a very frightening image of
nature/anti-nature—the child withering in the womb and the poisoned milk
flowing from the breast of the mother (as Irish-speaking parents turn to raising
their children through English).20
In both CPC’s story and Ó Neachtain’s poem, the image of Ráth Cairn
appears as what Benjamin termed “a historical index”—“that in which the Then
and the Now come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning”
(Hanssen 1998:56). CPC recognizes the fleeting image of Inis Treabhair in the
candlelight of Ráth Cairn’s first Christmas, an image which remains only as an
afterimage as Ráth Cairn’s older generation passes away. Like Benjamin’s
storyteller, “he has borrowed his authority from death” (Benjamin 1969:94). The
20. For Spenser, writing in 1596, although the trope was the same the problem was the
opposite: the children of English speaking colonists were learning Irish:
...moreover they drawe into themselves, together with their sucke, even the
nature and disposition of ther norses: for the mind followeth much the
temperature of the body; and alsoe the wordes are the image of the minde, soe
as, the[y] proceeding from the minde, the mynd must be needes affected with the
wordes. Soe that the speach being Irish, the hart must needes be Irishe; for out of
the aboundance of the hart, the tonge speaketh (Spenser 1596).
219
presence of death authorizes a relationship to time in which, in Ó Buachalla’s
terms (quoted above), past history, present reality, and future hopes are
conjoined. Likewise, for Ó Neachtain, the images of Ráth Cairn appear to him in
a moment of danger (Benjamin 1969:257) as he contemplates the disappearance
of the Irish language and of the Gaeltacht.
In Chapter 4 we saw how Máirtín Mac Donncha’s lament for Darach
Ó Catháin and his poem about Ráth Cairn are grounded in prophetic time. The
present is an interregnum between past and future ideals, whether of ideal
sociality (sean-nós occasions) or ideal political orders (the past and future unity
of Ireland). The time of sean-nós performance, like the time of hospitality and
gift-giving, is incompatible with and falls out of linear historical time, the time of
historical progress (Benjamin 1969:263). I was told many stories about Máirtín’s
father, about how if he met you on the road he would forget about his farm work
if the occasion demanded a chat or song. Máirtín’s Ráth Cairn poem celebrates
the liberatory potential of technology—“The sowing is done in just one day with
a tractor and a machine.” The implication is that this freedom from toil will
release energies for sociality. The oldest generation of Ráth Cairn understood
this, and as Máirtín said to me, “they were great crack” (bhí an-chraic iontub).21
The following generation, Máirtín’s own, was concerned mainly with technology
and economic progress for its own sake and had lost sight of utopian goals: “The
old people never used to talk about money or land or cattle or anything. It was
21. Crack: artful conversation and sociality. See Chapters 2, 4, and 7.
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only—O, yeah, the young people now talking about silage and bales of hay. And
milk quotas and things like that.”22 One of the main functions of verbal art in the
Gaeltacht seems to be to keep the mythic in play, both thematically and in the
social relations recreated in performance.
“A Cat and a Mouse in a Box”
If Irish is dead she is dead and ten million more pages of folklore
will not bring back for our posterity any glimmer of the life it lacks.
If Irish is dead our future generations will be as proud of this ‘past
of a dead civilization’––Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s wax cylinders––as a
bride who finds the corpse of her husband’s first wife in her
marriage bed.23
(Ó Cadhain, 1990 [1950]:154)
Benjamin (1969:263) argued that the social order of modernity was
underlain by a particular concept of history: the idea of “the historical progress
of mankind” as it advances through “homogenous empty time.” Anderson (1983)
appropriated Benjamin’s insight for his theory of nationalism. But there seems to
be a disjunction, in Ireland at any rate, between the rationalized homogenous
22. Ní bhíodh an sean-dream ag caint ar airgead na ar thalamh na ar bheithigh na ar thada. Ní
raibh ann ach––O yeah, an dream óg anois ag caint ar silage agus baleannaí féir. Agus quota bainne
agus rudaí mar sin (7/8/97). The use of English words here is deliberate and marked. See Chapter
6.
23. Má tá an Ghaeilge marbh tá sí marbh agus ní thiúrfadh deich milliún leathnach eile
béaloideasa ar ais dár sliocht aon dé den tsaol ar dhe í. Má tá an Ghaeilge marbh cuirfeadh an ‘past of a dead
civilization’ seo––ceirníní Sheáin Uí Shúilleabháin––an oiread céanna bróid ar ghlúinte ár sleachta, is a
bheadh ar bhrídeog a gheobhadh corp céad mhná a fir ina leaba pósta.
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space-time of the state and the space-time of nationalism, at least in its
revolutionary moment.24
The poet and educator, Pádraig Pearse, went to live in Ros Muc in the
Connemara Gaeltacht, learning Irish and absorbing the ethics and aesthetics of
Irish-speaking culture. It was in the name of a Gaelic social and cultural order (as
he imagined it) that Pearse led the hopelessly outgunned Easter Rising of
1916—a victory of self-sacrifice and messianic time over the rationalized spacetime of the colonial order.25
Beginning with Eamon De Valera’s populist administration in 1932,
political and media control under Fianna Fail rule consolidated the Irish state as
an imagined community. This process included the deployment of a new
linguistic regime: an anglophone state (largely retained from colonial times) with
Gaelic window-dressing. Refunctionalizing the Irish language as a “beautiful
jewel” (Ó Ciosáin 1993:182) in the postcolonial crown entailed the ideological
erasure of actual Irish-speaking communities through their folklorization and
mythification as exemplary centers of Irishness, along with their actual
destruction through emigration and underdevelopment.
24. Nowadays, as the Irish state attempts to reinvent itself in a technocratic vein, there is
for all intents and purposes no official annual Independence Day or celebration of nationhood
except perhaps St. Patrick’s Day; since the 1970s the Easter Rising has been publicly
commemorated mainly by Republican groups. Many overtly nationalist textbooks were revised
and even old nationalist ballads were removed from the school curriculum since the 1970s.
25. The Easter Rising was denounced by one provincial Irish paper as “a Poet’s rebellion
with too much literature” involved; “the Crazy Rebellion was the work chiefly of a lot of Crazy
Poets. This has surprised people as far away as Chicago...” (quoted in Lee 1989:35).
222
Within the space of the new Irish nation-state, Irish and the Gaeltacht
became a spectacle, a fixed symbolic image of the past and the unchanging
essence of the nation. But the state’s ideological imaginings of Gaelicness were
contradicted by those of Irish-speakers themselves, who had a completely
different relation to the past and whose life experience was rooted in what was,
already by the 18th century, an oppositional discourse within the emerging order
of modernity. In the 20th century, an Irish-language counter-public sphere
emerged which was based equally in the Gaeltacht and among urban Irishspeakers. An example of this counter-public sphere was the Irish-language
socialist weekly newspaper, An t–Éireannach (The Irishman), published in the
1930s (Ó Ciosáin 1993) with an urban and Gaeltacht base.
A typical figure in this process was Máirtín Ó Cadhain, whose
imprisonment by De Valera during the Emergency (W. W. II) and subsequent
political and literary interventions exemplified his role as the Gaelic bad
conscience of the new Irish state. As a young man in 1930s Connemara, Ó
Cadhain played a leading role in Muintir na Gaeltachta, and participated in the
cycling trip to meet De Valera in Dublin on Easter weekend 1934—the
anniversary of Pearse’s uprising.
In August of 1934 Ó Cadhain gave a speech in An Ceathrú Rua (in
Connemara) urging Gaeltacht people to take part in the land campaign. His
speech was a clear-headed analysis of the political, economic and linguistic
realities of the Irish state, where English and English-speakers had the upper
223
hand, even in the newly-designated official Gaeltacht areas. He saw little hope
for bilingualism in the narrow confines of a state where the Irish and English
languages couldn’t live together “any more than a cat and a mouse could live
together in a box” (An t-Éireannach, 1/9/34).
Ó Crualaoich (1989) has shown how Ó Cadhain’s literary work drew upon
the discourse of folklore, that is, on the living linguistic culture of the subaltern.
This is especially true of this 1934 speech, which situated political analysis firmly
within the cognitive framework of Irish language folkloric discourse. Thus,
arguing against the Government’s policy of turning the Gaeltacht into
geographically defined welfare ghettos, Ó Cadhain said “We, the people of the
Gaeltacht, are not willing to be made into a separate people or to have any Black
Pig’s Dike put around us to entrap us” (see Chapter 2). 26 “The Black Pig’s Dyke”
is a figure from storytelling; Ó Cadhain’s use of it invokes a universe of discourse
familiar to his Connemara audience, but not familiar to outsiders. His eloquence
is grounded in the symbolic values of storytelling, which functions as a high
register in the Gaeltacht.
The Cumann na nGael government27 had attempted to relocate
Connemara people from the coast onto reclaimed bog land in the mountainous
26. Níl muide, muinntear na Gaedhealtachta, sásta daoine ar leith a dhéanamh dínn ná Claidhe na
Muice Duibhe ar bith a chur orainn le muid a sháinniú.
27. Cumann na nGael represented the pro-Treaty side in the Civil War and was the
historical predecessor to the present-day Fine Gael party, the second-largest party in Ireland after
Fianna Fáil. Cumann na nGael was a conservative party and had a pseudo-fascist element during
the 1930s, the “Blueshirts.” The term Blueshirt is still used as a term of abuse for members of
Fine Gael.
224
townland of Seana-Phéistín. The project was soon abandoned, but De Valera’s
government attempted to revive it in response to Muintir na Gaeltachta’s land
agitation. Referring to this, Ó Cadhain said that the “gruagach gránna” [ugly
specter or giant] of Seana-Phéistín was raised again from the grave of Cumann
na nGael.” Ó Cadhain’s speech resembles what his contemporary, Walter
Benjamin, described as a “dialectical fairy tale” (Buck-Morss 1989:273)—a
celebration of human cunning,
the capacity, through “awakening,” to outwit history, which has
placed a spell on the dreaming collective, and has kept its members
unconscious. Hegel’s “cunning of reason” literally deifies history,
affirming the myth of progress. For Benjamin [however], cunning is
the trick whereby human subjects get the better of mythic powers.
Ó Cadhain’s speech makes a similar reversal of perspective, identifying state
policies with monstrous mythic powers and urging the people of the Gaeltacht to
awaken from and fight “the curse of Cromwell.”
A scene among ruins
Late in his life, Máirtín Ó Cadhain made a film in which he returns to his
native townland in Connemara, An Cnocán Glas. In one scene, he stands among
the stone walls, rocky fields and the ruins of his ancestors’ houses and recalls his
childhood. “We often told each other, when we were children, that [these stone
constructions] were the feats of Fionn and the Fianna Éirinn.”28 But it wasn’t the
28. The Fianna were mythical culture-heroes, led by Fionn Mac Cumhaill and
represented in folklore as belonging to a warrior-band. Such bands existed in early Irish
society—an age-grade to which young men belonged between childhood and full adulthood,
225
Fianna but his own people who built this landscape—what appeared to be
natural or even supernatural in the landscape was what Benjamin and Lukács
termed “second nature,” human technology. Ó Cadhain the writer, transformed
into an urban intellectual, is trying to come to grips with the fact that he is still
inseparable from the community of his youth,29 but that this community has
changed and moved on, just as he himself has. The Fenian tales and miraculous
stories he loved as a child—“the literature of the poor” with which he and his
friends tried “to fool [ourselves out of] our hunger” (le dallamullóg a chur ar ar
gcuid ocrais)—contained a utopian impulse, what Benjamin would call a vision
of “ur-history.” Ó Cadhain, in his moment of dis-enchantment among the ruins,
now sees this impulse in its proper place, in the historical life of the human
community. Benjamin (1969:257) maintains that the past “can be seized only as
an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never
seen again.” Something of this sort happens in Ó Cadhain’s film as he recalls the
midsummer ritual of his youth, the lighting of bonfires on St. John’s Eve:
Here it is.
A person would think that everything had changed except the
stones. But but these too have changed more or less. For around
this stone [?]—this is An Cnocán Glas [a place name: The Green
Hill]—it is from this airy hill that the townland got its name.
The houses are there, they were around this townland.
There were houses there [pointing].
regarded by society as liminally “wild” and part of nature.
29. Addressing the people of his townland in the voiceover, he says he cannot put pen to
paper without “you coming between myself and the paper” (ag dul idir mé féin agus an páipéar).
The phrase suggests interference; Ó Cadhain’s point is that his people are the true medium of all
hi artistic creation.
226
There were houses there.
There was a house there, for example, and one of the people who
taught Irish in Maynooth was from there.
But for thirty years or so the houses have been moving from here
and going down along the road.
Here is where the bonfires used to be.
I remember them well.
I remember the people gathered round them.
I remember the fód coise [burning sods of turf] being brought
home.
I remember, I remember the fód coise being put in the embers at
home.
I remember the fód coise being thrown into the gardens and the
fields. And thrown at the livestock.
From this airy hill, this Green Hill, you could see maybe 50 fires.
Fifty bonfires on St. John’s Eve.
Away from you to the east, east towards Galway, west out as far as
An Cnoc. And there was a ring of bonfires, around Caoláire na
Gaillimhe, around Galway Bay, [and] ... County Clare. Westwards
to Ceann Boirne [Burren Head] and westwards to Ceann na Caillí
[Hag’s Head]. There is no bonfire here any more, because, because
there aren’t many houses left. It isn’t here that bonfires are built
nowadays. 30
The scene in the film is quite striking as Ó Cadhain points at the places around
him while delivering a litany of “I remember” and place names.
30. Seod é. Cheapfadh duine gur athríodh chuile short, b’fhéidir, ar an mbaile seo ach ábhar na
clocha. Ach athraíodh siad sin féin ina mbeagán nó ina mórán. Mar timpeall ar an liagán [? = (standing)
stone, monolith] seo, seod é An Cnocán Glas, an áit seo, an cnocán aerach seo, a fuair an baile a ainm. Tá
na tithe sin, timpeall an liagán seo a bhí siad. Bhí tithe ansin [ag spáint]. Bhí tithe ansin. Bhí tithe ansin.
Bhí teach ansin cur i gcás, agus b’as, duine de na daoine a bhí ag múineadh Gaeilge i Maigh Nuad sa gcéad
seo caite. Ach le deich mbliana fichid nó mar sin tá na tithe ag athrú as seo, is ag dul síos le bóthar. Anseo a
bhíodh na tinte cnámha ann. Cuimhrím go maith orthu. Cuimhrím ar na daoine bailithe timpeall orthu.
Cuimhrím ar na fóid coise dhá dtabhairt abhaile. Cuimhrím ar na fóid coise dhá gcuir sa ngríosach sa
mbaile. Cuimhrím ar na fóid coise dhá gcaitheamh isteach sna garrantaí is sna goirt. Is dhá gcaitheamh (?)
ar na beithígh. Ón gcnocán aerach seo, an cnocán glas, d’fheicfeá b’fhéidir leathchéad tine. Leathchéad tine
chnámh Oíche Shin Sheáin. Uait soir, soir anall as Gaillimh, siar, siar amach anall (?) chomh fada leis an
gcnoc. Agus bhí fáinne de thinte cnámhe, thimpeall Caoláire na Gaillimhe, thimpeall Cuan na Gaillimhe
[unclear] Condae an Chláir. Siar go Ceann Bóirne agus siar go Ceann na Caillí. Níl aon tine chnámh anseo
feasta, mar, níl mórán tithe fágtha. Ní anseo atá an tine chnámh feasta.
227
Saint John’s eve is a ritual of community regeneration, when the worlds of
the living and dead came into contact. The lit “travelling sods” (fóid choise) were
carried to individual hearths and fields, and hurled at animals, to bring them
fertility and protection. The ring of watch-fires recalls those of the Fianna, and a
legend known to Ó Cadhain31 has it that these fires were the signal for the people
to rise up against the occupying “Danes” at the time of Brian Boru (Danaher
1972:134-53). Ó Cadhain’s litany-like recitation of this recalled ritual and of the
locations of houses and bonfires reminds us that dialectical images are based in
the history and ritual of communities, and that the act of memory is
performative, an operation in and on the present (cf. Feldman 1991). The flow of
his narrative directs our attention from the mythical Fianna to the living
community of the past, then shows us that this life, for better or worse, has
moved on: it isn’t here that bonfires are built nowadays.
The moment of sublation reveals itself visually, in an instantaneous
flash wherein the old is illuminated precisely at the moment of it
disappearance. This fleeting image of truth “is not a process of
exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does it
justice.” (Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss, see below)
The spark of life, which Ó Cadhain both literally and figuratively recalls, is an
image of ur-history, of a classless society. Such images belie the official
mythologies of modernity, progress, and linear time; they are like
the initial day of a calendar which serves as a historical time-lapse
camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in
31. Recounted in Raiftearaí’s long historical poem, Seanchas na Sceiche; cf. Chapter 4).
228
the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance (Benjamin
1969:263).
The living and the dead
The opposition between the living and the dead, “an beo agus an marbh,”
was Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s political master trope. His novel, Cré na Cille (Ó
Cadhain 1949), was set among the corpses of a graveyard, a site which
allegorically fused a vision of the contemporary Gaeltacht, a satirical portrait of
the Irish state, and memories of his recent internment by that state in the Currach
Camp, County Kildare (see Chapter 7).
In one episode in Cré na Cille, various characters discuss The Frenchman, a
downed WWII pilot who has learned Irish in the Graveyard. He undertakes a
linguistic survey of dental consonants in “the dialect of the Half-guinea”—the
Half-Guinea is the cheapest of the graveyard’s three plots—but is disqualified by
“the Institute [of Advanced Studies]” for learning “too much Irish––of a kind
that isn’t dead throughout the scheduled periods––and since they suspect that a
few words of it are Revival Irish, he has to unlearn every syllable of it until he is
qualified to do that research properly.” He is assigned to collect the community’s
“spent folklore” (béaloideas caillte), “so future generations of Gael-corpses will
know what kind of life existed before them in the republic of Gael-corpses” (Ó
Cadhain 1949:239).
The popular culture of the Gaeltacht was received by urban anglophone
elite culture in terms of “folklore” and––once it was safely dead—collected and
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archived in Dublin. This reflected the predominant view of the modernizing
elites of the Irish state who saw the Irish language, its culture, and even its
speakers as relics of the (glorious, national) past (cf. Ó Giolláin 1989, 1993, 1996).
In 1950, addressing Cumann na Scríbhneoirí in Dublin, Ó Cadhain delivered a
bitter polemic against such an idea of “folklore” (1990 [1950]:154-56). He asked
his listeners to imagine a circle drawn around a few streets in central Dublin, a
circle which took in Trinity College, the Royal Irish Academy, the National
Museum, the Irish Folklore Commission and its archives, University College
Dublin, and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. This circle, he suggested,
was the “Chief-Cemetery of Ireland” (Príomh-Chill Éireann), the Newgrange32 of
the Irish state. In it was “The Dead Clay” (An Chré Mharbh)––the calcified culture
of Irish Ireland and its (equally calcified) caretakers, the scholars, in whose
number he included himself “and my little Medieval pile of clay.” This he
contrasted with “The Living Clay” (An Chré Bheo) of the surviving Gaeltacht, and
the living imagination embodied in its people and their language and culture.
Here Ó Cadhain extended the metaphor he developed in Cré na Cille––of
clay as the transformative essence of social life––and used it to profoundly
critique the Irish state and the modernizing discourse which worked to
marginalize Irish language and traditions.33 “Clay” (An Chré) was the concrete
32. Newgrange: Brú na Bóinne, a megalithic tomb (c. 5000b.p.) in County Meath.
33. See Chapter 7.
230
dialectical image Ó Cadhain employed to remind us, as Susan Buck-Morss
(1989:146) put it,
that precisely by giving up nostalgic mimicking of the past and
paying strict attention to the new nature, the ur-image are
reanimated. Such is the logic of historical images, in which
collective wish images are negated, surpassed, and at the same time
dialectically redeemed.
Conclusions
We have seen how the medieval sovereignty myth was transformed in the
popular consciousness of the Gaeltacht. The triple image of the Goddess of
Sovereignty, the King, and the Poet has given way to images of nature and antinature and fleeting images of community and sociality in poetry and storytelling.
Images of ur-history are not overtly “political,” but animate implicit critiques of
“modern” social relations.
Aesthetically, these images work in a manner similar to montage, where
fragmentary elements are presented in contiguity, while making connections
between them is a task left to the audience. This is in keeping with the allegorical
aesthetics of sean-nós song (Chapter 9), being based on fragments, a poetics of
death, the making of indexical connections over time between events, people,
etc., and featuring an incompleteness of expression which requires the active
involvement of an audience.
As far as I have been able to tell, the remarkably similar series of images of
human sociality—Ráth Cairn as a ring of light and as a guiding light in the midst
of darkness, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s ring of bonfires around Galway Bay—were
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independently conceived out of a common stock of cultural images. It is
interesting that St. John’s Eve and Christmas rites formed opposite ends of the
yearly calendar, being relatively “pagan” and “Christian” festivals of community
and family regeneration. I am quite struck by the “Durkheimian” (1965 [1915])
features, as collective representations, both of these festivals and of the images of
rings of light. But Durkheim saw collective representations as operating mainly
on a synchronic plane—as the direct impression of forms of sociality on an
individual human psyche which is itself fundamentally pre-social. I hope to have
shown the much greater complexity of the Irish images discussed here. These are
essentially diachronic, while functioning allegorically—more on the indexical
plane than the symbolic plane. They are constructed in memory, and in a way,
have more to do with structuring collective ritual than they are structured by this
ritual.
In Ó Cadhain’s writings and speeches, these dialectical images become
overtly political, using the discourse of folklore as a cognitive framework to
critique the social relations of the state. Although raised in an environment rich
in traditional stories, song and poetry, Ó Cadhain refused to regard this folklore
as a fixed national “heritage” or “treasure.” Rather than seeing folklore as
something enduring, Ó Cadhain saw it as something ephemeral. He celebrated
this aspect of folklore, remarking that fairies were getting scarce in Connemara,
driven away by blasting for new roads. Rather than preserving disembodied
“traditions,” Ó Cadhain advocated the elimination of poverty in Ireland and the
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creation of a just social system, preserving the communities that gave birth to
these traditions. His attitude to the artifacts of folklore paralleled that of
Benjamin’s critique of historicism—the “cautious detachment” with which the
historical materialist views “cultural treasures” (Benjamin 1969:258).
CHAPTER SIX
VOICE: THE NATION, THE STATE, AND THE NEIGHBORS
Something about a bicycle
One day a few years ago I was driving to work from Ráth Cairn and I
stopped to give a lift to an elderly woman who was going to visit a relation about
a mile down the road. We spoke in Irish as usual and she mentioned that she
usually makes the trip by bicycle but wanted a lift that day owing to the rain.
Then she added, “I suppose you use the word
but we always say
.” When I asked her why she didn’t use the term rothar (the normal Irish
word for bicycle) she said that she would never use the word in conversation
with members of her own generation—“the word we use is
Irish shows many variations in both grammar and vocabulary even over
quite small geographical distances. Ráth Cairn shows a fair amount of “dialectal”
variation even within individual families, where family members come from
different parts of Connemara. One happily married couple seem to find no
difficulty in using two different words for “dog’,
(madra) and
(gadhar),
to refer to the same well-trained animal living in their back garden. Seemingly
233
234
the marriage between gadhar and mada is an easier one than that between baidhskl
and rothar. Some differences make more of a difference than others.
The rejection of rothar by Irish speakers born in the 1920s is quite notable
considering the term was already in use in the 1890s. Ironically, it may have been
coined by none other than Father Peadar Ó Laoghaire, who is best remembered
as the staunch advocate of caint na ndaoine (colloquial speech; literally “the
people’s speech”) in Irish writing. An article published in 1896 in Irisleabhar na
Gaedhilge (The Gaelic Journal)1 gives a list of 43 terms composed by Ó Laoghaire
for various parts of the bicycle, along with the prediction that the bicycle would
be of great assistance to advocates of Irish (lucht chosanta na Gaeilge), and that it
would be a great embarrassment to them to not have an Irish term for every part
of their machines. Ó Laoghaire was a native speaker of Irish and the author of
Séadna, the first novel written in the language.2 He derived his terms for bicycle
parts through metaphorical extension and adaptation of existing Irish terms for
body parts, parts of other wheeled vehicles and terms associated with horse
livery. The term rothar itself is derived from roth (wheel).
The article was published at the cusp of a tremendous world-wide fad for
bicycles, which, in Ireland, happened to coincide with a fad for the Irish
language. Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League) had recently been founded, and
1. Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (6)11:176; 1896. This article was discussed by Liam
Ó Muirthile in his weekly column in the Irish Times, 2/18/93.
2. Séadna was composed entirely in direct speech, as was Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s novel, Cré
na Cille (see Chapter 7).
235
its organizers were soon busy cycling around the country spreading the creed of
Irish (along with céilí dancing). The Gaelic League’s Irish classes were popular in
part because they provided an occasion for men and women to socialize together
outside of the purview of the Church. Likewise, the bicycle offered young
people, especially women, a new degree of independence and mobility. The new
machine and the national language both provided new avenues for sociality as
well as offering the promise of new forms of community.
In its early years, the Gaelic League was the first nonsectarian popular
movement in Ireland since the heyday of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. It
marked a decisive turn from elite antiquarian interest in the language to popular
efforts to revive Irish as a national language. The Gaelic League spawned literary
revivals in both languages 3 and eventually gave birth to the independent Irish
state.
Urban gaeilgeoirí (Irish language enthusiasts) are still infamously
associated with bicycles, as in Flann Ó Brien’s phrase “Gaelic morons with their
handball medals and bicycle clips” (Kiberd 1996:498). Presumably these living
stereotypes (Cronin 1989), if they still exist, can be found traversing the country
on two wheels, armed with all 43 of Ó Laoghaire’s terms for bicycle parts.
Irish, with its fine-grained dialectal differences, is an example of a weakly
standardized language; in some respects it could even stand for the linguistic
3. The elevation of “Anglo-Irish” dialects to a vehicle for serious literature (by Douglas
Hyde, J.M. Synge and others) coincided with and was dependent on the similar elevation and
revival of Irish.
236
situation in Europe before what Anderson (1983) called the “assembly process”
of both nation-states and their official “national” languages (more on this later).
Nation-builders in Ireland have been language builders too, of course, and the
relatively newly-coined word rothar is a seemingly innocent example of this
process, which goes on all over Europe. But it is famously rejected in the
Gaeltacht.
When the term is used, it is often treated as something less than a fullfledged citizen of the Irish language. Ó Siadhail (1983:205-8) points out that in the
dialect of Cois Fharraige (varieties of which are spoken by most Ráth Cairn
people) rothar would be pronounced ro:r. But since the word is a modern
coinage,
is more often used. Other examples are Irish names of months,
introduced through the school system and similarly treated as a loan-words.
Older people tend to use English words for some, but not all of the names of
months. But the English loan word bicycle is has been given full linguistic
citizenship (
, “my bicycle;”
, “on the bicycle,” etc.).
“We-language” and “they language”
When speaking of lexical differences, I have heard Ráth Cairn people (like
the woman who says
) use the phrase an focal s’againne (“our word”).
This “ours” refers to the local center of social value, and depending on the
context, can mean the family, the townland, community, or various wider
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collectivities like Connemara or those who speak like Connemara people.4 The
sense of ownership is grounded in performance, talk and verbal art, in specific
gatherings in specific hearths, sessions, etc.
If one cared to formalize this view as a semiotic theory, one would say
that form and value are brought together in performance by specific groups of
people (the “we” impled in s’againne) talking about specific things. “S’againne”
is used in this sense for much more than words. Gaeltacht culture in general has
been resolutely local; authority and value are grounded in locality and
community. Hence the relative lack of enthusiasm from Gaeltacht people for
standard Irish, and their high tolerance for, and even indifference to, dialectal
variations. For a certain generation of Irish-speakers, the suspicion of rothar is the
suspicion of standardized language as a superposed register––something
imposed from above, as opposed to what we say or what they say in the next
parish or townland. Standardized language in its full-blown form is the creation
of the nation-state, and a creature of a different set of ideologies of language and
linguistic value.
The nation-state is also predicated on maintaining a sense of “we-ness,”
but often justifies standardizing language in terms of referential clarity rather
than local groundedness. At the “processural top and center” (Silverstein n.d.:51)
of the nation-state are its own authoritative performances, located in the acts of
4. When speaking about a dialect as a whole, Gaeltacht people tend to use phrases like
“the Connemara man” (fear Chonamara), as in “The Connemara man would say x.”
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its regimenting institutions, the media, schooling, etc., and in the speech of those
it privileges.5 A standardized register of a language, used in prestigious contexts
and by important people, takes on the power and prestige of its surroundings,
and is felt to be the most precise and flexible instrument of thought and
communication. This rationalization (in both senses of the term) of the standard
reflexively constructs all other varieties of the language as “dialect”—“local
color,” material for the Roddy Doyles, Dickenses, and Mark Twains of the world
to work with. While the ideology of Gaeltacht people locates power and value in
place and community, for what Silverstein (n.d.) terms “the standardizing
imagination,” power and value are found in a transcendent code which is felt to
not reflect a limited local point of view but rather the context-free “view form
nowhere” of rational objectivity (Errington 1998). From this perspective—a
perspective that denies being a perspective—in overcoming one’s limited point
of view one also overcomes the limits of one’s “own” language.
But what of Peadar Ó Laoghaire and his terms for bicycle parts? His
concern wasn’t so much with referential clarity as with national identity, that
advocates of Irish shouldn’t have to shamefacedly resort to “English” to talk
about their bicycles, much less to name them. Here, language ideally demarcates
populations (Urciuoli 1995; Irvine and Gal to appear) on a one-to-one basis. But
for the Irish to “deanglicize” their speech, their language must be complete—able
5. Note that bourgeois performances often pretend to be non-performances; the lecture or
the dictionary, for example.
239
to referentially parse the new world of technology as well as the old world of
tradition. In a tightly drawn circle, the issue of identity brings us back to a
concern with the perfection of the code as an instrument of referential clarity. To
this day, the same ideological circle dominates debates about the standardization
of Irish.
The ideological connections between language use and social identity can
be more complicated than this. Joseph Errington (1998:156-5), elaborating on
Gumperz’ (1982:64-72) discussion of code-switching between minority and
majority languages, notes that typically the two languages are functionally
differentiated by their speakers as metaphorically “we” language versus “they”
language. These contrasting codes are associated with in-groups and out-groups,
which are characterized by relatively closed versus relatively open social
networks. Mastery of the “we” code is thus grounded in nonverbalized shared
understandings to a greater degree than is mastery of the “they” language.
Mastery of the “they” code involves an understanding of the “relatively explicit,
context-free norms which inform use of that out-group language” (Errington
1998:157; cf. Gumperz 1982:71).
From this perspective, we can reexamine Gaeltacht-based Irish speakers’s
use of “bicycle” versus “rothar” as examples of “we” code versus “they” code.
Rothar is metaphorically de-voiced in the Cois Fhairrge dialect—treated as a
word from outside. Although Irish speakers are aware that bicycle is an “English”
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word, it has been fully possessed by Irish.6 Outsiders, who are typically learners
of Irish, may not recognize a phrase like
(my bicycle) at all.
An Irish-learner like myself thus passes through three concentric
“languages”—English on the outside, then Irish, and at the center of “we-ness,”
English again, but an “English” that has been repossessed by Irish speakers. The
instant I appeared in Ráth Cairn, I was given an Irish version of my name
(Stiofán) as befits a budding “gaeilgeoir.”7 The first time I met the elderly woman
I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, she asked me (in Irish) what my
name was. I said it was Steve, but that people called me Stiofán. She replied that
after I was in Ráth Cairn a while longer, people would start calling me Steve
again. By this she meant that I would acquire “Steve” as an informal nickname as
opposed to the formal “Stiofán.” This Steve2 would index familiarity, a
familiarity I might not have easily achieved had I insisted from the start on being
called Steve1. Similarly, Ráth Cairn people sometimes tease “blow-in” Irish
speakers who have settled in the community by addressing them by English
versions of their names. I have seen people get quite upset at such treatment, but
it seems to be intended as a welcoming gesture. For a long time, Gaeltacht people
who spent time working in England or America have been quite used to dual
6. Lillis Ó Laoire suggested the term “possession” (sealbhú) to describe this phenomenon.
7. I asked a friend once how one knows, upon meeting a stranger, if he or she is also an
Irish speaker. The first thing he mentioned in response was “if their name is in Irish.” The Gaelic
League encourages Irish-speakers to wear a special ring-shaped pin (An Fáinne) to identify
themselves, but these are currently very much out of fashion with younger people.
241
names; thus one person was both Dudley Kane and Darach Ó Catháin—the
migrant worker in England and the sean-nós singer in Ireland.
As described by Gumperz, “we” and “they” codes function as “restricted”
and “generalized” codes in the manner Bernstein (1971) has suggested. This view
should be qualified in light of Labov’s (1982 [1969]) critique of Bernstein, to the
effect that the difference is ideological as much as it is grounded in actual
semiotic differences in the codes themselves. In the case of “local” versus
“standard” Irish, their use is grounded in the ideologies I have outlined
above—an idea that speech gets its value from locally and personally grounded
performance, versus an idea that the value of language is grounded in its
referential clarity. These ideological differences partially coincide with two
different theoretical views of the nature of the sign, that of Bakhtin and Peirce on
the one hand, and that of Saussure on the other.
For Peirce any sign has three parts, the Representamen (or sign vehicle),
the Object to which it refers, and its Interpretant, a more developed sign which
results from any actual event of sign-usage. Saussure and those who follow him
ignore the performative dimension and locate linguistic “value” entirely in the
structure of a transcendent synchronic system of signs. The linguistic sign for
Saussure is the combination of a sound-image and a concept. The “value” of any
one linguistic sign is the outcome of its systematic relation to all other signs in
the language system. It is interesting that for Peirce (8.331) the paradigmatic
example of the sign relation is the gift (A gives B to C), whereas for Saussure the
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paradigmatic example of linguistic value is the commodity, where (as Simmel
points out) objects receive their exchange value through the mediation of an
abstract and totalizing system of value, money (Simmel 1990:120).
Saussurean linguistics has had great difficulties dealing with the relation
of language to its object (the referent of a sign) as well as to its users (the
speaking subject). Saussure’s doctrine of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign
locates the motivation of the relation between concept and sound-image in the
language system as a whole rather than in any act of language use. The language
system acts to carve up the conceptual world into concepts, through which we
can perhaps recognize the “things out there” in the real world. But the existence
of such a real world is not strictly necessary to the theory, and is even
problematic to it.
While Peirce’s theory describes very well the practice of both Gaeltacht
people and the nation-state––their uses of language––Saussure’s theory is a
mirror image of the ideology of the nation-state and its “standardizing
imagination.” The nation-state attempts to socially realize Saussure’s theoretical
dream of an abstract unitary language system, in a world where national
languages ideally parse national populations in the same 1:1 ratio that for ideal
Saussurean langue characterizes the unity of the sound-image and the concept.
Here, the locus of anxiety is the boundaries––boundaries between word-concepts,
between languages, between populations. Peirce’s and Bakhtin’s theories focus
243
on centers––acts of reference, of situated use of signs, while Saussure’s theory
focuses on boundaries––systemic distinctions between linguistic signs.
In Bakhtin’s (1981:271) terms, a “unitary language,” the “expression of the
centripetal forces of language, ... is not something given but is always in essence
posited––and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of
heteroglossia.” Unitary language is both something which is believed in (by the
ideology of both the nation-state and traditional normative and descriptive
linguistics), and something enforced by the regimentation of the state and its
institutions. In opposition to these forces are what Bakhtin calls “centrifugal
forces” which create or manifest “heteroglossia.”
Performance, authoritative use of language in context, leaves behind what
Bakhtin calls a “taste.” Thus,
All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a
party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age
group, the day and the hour. Each word tastes of the context or
contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and
forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic,
tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word (Bakhtin
1981:293).
Negotiating one’s own taste in lexical matters is a delicate business in a socially
stratified society. Máirtín Ó Cadhain himself was vexed by the bicycle question.
In his 1969 memoir Páipéir Bhána Agus Páipéir Bhreaca he writes:
The English words that have come into the [Irish] speech are a
troublesome matter. I heard an Irish scholar saying he couldn’t
bring himself to say ‘rothar’––bicycle, that is, that maybe if he tried
and imposed enough hardship on the learned instruments of his
mouth he could manage to utter it, but on principle he wouldn’t.
But if I myself said ‘rothar’ among the people I grew up with I’m
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afraid they’d think I was being conceited. But I couldn’t find it in
myself to utter the term they themselves use, ‘baidhsilic’, either. It’s
not just that Irish scholar who needs a psychiatrist!8
Here Ó Cadhain juxtaposes two different linguistic ideologies. One
involves a discourse of linguistic “purity.” Thus the linguist objects that rothar
isn’t native to the dialect and violates its phonological rules, and by extension,
the linguist’s own mouth as a carefully crafted simulacrum of the dialect in all its
purity. Compare this statement to the dilemma of the dead Frenchman in Cré na
Cille who is forced by “the Institute” to unlearn all his Irish to rid itself of
“Revival Irish” and other forms of linguistic pollution.9 For Ó Cadhain such
purity can only exist in language that is “fully dead,” objectified and preserved
as a national treasure or heritage. As we will see in Chapter 7, he associated such
notions of purity with lyric poetry, Romanticism, and conservative nationalism.
In contrast, Ó Cadhain advocated “rough” prose, as language which fully
answered to the “roughness” of life itself (Ó Cadhain 1969:36-37).
In the passage quoted above, Ó Cadhain contrasts the ideology of purity
with a Gaeltacht ethos of solidarity. The ideology of the local and personal rejects
the term rothar as belonging to a “they” code—a superposed register. Thus,
someone using the word rothar would be accused of “getting above himself.” The
8. Is cúrsa crosta iad na focla Béarla atá teagtha isteach sa gcaint. Chuala mé scoláire Gaeilge ag rá
nach bhféadfadh sé rothar a rá, bicycle deile, go mb'fhéidir dhá dtaithíodh sé é agus anró aírid a chur ar
ghléasannaí oilte a bhéil go n-éireodh leis é a rá, ach ar phrinciple nach ndéarfadh. Ach dhá ndeirinn féin
rothar i gcomhlódar na ndaoine ar éirigh mé suas leo bheadh faitíos orm go sílfidís gur suimiúlacht a
bheadh orm. Ach ní bhfaighinn ionam féin leagan eile atá acu féin air a rá ach oiread, ‘baidhsilic'.
Teastaíonn siceolaí ó dhaoine seachas an scoláire Gaeilge sin! (Ó Cadhain 1969:18).
9. Ó Cadhain 1949:239; cf. my discussion of this passage in Chapter 5.
245
use of English loanwords, sometimes altered almost beyond recognition in local
speech (as in the form baidhsilic) is part of the contrasting “we” code in Ó
Cadhain’s own community. But Ó Cadhain himself felt embarrassed to utter
forms like baidhsilic, probably due to the fact that he was far more familiar with
speaking English than the generation before him was. Thus the salience of bicycle
as an “English” word would have been far greater for Ó Cadhain than it was for
his elders.
The linguist de Bhaldraithe (1953:1) has documented a change in the
phonology of English loan words in Cois Fhairrge Irish (Ó Cadhain’s dialect)
which roughly corresponded to this generational difference. “New loan words”
were thus phonologically closer to their English originals than “old” loan-words.
Thus the English word job, borrowed as a verbal lexical element into Irish was
realized in Irish, first as
, then as
. Likewise trap was borrowed, first as
tra:p, then as træp’. In both cases, the old and new borrowings carried
contrasting lexical meanings in their Irish usages.
Changes in the phonological realization of loan-words might “feel,” to
speakers such as Ó Cadhain, like a yielding to the symbolic power of English.
But the solution to this problem, the coining of “native” terms in Irish, often
amounted to an even greater yielding to English, in Ó Cadhain’s estimation.
Thus, the passage quoted above continues,
I count as indirect, if unintentional, attacks on the language many
of the new words that are brought into Irish from English letter by
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letter as it were, without regard to sound or anything. Irish is no
longer able to have its own way with borrowings. 10
Ó Cadhain complained that older neologisms like léirmheastóir (critic) and
amharclannn (theater), which, although awkward-sounding, were constructed
from native Irish elements,11 were being replaced with words like critic or téatar.
Not only do these words phonetically resemble their English counterparts, they
are also calques of them, i.e., they derive their sense from the semantic system of
English rather than that of Irish.
Ní Laoire (1983), following Dorian’s (1981:101) observations about East
Sutherland (Scots) Gaelic, analyzes the use of English borrowings as a register
phenomenon, marking a degree of “informality” in the speech event.12 In the
words of an office worker in a Gaeltacht coop,
[I]f you used the Irish name or anything like that they’d think your
Irish was a bit posh, or it wasn’t the kind of Irish they speak
themselves, you know. They’d rather use a few English terms than
10. Comhairim féin in a ionsaí neamhdhíreach ar an teanga ag daoine nach ionsaí is rún dóibh go
leor de na focla nua atá dhá dtabhairt isteach sa nGaeilge ón mBéarla litir ar an litir mar déarfá, gan aird ar
fhuaim ná eile. Mar fhocla Béarla adéarfar go brách iad. Níl an Ghaeilge feasta i n-ann a cuid féin a
dhéanamh den iasacht (Ó Cadhain 1969:18).
11. Léirmheastóir is constructed from roots glossable as SHOW + ESTIMATION +
AGENTIVE; amharclann from VIEW + PLACE.
12. Ní Laoire assumes that the phenomenon of register involves variation along a single
dimension—formality and informality of the speech event. But it is questionable whether
formality represents a single dimension in the complex sociolinguistic situation of the Gaeltacht.
Cf. Irvine 1984.
247
put Irish words on everything.13
In the testimony of this informant, the use of English terms primarily marks “weness,”—an informal social relationship. Gaeltacht coops are one of the main
interfaces between the local community and the state (Chapter 2). Taking the
example mentioned by this interviewee, if a representative of a coop, speaking to
a local person, used the Irish noun taisceán rather than the English term, safe (i.e.,
a container for valuables), this could be felt to invoke their distinct positional
identities as representatives of local versus non-local collectivities. It is the
provenance of the term taisceán—its origin in the Standard—rather than any
perceived formality or informality of the speech event, that would foreground
these identities. Thus if I used the word taisceán speaking to a friend in Ráth
Cairn, his likely response would be to comment, “That’s a nice word,
‘taisceán’!”(Is deas an focal é ‘taisceán’!). What is being mocked here is not formality
(of code or of speech event), nor an idea of “good grammar” or even register
itself. Speech forms are rejected which appear to derive their authority from
social processes which are ideologically construed as outside of and “above”
those of the Gaeltacht.
In the discourse of personalism in the Gaeltacht, register and related
phenomena are apperceived in terms of voice—the social and personal
provenance of speech forms. Thus a Ráth Cairn man, objecting to the use of
13. [D]há ndéarfá an t-ainm Gaeilge nó rud ar bith mar sin cheapfaidís go raibh tú saghas
ardnósach i do chuid Gaeilge nó nach shin an saghas Gaeilge a labhraíonn siad fhéin, you know. B’fhearr
leo roinnt téarmaí Béarla a úsáid ná bheith ag cur focal Gaeilge ar chuile short (Mac an Iomaire 1983:1516; quoted in Ní Laoire 1988:297).
248
certain words on Raidió na Gaeltachta (R. na G.), asks “where did they get that?,”
then answers his own question: “In the school”(Cá bhfuair siad é sin? Sa scoil.).
Within Gaeltacht communities the discourse of personalism, backed by an
ethic of solidarity, leads to the rejection of diglossia (Chapter 2). But this is a
rejection, not only of English/Irish diglossia, but also of Irish-language standard
registers. This ethos extends, in large part, to the management of Raidió na
Gaeltachta, much to the puzzlement of the linguist Máirtín Ó Murchú (1984:18),
who argued that written Standard Irish should be augmented by a spoken
standard as well:
When Raidió na Gaeltachta began, a new necessity was felt for
standardization of the spoken language so that the speakers would
be widely understood, and because they were worried about
certain complaints that were being made regarding the quality of
the Irish that was broadcast.... [In response] it was argued that it
would be ‘completely unreasonable to expect anyone of them to
speak anything other than their own natural dialect.’ This
argument seems to reveal a complete disregard for the particular
features that obviously pertain to cultivated speech in comparison
to ordinary speech in any linguistic community.14
The response of the station’s management exemplifies the discourse of
personalism insofar as it invokes one of the core values of Gaeltacht culture,
“nature” (nádúr).
14. Nuair a thosaigh Raidió na Gaeltachta, braitheadh riachtanas as an nua le caighdeánú a
dhéanamh ar an teanga labhartha toisc gur measadh deimhin a dhéanamh de go dtuigfí na cainteoirí raidió
go forleathan, agus toisc go rabhthas imníoch faoi ghearáin áirithe a bhí á dhéanamh faoi chruinneas na
Gaeilge a bhí á craoladh. ... áitíodh gur ‘mhíréasúnach ar fad a bheith ag súil go bhféadfadh aon duine acu
rud ar bith eile a labhairt ach a chanúint nádúrtha féin.’ Is baolach go léiríonn an t-áiteamh sin neamhaird
iomlán ar ne tréithe ar leith a bhaineann go follasach leis an gcaint chothaithe i gcomparáid le caint na
muintire in aon phobal teanga.
249
Arguably, however, a new type of “cultivated speech” is in fact
developing on R. na G. An example of this is the very name of the station, which
is pronounced ræ:d’io: n∂ ge:lt∂xt∂ by announcers.15 In informal speech it would
more often be called re:di:o: na ge:lt∂xt, omitting the word-final marker of the
feminine singular genitive and treating radio as an unassimilated English loan
word. In Ráth Cairn, Máirtín Mac Donncha frequently remarked to me that he
knew what a re:di:o: was but never saw a ræ:d’io: in his life!
Ó Murchú’s objection that the virtues of “cultivated speech” (caint
chothaithe) are ignored by the station seems strange, considering that R. na G.’s
programming is full of spoken and sung poetry, “hard talk” (cruachaint),
heightened conversation, traditional storytelling and so on. These are the “formal
registers” of Irish speech in the linguistic community of the Gaeltacht.
Furthermore, as speech genres, they are similarly constituted in each of the three
dialect areas. Thus they provide a (non-phonetic) basis for linguistic unity
between the dialect areas. And R. na G. seems to have promoted a greater mutual
intelligibility between dialects without resorting to a spoken standard Irish.
But Ó Murchú’s objection is in fact a cultural rather than a linguistic one.
Thus, he presents the choices available for the language as being to either
develop it “as a broad multifunctional aspect of our culture” (mar ghné fhairsing
ilfheidhmeach dár gcultúr) or “to leave it bound within the local folklore traditions
15. Ní Laoire (1988:297-98) cites similar phenomena on R. na G.
250
that have survived this long” (í a fhágáil fuaite laistigh de na traidisiúin áitiúla
béaloidis atá tagtha slán chomh fada seo).
This is an example of a discourse of national development applied to the
Irish language. It valorizes certain linguistic forms (standard Irish) in terms of
their modernity—a modernity which is manifested through orthographic and
aural homogeneity. These homogeneities are rationalized in terms of the
regimented code’s supposed neutrality and semiotic transparency (Silverstein
1987, to appear; Errington 1998). Underlying the discourse is a linguistic ideology
identical to that of Anderson (1983) in his analysis of the rise of the nation-state:
that uniformity of code promotes “wider communication” (an chumarsáid
fhorleathan) and the ability “to draw together speakers of the language in a
unified community” (lucht labhartha na teanga a dhlúthú i bpobal aontaithe). In
contrast, the non-standardized codes of the peripheries are seen as narrowly
traditional, “local”—i.e., bound to specific places and persons, and oldfashioned.
The ideology of standardization tends to elide issues of domination of the
peripheries by the center, attributing the power of the center to the inherent
linguistic qualities of the rationalized code. In the Gaeltacht, however, speakers
tend to explicitly respond to Standard Irish forms in terms of power and
symbolic domination, reading these forms in terms of their provenance in the
rituals of power of the centralized state.
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Anxieties of Standard Irish
The social and linguistic orders of the nation-state are contested orders. In
Ireland, a polyphonic debate about what forms written and spoken Irish should
take has mirrored anxieties surrounding the contested identity of the Irish
nation. As Schieffelin and Doucet (1998:285) observe for Haitian Creole,
arguments about orthography reflect competing concerns about
representations of Haitianness at the national and international
level—that is, how speakers wish to define themselves to each
other, as well as to represent themselves as a nation.
Linguistic ideologies pertaining to Irish have been influenced by three major
discourses, which I call the discourse of national development, the discourse of
purity, and the discourse of personalism. The first two discourses operate in
what could be called the “national” arena, positing ideal relationships between
language, the speaking subject, and the state. The discourse of personalism
operates mainly on a local basis in the Gaeltacht. It also posits relationships
between language, the speaking subject, and community, but is opposed to the
first two discourses and often involves a rejection of the state and state-defined
notions of linguistic propriety. Any individual, whether of Gaeltacht or nonGaeltacht origins, can participate in any discourse.
Discussions of standardization inevitably become entangled with
dilemmas based on the practices and ideology of the nation-state. In the 1920s
and 1930s—the early years of the Irish Free State—a “War of the Dialects” raged
about which dialect was superior as the basis of a new national language. Some
effort was made, early on, to elevate Munster Irish (the southern dialect), based
252
on claims that it was closest to Classical Irish. It is often maintained that the
current-day official Standard is biased towards Munster forms.
There was also a “war” over which script to use—Roman or Gaelic,16
whether or not and to what degree Irish orthography should be “simplified,”
and the ongoing debate between advocates of “caint na ndaoine” (colloquial
speech) and those who advocated creating a new artificial literary standard. All
of these debates reflected the political positions of the debaters regarding the
Irish Free State and its acceptance of the terms of the 1921 treaty with England
which partitioned the country and led to the Civil War of 1922-23 (Ó Ciosáin
1993:204).
Most debates around standardization have centered on orthographic
reform. There are two issues involved: the question of creating a unified spelling
for the three major dialects, and the “modernizing” of spelling to reflect
twentieth century pronunciation. But these debates inevitably raise a deeper
ideological issue. Any standardized form of Irish would inevitably function as a
superposed “high” register, implicitly devaluing “caint na ndaoine” as merely
provincial talk.
Such a register would in fact occupy much of the same functional ground
that English has held, first in the colonial state and then in the new Irish state.
16. A variant of the Gothic script invented for Queen Elizabeth I when she ordered Bibles
to be printed in Irish to propagate the Protestant faith in Ireland. The queen was “an excellent
linguist” and an early gaeilgeoir—she commissioned what may have been the first Irish-language
primer in 1564 (Ó Huallacháin 1991:103).
253
Thus the role of English and the experience of Irish speakers under anglophone
domination underlies debates about the standardization of Irish.
Early debates centered on the question of reviving the literary standard of
the 17th Century.17 Classical Irish, used throughout Gaelic speaking Ireland and
Scotland in the period between 1200 and 1650, was a superposed standard
register, regimented by bardic schools and grammatical tracts (McManus
1994:335). It thus bore some resemblance to modern standard registers in
European languages.
The main point of reference for those who advocated a Standard based on
17th Century forms was not a bardic text or even a poetic work, but a polemical
history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, written in the 1620s by a French-educated
priest, Geoffrey Keating. The language of Foras Feasa “was to become the
linguistic and stylistic lodestar of modern Irish prose, much like Luther’s Bible
translation had been for German;” unlike Luther’s work, Foras Feasa circulated in
manuscript form and was “probably the last important book in European
literature whose influence and dissemination owed nothing to the printing
press” (Leerssen 1996:274). Although Keating’s prose style was more modern
than that of the classical bardic register, he drew upon bardic style, e.g., in his
use of “‘runs’ of alliterative epithets” (Leerssen 1996:405)—a style still valued (as
cruachaint) in present-day Gaeltacht speech.18
17. A survey and discussion of these debates can be found in Ó Háinle 1994.
18. Cf. above and Chapter 4.
254
The magnetic attraction of Keating’s work to 20th Century Irish revivalists
derived not only from its language but also to its function as a polemical
“vindication of Irish civility” in response to English calumny (Kiberd 1996b;
Leerssen 1996). Richard Henebry, writing early in the century, advocated a
return to the Irish of Geoffrey Keating, banishing English borrowings and what
he termed “Revival Irish,” which he accused of being a vehicle for thought which
“has been conceived in English and is really a more or less mechanical
translation of the mental English original” (quoted in Ó Háinle 1994:760).
Henebry, an instinctive elitist, attacked not only revivalists like Pádraig Pearse
but also the speech of native speakers themselves as being impure. Colloquial
Gaeltacht speech contained many borrowings from English; likewise, many
newly created words in popular usage were based on the semantics of English
rather than Irish. Arguing against a laissez faire approach to colloquial speech,
Henebry asserted that the real meaning of caint na ndaoine should be “the
language of human beings,” not “the language of cattle” (quoted in Ó Háinle
1994:760-61).
The contemporary argument for a standardized form of Irish has been
summarized by Séamas Ó Murchú:
It is generally accepted now that a standard, especially a written
standard, is necessary for Irish if it is to be advanced as a national
language. In short, it is needed (a) as a unifying link between the
255
various dialects and (b) as an aid to the learner (S. Ó Murchú
1978:362).19
This is the simplest form of the discourse of national development, which sees a
need for unifying the forms of Irish in order unify speaking and reading publics.
However, “a unified Irish language is still only an object to pursue.”20 Any
language must acquire new words or add to the range of meaning of existing
words as the social, technical, and physical world of its speakers changes. The
particular problems facing Irish, as a minority language in a basically
anglophone modern nation-state, are particularly intense and bring into relief
many typical aspects of European linguistic ideologies. Thus in the discourse of
national development, the hoped-for unity of Irish also requires its semantic
completeness—as a Ráth Cairn person put it to me, Irish needs to have “words
for everything.”
Demography, regimentation, and neurosis
The idea that a non-standardized Irish is incomplete or incapable of
dealing with modern realities is very deeply ingrained. With what is hopefully
intentional irony, Ó Háinle (1994:777) mentions “a list of 80 words compiled at
Yale University in 1962 to test the modernity of languages.” Irish lacked only
19. Glactar leis go coitianta anois go bhfuil caighdeán, go háirid caighdeán don scríobh,
riachtanach don Ghaeilge inniu má tá sí le cur chun cinn mar theanga náisiúnta. Go hachomair, tá gá leis
(a) mar nasc aontaithe idir na canúintí éagsúla, agus (b) mar éascaíocht don fhoghlaimeoir.
20. Madne Oftedal, in a review of De Bhaldraithe’s (1959) Irish English Dictionary, quoted
in de Bhaldraithe 1992:204.
256
three of them: words for “demography,” “regimentation” and “neurosis.” But he
points out that Ó Dónaill’s 1977 Irish-English Dictionary gives us déimeagrafaíocht
agus néaróis, leaving the Irish language lacking only “regimentation!”
Notice one doesn’t test for “modernity” by asking if anyone is using Irish
to engage with the things that English-speakers sometimes call “demography’,
“regimentation’, or “neurosis.” Rather it is the presence of the “concepts” felt to
be embodied in the actual forms of (English) words that is needed, and Ó
Dónaill’s déimeagrafaíocht and néaróis in addition to being calques or loan
translations of the English terms reassuringly resemble them as well. This is the
mechanical translation that Henebry feared.
In actual use such coinages could perhaps develop their own distinctive
senses in Irish, acquire full citizenship and be fully possessed by speakers of the
language, but as long as they are felt to belong to a domain in which English feels
more appropriate, this is unlikely to happen.
How is Standard Irish regimented? When Irish speakers disparage “book
Irish,” the “book” they refer to might as well be any book, but if we have to
choose one, there is The Official Standard: Grammar and Orthography of Irish (An
Caighdeán Oifigiúil: Gramadach na Gaeilge agus Litriú na Gaeilge) published by
the Irish state in 1958. This book was the latest in a series of government
documents which began with spelling reforms in the 1940s when various
systems of orthography based more or less on Classical Irish were finally
abandoned (Ó Siadhail 1981:71-2). As the title suggests, the authors of this work
257
wished only to arrive at a standard spelling and grammar for government
publications. At the same time, they hoped that the book would provide
guidance to publishers and teachers—in short, that it would give birth to a
genuine Standard that would eventually gain wide acceptance. This would make
Irish “able to compete with English... [and would keep it] abreast of the
languages of other cultured communities”21 (quoted in Ó Háinle 1994:783).
This Standard is the creature of the Dáil translation bureau (Rannóg an
Aistriúcháin). The first Dáil (the Irish parliamentary body), elected after most of
the leaders of the failed1916 Easter rising were executed by the British, met on
January 21st, 1919. Famously, it transacted all its business in Irish (Daltún
1983:13). Subsequent sessions were conducted in both Irish and English, and the
translation bureau was created to mediate between the two languages.
This first, “republican” Dáil went the way of all flesh when the Irish Free
State was created in 1921. Subsequent governments have been more “pragmatic”
about the language question, but the first meeting of the first Dáil and the
original Proclamation of the 1916 insurgents have achieved a mythical status;
two of the three “foundings” of the Irish state were Irish-language events.
The practical, as opposed to the mythological, significance of Irish derives
from the linguistic behavior of subsequent governments. A few monolingual
Irish-speakers were elected to the Dáil in the 1930s, but the great majority of Dáil
21. inniúil ar dhul i gcoimhlint leis an mBéarla... ar chomhrian le teangacha na bpobal cultúrtha
eile.
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debate has been in English. Irish and English are constitutionally the “first” and
“second” official languages of the state. In practice, laws are drafted, debated and
enacted in English, then translated into Irish.
The translation bureau, along with related civil service bureaus and
committees, is thereby engaged in a massive effort of linguistic regimentation,
motivated by an ideology of referential transparency between the two languages.
Thus the philosophy of the Terminology Committee of the department of
Education:
That as far as possible one term shall express one concept, and one
concept shall be expressed by one term; for example in
environmental matters that trualliú is the same as ‘pollution’ and
that no other term is recommended but truailliú .22
The State functions in English, creating a register of semantically
equivalent Irish forms. But the more perfectly this semantic equivalence is
achieved, the more this formal register of Irish becomes a calque of its English
equivalent.
Gaeltacht people could thus be forgiven for seeing, in Standard Irish, an
Irish-language mask covering English-language thought. But this is more or less
the way that devotees of Standard see the speech of the Gaeltacht. Which is more
“polluted,” truailligh, or a word more likely to be heard in the Gaeltacht,
“pollute-áil?”
22. Ó hÓgáin 1983:30; my translation.
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In a variant of the discourse of national development Alan Bliss (1981) has
advocated establishing three regional standards for Irish, so as not to alienate
native speakers. Bliss, like many others, envisions two possible futures for Irish.
One option would be to create a Standard Irish which would be used “for all
purposes to the exclusion of English.” But “if Irish was to be used for all
purposes, a standard language would have to be devised ab initio, and a large
part of its vocabulary would have to be invented.” Bliss admits that has actually
been done, but “to use Irish for technical and intellectual purposes is to run
counter to the spirit of the times” when English already occupies this position
internationally, becoming more and more an international super-standard
language (Bliss 1981:78).
The other option, felt by Bliss to be more realistic, would feature diglossia
similar to that of Luxembourg (where French and Luxembourgeois are
functionally differentiated). In this scenario, English would occupy the high
registers—“used for all scholarly, technical, and political purposes”—with
written Irish used only on “a rather small scale—private letters, advertisements,
local newspapers and official announcements of a local nature (Bliss 1981:78).”
This writing would be done in the three regional standards. However documents
of national significance like the Constitution would still have to be written in
some form of a national standard Irish “which because of its legal force would
need to have the same form in all parts of the country” (ibid: 82). This statement
betrays another aspect of the ideology of the standardizing imagination—that
260
legal knowledge comes from the precise wording of laws, rather than from the
ongoing deliberations of lawmakers and courts. Interestingly, Bliss does not deal
with the question of whether or not the Irish state or any state has defined or
needs to define an official national or international standard for English.
Bliss’ argument reveals the greatest vulnerability of the discourse of
national development. If one accepts the techno-functionalist view of language
(Errington 1998) implicit in this discourse, one has to admit that the English
language is already fulfilling the role hoped for Irish. English-language media
and schooling already promote national integration and provide the matrix for a
vibrant (and internationally exportable) Irish “national” culture.23 English also
functions as a medium of supranational integration.
Bliss’ proposal is in line with the political, economic and linguistic policies
of the Irish state. The state has promoted economic growth through encouraging
massive direct foreign investment, attracting multinational corporations with
extremely low tax rates and the promise of an educated, disciplined, and
English-speaking labor force. At the same time the state’s official language policy
has been to promote “bilingualism,” although (as discussed in Chapter 2) there is
no emergent functional differentiation between Irish and English.
23. Cf. newspaper discussions of so-called “Dublin 4 speak,” named after the affluent
neighborhood of Dublin where R.T.E. (the national broadcasting network) is headquartered, or
“the DART accent,” named after the commuter rail line that connects that neighborhood to other
affluent areas along the shores of Dublin Bay. There are signs that a “standard” register is
emerging in English which is being adopted (especially by young people) all over Ireland.
261
Connemara voted heavily against Ireland’s entry into the European
Community (now the European Union) in the referendum of 1972. This
scandalized the government, which blamed Raidió na Gaeltachta (then in its
infancy) for being “biased” in its presentation of the referendum issues—i.e., for
failing to heavily promote a “yes” vote, as was done by the English speaking
media. The government responded by taking a more direct role in running R. na
G. (Ó Glaisne 1982:135-41).
Upon entry into the European Union, Ireland did not push for the
designation of Irish as an E.U. “working language,” an act that was tantamount
to accepting English as the official language of the state. This could be adduced
as evidence of what Schiffman (1996) terms a “covert language policy” in favor
of English.
Coin of the realm
The Caighdeán Oifigiúil was published 40 years ago this summer.
The French franc was also devalued in the summer of 1958.
Irish Times, 9/26/98
A statement repeated to me several times by English-speakers goes
something like this: Not everyone knows this, but legally, the Irish-language
version of any law (including the Constitution itself) is the real, legally binding
version. So if you get a smart lawyer, who knows Irish extremely well and can
find an error or discrepancy between the Irish and English versions of the
relevant law, you can get away with murder...
262
It is true that according to Article 25 of the 1937 Irish Constitution, in the
case of a discrepancy between the two, the Irish-language version of any law has
primacy over the English-language version (cf. Ó Riain 1994:25). What gives the
statement the force of a myth (Barthes 1972) is the excess of significance it
attributes to this fact. The myth has interesting implications—that in reality, laws
are “really” made by the anonymous drudges who translate them into Irish. The
legitimacy of the state then rests on their narrow shoulders; any mistakes they
make bring into doubt the state’s ability to govern. The myth also expresses the
feelings of the ordinary citizen that his fate is governed by mysterious others
who speak their own private codes. Here, Irish is seen as a secret language
spoken by the state to itself.
A strangely symmetrical legend, related to me a few times in Ráth Cairn,
concerns Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s release from prison in 1944. Along with many
other republicans, Ó Cadhain was interned in a concentration camp in Co.
Kildare during World War II, on orders from De Valera. As the story goes, De
Valera finally ordered Ó Cadhain’s release because his expertise was needed for
the English-Irish dictionary!
Like the myth about Irish-language laws, this story, related to me by
Gaeltacht people, imagines a flaw deep in the heart of the state. According to this
myth, the state was unable to author its own Andersonian birth certificate, a
dictionary, without the aid of those it had expelled from the body politic.
263
The only thing untrue in this legend was that Ó Cadhain was deliberately
released in order to work on the dictionary. In fact, upon his release, Ó Cadhain
went to Dublin and worked “on the turf” in Phoenix Park—turf was used to
replace coal during the war emergency and the government used the park as a
distribution point for the city. Many former prisoners as well as Gaeltacht people
worked there. Ó Cadhain supplemented his wages by providing words for the
Department of Education’s lexicographers. He was paid by the word for this
work, and kept providing words until his £1000 contract was used up (Costigan
1987:65). Later (1947-56) he worked for the Dáil translation bureau. And many
words and phrases from his literary work were incorporated into Ó Dónaill’s
(1977) Irish-English dictionary (Ó Murchú 1982:iii).
What makes the legend particularly mythical is the implication that the
state needs to use native speakers of Irish as a kind of mask to hide its
anglophone inner self. This is the obverse side of the English speakers’ myth
about Irish-language laws, which posits a secret Irish-speaking heart in a selfevidently English-speaking state.
Another story I was told about Ó Cadhain has it that De Valera used to
ask him for advice on speech writing. De Valera perfected a style of public
speaking where his speeches would begin and end in Irish, but were otherwise in
English.24 One day, the story goes, he phoned Ó Cadhain in the translation
24. When Muintir na Gaeltachta met De Valera in Dublin in 1934, they insisted on
negotiating in Irish—since De Valera’s Irish was limited, they would have the upper hand,
whereas De Valera would have the upper hand if the negotiations were in English (Ó Ciosáin
1993:157).
264
bureau shortly after 5pm, but Ó Cadhain refused to speak Irish to him, saying “I
only speak Irish between 9 and 5.”
An abundance of state, semi-state, non-profit, and private companies,
bodies, organizations, and artistic groups bear Irish-language titles while
functioning in English. As with De Valera’s speeches, the value of this
“symbolic” use of Irish—its ability to mark and affirm genuine identity, derives
from people, somewhere, somewhen, actually using the language to live and
communicate in. The Gaeltacht is like a linguistic Fort Knox (Taussig
1997:132)—removed from the center, but functioning as a hidden guarantor of
value for the national language. The Gaeltacht is regularly compared, in national
discourse, to a “treasure,” “storehouse,” etc. The two stories about Ó Cadhain
carry a similar message—that Gaeltacht people are needed by (and paid by) the
state to guarantee the value of its rhetoric, as well as that of its grammars and
dictionaries.
A discourse of linguistic purity
At the turn of the century, the writer Peadar Ó Laoghaire argued that a
return to classical Irish would devalue the living speech of the Gaeltacht and
advocated sticking to “caint na ndaoine.” Those who advocated sticking to the
living speech of the Gaeltacht sometimes went as far as advocating not
standardizing Irish at all, or developing three regional standards rather than one
national standard. Ó Laoghaire represented one extreme in the debate:
265
The man who wants to ‘avoid provincialisms’ simply avoids the
language. Hence, what he writes is not Irish of any description. It is
simply a Volapük invented by himself. [...] The proper thing to do
is to preserve carefully all ‘provincialisms’: not to let a shred or a
trace of them be lost. [...] Let us preserve, not only ‘provincialisms’,
but even the most isolated localisms. Ink and paper are not very
expensive (quoted in Ó Háinle 1994:761; Ó Laoghaire’s emphasis).
A 1954 article by the poet Seán Ó Ríordáin exemplifies the discourse of
linguistic purity. Ó Ríordáin was a native speaker of Irish from Baile Mhúirne in
Co. Cork, a Gaeltacht area which he describes as being breac go maith (“very
spotty,” i.e., going over to English) during his youth. Later in his life he visited
Corca Dhuibhne on the Dingle peninsula in Co. Kerry and was impressed by the
“purity” (glaine) of the dialect there. He compares this in the article to the dialect
of Sophocles and Plato, dubbed “exquisite parochial” by Arnold Toynbee. He
quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lament for “what Anglo-Saxon might have
been” as a literary language if it had escaped mixture with other languages. In
Hopkins’ words, “in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done with the
compound I cannot doubt that no beauty in a language can make up for want of
purity.” Ó Ríordáin comments that such purity depends on “dialects being
separated from one another as they are now. The more separate they are, the
purer, the more closely-knit, the more native they are.”25 Here Ó Ríordáin takes
the “separation” of the dialects, the historical effect of the decline of Irish, and
makes it into a virtue.
25. na canúintí do bheith deighilte ó cheile mar atáid fé láthair. Deighilte sea is glaine agus is
dlúithe agus is dúchasaí iad.
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Ó Ríordáin continues with a suggestion that when the language is revived
and spreads throughout Ireland, it would be better for one dialect to gain the
upper hand than for all the dialects to meld together. He then gives advice to
gaeilgeoirí who wish to gain access to the “beauty” (áilleacht) of a specific local
dialect:
Say it is an urban Gaeilgeoir who seeks it. He must live in the
Gaeltacht for at least a year and be humble in his mind in the
presence of the people. He must hold in contempt whatever Irish
he still remembers—throw away whatever he has. He must be
reborn. He must let the living Irish into his blood. This year will
stay inside him, enriching him and changing him and aiding his
reading and thoughts in Irish (Ó Ríordáin 1982 [1954]: 87).26
This is an exceptionally strong statement from a poet and linguistic virtuoso who
is highly attuned to the “fine weave” of specific local ways of speaking. But I
heard similar sentiments expressed by urban gaeilgeoirí many times in my
fieldwork, often in almost exactly the same terms.
There are several interesting things about Ó Ríordáin’s statement. The
almost ritual sacrifice of the self is also a humbling of the urban self in front of
rural others in the sacred space of the Gaeltacht. The romanticism of the gesture
is a revolutionary one, calling for the overthrow of the existing linguistic order.
The act of intense personal transformation involves a double mimesis. The
speech and thought of the gaeilgeoir is felt to become in many respects a mirror
26. Abair gur Gaeilgeoir cathrach é atá a lorg. Níor mhór do cur fé san Ghaeltacht ar feadh bliana
ar a laghad agus bheith umhal ina aigne féin i láthair na ndaoine. Níor mhór do bheith droch-mheastúil ar a
bhfuil de Ghaeilge ina chuimhne cheana fein—a bhfuil aige a chaitheamh uaidh. Níor mhór do teacht ar an
saol ath-uair. Níor mhór do an Ghaeilge bheo do ligint sa bhfuil aige. Fanfaidh an bhliain seo istigh ann á
shaibhriú agus á athrú agus ag cur len a chuid leitheoireachta agus len a mhachnamh i nGaeilge.
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of the purer speech and thought of the Gaeltacht community. 27 Thus
transformed, he or she is to return to the state, transforming it in turn. This
double mimesis is an example of what Taussig (1997) calls the magic of the state.
It is the state which invests the Gaeltacht with a sacred significance as a place of
personal and national transformation.
As we saw in chapters 2 and 5, until the 1970s Irish state policy tended to
emphasize the spiritual qualities of the Gaeltacht at the expense of its material
well-being. Although Ó Ríordáin came from the rural Gaeltacht, the discourse of
linguistic purity is rooted in what is essentially an urban standpoint, listening in
to local dialects from the outside. It is also open to the charge of spiritualizing
poverty. Máirtín Ó Cadhain criticized the discourse of purity precisely because it
required the culture of the Gaeltacht to be static and “dead”—a living death as
the victim of the state’s magic. The cultural and linguistic qualities celebrated by
Ó Ríordáin are arguably the effects of poverty and the decline of the Irish
language.28
27. Contrary to what one might expect, ideas of sexual “purity” are not an essential part
of this discourse. I often heard both Gaeltacht people and gaeilgeoirí say that they felt freer to
speak about sexual and bodily matters in Irish than in English. Historically, the regime of
censorship in Ireland has been associated with the same “modernizing” tendencies which
denigrated Irish. This had the effect of partially removing Irish language discourse from the
regime of censorship’s sphere of influence (cf. Kiberd 1995). Máirtín Ó Cadhain linked class
ambitions in the Gaeltacht to anglicization and the puritanism of a “censorious Freudian SuperEgo” (Chapter 7).
28. The point of view which located the spirituality of the Gael in his poverty was
attacked in two Gaeltacht satires, Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht (O’ Brien 1973) and
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (see Chapter 7).
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In such a discourse, Irish emerges as a very unusual example of an
“official national language,” where urban elites gain more credibility by
achieving native-like proficiency in the speech of a single poor rural townland
than they do by becoming exemplars of a new, “modern,” “dialect-free” national
standard.29 Although the English spoken by such people is sometimes quite
“posh,” it just as often is not. Even in English—which is constitutionally “the
second national language” but pragmatically speaking, the main national
language—the “centripetal forces” (Bakhtin 1981) of standardization are fairly
weak.
The personalism of Gaeltacht attitudes to speech is reinforced by the
discourse of purity and by generations of urban gaeilgeoirí returning like
swallows every summer to the same rural hearths. These people often have kinlike relations within the local community. Many of them have genuinely put
Ó Ríordáin’s advice into practice, a practice quite similar to that of anthropology
with its emphasis on long-term participant fieldwork.
The founder of the Gaelic League, Douglas Hyde, examining Irish culture
in 1892, saw his fellow Irishmen living in a “halfway house” between Irish and
English customs, language, and thought, having ceased being Irish without
becoming English. In his famous lecture, “The Necessity for Deanglicising
Ireland,” Hyde advocated reviving Irish as the national tongue of what would
29. An interesting exception which proves the point is the speech of working-class urban
gaeilgeoirí in Belfast, who have created their own “Gaeltacht” within the Nationalist community.
Although they do visit the rural Gaeltacht, these speakers often take pride in having their “own”
dialect as well as their own Gaeltacht (cf. Feldman 1991, O’Reilly n.d.).
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thereby become a distinct and independent nation. Hyde reserved special scorn
for the anglicization of personal and place names, and the ugliness of the new
names created in a desperate attempt to imitate English ways.
The techniques of the self recommended by Ó Ríordáin are aimed as much
at “deanglicizing” the self as at improving its Irish. Ó Ríordáin’s article began
with his confession that the speech of his native community, Baile Mhúirne, was
“mixed,” not with other dialects of Irish, but with English. Lurking within the
discourse of linguistic purity is a purism which, like the purism of Richard
Henebry, ultimately denigrates Gaeltacht speech as being fatally polluted with
English borrowings and code-switching.
With this in mind we can consider an earlier piece of advice from Peadar
Ó Laoghaire, on how to translate from English into Irish:
Read over the English matter carefully. Take all the ideas into your
mind. Squeeze the ideas clean from all English froth. Be sure that
you allow none of that oozy stuff to remain. English is full of it.
You must also get rid of everything in the shape of metaphor. Take
instead of it the true idea which the metaphor is intended to
convey. When you have the ideas cleared completely of foreign
matter, put them into the Irish side of your mind and shape them in
the Irish language, just as you would if they had been your own
ideas from the start.30
Ó Laoghaire suggests dividing one’s mind into “English” and “Irish” sides as a
bulwark against the oozy impurity of English-language expression. His
injunction against metaphor represents an attempt to minimize or avoid
mimesis—a mental quarantine at a border crossing.
30. Peadar Ó Laoghaire, Papers on Irish Idiom, originally published in 1899. Quoted in
Cronin 1996:147.
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Full sentence
The question of what actually counts as “speaking English” is
problematic. Once I was with some Ráth Cairn people on a trip to An Cheathrú
Rua in Connemara, and we were talking to a middle-aged man about the new
Irish-language television station, Telefís na Gaeilge (T. na G.). He particularly
objected to the use of English in one soap opera on T. na G.: “There are full
English sentences in it!” (Tá full sentence Béarla ann!). This man’s lapidary
statement encapsulated what did and did not count as “speaking English” as far
as he was concerned. Intra-sentential code switching (inserting an Englishlanguage noun phrase—full sentence) was fine, but not inter-sentential code
switching. He considered the “full sentence,” I suspect, to be the minimal unit of
linguistic intention, and thus, in a sense, of speaker identity. Proverbs tend to be
full sentences, as do quoted witticisms in conversations. But proverbs are
seanfhocail—”old words”—and the term “word” (focal) is used metaphorically to
refer to personal intention. This might have something to do with why the man
used the English term sentence rather than the more technical Irish term, abairt,
which is derived from a root meaning “say,” and can also mean “phrase.”
But a most impressive institution of metalinguistic regimentation exists in
the Gaeltacht as well—the Irish-language summer colleges for children. They are
a state-sponsored rite of initiation for most Irish teenagers, who follow in the
footsteps of the nation’s gaeilgeoirí founding-fathers to the liminal zone of the
rural Gaeltacht.
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Most summer colleges send children home if they are caught speaking
English, and “speaking English” is often defined as the utterance of a full English
sentence. Tales of horror as hapless children are sent home for saying “Excuse
me!” after sneezing at the dinner table are probably exaggerated. But this man,
who boarded summer college children, would have been asked to participate in
regimenting the speech of his charges.
Language and value
Both Ó Laoghaire and Ó Ríordáin were native speakers of Irish who,
having grown up in the Gaeltacht, went on to become national literary figures. I
have discussed a few of their writings about the Gaeltacht in which they
participate in a discourse of linguistic purity—a discourse which implies a point
of view from outside the Gaeltacht looking (or listening) in. Such discourses are
metapragmatic in that they attempt to classify, revalue and/or regiment various
ways of speaking (Silverstein 1976; Lucy 1993; Hill 1998).
A central concern of this dissertation involves the various ways that
people have struggled to value and revalue various ways of speaking Irish. Thus,
main points of contention in the political struggles described in Chapters 2, 4,
and 5 have been the relationships between language forms, cultural values, and
communities of speakers, which mediate the relationships between these
communities and larger collectivities. These struggles involve discourses about
languages and communities in their entireties. Other issues involve the valuation
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of particular generic ways of speaking: poetic speech, the “crack,” song, etc.
Styles and registers of speaking are valued and revalued in these discourses as
well: Is a Standard Irish is a worthy goal? What communities would such a
Standard ideally represent? What kinds of relationships between Irish and
English words or ways of speaking are desirable, and what communities or types
of person are associated with various styles of code-switching? The lexical
“value” of individual words is also an issue, along with the question of who or
what shall determine these lexical values—learned committees at the center of
state power, or local communities far from the center.
It is possible to consider these discourses as socially “constructing” the
values of various ways of speaking from without, as it were. But every act of
speaking is also an implicit act of valuation. To the extent that any stretch of
speech is “voiced” in Bakhtin and Voloshinov’s sense, the participants in the act
of speaking make an implicit connection between language form, cultural values,
and social points of view.
Quotation
The rich variety of forms and functions of quotation in various cultures of
speaking has been one of the major topics in linguistic anthropology (cf. Lucy
1993). These pertain to what Voloshinov (1973:117) shows are social relations
between speakers and between contexts of speech. The forms used in reported
speech
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reflect basic and constant tendencies in the active reception of other
speakers’ speech [...] How, in fact, is another speaker’s speech
received? What is the mode of existence of another’s utterance in
the actual, inner-speech consciousness of the recipient? How is it
manipulated there, and what process of orientation will the
subsequent speech of the recipient himself have undergone in
regard to it? What we have in the forms of reported speech is
precisely an objective document of this reception. Once we have
learned to decipher it, this document provides us with information,
not about accidental and mercurial processes in the “soul” of the
recipient, but about steadfast social tendencies in an active
reception of other speakers’ speech, tendencies that have
crystallized into language forms.
As Judith Irvine (1996) has shown, quotation involves the relation of two or more
contexts of speaking--the reporting and reported contexts:
With reported speech forms [...] the speaker constructs or
represents a projective relation among dialogues: a projecting one,
i.e. the pragmatic present, and a projected or implicated one, whose
utterance is quoted (Irvine 1996:147).
This seemingly very simple structure can be endlessly complicated in practice.
Quoted speech is not always overtly marked (eg., by quotation frames such as
“He said ‘X’”). Any aspect of the speech situation can serve to identify a stretch
of speech as quotation, including even the social role of the speaker. Griots
(members of a West African bardic caste) are a case in point, where
quotative framing is virtually implicit in the social identiy of the
griot, so central is quotative transmission (jottali) to the very
definition of the griot’s place in society (Irvine 1996:148).
Entire languages can become understood as the “words of the ancestors,” as in
the case of Wasco (Moore 1993:237), a dying Native American language:
For younger speakers, knowledge of the language is constituted in
memories of its authoritative use in context(s). The need to validate
this knowledge by rendering it performable involves the
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intertextual re-enactment of remembered events of use through
direct quotation: “Grandma said: ‘...’.”
Proverbs are understood in many cultures as ancestors’ or elders’ speech,
although they may be marked as such only by their grammatical form. As Irvine
(1996:148) points out, one could invent a Wolof proverb in the proper form
and have it be taken as ancestral wisdom. As in the invented
traditions discussed by Hobsbawm (1983), a dialogue among
ancestral speakers would thus be implicated by the proverb form
although having no actual historical basis.
By looking at various practices of quotation and attribution in Ireland we
may begin to understand them as instances of a more general phenomenon
involving history, memory, and personality.
Proverbs are sometimes framed in similar ways (mar a déarfá, mar a dúirt an
té a dúirt, etc.), occasionally with humorously absurd attribution--“quotation
proverbs” (Mac Con Iomaire 1988:210) which
not only lack the seriousness and solemnity of ordinary proverbs,
but they turn some of them about and hold them up to ridicule:
“‘There is no luck except where there is discipline’--as the son said
while beating his father” (“Ní bhíonn an rath ach mar a mbíonn an
smacht”--mar a dúirt an mac agus é ag bualadh a athar)
Humorous usages or parodies are valuable for revealing the underlying
assumptions which they play upon—in this case, that something worth repeating
has an author and was created in and for a specific situation. This assumption is
very common in the performance tradition, where transmission is often
personalized—tied up with memories of persons and events—through practices
of quotation, naming, and narration.
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Imitation
During my fieldwork in Ráth Cairn, one of the first things that struck me
about speech styles in Irish was the manner in which people imitated others in
passing. These minimal quotations, usually only a single word or short phrase,
are framed with phrases like mar a déarfadh x (“as x would say”). Miniature
performances, they simultaneously summon up an image of a third person and
focus attention on the linguistic form of the quoted word or phrase. They are
thus “poetic,” representing the minimalist convergence of the poetic and
metalinguistic functions of language (in Jakobson’s 1987 [1960] sense). As
performances, they are an extremely common feature of “the crack,” acting as the
first step in the progression to heightened conversation and verbal art.
Performative quotation is the essence of linguistic personalism,
simultaneously calling attention to the social and personal provenance of
particular language forms and making social types out of the individuals quoted.
Thus it is a powerful metalinguistic tool in a community
where different generations and social strata exhibit markedly different speaking
styles.
The situation in the Irish Gaeltacht is very much like that of the
Norwegian-speaking community studied by Blom and Gumperz (Gumperz
1982:27), where
[w]hat was normal usage for some in some situations counted as
marked for others. Marked forms, moreover, tended to be used to
convey indirect inferences which could only be understood by
someone who knew both the speaker’s family background and his
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or her position within the social spectrum of value orientations.
Language use in situations such as these... is a way of conveying
information about values, beliefs and attitudes...
In its minimal form, performative quotation is used in situations where both the
audience and the person quoted are social familiars. Detailed background
information about speakers and situations can be left unspoken. Even the
identity of the quoted person can be left unstated. I noticed that Máirtín Mac
Donncha sometimes mentioned the person’s name only for my benefit, assistance
that was clearly unnecessary for the other people involved in the conversation.
These minimal quotations form the basis of much of Irish language verbal
art. Although I was fascinated with the minimal forms, I was never able to tape
record them, because they weren’t regarded as “performance” and usually only
took place in private conversation. People seemed almost unaware that they
were doing it, and I never got anyone to reflect on the practice. Instead, I
occasionally tried to produce these forms myself. One time when a group of Ráth
Cairn people was visiting Connemara, we were in a pub where a lottery was
taking place, and I remarked that if a certain elderly Ráth Cairn woman were
there, “she’d be looking at the numbers.” (bheadh sí ag breathnú ar na numbers).
The response I got was “You’ve been here too long!” (Tá tú rofhada anseo). What
made it work as a performative quotation was the use of “her word” (numbers)
spoken in her voice, plus her reputation as an enthusiast of any form of lottery,
bingo, etc.
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I found that the great majority of people quoted were older people and
“characters,” especially people who had died in the last several years. I heard a
few such people quoted so much that I felt like I knew them myself, even though
they had passed away before my arrival in Ráth Cairn.
Quotation of older people is almost invariably affectionate, if not
respectful, in tone. Typically it highlights antiquated speaking styles, especially
the difficulties “the old people” (an seandream) had with English. Sometimes it is
expanded into a full anecdote. For example, a (named) Ráth Cairn man goes to
Athboy and wants to buy some ballach (a type of fish), and asks the shopkeeper
for “four bollockses.” Máirtín Mac Donncha told me many stories like this,
sometimes adding that it was a good thing to hear bad English in Ireland!
Voice and the social construction of codes
Quotation framing acts to increase the salience of codes, by voicing
them—attaching them to social types. All quotation typifies, as Lucy (1993:120)
points out:
A unique utterance is not, by definition, a token because there is no
corresponding type. (The sign is only a sinsign in Peirce’s
framework). However, the moment a second utterance is produced
which purports to copy or replicate that original utterance, it is no
longer unique; a type has been created (the original utterance has
been typified) and the original and its replicas must be regarded
thereafter as tokens of a type—even though the reporter may be
striving to articulate their contextual specificity and ultimately
deny their status as tokens of types.
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For Peirce (4.537), the token/type distinction is part of the trichotomy of tone,
token and type (also called qualisign, sinsign, and legisign). In Peirce’s
philosophy all such distinctions are gradient rather than absolute, due to the
principle of “synechism” (continuity). That is, tone, token, and type shade into
one another. This has implications for the study of reported speech. More than
just speech can be “reported.” Voicing occurs on the tonic level, reporting
speaking style and other gestural elements.31
Take for example the statement by Máirtín Mac Donncha (discussed in
Chapter 5): “O, yeah, the young people now talking about silage and bales of hay.
And milk quotas and things like that.” (O yeah, an dream óg anois ag caint ar silage
agus baleannaí féir. Agus quota bainne agus rudaí mar sin ). He imitates the tone of
voice and the lexical accent of “the young people,” calling attention to the link
between their speaking style and their social values. Farming-for-profit is an
English-language discourse in County Meath, and the use of English terms by
“the young people” of Ráth Cairn is a power code analogous to the Hispanicized
power code used by Mexicano-speaking cultivators, as reported by Hill
(1985:727).
Just as voicing often calls attention to the social bases of code-switching,
code-switching is a matter of voice. Code-switched statements like “My friend is
into that as well” (Tá mo chara into that as well) adopt English-language cliches
into Irish-language sentences. Gaeltacht teenagers have perfected this style,
31. See Chapter 8 for an example of quotation in dancing.
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which seems to be attractive to them because most teenagers speak entirely in
cliches anyway, and also for its value in driving purists crazy. Cliches, as readymade chunks of speech, take on value due to their indexical connection to valued
domains (e.g., English-language television shows). Thus, this type of codeswitching could be seen as a negotiation with the symbolic power of English (cf.
Hill 1985:725).
Explicit framing of quotation (as opposed to mere voicing) moves the
metalinguistic event further up Peirce’s trichotomy, explicitly constructing the
reported speech as a token of a type. In ordinary speech, Irish-speakers
commonly deal with words or phrases that feel somewhat at odds with the
conversation’s style by framing them as anti-quotations: mar a déarfá (“as you’d
say”) or various improvisations on the same theme: Mar a dúirt an ceann eile (“as
the other one said”), similar to the use in English of phrases like “so to say” or
“as it were.” Sometimes such phrasings are little more than devices to mark out a
kind of rhythm in speech or to express nervousness. But as they become more
prominent they work to thicken the texture of speech by de-centering portions of
it, attributing it to some other context. An example of this is the use of mar a
déarfá or mar a deir an Béarla (“as the English [language] says”), on Raidió na
Gaeltachta by interviewees when using words or phrases they feel are in
“English” rather than assimilated borrowings, eg. “county board” as opposed to
“bicycle.”
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Quotation framing can “insulate” (Irvine 1996:149) the speaker from full
responsibility for the words it frames; the speaker is thus not “speaking English”
and breaking the rules of R. na G. (the station forbids English-language talk and
song lyrics).
This null type, anti-quotation (the use of forms such as mar a déarfá, “as
you’d say”) tends to be used to frame speech that feels to the speaker like it is
relatively less voiced than the ongoing discourse they are participating in.
Examples of this are the framing of technical jargon in informal conversation and
the framing of English words and phrases on Raidió na Gaeltachta. Other forms
of quotation framing are used to frame speech which feels relatively more voiced
than the ongoing discourse. People use it to frame phrases from other dialects:
“as the Kerryman says...” (Mar a deir fear Ciarraí...). On R. na G. (12/24/98), an
interviewee mentions having visiting relatives from America, and the host says:
“As they say naturally, you have yanks visiting” (Mar a deireann siad go nádúrtha,
tá yanks sa mbaile a’d). Here the host uses an English word (yanks) that the
interviewee would have used if he weren’t speaking carefully due to being on
the air.
At the furthest extreme is performative quotation, where the voices of
named individuals are animated in conversation. This type of quoted speech is
maximally voiced—representing the point of view of a single individual.
In Irish-language verbal art, maximal use is made of the construction of
voice in direct discourse (Chapters 7 and 8). Verbal art can be seen as an
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extension and deepening of everyday practices of quotation and voicing. One of
the many social ends served by verbal art is thus the metalinguistic
regimentation and revaluing of speaking styles. It comes as no surprise, then,
that Gaeltacht verbal art plays an important role in resisting ideological assaults
from without.
A case in point is Joe Steve Ó Neachtain’s humorous poetic dialogue
(agallamh beirte) (1986:35-40) “Ar Thóir Deontais” (Looking for a Grant), which
features a confrontation between a Gaeltacht mother and the civil servant who
has denied her son a grant for speaking Irish. The civil servant relates to the
mother how she gave her son an oral examination and concluded that he didn’t
know any Irish at all. The humor of the piece revolves around the linguistic
misunderstandings between the two. The civil servant reports the conversation
she had with the son, but it becomes clear that the son, like the mother, heard the
civil servant’s “Standard” Irish words as English words:
[civil servant]:
Dúirt mise— ‘Cad is ainm duit?’
Is níor fhreagair sé in aon chor!
I said— ‘What is your name?’
And he [the son] didn’t answer me at all!
[mother]:
A dhiabhail, ní Cod is ainm dó!
Baisteadh chomh maith leat féin é.
The devil [an expletive], his name isn’t Cod!
He was baptized just like you were.
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Neither the son or the mother recognize the Munster dialect form, Cad is ainm
duit. They both hear it as “Cod is ainm duit”—“Your name is a cod [a joke].”
Likewise, they hear rothar as “roar” instead of “bicycle,” and so on.
The son doesn’t speak Irish at all, says the civil servant. She recommends
that the family watch Trom agus Éadrom, a television program featuring light
entertainment and a “bilingual” format featuring token use of Irish. The woman
objects (using two assimilated English words) that that show is nothing but the
host “scratching himself and blabbing in English” (á scraitseáil féin / Is é ag
plobaráil i mBéarla). She says that the show’s host is the type of person who is
highly regarded and will get the best jobs in Ireland, and that the civil servant
would never have gotten her job if she spoke Irish “from the cradle” (ón
gcliabhán).
The civil servant responds, “But I have standard [Irish] and grammar,
something that doesn’t exist in the Gaeltacht” (Ach tá caighdeán agam is gramadach,
/ Rud nach bhfuil sa nGaeltacht). She accuses the mother and son of speaking “halfEnglish” (leath Béarla). To this, the mother retorts that the civil servant wouldn’t
speak Irish at all if it weren’t for her well-paying job.
In this poetic dialogue, and typically for the genre, the mother and son are
cunning simpletons attempting to gain the upper hand in conflict with the
outsider. Here, they do so by threatening her with retaliation from their local
T.D. (representative in the national Dáil). In the clientelist political system of
Ireland, this is the only way to beat the Civil Service.
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Like the man referred to above who objected to “full sentences” in English
on T. na G., the conflict in Ó Neachtain’s dialogue contrasts two attitudes to
bilingualism. The mother, by her own reckoning, speaks “Irish” all the time, but
has no problem with lacing her speech with unassimilated as well as assimilated
loanwords from English. The civil servant, on the other hand, stands for a
“bilingualism” where a pristine but artificial form of Irish is spoken, and where
“standard [Irish] and grammar” are objects of value in an English-speaking
world.
This is a conflict over possession. Ó Neachtain suggests that the discourse
of the civil servant, by recognizing as genuine “language” only that which is
regimented and formalized as “standard and grammar,” dispossesses Gaeltacht
people.
The position of Irish is thus similar to that of Mexicano, a minority native
language of Mexico, where the purist discourse of “legitimo Mexicano” acts to
devalue peasant speech. Jane Hill (1985:735) refers to this purism as “linguistic
terrorism,” the voice of a Spanish-language discourse. “Thus, purist rhetoric joins
other pressures in driving Mexicano into an underground, often secret, solidarity
code.”
For the hero of Ó Neachtain’s miniature drama, as for Máirtín Ó Cadhain,
bilingualism in Ireland is like “a cat and a mouse in a box” (Chapter 5). In an
equal contest, English will have the upper hand (cf. Eckert 1980). But in the
wilfully hybridized speaking style that Ó Neachtain celebrates, the mouse has
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the cat in the box—English-language elements have been possessed and
subordinated to an Irish-language discourse.
In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, as the colonial regime was
consolidated in Ireland, Irish-language poets mocked their fellow Irishmen’s
adoption of English mannerisms by calling attention to the newfangled
Englishisms (béarlachas) in their speech, manners and dress (Leerssen 1996:204).
Now, in the late twentieth century, Gaeltacht poets like Ó Neachtain defend the
hybrid speech of their neighbors against the linguistic purism of an independent
Irish state.
Conclusions
In this chapter we have explored a few of the consequences of the unusual
status of the Irish language as both a minority language and the official national
language of Ireland. We examined three different discourses about the language:
the discourse of national development, the discourse of purity, and the discourse
of personalism. Debates about the ideal form of the Irish language are motivated
by conflicting conceptions of community—of what kinds of people speak Irish
and what types of social relations ideally underpin the Irish state. Each discourse
constitutes a particular set of ways for locating social value in linguistic forms.
The practices and institutions associated with these discourses attempt in
various ways to create global images of ideal communities of Irish speakers. In
this sense, they function as attempts to “voice” the Irish language as a whole—to
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connect idealized linguistic forms to idealized images of speakers as social types.
In this case, the social types are not so much types of person as types of
community.
Each discourse tries in its own way to situate the Irish language vis-a-vis
the unquestioned symbolic power of English. They do so by imitating the
perceived referential power and transparency of the English language (in the
case of the discourse of national language development), attempting to avoid
English altogether (as in purist discourses) or finally, embarking on strategies of
incorporation and possession of English forms (in the case of the personalist
discourse of the Gaeltacht).
There is another aspect of the relationship between the Irish and English
“languages” that we have barely touched on thus far: the relationship between
linguistic cultures as repertoires of generic ways of speaking—sets of practices
which relate discourse forms, the social organization of speech events (e.g.,
footing in Goffman’s (1981) sense) and cultural values or points of view.
The situation in Ireland is that cultural “ways of speaking” and
“languages” (Irish and English) are overlapping categories. Names of many
speech genres are commonly used to refer to forms of talk current in both
languages. Thus, Máirtín Mac Donncha, like other Irish-speakers, uses terms like
“joke,” craic (“crack”), seisiúin (“session”), “party,” “sketch,” (a satirical skit),
sean-nós, and so on, to refer to performances in either language. Writers such as
Glassie (1982), Lloyd (1993), and Shields (1993) have recognized the great
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similarity between “traditional” genres in English, such as broadside ballads,
and Irish-language genres such as lyric song laments. Joe Heaney (Chapter 8)
recognized these as essentially similar and used terms like “lament” and “seannós” to cover productions in both languages.
The term gaelach is used by Irish-speakers to refer to possession of such a
valued ensemble of ways of speaking. One can be “gaelach” without speaking
Irish and one can speak nothing but Irish without being “gaelach.” For Irish
speakers, quite clearly, the term “gaelach,” although having the specific meaning
of “pertaining to the Irish language,” refers more widely to the general forms of
sociality in which “Irish” ways of speaking are embedded. As Glassie’s Englishspeaking informants in 1970s County Fermanagh pointed out, in many ways the
most profound “linguistic” transformations in Ireland occur, not when Irish is
abandoned in favor of English, but when more “traditional” modes of sociality
are abandoned in favor of more “modern” ones. Glassie’s informants saw this
literally as a process of “losing the language”—i.e., losing one’s ability to (like the
Irish language poets discussed in Chapter 4) utilize talk as an effective means of
mobilizing traditional social and cultural value.
At this level, we take leave of narrowly specific cultural notions of
language form considered in itself, and turn our attention more directly to the
relationships between ways of speaking and forms of sociality in general—taking
Gaeltacht culture as a culture of speaking. Thus, we have looked at ordinary
practices of quotation and anti-quotation in conversation and in more “formal”
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situations such as radio talk. We have noted continuities between these everyday
practices and the loftier reaches of verbal art—poetry and song performance (to
be explored in greater depth in Chapter 8). We have seen how notions of the
normative nature of the “code” itself—what should or should not count as
“speaking Irish”—emerge from everyday speech practices and are refracted
more deliberately and self-consciously in verbal art. “Code-switching”
(incorporation of English grammatical and lexical elements in “Irish-language”
speech events), and conflict about it, is principally a matter of voicing. By looking
at ways of negotiating, maintaining, and violating norms of code-switching, we
saw the voice system and the here-and-now construction of voice as an active
tool of social interaction.
In the next chapter we return to Máirtín Ó Cadhain, this time as a Dublinbased writer, intellectual and political activist. His great novel, Cré na Cille, is a
modernist symphony of voices, on a par with the works of Joyce and Beckett,
and also the first modernist novel to be set in a rural rather than an urban milieu
(Kiberd 1996). Cré na Cille is Ó Cadhain’s novelistic attempt to globally examine
the relationships between ways of speaking and forms of sociality, through an
aural portrait of the speech of an entire Gaeltacht community.
Ó Cadhain saw his life work as a struggle to create a modern literary
language in Irish. Such a task is highly political in any language, and all the more
so in a “national” language which also happens, perhaps uniquely, to be a
minority language. Ó Cadhain’s novel is an attempt to bridge these
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contradictions in part by relying on a very traditional form––the construction of
voice in direct discourse––which he took to new levels in Cré na Cille.
CHAPTER SEVEN
VOICES OF THE DEAD AND A ‘NEW MEDIUM’: MÁIRTÍN Ó CADHAIN’S
CRÉ NA CILLE
The Irish language is the re-conquest of Ireland, and only the reconquest of Ireland will save the Irish language.1
(Ó Cadhain 1990 [1970]:18)
Máirtín Ó Cadhain was born in 1905 in Cois Fharraige in the Connemara
Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking district) in county Galway. A lifelong radical, he saw in
the restoration of Irish, his native language, the possibility of creating a
revolution that would put an end to the social and cultural power of Ireland’s
colonizers and their heirs. Ó Cadhain escaped poverty to become a schoolteacher
and writer, only to lose his job for being a member of the IRA. Like many others
he was interned in the Curragh prison camp––“Ireland’s Siberia, surely the
coldest place in Ireland ”––for most of World War Two, a place he compared to
Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead (Ó Cadhain 1969:7). This experience transformed
Ó Cadhain’s life and gave him the experience which formed the basis of his
career as a writer:
I spent the equivalent of five years in three or four prisons but most
of it was in the prison camp in the Curragh of Kildare. I don’t wish
to say much about it although it is relevant to these issues. I learned
1. “Is í an Ghaeilge Athghabháil na hÉireann, agus is í Athghabháil na hÉireann slánú na
Gaeilge.”
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as much about humanity [there] as I would if I’d lived a hundred
years. Knowledge of humanity, of life, is necessary for a writer (Ó
Cadhain 1969:26).2
The internees managed to turn the camp into a kind of university where Ó
Cadhain taught himself and others several European languages, reading through
the Russian and French classics (Ó Cadhain 1969, 1973). These influences are
evident in his novel, Cré na Cille,3 which he began shortly after being
(reluctantly!) released from the camp.
‘A new medium’
Ó Cadhain was a committed modernist, and as such faced immense
problems working through the medium of Irish, a language seemingly suited
only for the old and traditional. Historical events had driven Irish back to the
western seaboard where it survived in the speech and folklore of a rural
underclass. Although Irish for centuries had a highly developed vernacular
2. Chaith mé ionann’s chúig bhliana idir trí nó ceathair de phríosúin ach ba sa gcampa géibhinn ar
Churrach Chill Dara a chaith mé an chuid is mó dhe. Ní mian liom mórán a rá faoi sin, cé go mbaineann sé
le mo scéal. Fuair mé an oiread eolais ar an duine is dhá mbeinn céad bliain ar an saol. Tá eolas ar an duine,
ar an saol, riachtanach don scríbhneoir.
3. Keefe’s (1984) translation of “Cré na Cille” as “Churchyard Clay” may conjure up a
misleading image of an English or New England village with its church and graveyard at the
center, etc. Cill historically meant ‘church’, originally a monastic ‘cell’, but its basic meaning now
would simply be ‘graveyard’. Irish Catholic graveyards are often not contiguous to churches,
although often they are associated with ruins of ancient churches or monastic sites, destroyed or
abandoned as a result of invasion or colonization. These sacred grounds are often eccentric to
modern settled areas. The liminality of these sites is thus the product of historical disruption as
much as ecclesiastical design. As for cré, the most common equivalent in English as spoken in
Ireland, in speaking of human remains, would be ‘dust’ (Tadgh Ó Dúshláine, personal
communication). In Irish the same word is used for human remains, clay, and earth. Ó Cadhain’s
title plays on the full range of meanings of both cré and cill.
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literature and a standard literary register, these were destroyed along with native
political and educational institutions in the events following the Elizabethan
conquest in the 17th Century. After independence in 1922, the Irish state
officially promoted the language, but in practice functioned through English,
treating Irish as a static symbol of the past, a ‘tradition’ to be lovingly preserved,
but without relevance to modern life.
As we have seen in Chapters 2, 5, and 6, because of the perceived cultural
and political power of English, bilingualism was often not seen as a viable option
in Ireland. Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha (known as “An Seabhac”) was typical of
many when in a 1936 lecture he maintained that the country as a whole was
forced to decide between two opposed futures for the language:
[I]t isn’t very certain which of them they have decided upon, [Irish]
as a beautiful valuable jewel in a glass case, an object of wonder
and pride, of scholarly study, or as the normal instrument of fair
and hearth, shop and church, business and culture, relying on
[Irish] alone.4
Style became politicized in such an atmosphere; depending on the stand one took
on An Seabhac’s question, either Irish should grow and develop modern themes
and styles or else it should be confined to older, ‘traditional’ styles and themes.
Thus, conservative nationalist literary critics maintained that Irish literature
4. [N]í ro-chinnte atá sé cioca tá sé beartuighthe aca í bheith ‘na seoid áluinn luachmhar fé chlúid
i gcás gloine, chun bheith ag déanamh iongantais is mórtais di, is staidéar léigheanta uirthi, nó í bheith ‘na
gnáth-uirlis aonaigh is teaghlaigh, siopa is eaglaise, gnótha is cultúra, agus a bheith i dtaoibh léi amháin.
In Éire na Gaedhilge nó Anglo-Ireland--Ciocu? (“Irish [-language] Ireland or Anglo-Ireland-Which one?”), quoted in Ó Ciosáin 1993:182. I am grateful to Éamon Ó Ciosáin for calling my
attention to this quote.
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should stick to what was termed caint na ndaoine--colloquial speech (literally, “the
people’s speech”) as they understood it (Chapter 6). They saw Irish as a vehicle
for the preservation of traditional values, with any salacious or controversial
material edited out. But those wishing to modernize Irish faced an additional
issue -- the wholesale imitation of English grammar and idioms, which writers
like Ó Cadhain saw as beholden to an alien discourse.
In a testament he wrote shortly before his death (Ó Cadhain 1969), Ó
Cadhain argued, taking issue with his conservative critics, that Irish was a new
literary medium. Any possible continuity with past literary traditions had been
broken by the marginalization of Irish and its speakers under an Anglophone
cultural and political regime. As an innovating writer in a minority language, he
was faced with a dilemma: to either break with the ‘folk’ speech community or
be bound by it.
Ó Cadhain refused to do either. Although brought up in a rich oral
tradition, he refused to become a ‘folkloric’ writer, confined to the themes and
forms of folklore. Likewise, he refused to try and create a special literary register
within Irish, a “unitary language” of tradition, whether old or new. Like Bakhtin
(1981:271), he identified such attempts with literary lyric poetry. He maintained
that Irish, like other minority languages, was plagued by a “disease of poetry”-lyric poets writing about their own “private minor upset little pharmacist’s
bottles,” severing the connection between writing and the social world. Prose, on
the other hand, was “the material, the concrete, the building-stone of life, and as
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rough and disagreeable as life itself” (Ó Cadhain 1969:36-37).5 Ó Cadhain sought
a development and enrichment of all the lexical and stylistic resources of Irish,
bringing them to bear on the modern world as he found it. But such an
enrichment could proceed only through a critical process in which the cultural
and social connotations of Irish ways of speaking were brought to the
foreground artistically, revealed for what they were. Cré na Cille , his major
novel, was an attempt to do this satirically, and did so by bringing together the
methods of satiric folk poetry of Connemara and the modern European novel.
Ó Cadhain’s own account (1969) of his evolution as a writer focuses
heavily on words––their creation, meaning, and connotation. This is in keeping
with Friedrich’s observation that lexical meaning is a primary focus of poetic
craft; poetry draws upon and deepens the motivations of words, their connection
to the grammatical and semantic structure of language as a whole (Friedrich
1979, 1996; see also Jakobson 1987 [1960]). Silverstein (1979) notes that the word,
as the largest decontextualizable unit of language, is a natural focus for
“secondary rationalization,” in which pragmatic meaning (the perceived residue
or effect of language use in context) is projected onto lexical structure.
Ó Cadhain was supremely aware of the poetic and pragmatic potentials of
words, and sought to exploit them in his own effort to reconstruct Irish as a
literary language. His prose––fictional works, political tracts and literary
5. Ó Cadhain here referred explicitly to literary lyric poetry, while maintaining that local
folk poets in the Gaeltacht still had “a public and a function” and played a social role similar to
that of poets under the old gaelic regime. Cf. Denvir 1989. Although he criticized lyric poetry, Ó
Cadhain’s prose is deeply poetic in the sense explored by Friedrich (1996).
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essays––is often dense with new or unfamiliar words, words the author coined
himself or picked up from Old and Middle Irish, Scots Gaelic, archaic words
from folklore, and even fossilized Irish words he found in the Hiberno-English
dialects of his cell-mates in the Curragh camp. He saw himself as a literary
craftsman, but as responsible to his community and its popular speech forms. He
was proud of the fact that his neighbors in the Connemara Gaeltacht had little
trouble understanding Cré na Cille, which was certainly not the case with nonnative speakers who lacked the intuitive sense of the deep structure of Irish that
would allow them to grasp unfamiliar words.
Ó Cadhain approvingly quoted Mallarmé’s maxim--donner un sens plus pur
aux mots de la tribu (Ó Cadhain 1969:16-17). But his “tribe” was first and foremost
the people of the Gaeltacht––Irish-speakers whose communities and language
were becoming more, not less marginalized under an independent Irish state.
These communities were in a sense doubly colonized: by an anglophone national
Irish state, and in a wider sense by that state’s own neocolonial domination
under the emerging post-war world order of the 1940s. Ó Cadhain saw the
decline of Irish within the Gaeltacht as the linguistic expression of the increasing
class stratification of Irish-speaking communities.6 The living speech of the
Gaeltacht, with its ever-changing linguistic fashions of speaking, genres and
6. Ó Ciosáin (1991) critiques the strangely romantic and condescending assumptions
about the Gaeltacht as classless that underlie and undermine Hindley’s (1990) analysis of the
decline of Irish.
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registers, was both the expression and a prime instrument of such change. Cré na
Cille was Ó Cadhain’s parodic microscope with which to examine it.
Ó Cadhain’s realism
Máirtín Ó Cadhain saw the representation of ‘a person’s own speech’ as
the key to his characters’ psychology:
The most important thing in literature now is to reveal the human
mind, something the camera cannot be pointed at. I mean a
person’s own speech. Speech is much stronger for doing that than
giving stock phrases about his clothes, physical appearance, his
language, the furniture in his house or the stage props, the features
of the country, or the customs there. If it is a historical story, the
history will tell you what your story’s characters did, and psycheology7 will help you a great deal to guess what led them to do those
things. It’s not what is on a person’s skin [ie, what’s on the outside]
that is important, or even his skin itself, but the thing he is walking
around with inside of his head. We know more about the stars of
heaven than about what is happening inside that little shell next to
you (Ó Cadhain 1969:30-31).8
7. Ó Cadhain gives his own coinage––‘aigneolaíocht’––glossing it with the more common
‘síceolaiocht’ –– a loan translation of the English ‘psychology’. Aigne has more of the meaning of
‘character, intention, disposition’ than the English term ‘mind’. Ó Cadhain’s discursive prose is
full of such coinages accompanied by glosses, in keeping with his project to build a modern Irishlanguage discourse.
8. An rud is tábhachtaí anois sa litríocht ar fad, an intinn a léiriú, e nach féidir an camera a dhíriú
uirthi. Caint dhílis an duine nach mór. Is acmhainní i bhfad caint chuige sin ná ag tabhairt seoraithe faoin
a chuid éadaigh, a ghné chraicinn, a theanga, troscán a thí nó troscán an ardáin, na tíre, ná na nós atá faoi
gcuairt. Más scéal stairiúil é, inseo an stair dhuit céard a rinne pearsana do scéil agus cuideo an
aigneolaíocht, an tsíceolaíocht, cuid mhaith leat le tomhais céard a thug dóibh na rudaí sin a dhéanamh. Ní
hé an rud atá ar chraiceann an duine a bhfuil an tábhacht ann, ná fiú an craiceann féin, ach an rud a bhfuil
sé ag siúl timpeall leis istigh in a cheann. Is mó atá a fhios againn faoi réalta Nimhe ná faoin a bhfuil ar siúl
istigh faoin mblaoisc bheag sin le t’ais.
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Writing about a Greek intellectual who resembles Ó Cadhain in many
ways, Herzfeld (1997b) maintains that Greek literary realism is founded on the
attempt to divine the motivations of others’ words and actions:
the description of motive and desire... is an important aspect of any
claim to realism the Greek context. Like most Greeks, Andreas
[Nenedakis] both doubts the possibility of knowing another’s
thoughts and recognizes the existence of conventions for doing so
(Herzfeld 1997b:7).
Ó Cadhain’s psychology is founded on similar doubts as to the knowability of
another’s motives or interior states. What distinguishes his realism (in Cré na
Cille) from that of Nenedakis is Ó Cadhain’s exclusive reliance on the direct voice
of characters in dialogue as the only instrument with which to plumb these
depths. To make matters worse, Ó Cadhain deliberately exaggerates the degree
to which his characters’ speech is composed almost exclusively of cliches. As
Friedrich (1986) points out, cliche and repetition form one of the main bases of
both “high” poetry and “folk” verbal art. In this sense, Cré na Cille embodies a
poetics of voice, but one which is maximally social, as is ensured by the
claustrophobic confines of its graveyard setting.
Ó Cadhain’s literary realism, like all realisms (Pesmen 1991) is a matter of
convention, but the convention he chooses is a venerable one in both the Irish
oral and literary traditions. In Cré na Cille he invented a new literary form, which
was nonetheless grounded in the ethnopoetics of the Gaeltacht, functioning as an
extension of traditional verbal art. Cré na Cille is written entirely as the direct
speech of a community of corpses buried in a churchyard in Cois Fharraige in the
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1940’s. There is no narrator--the reader encounters only the characters’ voices in
dialogue with each other; characters are not even named except in their own or
others’ speech. This device powerfully highlights speech style, since it is by their
speech styles that we know the characters. The construction of voices in direct
quotation is typical of Irish language verbal art, which emphasizes the direct
speech of its protagonists over narrative description. Cré na Cille is in many ways
closer to the dramatic lyric of satiric folk poetry than it is to contemporary Irish
or English language prose.
By foregrounding speech style in this manner, verbal art lays bare its
connection to a character’s point of view and social position. As an intervention
in the language, Ó Cadhain’s work follows that of the poets of the 17th and 18th
Centuries, who attempted to revalue the Irish language against English as an
expression and vehicle of a newly politicized Irish cultural identity. One of the
main ways they accomplished this was by satirizing the adoption of ‘foreign’ (ie.,
English) voices by Irish-speakers:
Time and again in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic
poetry, the point is made both on the aural and on the semantic
level, that the inner harmony of Gaelic Ireland has been jarred by
the intrusion of foreign elements. This is usually done by
introducing English words, names, phrases into the text (Leerssen
1996:204).
Cré na Cille is a realistic novel within its satirical framework, almost a
novelistic ethnography of speaking, portraying a dialogic interrelationship of
ways of speaking including gossip, satirical songs and poetry, ritual laments,
proverbs, witticisms, parody of others’ voices, various styles of codeswitching
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between English and Irish, and pure invective. These speech forms are
parodically distorted and rendered absurd by virtue of coming from the mouths
of corpses.
Lack of transcendence
The action of the novel centers around the main character, Caitríona
Pháidín, a newly arrived corpse, and her obsession with outdoing her still living
younger sister Neil, a rivalry which dates back to Neil’s marriage to the man who
Caitríona adored. Although Caitríona later made a good marriage, her own son
Pádraig failed to prosper. Neil and Caitríona have spent their lives competing for
an American sister’s inheritance and for the land of Tomás Taobh Istigh, a lazy
waster of an uncle who plays the two sisters off against one another.
Gearóid Ó Crualaoich (1981:82-84) shows that the deep structure of the
novel is based on the contrast between “the feminine, effeminate, unsuccessful
world” of Caitríona, her son Pádraig, Pádraig’s wife and her mother Nóra
Sheáinín on one side, and “the masculine, manly, prosperous world” of Neil, her
son Peadar, his wife Meaig and Meaig’s father, Briain Mór, on the other side.
The story is introduced to the reader in a polyphonic counterpoint, related
in overlapping stories, gossip, songs, ‘nonsense’ poetry, allusions to trashy
romances, verbal abuse and quoted witticisms as the other characters make a
mockery of Caitríona’s plight.
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In the very first sentence9 of Cré na Cille Caitríona Pháidín wonders if she
is buried in the pound plots or the 15 shilling plots. She muses to herself on what
a fine funeral she must have had, having spent the last years of her life attending
other people’s wakes and funerals, building up a network of obligations among
relatives, neighbors and associates by contributing to their remembrances. Using
this system of reciprocity, Caitríona Pháidín hoped to compete with the local
shopkeeping class by having ‘a fine great altar’ (Altóir bhrea mhóir) at her funeral.
After her death she interrogates new arrivals to the cemetery about the state of
her own funeral: who attended, how many candles were on the altar, whether
“the mountain people” (lucht an tsléibe) were there (with their offerings), and so
on.
Eileen Kane (1968:249-50), in her fieldwork in the Donegal Gaeltacht,
reports people as saying, upon hearing of a death, “are there offerings on us?”
She notes that “shopkeepers and tradesmen... have more extensive non-kin
obligations (one estimated that he gave £50 a year in offerings)...” One of the
subtexts of Cré na Cille is the uneasy relationship between the reciprocity
economy and the newer forms of political economy; Caitríona is clearly
identified with the former and is therefore doomed to lose out in her quest for
status. The shopkeeping class, of course, use their access to capital to exploit both
the system of reciprocity and the market economy. Caitríona’s hopes are dashed,
9. A sentence which because of its complex grammar was often as far as novice readers of
Irish ever got (Ó hÉithir 1977)!
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though, as she learns that she wasn’t buried in the “pound plots,” in spite of her
instructions to her son Pádraig.
Caitríona is told on arrival that “it’s the same life here as in the ‘old
country’” (p. 17), and hears the babble of voices all around her, all saying the
same things they said in life. This profound lack of transcendence gives Cré na
Cille its satirical power. Life’s petty obsessions are only magnified in the
unchanging environment of the graveyard. Caitríona and others lament the fact
that the living do not realize the importance to the dead of such symbols of
wealth as finely made coffins, lavish wakes, expensive plots, and a cross “of the
island greenstone.” The idea of Heaven is dismissed entirely by Caitríona
(Ó Cadhain 1949:63), who, musing to herself, remembers how as a girl she
peered into the deceased Earl’s estate and imagined him dining with St. Peter:
They are the same thing--rails around a grave and the high fences
around the Earl’s house. […] It seemed to me then that it was the
same thing to be clear in The Earl’s [rent] books and being clean in
the books of Heaven.
Ó Cadhain’s theatrical note on the frontispiece says “Time: Eternity.” But the
term he used, de shíor, has the basic meaning of ‘eternally, continually,
unceasingly’, as in repetitive unchanging action. There is no other world. New
corpses are roughly thrown in on top of old ones, in the wrong graves, and then
arbitrarily shunted off to new graves. Literally thrown together, social distance is
narrowed to zero. Claustrophobia takes an extreme form in this world made of
talk--everyone hears everything everyone else says and has ever said, about
themselves and about others.
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Cré na Cille both uses and makes a mockery of death as the absolute end,
as the “Way of Truth” (Slí na Firinne), the site of ultimate moral reckoning.
Conventional phrases used “above” to claim veracity for a statement -- ‘Dar dáir
mo chonra’ (by the boards of my coffin), or ‘Sin é corp na firinne’ (‘that is the body
of the truth’ --i.e. the whole truth) -- become comically absurd in this
environment. Mendacity does not cease; there is no Last Word.
The graveyard setting of Cré na Cille was partially inspired by
Dostoevsky’s short story Bobok (Titely 1989) where a narrator overhears the
residents of a graveyard agree to “cast aside all shame” and indulge, for the first
time, in “shameless truthfulness.”10 Ó Cadhain’s characters have no such
pretensions, and any transcendence achieved happens against their wills, but like
Dostoevsky’s corpses, the inevitable slide into oblivion that awaits them takes
the form of loss of social identity as they are forgotten by the following
generations (cf. Ó Crualaoich 1981).
Clay as medium and trope
The idea of corpses talking in the graveyard came naturally enough to Ó
Cadhain’s neighbors in Cois Fharraige, for whom “the dead were more luminous
to them than the living:”
Every bend in the road, every lane, bush, hill, outcrop and almost
every rock was a living thing to us with a personality of its own.
10. Some reviewers compared Cré na Cille to Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Ó Cadhain
vehemently denied having read or been inspired by the Anthology, but admitted to having read
Bobok (Ó Cadhain 1969:32-3).
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[…] They were part of our dead: our manifest history was in them
(Ó Cadhain 1969:8).
In Connemara’s mythic topography, the landscape is a place of transformation,
uniting language, narrative, the dead, and moral values. Folk stories tell of dead
souls stuck in specific places in the landscape until their sins are redeemed. The
clay of Cois Fharraige is human in the fullest sense, the product of human labor,
sand and seaweed, “the sterile querulous clay of the strand-seaweed” as one
character, Dotie, calls it (Ó Cadhain 1949:296), and the medium to which the
dead return. Dotie comes from prosperous East Galway; her lament for its rich
soil takes on the form and themes of the caoineadh, women’s extemporaneous
funeral oratory. But her orations are immediately dismissed by the other
characters:
-----…Dia dhá réiteach. Nach mairg nar thug siad mo
chual cré thar Ghealchathair soir, agus mé a
shíneadh i dTeampall Bhrianáin ar chlár ghléigeal
an Achréidh ab uil mo mhuintir! Tá an chré caoin
fáilteach ann; tá an ché sprosach síodúil ann; tá
an chré lach múirneach ann; tá an chré díonmhar
teolaí ann. Níorbh fhíniú é fíniú na fearta ann;
níor thruailliú é truailliú na feola ann. Ach
glacfadh cré cré; phógfadh agus dheornfadh cré cré;
dhéanfadh cré cóimeascadh le cré…
----- Tá an maothnas uirthi seo aríst…
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-----…God save it! Isn’t it a pity they didn’t take my heap of clay
over beyond Brightcity [Galway] to the east, and stretch me out in
Teampall Bhrianáin on the bright plain of Achréidh where my
people are! The clay there is welcoming; the clay is easy and silky
there; the clay is pleasant and affectionate there; the clay is
protective and warm there. The grave’s decay is not decay there;
decay of the flesh is not decay there. But clay would welcome clay;
clay would kiss and embrace clay, clay would mingle with clay…
----- The sentimentalism has her again…(Ó Cadhain 1949:54).
In Dotie’s oration clay is the metaphorical essence of sociality and
embodies the difference between her own community and that in which she had
the misfortune to be buried in. Cré na Cille’s chapter titles extend this metaphor to
one of transformation:
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TABLE 7.1: Cré na Cille, frontispiece (with translation)
AM: De Shíor
TIME:For ever/constantly
LÁTHAIR: An Chill
PLACE: The graveyard (cell)
RÉIM:
PROGRESSION:
Eadarlúid I : An Chré Dhubh
Interlude I :The Black Clay
Eadarlúid II : An Chré dhá Sreathnú
Interlude II :Layering the Clay
Eadarlúid III : An Chré dhá Slámadh
Interlude III :Gathering the Clay
Eadarlúid IV : An Chré dhá Meilt
Interlude IV :Grinding the Clay
Eadarlúid V :An Chré dhá
Cnáimhleasú
Interlude V :Bone-dressing the Clay
Eadarlúid VI : An Chré dhá Sua
Interlude VI :Kneading the Clay
Eadarlúid VII : An Chré dhá Cumadh
Interlude VII :Shaping the Clay
Eadarlúid VIII : An Chré dhá
Cruaghoradh
Interlude VIII : Hard-firing the Clay
Eadarlúid IX : An Chré dhá Líomhadh
Interlude IX :Polishing the Clay
Eadarlúid X :An Chré Gheal
Interlude X :The Bright Clay
This series implies purification and transformation, through human labor, into
something enduring, like pottery, paper, or bronze. Ó Cadhain was famous for
the polyvocality of his words, however, especially his titles--at least some of
these titles have other meanings having to do with mendacity and arguments,
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e.g., ‘confusing’ instead of ‘kneading’, ‘making up (lies)’ instead of ‘shaping’, etc.
Such a transformation could have a variety of outcomes as we shall see.
Clarification
The graveyard in Cré na Cille is Ó Cadhain’s vehicle for the transformation of
caint na ndaoine (colloquial speech) into a new medium. His use of direct speech
allows him to develop new forms within the “native” speech registers of he
found around him, rather than creating new ‘literary’ registers. By doing this he
brought the native registers into dialogue with each other, letting them answer,
rebut and debunk each other through his characters. An example of this dialogue
is the meeting between the newly deceased Tomás Taobh Istigh and Nóra
Sheáinín, whose daughter has married Caitríona’s son. A corpse of shady social
origins, Nóra is attempting her own post-mortem elevation into middle class
respectability. Aided by the romantically befuddled Máistir Mór (the
schoolmaster), Nóra has become ‘literate’ (the Master reads to her from his own
grave), and ‘cultured’ (she uses fashionable English-language phrases, quotes
from romantic novels and Abbey Theater productions, and throws in the odd
word of French), even standing for election and founding a Rotary club in the
graveyard. Nóra’s newfound respectability is infuriating to Caitríona, who
constantly harps on Nóra’s shady past and the ignorance and poverty of An Gort
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Ribeach, Nóra’s townland. But Caitríona’s protestations have been ignored by
the other characters until now:11
----- Éist, Thomas! That’s the dote! Ní dhéanfaidh
an ‘tiff’ sin le Caitríona …
----- T’anam ón docks é “tiff”?
----- Ní dhéanfaidh an sciolladóireacht sin ach
t’intinn a ‘vulgarisáil.’ Ní foláir domsa caidreamh
a bhunú leat. Is mé oifigeach caidrimh chultúrtha
na cille. Bhéarfaidh mé léachtaí dhuit ar “Ealaín
na Maireachtála.”
----- T’anam ón docks é, “Ealaín na Maireachtála…”
----- Mhothaigh dream léarsannach againn anseo go
raibh dualgais orainn dár gcomhchoirp, agus
chuireamar Rótaraí ar bun …
----- Is mór a theastaíos Rótaraí uaibh! Féacha
mise …
[NS]----- Hush, Tomás! That’s the dote! That tiff with Caitríona won’t
do …
[TTI]----- Your soul from the Devil ‘tiff’?
[NS]----- That abuse will only vulgarize your soul. I must establish
relations with you [a pun]. I am the cultural relations officer of the
graveyard. I’ll give you lectures on “The Art of Living.”
[TTI]----- Your soul from the devil, “The Art of Living…”
[NS]----- A far-seeing group of us here felt that we had a duty to
our fellow-corpses, and we founded a Rotary…
[TTI]----- You certainly need a Rotary! I’ll see…
(Ó Cadhain 1949:294)
Tomás does not understand Nóra’s use of the fashionable English phrase ‘tiff’.
He interrupts her with an incredulous response, spoken in a homely cliche
(“your soul from the devil ‘tiff’”?). Nóra substitutes the Irish phrase
‘sciolladóireacht’ (verbal abuse or scolding), but continues on with the English
11. Characters are not explicitly identified in Cré na Cille; for clarity I have identified them
in the English translation as follows: NS = Nóra Sheáinín; TTI = Tomás Taobh Istigh; D = Dotie; S
= An Scríbhneoir (The Writer); CP = Caitríona Phaidín.
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verb ‘vulgarize’, itself vulgarly gaelicized with the verbal suffix -áil.12
With
this one word Nóra expresses her snobbish aspirations and reveals their source
in an English-language discourse. Ó Cadhain’s satire broadens with her next
words which reveal her awkward command of bureaucratic jargon. Her offer to
“establish relations” is an inadvertent sexual pun. “Ealaín na Maireachtála” (‘The
Art of Living’) is absurd in a graveyard setting as well as making much more
sense in English than in Irish -- Ealaín is often used derogatorily (to refer to
drinking for example), and maireachtáil has the connotation of ‘survival’ as much
as ‘living’.
----- Go díreach, Thomas. Féach thú fhéin! Ruabhoc
romansúil thú a Thomais. Ba ea ariamh. Ach ní mór
don románsaíocht stafóga an chultúir faoina cosa,
lena hardú suas as an bhfód fiáin, agus Rí-Chorr
comhéigneach na Fichiú hAiose ag ardchéimniú i
gcluana gréine Chiúpaid a dhéanamh dhi, mar adeir
Mrs. Crookshanks le Harry …
----- Foighid ort, anois a Nóra chóir. Inseoidh
mise dhuit céard adúirt Aoibheall Bhreoilleach le
Snaidhm ar Bhundún i “Roiseadh na Fallainge” …
----- Cultúr, Thomas.
----- T’anam ón docks, ab í Nóirín Sheáinín as an
nGort Ribeach atá agam ar chor ar bith? … Muise
meastú a dtiocfaidh canúint mar sin ormsa i gcré na
cille? Diabhal mé a Nóra go mbíodh caint bhreá
Ghaelach agat sa sean-reacht! …
----- Ná lig ort fhéin, a Nóróg, go cloiseann tú
chor ar bith é.
----- Gug gúg, a Dotie! Gug gúg! Déanfaidh muid
stroipín beag comhrá ar ball. Eadrainn fhéin, tá a
fhios agat. Gug gúg!
[NS]----- Certainly, Tomás. Look at yourself! You’re a romantic
roebuck, Tomás. You always were. But Romanticism needs the
12. The ending of an ordinary Irish verb class; used as a suffix it is a typical way of
incorporating English loan-words. (Stenson 1990). This suffix is extremely productive, however,
lending itself to a particular style of ‘creolized’ conversation, parodied in Antoine Ó Flatharta’s
recent dramas (cf. Ó Flatharta 1986).
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staffs of culture under her feet, to raise her up from the wild sod, to
make her the cutting edge of the Twentieth Century dignifying
herself in Cupid’s sunny meadows, as Mrs. Crookshanks said to
Harry …
[S]----- Patience now, my dear Nóra. I’ll tell you what Aoibheall
Bhreoilleach said to Snaidhm ar Bhundún in “The Tearing of the
Cloak” …
[NS]----- Culture, Tomás.
[TTI]----- Your soul from the Devil, would that be Nóirín Sheáinín
from Gort Ribeach? …By dad do you think an accent like that will
come over me in the graveyard’s clay [cré na cille]? Devil me Nóra
but you had fine Gaelic talk in the old days!…
[D]----- Don’t let on at all that you hear him, Nóróg.
[TTI]----- Koo koo, Dotie! Koo koo! We’ll have a bit of conversation
in a while. Just between us, as you’d say. A pleasant little chat
between us, you know. Koo koo!
(Ó Cadhain 1949:294)
Nóra’s tremendously mixed metaphor brings together Yeatsian imagery and
quotation from the cheap novels supplied by the Schoolmaster. ‘Mar adeir x...’ or
‘Mar adúirt x...’ (‘as x says/said’) are very commonly used when quoting or
attributing local witticisms.13 One would rarely find a ‘Mrs. Crookshanks’ quoted
in this manner!
At this point An Scríbhneoir (‘The Writer’) breaks in--Ó Cadhain’s parody
of hack ‘folkloric’ writers such as those who wrote for the state-sponsored Irishlanguage publishing project, An Gúm. The Writer begins to quote from his own
‘masterpiece’ -- the characters’ names (‘Aoibheall Bhreoilleach’ and ‘Snaidhm ar
Bhundún’) translate as ‘Frolicking Naked’ and ‘Knotted Bowels’.
13. Glassie (1982) and Ó Crualaoich (1989) emphasize the importance of this type of
quotation as one of the most common forms of Irish verbal art.
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Not recognizing her new accent, Tomás has been unaware of Nóra’s true
identity until The Writer addresses Nóra by name. Tomás comments on her
changed accent, using the ambivalent word gaelach to approvingly describe her
former ways. Gaelach means ‘gaelic’, i.e., ‘pertaining to Irish-language culture or
values’, but also, ‘backwards, homely, simple’. Nóra’s friend Dotie breaks in
urging her to ignore this insult, only to be greeted lewdly by Tomás.
The conversation continues:
----- Bhí an cultúr orm ariamh, a Thomais, ach ní
raibh tú i ndon a fhiúntas a mheas. B’fhollasach
dom é sa gcéad affaire de coeur a bhí ariamh agam
leat. Marach sin b’fhéidir go ndéanfainn thú a
ghreasacht beagán. Uch! Fear gan cultúr! Comradaí
ba chóir a bheith a gcéile. Tiúrfaidh mé léacht
duit, le cuidiú an Scríbhneora agus an Fhile, ar an
ngrá platónach…
----- Ní bheidh plé ar bith agam leat, a Nóra
Sheáinín. M’anam nach mbeidh!…
----- Mo chuach ansin thú, a Thomais Taobh Istigh!
…
----- Bhínnse ag cuimilt leis an uaisle tigh Neil
Sheáinín…
----- A chonúisín! …
----- Óra muise, is mór an spóirt iad na ceanna
coimhthíocha sin, a Chaitríona. Bhíodh smáileog
mhór bhuí ag iascach in éindigh le Lord Cockton i
mbliana, agus chaithfeadh sí a raibh de ‘feaigs’
déanta. Chaithfeadh agus deirfiúr an tSagairt
freisin. Bíonn siad i mboscaí móra i bpóca a
treabhsair aici. Tá Mac Cheann an Bhóthair scriosta
dhá gcoinneál léi. Tuilleadh diabhail aige, an
bacach! Ach i nDomhnach duit, tá sise go gleoite.
Shuigh mé isteach sa mótar abuil sí. “Gug gúg, a
Neansaí,” adeirimse …
----- Cré amh chaobach í t’intinn, a Thomáis dote,
ach déanfaidh mé í a shua, a chumadh, a
chruaghoradh agus a líomhadh nó go mbeidh sí ina
soitheach álainn cultúir …
----- Ní bheidh plé beag ná mór agam leat, a Nóra
Sheáinín. M’anam nach mbeidh. Fuar mé mo dhóthain
díot. Ní bhíodh neart agam mo chois a chur isteach
tigh Pheadar an Ósta, nach mbítheá istigh leis an
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tsáil agam, ag súdaireacht. B’iomaí pionta breá a
sheas mé ariamh duit, ní dhá mhaíochtáil ort é! …
----- Ná lig ort fhéin, a Nóróg, …
----- Nár lagtar ansin thú, a Thomais Taobh Istigh!
Go lige Dia mór do shaol agus do shláinte duit!
Tabhair fúithi anois te bruite, faoi Nóirín na
gCosa Lofa. Ag imeacht ag súdaireacht! An raibh tú
tigh Pheadar an Ósta, a Thomais Taobh Istigh, an lá
ar chuir sí an pocaide ar meisce?… Go gcuire Dia an
rath ort, agus innis é sin don chill…
[NS]----- I always had the culture on me, Tomás, but you couldn’t
appreciate its value. It was clear to me in my first affaire de coeur
with you. Except for that I might have encouraged you a bit. Ugh!
An uncultured man! Lovers should be comrades. I’ll give you a
lecture, with the help of the Writer and the Poet, on platonic love…
[TTI]----- I won’t have anything to do with you, Nóra Sheáinín. On
my soul I won’t!
[CP]----- Good for you Tomás Taobh Istigh!…
[TTI]----- I used to suck up to the gentry in Neil Sheáinín’s [sic]
house…
[CP]----- You little rubbish!
[TTI]----- Oh my, those foreign ones are great sport, Caitríona.
There was a big lump of a blonde fishing with Lord Cockton this
year, and she’d smoke all the fags ever made. She would, and the
priest’s sister would too. She keeps them in big boxes in her trouser
pocket. Ceann an Bhóthair’s son is destroyed keeping her supplied.
Serves him right, the beggar! But I tell you, she is lovely. I sat in the
car with her. “Koo koo, Neansai” I said …
[NS]----- Your mind is raw lumpish [loutish] clay, Tomás dear, but I
will knead it, shape it, fire it and polish it until it is a lovely vessel
of culture…
[TTI]----- I won’t have anything at all to do with you, Nóra
Sheáinín. Upon my soul I won’t. I’ve had my fill of you. I couldn’t
set foot inside Peadar’s pub without you at my heel behind me,
sponging. It’s many’s the fine pint I’ve stood you, not to begrudge
you for it! …
[D]----- Don’t let on, Noróg …
[CP]----- Strength to you there, Tomás Taobh Istigh! May great God
give you life and health. Give it to her piping hot now, to Nóirin na
Cosa Lofa [Nóirín of the smelly feet]. Going sponging! Were you in
Peadar’s pub, Tomás Taobh Istigh, when she got the billygoat
drunk? …God prosper you, and tell it to the graveyard!
(Ó Cadhain 1949:294-95)
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As Tomás rejects Nóra’s offer of ‘Platonic Love’, Caitríona Pháidín cheers him on.
Her approval of Tomás is entirely contingent on his laying low of her enemies -her own sister Neil and Nóra Sheáinín. In the end, Tomás refuses Nóra’s offer to
make him into a lovely vessel of culture, which sets the stage for her
uncrowning. Finally Nóra is unmasked as a drunkard and a sponger and her
pretensions to ‘culture’ come to nought.
Nóra embodies a particular kind of falsely progressive ‘culture’, just as
characters such as Tomás and The Writer represent a kind of backwardness and
its romantic literary glorification, respectively. Nóra’s offer to transform Tomás
recapitulates Ó Cadhain’s sequence of chapter titles, showing us how much is at
stake here.
There are no ‘positive’ characters in Cré na Cille, with the possible ironic
exception of Caitríona Pháidín, whose bitterness and invective amount to almost
pure negativity. The characters are all stereotypes in some sense; their existence
in the novel is that of kinds of speech -- the reader/listener recognizes them from
their speech styles, especially from their habitual phrases. Here we see the full
potential of quotation (Chapter 6) to typify, if not to reify, both speech styles and
stereotypic images of persons.
Unlike real people (cf. Hill 1995), these characters exhibit a relative lack of
complexity of social ‘voices’; each character has basically one voice, although
characters constantly refer to, mimic and mock other characters’ ways of
speaking, as we saw above. This is the essence of Ó Cadhain’s process of critique,
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in which styles, ‘embodied’ (!) in stereotypic characters’ voices, fight it out,
revealing their own and each other’s social and cultural essences.
Ó Cadhain in the public sphere
Máirtín Ó Cadhain could be seen as a typical nationalist intellectual of the
type analyzed by Anderson (1983). But Anderson’s theory runs into difficulties
in dealing with Ireland, paralleling the difficulties of the Irish nation-state itself.
Perhaps no single person embodied such difficulties as much as Ó Cadhain. He
self-consciously cast himself as a guardian of Irish-language learning, a role
formerly played by the poetic learned class in the Gaelic political system. As a
republican, he believed in and participated in the construction of an independent
democratic Irish nation-state. He was an essential element in the effort to recreate
Irish as a national language, working first for the Dáil’s 14 translation service
(1947-56) and eventually becoming Professor of Irish at Trinity College, Dublin.15
But one of Ó Cadhain’s most bitter complaints was the lack of any serious public
role for Irish: even Russian was more likely to be heard on Dublin busses than
Irish (Ó Laighin 1990:142). The public sphere in Ireland was fundamentally
Anglophone, with Irish only occupying interstitial niches or playing an
ornamental role in Irish affairs––casting doubt on the possibility of a viable
14. the Irish Parliament.
15. A great irony considering that Trinity College was a Unionist stronghold long after
Irish independence, flying the British flag over its campus in central Dublin until 1935.
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modern Irish-language literature. Ironically, the Abbey Theater Company,
founded in Dublin at the end of the 19th Century, was originally seen as a partial
substitute for an Irish national public sphere, in the absence of an independent
Irish State (Kiberd 1996, Pilkington 1997). The literary revival of which the Abbey
Theater was both expression and medium helped precipitate the political
revolution of the 1920s. But even though they grew out of the movement to
revive the Irish language (The Gaelic League, founded in 1893), these literary and
political movements did not create viable Irish-language media; with the
exception of An t-Éireannach in the 1930s (a weekly socialist paper to which Ó
Cadhain contributed) most Irish-language papers were vehicles for revivalist
propaganda rather than forums for information and general debate about current
issues (Ó Ciosáin 1993). The national public sphere of independent Ireland
functioned through English.16 The Irish state was not able to achieve the political
unification, economic independence, or linguistic revival felt to be the nationstate’s due. This resulted in (or was perhaps the expression of) a lack of
ideological closure––to a certain extent there were two nations in the Republic of
Ireland. The Irish-speaking “nation,” such as it was, existed in an almost
clandestine manner, relatively excluded from the public sphere and sharply
divided between a fairly limited literate urban group (intellectuals and
16. This situation has only begun to change since the 1970s, with the creation of Irishlanguage radio (1972) and television (1996) channels, both in response to agitation by Gaeltacht
civil rights groups.
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radicalized urban poor) and the rural (mostly poor) Gaeltacht, whose class
divisions Cré na Cille mercilessly satirized.
In the rural Gaeltacht, the Irish-language counter-public sphere was
embodied in traditional knowledge (placenames, narratives and song), the verbal
art of local poets and “characters,” through performance forms such as agallamh
beirte. This popular culture tended to be received by urban anglophone elite
culture in terms of ‘folklore’ and––once it was safely dead––carefully collected
and archived in Dublin. This reflected the predominant view of the modernizing
elites of the Irish state who saw the Irish language, its culture, and even its
speakers as relics of the (glorious, national) past (cf. and Ó Giolláin 1989, 1993,
1996).
In Chapter 5 we looked at Ó Cadhain’s 1950 speech, Béaloideas (Folklore),
in which he compared the museums, archives, and universities of central Dublin
to the sacred tomb of a dead civilization, in which the “dead clay” of Gaelic
Ireland lay embalmed. Here Ó Cadhain extended the metaphor he developed in
Cré na Cille––of clay as the transformative essence of social life––and used it to
profoundly critique the Irish state and the modernizing discourse which worked
to marginalize Irish language and traditions. It might not be too out of line to
consider An Chill, the graveyard of Cré na Cille, as his mocking send-up of the
Irish state as a whole (cf. Ní Bhroin 1988), challenging us to try and distinguish
the dead from the living. On another level, Cré na Cille most certainly reflected
his prison-camp experiences (‘cill’ is also the word for ‘cell’), the claustrophobic
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confines of the Curragh Camp (he began writing the novel shortly after his
release). 17 Cré na Cille is above all his satirical portrait of a Gaeltacht community.
In this sense it is fruitful to compare these fictional Graveyards to the Otherworld
of folklore, the mirror image through which living tradition analyzes the
everyday social world (Taussig 1980, Bourke 1997). Such Otherworlds are also
places of transformation, and for Máirtín Ó Cadhain, the Irish-language public
sphere in Dublin was a safe haven from which to mount guerrilla attacks on the
anglophone state. An “underground politician” (Ó Glaisne 1971), he constantly
intervened to embarrass the state into honoring its nominal commitments to the
language. He wrote a column in Irish for the Irish Times from 1953 to 1956
(although its editors often had no idea what he was saying) in which he
commented on events and persons of the hour (disguised by “humorous
symbols”), and was “a dangerous satirist in Irish and in English” (Ó Glaisne
1971:16-17). Part of the myth that grew up around Ó Cadhain was his intricate
knowledge of local events, persons and even their genealogies, garnered from an
immense network of acquaintances; he was not loathe to put this knowledge to
17. To this end it is worth noting how consistently in Ireland prisons have provided
transformative political spaces. The prisoners’ movement in the Curragh Camp in the 1940’s built
on that of the 1920s and was was an important precursor of the prisoners’ movement and hunger
strikes of the 1980s in Northern Ireland. Cf. Feldman 1991 for a description of how prisoners’
development of channels of relatively free and open communication (including use of Irish)
transformed the political space of the H-blocks.
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work, as when he publicly branded an anti-Irish language activist an “adulterer
of petrol” (Ó hÉithir 1973:9). 18
Cré na Cille was serialized in weekly installments in The Irish Press, a
national English-language newspaper, between February and September 1949
(Titley 1989:37). Although written in Irish, the novel was in effect deployed in
both public spheres simultaneously, for Ó Cadhain knew it would be read and
understood very differently by different types of reader. One day during this
period Ó Cadhain was on a bus in Dublin and heard himself discussed in
unflattering terms:
In the seat in front of me a man and a young girl were discussing
Irish-language literature. Naturally, I began to listen: ‘I hear there
will be another book soon from Peig’19 said he: as usual with the
Gaels and their wives or lovers, the conversation was in English.
‘What do you think of this story serialized in the Irish Press?’ said
the girl. ‘This Ó Cadhain fellow’, he said. ‘A right galoot if ever
there was one. A Joycean smutmonger’. To this day I don’t know
who the girl was. The man was fairly well-known in literary affairs.
But at any rate I had gotten another mouthful of free advice for my
18. Having great genealogical, mythical, historical, linguistic and poetic knowledge
which is brought to bear on current political issues in the form of allegorical fables and concise
and sometimes gnomic poetic kennings or condensed symbols, Ó Cadhain’s understanding and
practice of rhetoric bears a striking resemblance to that of the medieval Irish court poet as
described by Carney (1967). Cf. Chapter 4.
19. Peig Sayers, a “folk” writer from the Kerry Gaeltacht, whose Irish-language
autobiography has long been required reading in the school curriculum. Peig was an
exceptionally gifted storyteller, perhaps unjustly infamous for her litanies of sadness and misery.
Dotie’s character in Cré na Cille is possibly based on this aspect of Peig.
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benefit (Ó Cadhain 1969:12-13).20
This event provides the background for an episode of Cré na Cille where Nóra
refuses the Writer entry into the Rotary Club:
…You won’t be accepted. Your work is Joycean…You’re no good to
me. I won’t listen to “An Fuineadh Gréine.” You must have a low
intellect to write something like that… You’re reciting your
“Brionglóid an Dionosaur”… I won’t listen. A right Joycean Galoot.
You’re a lowly expression of Living Nature. 21
In this sense we can see Cré na Cille as an intervention in the Anglophone national
space as much or more than as a contribution to it. In his literary memoir Ó
Cadhain compared the novel’s reception in urban predominantly anglophone
middle class culture to an event which happened to him while collecting folklore:
Some Gaeltacht people would agree with [the man on the bus], or
they would agree with the criticism. It stands to reason that they
would be sensitive, especially in recent years with the old way of
life changing from top to bottom. A few years ago I got to know an
old man in north County Galway. I think he was one of the last
people in the area who had any Irish at all. He spoke it clearly and
eagerly. I wanted to put things from him on tape and he couldn’t
wait to hear his own voice on the tape, once he heard things that
were already on the same tape. His daughter was there, a
bedraggled one, a spinster it seemed: ‘Oh no! I couldn’t allow him!
I know he would say the wrong things! He wouldn’t know how to
20. San am a raibh Cré na cille ó sheachtain go seachtain san Irish Press bhí mé lá ar bhus i
mBaile Átha Cliath. Sa suíochán róm amach bhí fear agus cailín óg ag plé litríocht na Gaeilge. Ní nach
hiona chuir mé cluais orm féin: ‘I hear there will be another book soon From Peig’, adúirt seisean: mar is
iondúil le Gaeil agus len a gcuid ban nó a gcuid leannán, i mBéaria a bhí a gcomhrá. ‘What do you think of
this story serialized in the Irish Press?’ adúirt an cailín. ‘This Ó Cadhain fellow’, adúirt sé. ‘A right galoot
if ever there was one. A Joycean smutmonger’. Go dtí lá an lae inniu níl a fhios agam cé hí an cailín. Fear a
bhfuil roimt mhaith cáil air i gcúrsaí litríocht é an fear. Ar aon chor bhí gáilleog eile de chomhairle mo leasa
faighte agam i n-aisce.
21. ... Ní glacfar leat. Tá do shaothar Joysúil... Níl aon mhaith dhuit liom. Ní éistfidh mé leis “An
Fuineadh Gréine.” Intinn íseal-íseal atá agat agus rud mar sin a scríobhadh... Tá tú ag gabháil do
“Bhrionglóid an Dionosaur” ... Ní éistfead. Brionglóid an Dionosaur. Gaileota Joysúil dáiríre. Gné an-íseal
den Dúil Bheo thú (Ó Cadhain 1949:239).
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say the right things from the wrong things …’ (Ó Cadhain
1969:16).22
This English-speaking “censorious Freudian Super-ego” epitomized the forces of
false “modernization” for Ó Cadhain and dramatized the type of mentality he
believed would predominate following the loss of the language in Ireland.
Ó Cadhain’s radical political views, his unromantic portrait of the
language and linguistic culture of the Gaeltacht, and his experimentation with
new forms, were too much for traditionalist critics to bear. One reviewer,
reacting to both the novel’s radical form and its distasteful content, maintained
that “the author does not let on that it is he himself who is doing the talking. He
has put [his talk] into the mouths of others. A lot of it I wouldn’t put into the
mouth of a dog.”23 On the other hand, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s neighbors, the people
of the Gaeltacht, took well to the book in spite of its avant-garde nature.
Breandán Ó hÉithir noted its ready reception in Árainn (in the Aran Islands):
Shortly after the book came out I lent my own copy to a woman in
my townland of Eochaill. For the next six months the book went
from house to house from Eochaill to Cabhrúch, to Baile na Creige,
Fearann an Choirce and west to Baile na Seacht dTeampall.
Sentences and sayings from it went into [local] speech, and as Ó
22. D’aontódh cuid de mhuintir na Gaeltacht leis sin, nó d’aontóidís leis an gcáine. Tá sé ag luí le
réasún go mbeadh an mhuintir goilliúnach, go háirid na blianta seo agus a seansaol sinsire ag athrú ó bhun
go barr. Cupla bliain ó shoin chuir mé eolas ar sheanfhear sa taobh ó thua de Cho. na Gaillimhe. Sílim go
raibh sé ar an duine deireanach sa gceantar a raibh aon bhrí Gaeilge aige. Ba phaiteanta agus b’fhonnmhar
uaidh í a labhairt. Ba mhian liom rudaí uaidh a chur ar spól agus b’fhada leis go gcloisfeadh sé a ghlór féin,
nuair a chuala sé rudaí a bhí ar an spól cheana. Bhí an inín ar an urlár, ceann sraoilleach, puisbhean gan
pósa ba chosúil: ‘Oh no! I couldn’t allow him! I know he would say the wrong things! He wouldn’t
know how to say the right things from the wrong things …
23. “Ní leigeann an t-údar air fhéin gur bé fhéin atá ‘déanadh na cainnte. Tá sí curtha i mbéil
daoine eile aige. Go leor dhi nach gcuirfinn i mbéal an mhada” (quoted in Denvir 1987:38).
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Cadhain himself said, there was at least one Tomás Taobh Istigh in
every townland I mentioned. (Ó hÉithir 1973:3-4)24
Cré na Cille was read aloud in gathering-houses (Ó Cadhain 1969:13), and
eventually produced as a radio play. Phrases from the book were quoted in
conversation in much the same way as phrases from local folk-poetry were
quoted. Indeed the form of the work as a whole resembles that of the agallamh
beirte --the popular folk genre of poetic dialogues, usually satires with stereotypic
characters, which comment on local social and political issues. I recently heard a
broadcast on Raidió na Gaeltachta in which selections from the novel were read
to an audience in Connemara, during the intermission of a singing contest.
Hearing the characters’ lines interspersed with the raucous laughter of the
audience brought home the point that Cré na Cille is as much a work of popular
verbal art as it is an avant-garde experiment (Ó Crualaoich 1979).
Cré na Cille had a huge impact on younger Gaeltacht writers. The writer
Breandán Ó hÉithir credits Máirtín Ó Cadhain with revolutionizing Irishlanguage literature through the introduction of both a new level of realism and a
high level of craftsmanship. “To us, Gaeltacht people, the book was a revolution
in Irish-language writing. This was caint na ndaoine, but worked, enriched, hewn
in a way never before seen” (Ó hÉithir 1973:3).
24. Go garid tar éis don leabhar a theacht amach thug mé mo chóip féin ar iasacht do bhean i mo
bhaile féin Eochaill. As sin go ceann sé mhí shiúil an leabhar sin tithe as Eochaill, go Cabhrúch, go Baile na
Creige, Fearann an Choirce agus siar go Baile na Seacht dTeampall. Chuaigh abairtí agus nathanna as sa
chaint, agus, ar ndóigh mar a dúirt an Cadhnach féin, bhí Tomás Taobh Istigh amháin ar a laghad i ngach
baile a luaigh mé.
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Conclusion
Cré na Cille is a typical modern novel in many respects––it maintains a
“parasitic” relation to other speech genres (oral and literary), reconstituting them
in “polyphony” (Bakhtin 1981, Moretti 1996). In Silverstein’s (to appear:48-9)
analysis, the modern novel is one of the main tools for propagating the
ideologies behind standardized national languages.
[T]he presupposed perspectival jumble of interests in the society
that [the novel] realistically portrays [finds] its narrative linguistic
trope in the figurated “polyphony” of voicing that depends on
using linguistic “heteroglossia” to tropic advantage.
The novel is thus “a swatch of plausible reality which it both represents and, in
‘voicing’, gives voice to” (Silverstein n.d.:48-49). This trope is enabled by the
situation of the novel in the homogeneous space-time that Anderson (1983)
maintains is also the fundamental trope of the national imagined community.
But in some ways Cré na Cille has no space or time, let alone the newly
homogenous space-time which Anderson and others maintain is the novel form’s
gift to the imagination of nationality. Nor is there a narrator25 or any one clear
“authorial” voice. He has “put [his talk] into the mouths of others” after all. One
consequence of the lack of a narrator (or of a main character with whom we
identify and through whose consciousness we perceive the other characters) is
25. There is one voice which identifies itself as “Stoc na Cille” (The Trumpet of the
Graveyard) which speaks in archaized Irish making general pronouncements about the duality of
life and death. In spite of its exhortations to listen to its voice (which “must be heard!” -- caithfear
éisteacht!) the corpses never do, nor does it engage in dialogue of any kind with them. Partway
through the novel it seems to meet an even more mysterious disembodied second voice, and
finally it fades away. The lack of attention paid to Stoc na Cille contrasts strongly with the
characters’ doomed efforts to not attend to each others’ voices.
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the lack of indirect discourse––of the melding of a narrator’s and characters’
voices to create a sense of an accessible psychological interiority (Voloshinov
1973). Cré na Cille’s style instead reinforces a sense of psychological opacity (the
essential unknowability of other souls). The Andersonian idea of simultaneity is
also absent or radically altered here, with no overriding point of view or sense of
the possibility of a panoramic view of society, and no sense of novel itself taking
this view. Everyone is in ignorance in Cré na Cille, including and especially the
reader. Characters can only attempt to ‘read’ ongoing events as reported by (and
dialogically marked as the words of) other characters. Both local and ‘World’
events such as World War II are read with tairgreachtaí (prophecies), which
results in various hilarious mixups and anachronisms. In this sense Cré na Cille
could be seen as an anti-novel, a reflection of the lack of any place for Irish or for
the Gaeltacht in the space of the new Irish nation-state.26 The lack of
transcendence, of “character development” or a successful resolution of the
novel’s social and dramatic tensions, brings into relief this larger political failure.
Máirtín Ó Cadhain in many ways subscribed to the ideologies of modernization,
nationalism and linguistic standardization, but wished to see them realized in
Irish, his native language. The historical particulars which left him stranded, as it
were, in a language he felt he might himself outlive (Ó Cadhain 1969:40) led him
26. cf. Lomnitz-Adler’s (1992:3) concept of “the labyrinth” in modern-day Mexico:
“The political importance of national culture and the difficulty in describing national culture in
any terms other than the terms of nationalism has generated a circular dialectic, a vicious cycle
that is built on the tensions that occur between the maze of social relations that exist within the
national space and the ideologies regarding a common identity, a shared sense of the past, and a
unified gaze towards the future. I call this complex of issues the labyrinth.”
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to deeply question these ideologies, especially when they conflicted with his
commitment to democracy. But the democracy of An Chill is a direct rather than a
representative one. Attempts to create a “Rotary” with elections, lectures on
“cultural” topics and self-improvement, and limited membership are frustrated
by the very nature of the social space of the Graveyard, where everyone hears
everyone else and has equal access to his or her own “voice.” This arguably
represents a utopian strain in Cré na Cille ––the possibility of an equality based,
not on a Dostoevskian “openness” of souls transcending their petty day-to-day
interests, but instead on the self-representation of determinately partial and
recalcitrant interests. Whether the counter-space of Cré na Cille could become the
model for a new Ireland remains to be seen.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JOE HEANEY
Joe Heaney as interpreter of a tradition
Seosamh Ó hÉinniú, known in Connemara as Joe Éinniú, and in the
English–speaking world as Joe Heaney, was born on October first, 1919 in An
Aird Thoir, Carna, in the Connemara Gaeltacht in County Galway. The people of
Carna and the surrounding Iorras Aintheach peninsula were and are renowned
for their verbal art; large numbers of songs and stories have been collected there
since before the turn of the century. Joe won a scholarship at age 15 to attend
college in Dublin, although he only completed four years of a six-year program
of teacher training. By his own account, he was very shy about singing in front of
other people until he entered and won first prize in a singing competition in the
Oireachtas in Dublin in 1940. Not long after this he emigrated to Scotland, then
England and eventually to America.
It was abroad and on brief visits home to Ireland that Joe Heaney made
the recordings and performances that consolidated his fame as the leading
traditional Irish singer of his generation. He was a mainstay of the London folk
scene during the 1960’s and became well known as a singer in New York in the
1970’s. His last years were spent in American universities — Wesleyan
University at first, and then at the University of Washington in Seattle, as a
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visiting artist in the Department of Ethnomusicology. He died in Seattle on May
first 1984.
I was a student of Joe Heaney’s at the University of Washington in Seattle,
making the weekly trek to my lessons, which took place in an instrument storage
room in the basement of U.W.’s music building. At an absurdly early hour of the
day Joe would teach me songs, along with giving detailed descriptions of life in
Connemara, his philosophy of singing, and other “lessons” about life and love.
Joe’s understanding of love songs impressed me the most—his explanation of
why they were “lamentable,” and the darkness and depth of emotion in the
songs themselves. Then he would sing the songs for the tape recorder as various
large gongs resonated quietly in the corners of the room. Unfortunately I
recorded only the songs, and it took me quite a while to realize the value and
interest of the talk. My decision to rectify the situation came, alas, too late, leaving
me only with memories, some notes, and the archived tapes of those who had the
presence of mind not to turn off the recorder when the song was finished, and
who generously contributed copies of their tapes to the U.W.’s archives.1
When one listens to the many other fine singers and storytellers from
Carna, of his generation and the ones that followed, it becomes clear that Joe was
not by any means unique in his talents; he was the product of a close-knit
1. The interviews used in this chapter, unless otherwise cited, were recorded during Joe
Heaney’s three week residency at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1978. References are
to tape catalog numbers. Interviewers were Esther Warkov, Fred Lieberman and Mike Seeger. I
am very grateful to them and to Laurel Sercombe and Sean Williams at the University of
Washington Ethnomusicology Archive.
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supportive community which took (and takes) the art seriously, with high critical
standards. What made Joe Heaney unique was his position as both insider and
outsider, spending most of his life interpreting this tradition to others in other
communities. By the time he became a visiting artist among musicologists he had
already passed through at least two other interpretive communities—the Irishlanguage movement in Dublin and the folk revival scene in England and
America. The influence was mutual. Joe Heaney was an exceptionally articulate,
opinionated, insightful and forceful spokesman for the culture, language and
artistic tradition of Connemara as he saw it.
Participation in the tradition was an open-ended process of discovery for
him as he sought to deepen his feeling for and ability to perform the songs. To
this end he did not hesitate to look for insights from the various other
communities he passed through along the way. Thus one finds him quoting, to
support his views, the likes of Alan Lomax, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Ewan Macoll,
Séamas Ennis and Pádraig Pearse as well as his father, grandmother, and
neighbors in Carna. His statements about the song tradition must be taken with
this in mind; the proverbial grain of salt consists in this case in paying close
attention to whom Joe was speaking. While immediately addressed to some
particular American musicology student, his statements were in a wider sense
addressed to several other “others:” Irish Americans, folk revivalists, academics,
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the Gaelic Revival movement2 in Ireland, as well as “the folks back home” in
Carna. In his fairly solitary existence in Seattle in the final years of his life, Joe
Heaney was nonetheless fully engaged in dialogue with all these other voices.
His statements often reflected the points of view and terminology of these others,
but always answered them from his own solid and profound intuition of what it
meant for him to sing a song. The strongly and multiply dialogic nature of Joe’s
statements gives them an allegorical quality not dissimilar to that of some of the
songs themselves.
Musical form and the act of singing
The folklorist A. Martin Freeman, collecting songs in Baile Mhúirne, Co.
Cork at the beginning of the century, found that singers did not regard a song’s
musical form independently of its words:
However minutely a song may be discussed, only the vaguest
references to the tune will be heard. The tune is an elusive essence,
the mysterious soul of the words. It has no independent existence.
It is part of the singer’s secret, indistinguishable from his voice. [...]
Only experience in the country and long conversations about songs
will bring you to this conclusion: that the people hardly know
anything about their tunes. [...] If you tell [a singer] that two of his
songs have the same tune, he will answer that is impossible, since
they are different songs. If you then say, that the tunes are very
much alike, he will agree, and look upon you as a musical genius
for having noticed it. “What a marvellous thing,” he will exclaim.
“for a man who was not brought up in Irish to know so much about
our songs!” For—may I repeat it?—the tune without the words is as
2. Which, via An t-Oireachtas and other competitions, was codifying as well as reifying
“sean-nós” song and creating what amounted to an official canon. Cf Ó Laoire (1993, 1996), Ó
Cearbhaill (1995).
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little imaginable as a voice without a mouth. He thinks you
understand the song (that is, the words) so perfectly, that you have
got the tune. (Freeman 1920:xxiv-xxv)
It is difficult to believe that these singers were ignorant of the music of their
songs, especially considering that song airs could be played as instrumental airs.
It seems more likely that musical form was not thought of independently from
either a specific singer’s “voice” or the words of the song and their meaning, i.e.,
the song’s “story.”3 This would be more an example of a differing cultural point
of view than of inability to hear or conceptualize music as as an independent
entity.
Joe Heaney’s questioners often tried to solicit “rules” for or descriptions of
“patterns” of ornamentation. In response, Joe tended to adopt what Bourdieu
(1977:18) terms a “semi-theoretical disposition, inevitably induced by any learned
questioning,” formulating proverbial rules which he attributed to his elders in
Carna. Asked formalist questions (such as “How do you know where to put
grace notes in a song?”), Joe argued passionately and consistently for a radically
different understanding of his tradition, in which musical form is only one aspect
of a much wider act of orientation. He mobilized all available resources to
articulate and defend this vision, including technical musicological terms, nonsequiturs, and a few otherwise dubious recollections and interpretations. In
3. Ó Madagáin (1985) suggests that in 19th Century Ireland there was a much more of a
continuum between speech and song, with speech becoming more like song as its main function
became more that of expressing emotion. This would go along with a point of view that would
regard musical form as a pragmatic phenomenon primarily, and only secondarily as an aesthetic
matter.
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doing so he wasn’t being scientific, but was, arguably, articulating his insights as
best he could to people who came with quite different presuppositions about
music, song, and much more:
...the notes that you’re talking about, the embellishments of
it—whatever you call it, that’s nature’s accompaniment they call
that. I don’t try to do it, it just happens through the song when I try
to draw out a line, and not—hold on to that particular line because
there’s something special about that line. Don’t throw it away, hold
on to it as long as you can [78-15.10].
In this example, recorded at a public recital, he affects an unfamiliarity with
musicological terms (“whatever you call it”). He asserts, in passing, the role of
ornamentation in the tradition by reformulating the terms of the question in
folksy proverbial form (“nature’s accompaniment”), attributing it to “them”—the
old people in Carna. Then he gives his own answer.
Joe was conversant in both cultural worlds, but often argued for a point of
view similar to that which Freeman encountered in Baile Mhúirne. The
“something special” about the lines is the singer’s response to his or her own
knowledge of the song’s “story”—its narrative background.
Lyric song as direct discourse
Most utterances contain deictic elements which refer to the occasion of
utterance (such as person, tense, and spatial terms like “here” and “there”). Thus
the meaning, in a sentence, of “I” or “you” depends on who is speaking and
being spoken to. Deixis links an utterance to specific persons, times, and places.
When utterances are directly quoted, deictic elements in the embedded speech
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are left unchanged, as in “He said, ‘I’m going there now’.” The quoted sentence,
‘I’m going there now’, in and of itself offers no clue as to the meanings of “I, ”
“there,” and “now”—these must be supplied elsewhere.
In the case of much of the Irish song tradition, where songs often consist
entirely of direct speech, information about “who, what and where” has to come
from somewhere other than the sung text. This, I believe, is the basis of Joe
Heaney’s assertion that songs have stories—some kind of background
knowledge is often essential for understanding what the song is about. When
songs consist entirely of direct speech, as is the case with many “sean-nós” songs,
there is no explicit quotation framing (“he said”) in the song itself. Only the
transition from speech to song marks the song as someone else’s words. This can
create an especially powerful sense of being projected into the world of the
original utterance.
As I have shown in this dissertation, the use of quotation (either explicitly
or implicitly framed) to project an “original” dramatic scene for an utterance is
one of the major tropes of both conversation and verbal art in Ireland. Apt or
witty turns of speech are remembered and repeated, as are poems and songs,
accompanied if necessary by explanatory stories that set the scene. This form is
also used in verbal art to project a dramatic scene for a work, as in the poetic
agallamh beirte (Chapters 2, 4, and 6). Often it boils down to the simple poetic
device of composing in the first person—situating one’s own work in a dramatic
context. Being a trope, it is not a question of mere truth or falsity—whether
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anyone actually said that in such and such circumstances—although the taking
of such tropes literally figures prominently in the “invention of traditions” (cf. Ó
Buachalla 1993).
Rather than simply reading through this trope, taking it literally as a
straightforward account of a past event, it is worth asking what is gained by
using it—what richness is added to a performance or utterance in the here-andnow by treating it as the residue of a past event? Sometimes the effect of a song
derives from the lack of fit between the world it describes and the world actually
encountered by the poet. Satires may consist entirely of statements which appear
to praise—it is sometimes said of certain songs praising boats (An tSailchuach,
Pucán Mhicil Pháidín) that the boats themselves were worthless. On another level
entirely are songs like Cúirt an tSrutháin Bhuí, where the poet, Colm de Bhailís,
portrayed a shelter in which he was waiting out a rain-shower as a fabulous
palace, the envy of the Queen of England (Denvir 1996).
Poetry and conversation have a particularly close relationship in the
Gaeltacht regions, above and beyond the features universally shared between the
two, as Denvir (1989:96) points out:
...the good speaker and his hard sayings are held in high esteem in
Ireland, particularly in the Gaelic tradition. Speech can be almost a
creative art-form in itself, and many saying, lines, or indeed verses
of the poets are mentioned in ordinary conversation.
Likewise, the popular oral poetry of the Gaeltacht draws its inspiration and
many of its forms from conversation. Narrative storytelling has always relied
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heavily on the portrayal of the speeches and conversations of characters in
stories.
Often, the dialogue in these stories is in verse.4 James Carney suggests that
much of the epic tradition in Ireland took the form of poetic dialogues in a prose
context:
A very common literary form in Irish is the tale which is a mixture
of prose and verse, the prose being used for narrative, the verse for
emotional statements by the characters involved (Carney 1963:22)
It has been maintained (Dillon 1947:10-11) that this is the original form of the epic
in Indo-European society, which was preserved until modern times in the Irish
and Scots Gaelic Fenian tales. As we saw in Chapter 4, there is a strong tendency
in many Irish genres to identify “poetry” with directly reported speech. This
should be considered in the light of indigenous ideologies and practices with
regard to poetry.
The oral tradition tends to represent poetry as having been composed
extemporaneously. There are a great many stories about poets, usually consisting
of a narrative description of the scene which acts to frame the poetic utterances of
the protagonist(s).5 These stories offer outsiders an insight into folk conceptions
of poets and poetry, but also function to maintain traditional attitudes about
poetry and language, and help preserve the power of the poets.
4. For example, a number of the stories collected in the 1940’s from Peig Sayers (Wagner
and Mac Congáil 1983) feature verse-dialogue.
5. Delargy (1945:207) mentions “‘duels in quatrains’, as a rule with a short explanatory
prose introduction.”
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In many stories, however, the protagonists are not named as “poets” but
appear as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Ó Madagáin (1985)
argues that extemporaneously composed poetry, usually in the form of song,
including “arguments in verse,” was commonplace in Ireland in the last century.
These utterances were often passed on orally, along with narrative description,
i.e., reported context. Much of the song tradition, especially the Irish-language
tradition, takes this form, which could just as easily be used by poets to project a
narrative scene for their works, casting them in dramatic form.
The song and the story
Irish-language song is arguably an example of a “tale which is a mixture
of prose and verse”—where the verse is sung and the prose is not necessarily
recited. It might seem strange to regard the singing of lyric poetry as a kind of
storytelling, but in doing so I am following Joe’s own advice, when he insisted
that “singing a song is like telling a story.” Other singers of his generation are of
like mind in maintaining that songs have or tell or go along with stories. The
songs generally take the form of the speech of the main character(s), who are
identified only by accompanying narratives. Sometimes referred to as údar an
amhráin (“The authority for the song”), these narratives may be told by the singer
or by someone else, and range from a few words of introduction to complete
stories; sometimes the sung verses are interspersed with spoken narrative.
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The use of the term údar seems to encompass several of its senses as
defined by Ó Dónaill (Ó Dónaill 1977:1296):
1. Author, originator; source, origin.
2. Author, writer. [...]
4. Authority, reliable evidence.
5. Cause, reason.
The “story” of a song, as “údar” is first of all an account of the person who
composed it, the dramatic situation in which the song originated, and the reasons
for and effects of the author’s poetic response to that situation. But it is also the
authentication of the song, which makes it real for an audience by tying the poetic
utterance to a definite origin in history and by locating the song in a specific
place in the landscape.6 As Hugh Shields has observed,
the simple identity of the poet is often a matter of special interest to
a Gaelic audience. [...] Since the first-person mode predominates,
the same identity is shared by the poet and the main personage [...]
so that authorship need not be considered an extrinsic, nonnarrative aspect. A poet may be a local person whose circumstances
local people may guess at, if not actually know (Shields 1993:77).
The “story” in sean-nós singing is what could be called a potential, as
opposed to a performed narrative. As narratives they seem to range from quite
formal, artistic, and performable stories all the way to simple background
knowledge or indeed mere hunches or intuitions about the meaning or origin of
a song. In my fieldwork in Ráth Cairn I rarely heard stories to songs narrated as
part of song performance, but I frequently heard them discussed in conversation,
6. It is interesting to compare sean-nós song with Austurian “deepsong” (Fernandez 1986);
both are currently undergoing popular revivals based on their qualities of personalism,
celebration of place, and spontaneity as a kind of heroic utterance.
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often not connected with actual song performance. Older people who are not
singers nonetheless know both the words and the “stories” to songs; I have heard
one man in particular complain that younger singers he hears on Radio na
Gaeltachta obviously do not know the stories, even altering the gender of a
song’s characters. That the “story” functions as shared background information
rather than performed narrative does not diminish its importance. Without its
shared narrative background, much of a song’s meaning is lost. This is true
especially since sean-nós songs often consist entirely of the protagonists’ speech,
and thus are lyric and dramatic, rather than narrative, in nature. Songs refer to
their stories, just as ordinary conversation is enriched by references or allusions
to songs—e.g., a young man, while cleaning out an ancient decrepit pipe for an
older man, laughingly compares it to Píopa Ainde Mhóir. In my own fieldwork, I
have frequently been struck by how smooth and continuous the transition from
conversation to song can be, a phenomenon also well documented by Glassie
(1982) and Shields (1993). Ordinary conversation provides the occasion for
reference to, then narration of, a story, which peaks with reported poetic
conversation between the story’s protagonists, followed by a few sung verses or
an entire song.
When a song’s “story” is narrated in performance it portrays the lines of
the song as the actual direct utterance of the protagonist(s). An example of this is
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Joe Heaney’s spoken introduction to Amhrán Shéamais Uí Chonchúir.7 I include the
first two sung verses to give a feel for the kind of transition involved, between
spoken narrative and the sung poetry which this narrative frames as direct
quotation:
Bhuel, an t-amhrán atá mé ag goil a rá anois, sé an t-ainm a tugtar air,
‘Amhrán Shéamais Uí Chonchur’. Nó, tugann cuide de na daoine
‘Amhrán Árainn’ air. Mar is in Árainn a rugadh ‘is a tógadh Séamas Ó
Conchur. Fear bocht diaganta a bhí ann. ‘Is an t-am a raibh na ministéirí
nó , thugfadh cuide de na daoine ‘soupers’ orthu ag goil thart. Gheall
ministéir a bhí in Árainn cnagaire dúthaigh, sé sin a rá, gabháltas talúna,
rud a dtugainn muide gabháltas air, cnagaire a tugtar in Árainn air. Sin
timpeall ‘s, ocht n-acra fichead talúna. Gealladh é sin do Shéamas as ucht
amhrán a dhéanamh, a’ moladh an chreideamh gallda agus ag rith síos a
chreideamh fhéin, an creideamh caitlicheach. Agus bhí Séamas bocht mar a
duirt mé, agus ní raibh a fhios aige céard a dhéanfadh sé. Chuaigh sé
abhaile agus luí sé ar a leaba. Agus san oíche, bhí aisling aige. Agus san
aisling tháinig an t-aingeal aige agus thóg sé lamh leis. Agus thaspáin sé
dhó an t-anam dhá mheáchan. D’éirí Séamas ar maidín, agus chuaigh sé
go dtí an sagart paráiste. Agus d’inis sé dhó, mar a bhí an aisling aige.
“Chonaic mé” ar seisean “an t-anam dhá mheáchan aréir.” “Agus a
Shéamais a stór” a dúirt an sagart, “ar mheáigh an mhaith an t-olc” “Ó
mheáigh” a deir Seamas, “míle buíochas is altú le Dia.” “Muise a
Shéamais anois” a deir sé, “an bhfuil socraithe i t’intinn a’dsa céard a
dhéanfas tú?” “Ó tá” arsa Séamas. “Tá mise ag goil abhaile anois” a déir
sé, “Agus cluainfidh an saol fós, an t-amhrán atá mise ag goil a
dhéanamh.” Agus dearfaidh mise an t-amhrán anois mar a rinne Séamas
Ó Conchur é.
(Well, the song I’m going to sing now, they call it “Séamas Ó
Conchur’s song.” Or, some people call it “The Árainn song.”
Because Séamas Ó Conchur was born and raised in Árainn.8 He
was a poor, pious man. And this was the time when the ministers,
or, as some people would call them, the Soupers, were going
7. Broadcast 3/9/95 on Raidió na Gaeltachta. Recorded by Raidió Telefis Éireann in the
Damer Theatre, Dublin, in 1957. The song itself, without the spoken introduction, can be found
on the C.D. Amhráin ar an Sean-nós.
8. Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands.
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around. A Minister who was in Árainn promised him a ‘cnagaire
dúthaigh’ [a measure of land], that is to say, a ‘gabhaltanas talúna’
[a land holding], what we [in Connemara] would call a ‘gabháltas’,
they call it a ‘cnagaire’ in Árainn. That’s about 28 acres of land [16
acres according to Ó Dónaill p. 254]. That was promised to Séamas
in return for making a song, praising the foreign faith and running
down his own faith, the Catholic faith. And Séamas was poor as I
said, and he didn’t know what he would do. He went home and lay
on his bed. And in the night, he had a dream [aisling, a vision]. And
in the dream, an angel came to him, and took his hand. And he
showed him the soul being judged [lit., ‘being weighed’, after
death]. Séamas got up in the morning and he went to the parish
priest. And he told him about the dream he had. “I saw,” he said,
“the soul being judged last night.” “And Séamas, dear” said the
priest, “did the good judge the bad?” “Oh it did” said Séamas, “a
thousand thanks and blessing to God.” “Well Séamas” he said,
“Have you decided what you’ll do?” “Oh I have” said Séamas. “I’m
going home now” he said. “And the world will still hear [i.e., hear
forever] the song that I’m going to make.” And I’ll sing the song
now as Séamas Ó Conchur made it.)
Dhá bhfaighfinnse culaith éadaigh a mbeadh óir a’ silleadh léi
Ar chuntar dán a dhéanamh, ag moladh an chreideamh gall,
(If I would get a suit of clothes streaming with gold in return for
making a song praising the foreign faith)
Ní bhfaighfinnse ó mo chroí istigh, sliocht Liútair a mholadh ar aon chor,
A d’iompaigh ar lamh chlé, ‘s ar thréig Mac na ngrást.
(I couldn’t bring myself from my heart inside, to praise Luther’s
descendants, who turned towards evil and abandoned the Son of
graces.)
[10 more verses...]
The didactic beginning to Joe’s narrative reflects the occasion—a
performance in Dublin for an urban audience—although the discussion of terms
and dialectal differences would be common “at home” also. Joe was quite adept
at telling these introductory stories to English-speaking audiences, followed by
337
Irish-language songs, while maintaining that the songs themselves were
untranslatable. The main function of the “story” when narrated is to orient the
listeners, setting the stage for the song and equipping them for the change in
footing9 when the song inserts them directly into this constructed scene. What
was past in the story becomes present in the song, and the third person becomes
first person. The central act of singing and listening to sean-nós song was for Joe
this projection back in time, and he often used the word “story” to refer, not to
any kind of narrative, but to this past scene itself. This past scene is the secret of
the song, a shared history that is ritually enacted in performance:
...This is why they go anticlockwise when they’re singing, they hold
hands and go anticlockwise. Because they’re turning back the clock,
to when this time was—and each song tells a story. Because when
most of the songs were composed, the people couldn’t speak about
their feelings they had to put it over in song so people wouldn’t
understand what they were saying. The common enemy, wouldn’t
understand what they were talking (Heaney 78-15.5).
Songs very frequently support multiple interpretations—in effect different
“stories” or construals of their originating personae. This is a feature of the
manuscript tradition as well.10 Discussion and argument about the true narrative
background to lyric poems is thus part of the tradition.
9. Goffman (1981); see also Urban (1989) on the use of the first person in South American
ritual discourse. On the importance of reported speech for understanding the sociocultural
functions of language, see Voloshinov (1973).
10. Ruairí Ó hUiginn, personal communication.
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Singing style
The most often remarked feature of the sean-nós singing style is the highly
ornamented solo melodic line. Pitch, duration, tone-quality, and dynamics all
appear to be organized so as to allow the singer the greatest flexibility in
ornamentation (Bodley 1973). Melodic ornamentation consists of adding small
grace notes: melismatic ornamentation is “a group of adjacent auxiliary notes
decorating or replacing a main note of the melody;” intervallic ornamentation is
the replacement of intervals between main notes, and the filling in of intervals
with “a series of stepwise notes” (Ó Cannain 1978:71). Ornamentation results in a
kind of rubato:
The number of accents or beats per bar is constant, and falls mostly
into patterns of 2, 3, or 4. The duration of each of these beats is
variable—indeed it has to be so in order to accommodate the
ornaments.Thus one gets a form of rubato that is to some extent
structural—a rubato that has a specific part to play in the musical
structure (Bodley 1973:52)
The practice of ornamentation is but one aspect of the musical variation (between
measures, verses, performances, and performers) which is valued as the
hallmark of “true” traditional style:
Not only is the ornamentation changed from verse to verse, but
what might be considered the basic musical material of the song
may be varied as well (Bodley 1973:72).
Ornamentation, along with melodic and rhythmical variation take the same
forms in both song and instrumental music, which also share the same basic
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melodies.11 However, the exact nature and role of ornamentation in traditional
singing is a matter of some debate. Lillis Ó Laoire has suggested that the Gaelic
Revival movement and other aficionados have made a “fetish” of melodic
ornamentation, taking it as the unique measure of “true” sean-nós style and
distorting the tradition in the process, whereas many singers and some regional
styles use very little ornamentation (Ó Laoire 1996, and personal
communication). Clearly, melodic ornamentation is but one of many ways of
structuring a performed text. Relevant to this discussion is Glassie’s (1982:40)
observation that storytelling in County Fermanagh had two “modes:”
One is full and flat in sound, complex in grammar; it is used to
digress informationally, to orient the listener, and it approximates
prose. The other is melodic, rhythmically broken, grammatically
simple; it is used to advance the narration, to excite the listener, and
it approximates poetry. Neither prose nor poetry, thought nor
action, stories are both.12
Perhaps song performance lies on a similar continuum between relatively
“narrative” and relatively “lyric” poles; different regional traditions as well as
different singers and indeed songs in a given region would then occupy different
positions on this continuum. As we shall see, Joe Heaney understood melodic
ornamentation in this way, as one aspect of narrative performance—as part of
telling a story.
11. See Williams (1985) for a formal analysis of Joe Heaney’s style of ornamentation.
Williams argues that Heaney tends to ornament unstressed syllables; she emphasizes the
importance of the interaction between rubato and ornamentation in creating poetic tension (stress
and release) within the lines of a song.
12. See also Ó Crualaoich (1989); Linzee (1984) analyzes ornamentation in Joe Heaney’s
storytelling.
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Embodiment: “pulse” and “drone”
Joe Heaney used two terms to talk about how a singer keeps continuity in
a song while singing it, the “pulse” and the “drone” or “nyah.” These are quasiphysical entities that a singer “has,” and Joe often mentioned them at the same
time.
Well you see it’s like a bee, when it’s going into the hive. In sean-nós
singing, which is old style singing, there’s supposed to be the drone
of the ancient pipes in the voice, accompanying the song. Some
people have it, and some don’t. I’ve been accused of having it, it’s a
great honor to be accused of having it Ewan Macoll told me I had it.
Peggy Seeger told me I had it, ... I don’t put there it’s just there.
[Does that help you sing better?] Well it helps me balance my voice
better. Well I can hold on to the next line better by having this
following you know, following the words I’m saying. Or preceding
the words I’m saying. I keep a link with the lines you know, by
doing that. The lines are linked to one another. It’s like telling a
story. You’ve got to put grace notes in a story even to tell it, with a
bit of exaggeration. I mean it’s no use telling a story the way it
was—you’ve got to put something on to it. And help it along. [So
even when you stop singing to take a breath or something you still
hear the drones?] I still have it...even when I stop to talk, it still
helps me to carry on with the same, almost the same note as I
stopped on you know (Heaney 78-15.3).
There is, we suspect, “a bit of exaggeration” in this account itself! But it
accurately describes the role of nasalization in sean-nós, and makes sense as a
phenomenological account from the singer’s perspective. Likewise with Joe’s
description of the “pulse:”
My father told me, “when you’re singing a song, start softly, build
up a climax, and come down—slowly, easily toward the
end—because remember, in folk music there is no beat, it’s just got
a pulse; and the minute you lose that pulse you’re dead, the song is
dead. You can lose a beat,” he said, and survive—but the pulse,
no.” That’s the advice he gave me.
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A pulse, you know, it’s something that goes evenly more or less,
you know, with no sort of loudness all the time, or no sort of down
all the time. It’s a thing that keeps going, and when it stops that’s
dead, whatever they’re doing is dead. It keeps the same moment,
you know; going the same way all the time. You don’t run away
with something. You don’t beat (Quoted in Cowdery 1990:35).
It is hard to imagine Joe’s father using a term like “folk music,” and indeed in an
interview in Irish,13 we hear Joe say:
...Mar a dúirt an Béarlóir fadó, “In folk music there’s no beat—there’s
only a pulse.” (...As the English-speaker said long ago, “In folk
music there’s no beat—there’s only a pulse.”)
My suspicion is that this “pulse” is a musicological term that made sense to Joe,
both as a description of what singing felt like and rhetorically as ammunition in
his ongoing war against the Irish ballad boom, Liam Clancy, and the tendency to
put a regular beat and guitar accompaniment on every possible song. Joe seemed
to identify the pulse of a song with its poetic meter,14 and in this respect it is
interesting to compare his idea with one found in Irish folklore about poetry and
poets, féith na filíochta (the vein of poetry). As Ó hÓgáin (1979, 1982) has shown,
folk stories often portrayed this literally as a physical vein which poets had;
when the poet was seized by an emotional poetic frenzy, the pulsing of this vein
would produce poetry, its pulse corresponding to the poetic meter. Thus, poetry is
portrayed in the tradition as being a direct physical artifact of the poet’s body
and emotions. And since this poetry was sung, (Ó Madagáin 1985), we have
13. Interviewed by Mike P. Ó Conghaile, Raidió na Gaeltachta. Archived as tape R 779,
An Teanglann, Roinn na Nua-Ghaeilge, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath.
14. cf. Williams 1985
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evidence for a folk understanding in which song creates a direct connection over
time between singer and poet, via the pulse.
What Joe called “style” is a slowly developed habitual relationship to
songs and stories. He denied that he learned “ornaments” at the same time as
songs, saying:
First of all you’ve got to learn the song and develop your own style.
I mean, as the saying goes, you’ve got to walk before you run. The
main thing is to learn the song and what the song is all about. And
then, develop your own style in doing it, and then you’ll—there’s
nobody living that can tell anyone where to put grace notes in a
song. You just do it yourself. It takes years. [78-15.1]
Ornamentation is a question of time, coming from the desire to “hold on” to lines.
Joe relates the importance of a line to its place in the “story” to interviewer Esther
Warkov:
EW: Are slower songs more highly ornamented than the faster
songs?
JH: Oh yes, much more, much more. Well you see the point was,
that the ornamentation came from you see that the people wanted
to hold onto this particular line. They didn’t want to let it go. They
wanted to hold onto it as long as they could. Different lines in a
song are different, sung differently to other lines in a song, some
verses tells you of the tragedy and other verses tells, why did it
happen and they vary, like that—the same way you sing any
version of a song. [78-15.1]
Singing involves an act of orientation—putting oneself in the place of the song’s
protagonist:
EW: How did you know, when you were singing something, if it
wasn’t good?
JH: Sure, I judge it by the way I feel. Now, ‘do I feel this, or don’t I?’
That’s the question I ask myself all the time. Do I feel this song, do I
put myself in the man’s name that this particular song was written
about. Am I suffering the labors he did, can I go through that or
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have that picture before me; if I can’t follow that man, the journey
he took, whether he was in bondage or slavery, I don’t follow the
song and I don’t do it justice, and I know I don’t if I don’t do that.
And that’s what I had, that’s technique [unclear] in the song and I
had to listen and listen and develop my own style eventually in my
own particular way and that’s how I do it now. But I listened to the
way that they were doing it you see and you see the keening and
the lament right through the song in a sad song. And this is what I
was trying to get, which I eventually did, and did it my own way.
And I’m doing it my own way for the last, oh, for the last 20 years I
suppose. And it took me twenty, twenty-five for me to develop that
properly.
EW: ...so in the process of developing your style, the main
emphasis was on how well you could really picture the whole...
JH: How well I could live, live the song. It’s like drawing a picture.
If you don’t have the blueprint of what you’re doing you see you’ll
never get anywhere. And that’s the same with a song, start softly,
build up a climax, and come right down again.
EW: Would you ever take one line out of a song and sing that over
and over...?
JH: No. ...You’ve got to do the whole—The first important thing
about a song is, know the story. What the story is all about—and
that’s very, very important. And then you’re doing the song the
same as if you were telling the story. Each line varies, but you’ve
got to put them all together so they’ll make sense. I mean, it’s no
use trying to get one line, because one line follows the other and it’s
before another line so they’ve got to knit into one another. [78-15.2]
Joe speaks about singing both in terms of empathy (“live the song”) and craft
(“drawing a picture,” “knitting” lines together). But empathy takes the upper
hand, “playing the act” of going through the character’s life. As Joe imagines it,
the act of singing establishes a parallel between the singer’s and the protagonist’s
lives and agonies, and between these common experiences and the melodic form
of the song. At a recital he was asked to sing a verse of a song without, and then
with ornamentation. After trying this (without much success), with The Rocks of
Bawn, he offered this explanation:
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There’s a big difference in them two verses of that. In one of them
you’re in a hurry to go somewhere and the other one, you’re
playing the act, you’re working exactly what Sweeney was doing,
you’re going through the same thing that he was going through,
before the song was ever made. You have the picture before you of
the man going through this agony, and if he’d stop for one minute,
somebody else would get the job. And that’s exactly the picture you
must follow when you’re singing an old song. Especially if it’s a
sad one. Now if it’s a love song or an old man marrying a young
woman that’s a different story you can do what you like with them,
because they deserve it in the first place. ...you’ve got to have the
picture before you. And always have that picture and then you’ll
do the song properly then. [78-15.10]
For Joe, the meaning of a song’s “story” — events of long ago in the lives of the
song’s protagonists—becomes manifest in the melodic form of the song when it
is properly sung. Joe often used the word “story” to refer, not to any specific
narrative, but to the narrative meaning of a song in general, condensed or
distilled into music. The essence of song, then, is similar to what Paul Friedrich
(1986:39) has called the “master trope” of poetry: “to create felt consubstantiality
between music, language and myth.”
There is a sense, in the tradition, that “stories” are the physical marks or
effects of events and can substitute for the events themselves. Such is the sense of
the term “scéal” in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s (1967:42, 45, my translation) short story,
An tSraith ar Lár:
‘Seanbhróig chiréibthe mé,’ adúirt sé leis féin. ‘Má bhain mé scéalta as an
saol ní gan poill a fhágáil ionam é.’
(‘I’m an old tattered shoe’ he said to himself. ‘If I got stories out of
life it wasn’t without it leaving holes in me.’)
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Ó Cadhain’s character, reflecting at the end of his life, understands his own body
as a collection of “scéalta:”
Ba mhó de scéalta danra gach méir, cluais, cois, polláire agus súil leis. Níl
méir ag gabháil leis nár bhris teanachair gliomaigh...
(Every finger, ear, foot, nostril and eye of his was a greater cruel
story. He didn’t have a finger going that hadn’t been broken by a
lobster’s pincers...)
This understanding is evident in Joe Heaney’s sense of the identity of songs,
stories, and the lives of singers and listeners.
The most important thing about the song tradition to Joe Heaney was that
“songs tell stories.” But these “stories” lie hidden beneath the surface of the song
itself:
Well you see, nobody ever asked you to sing a song. ‘Abair
amhrán’. Say a song. You know what I mean? Therefore, you’re
telling the story in a nice way. Because, when most of these songs
were composed, the people couldn’t express their views orally so
they had to put it in verse. And that told the tragic tale, what was it
an emigration song, or a boating song— a boat tragedy like Anach
Chuain, or something like that, these conveyed the message and
without telling the story the song was lost. That’s why it’s always
advisable to say a little bit about the song before you start doing it
you know. [78-15.1]
...they’re turning back the clock, to when this time was—and each
song tells a story. Because when most of the songs were composed,
the people couldn’t speak about their feelings they had to put it
over in song so people wouldn’t understand what they were
saying. The common enemy, wouldn’t understand what they were
talking. [78-15.5]
What emerges from Joe Heaney’s account is a view of singing as a kind of ritual.
The central act of singing what Joe called “laments” is the act of visualization and
346
empathy that leads the singer to “hold on to” lines. The finalization (Bakhtin 1986;
Hanks 1996:243-244) of the lament as a particular type or genre of singing—what
makes it different from other kinds of singing, was for Joe Heaney this
imaginative act. The absence of this act “kills” or “destroys” a song, by failing to
“do justice” to it as a song or to its protagonists. Laments praise, as opposed to
satires—what Joe had in mind when he mentioned “a love song or an old man
marrying a young woman”—where “you can do what you like with them,
because they deserve it in the first place.”
“Sean-nós” as a genre
The use of the term sean-nós (“old-style”) as a name for both a style of
singing and a repertoire of songs seems to have developed in the milieu of the
Irish language revival movement, which sponsors singing competitions, most
notably, as part of An t–Oireachtas, the annual Irish-language festival. The term
itself is thus of fairly recent vintage (Mac Con Iomaire 1994, Ó Laoire 1996), and
it is a matter of considerable ongoing debate what is and is not “true” sean-nós
song. However, this does not compromise its validity either as a term or as a
genre if one follows Bakhtin (1986) in maintaining that genres develop as a
process in social discourse and embody an aesthetics and world-view as well.
The reflexivity of the term sean-nós, as defined both from “inside” and “outside”
the tradition, is also characteristic of the phenomenon of genre in general. The
semantics of the term, meaning something “old” as distinct from the new, is in
347
keeping with this reflexivity (e.g., the term “novel” for another famous speech
genre). Joe’s career as a singer and exponent of Irish singing both developed out
of and greatly influenced the development of sean-nós as a genre. Lillis Ó Laoire
(1996) argues that sean-nós singing has been “transformed from a form of
folksong little known and understood and practiced by Irish-speakers in rural
areas, to a powerful national identity symbol, representing a different cultural
and political agenda to that which was accepted as the contemporary
norm”—effecting its “exaltation to a mystified high-art discourse.”
Given all this, it is interesting to discover that in his interviews, Joe rarely
used the term, focusing instead on what he called (in English) “laments” as an
exemplary subset of songs which he felt embodied the essence of the tradition.
His main examples of “laments” were religious songs such as Caoineadh na dTrí
Muire, (“The Lament of the Three Marys”) which he recorded and made famous,
but which were considered, both locally in Carna and more generally throughout
Ireland as being women’s songs. In fact these sacred songs were felt to function
as both as prayers and as direct substitutes for the caoineadh (“keening,” women’s
funeral lament) which was suppressed by the Church (Partridge 1983). “Lament”
was the term Joe used in English for the caoineadh. Thus we find one of the major
exponents of sean-nós as a genre basing his understanding of its aesthetics on
forms which echo, replace or imitate other forms which are completely outside of
that genre.15 I would like to argue that we should understand Joe Heaney’s
15. See Hanks 1987 for a discussion of creative ambiguity between genres.
348
statements about singing as, in part, a strong dialogic response to the ongoing
discourses about singing, in Ireland and elsewhere, including the attempts
(largely by those born outside of the Gaeltacht) to define and regiment sean-nós
as a genre.
“Laments” and caoineadh
Joe Heaney’s interpretation of “lament” singing as a kind of ritual is an
innovation which follows and builds on formal elements in the song texts
themselves (such as their being composed as first-person utterances) as well as
on traditional song performance and traditional understandings of the nature of
poetry and speech in general. One element which seems to be innovative is the
strong connection Joe felt between song performance and caoineadh (“keening”),
women’s mortuary ritual oratory. His main examples of a “lament” were
religious songs such as Caoineadh na dTrí Muire, (The Lament of the Three
Marys), which portrays the Passion of Christ via a conversation between Mary
and Christ; Joe recorded it and made it as famous as it made him. These sacred
songs, however, were considered, both locally in Carna and more generally
throughout Ireland as being women’s songs, and were felt to function as both as
prayers and as direct substitutes for the caoineadh, which was suppressed by the
Church (Partridge 1983). “Lament” was also the term Joe used in English for the
caoineadh itself. When asked about the “social setting” of Caoineadh na dTrí Muire,
Joe described it as the lamentation for Christ at Lent:
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JH: ...most laments, you know, were sung during funerals and all
that people crying after the dead one you know. There used to be
what you’d call keening women in Ireland, years and years ago
who used to cry at every wake, they were specialized, and crying
over the dead person and telling about his good points, never his
bad ones. and even at the graveyard, they used to cry until the last
sod was put over the dead person. Now the lament, the óchón,
óchón, well that followed through the lament I sang yesterday, the
“three Marys” you know. The setting of that was especially during
Lent, every Friday during Lent the gathering, or even if somebody
came in off the street or from the next house that came in, while this
was on, they’d take part, sit down around and take part in it. By
taking part I meant, by keeping silent until the lament was over.
Which sometimes took a long time because, whoever was singing
the lament put everything they had into it—and it was usually a
woman. They left nothing out, every thing, and the sadness and
sorrow of their own life helped them to make it even better.
EW: Did the people who were taking part become emotional?
JH: Oh they would, most of them would you know, they would
especially if the older people, would become emotional they’d cry,
because this is something that they could see, as the person carried
on. They could see what was happening, the event taking place
which was the real meaning of the song anyway to follow a story to
follow a path, until you come to the turn. [...] Óchón, that means,
that’s really the saddest part; that means, ‘my sorrow’, óchón, óchón.
...That was used at all laments, and as I said before, there were
special women for this. Now they didn’t have to be related to the
person. They’d come and cry over the man waked on the bed. And
they did this with everybody, now they were crying their own
dead, you know. But they were using this to cry their own dead,
because this was part of their job. They weren’t paid to do it, they
just did it. They specialized in it. [78-15.3]
Joe Heaney rarely used the term sean-nós to refer to the song tradition, but
focused instead on what he called (in English) “laments” as an exemplary subset
of songs which he felt embodied the essence of the tradition. Furthermore, it is
clear from his accounts that Joe felt that song performance was profoundly
related to caoineadh. Caoineadh na dTrí Muire, with its refrain of “ochón, agus ochón
350
ó,” is only the most obvious example of this, but as Joe said, “you see the keening
and the lament right through the song in a sad song.” Joe intuited a connection
between what he called “lamentable”-ness as a quality of a song and melodic
ornamentation, ie., “holding on” to lines of a song and drawing them out with
grace notes. He used the same words to described the desire to “hold on” to the
dead at wakes and funerals. By making this connection he perhaps exaggerated
the role of ornamentation, transforming both his own style of singing and,
through his wide influence on other singers, the tradition itself. He was well
aware of this—when asked about the difference between the way he sang and
the way his father sang he answered that he was
... a bit slower with the slow songs; I hold onto them longer than he
used to do.... He was inclined to sing them a bit faster...
EW: Do you sing the songs more highly ornamented than they used
to sing them?
JH: More ornamented. I remember well. I was telling you about
Easter Sunday [ie., Caoineadh na dTrí Muire]. Well. I ornamented
that meself in the first place you know. That used to be sung
without ornamentations. And I do it my way and I get my own
ornamentations into it. And, they tell me it’s twice as good a song
with that than without it.
By his own account, what Joe Heaney did with Caoineadh na dTrí Muire was to
take it farther into the genre of ordinary song, ie., treating it more as a song
(rather than a prayer for certain occasions) by ornamenting it melodically. At the
same time, by doing this he borrowed some of its original context, using the song
as the basis for his own fame as a singer of laments, having intuited (or perhaps,
as Bourdieu (1977) would put it, misrecognized) the relation between melodic
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ornamentation and the secret of a song’s “story,” exaggerating its role in the
process.
Songs as commodities?
...I still love the songs and I wanted to do them better and better
and better and better. Do justice to the songs and that’s the only
way of presenting them is to keep them in the form that they were.
If you can’t add anything on, don’t take anything away that’s my
policy I would never compromise with groups, or people who’s
running before they can walk. They run away with great songs,
destroy them and then leave them down and take another one and
do the same with them... Only for the old people who kept the
songs alive, only where they were so preserved, in one area of
Ireland, especially the poor areas, they wouldn’t be alive today
because they’d be destroyed and distorted and cut up to
smithereens (Heaney 78-15.2).
...There’s no way I can do them as good as I want to do them. Even
to myself. I want to do them justice over justice. ...Because I love the
spirit of the songs and I understand why the songs were composed
in the first place. And nobody knows who composed the half of
them you see. Although collectors came around with tape recorders
and what have you, and they collected the songs, the people who
gave them the songs never got a penny out of them. And the
collectors sold books, you know, because the craze was on since
1966. ...Everybody wanted songs, to get these guitars and all that,
groups over groups, and finally they’re running out of names for
groups in Ireland. There are three hundred ninety groups. They’re
all doing the same thing (Heaney 78-15.2).
Joe Heaney might seem an unlikely crusader against the commodification
of traditional song. More than any other singer, he was responsible for creating a
market for recordings of sean-nós song. He was a major participant in the
folksong revival of the 1960’s and proudly claimed to have given songs such as
The Seven Drunken Nights to Liam Clancy. But he was strongly critical of certain
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musical alterations, most notably the addition of accompaniment to sean-nós
songs, especially to the songs he called “laments.” Joe saw accompaniment as
“killing” a song, eliminating the possibility of “holding on” to lines and
ornamenting them. Any accompaniment which imposed a regular “beat” would
reduce the possibilities for rubato, the ornamental drawing out of lines of a song.
Joe saw this as exploitation, reducing a song to a commodity and severing the
essential connection between singer, song, listeners, and story. I find it
fascinating that Joe Heaney criticized the commercialization of songs in these
terms, which link formal changes in musical structure, a severing of social
relationships, and a new conception of time. Mauss (1967:34-5) characterized the
transition from gift exchange to barter and market systems in terms of the
elimination of the element of time from exchange. In Ireland, Glassie (1982) has
shown the importance of several genres of talk, storytelling, and song as
elements in a system of exchange which also included food, music, and labor.
Elsewhere in Europe, on the Greek periphery, Seremetakis (1991) argued for a
“women’s imaginary” based on memory, shared substance, death ritual and
laments, in opposition to discourses of modernization. I believe that Joe Heaney’s
comments are best understood against this background, and that what he was
arguing for was a specific reality, of the nature of songs as texts and of practices
of singing and listening, which is at odds with the forms that texts, singing and
listening take under relations of market-governed production and consumption.
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Performance
“Dancing in those shoes is like trying to play a bodhrán with a piece of
rubber.” Thus spoke Máirtín Mac Donncha, dancer, poet, singer, “character” and
social conscience of Ráth Cairn. Máirtín was conducting a workshop in “damhsa
ar an sean-nós” (solo step dancing) in the hall built by the local co-op,
Comharchumann Ráth Cairn. His students were mostly local children (who
picked up the steps effortlessly), a few adults, and one hapless Yank wearing the
wrong shoes. While demonstrating various steps to us, Máirtín called out a series
of names, the names of people “whose” steps they were. So dancing, at least in
Máirtín’s case, could involve quotation, as with so many other kinds of
performance. At a music session more than a year after this (27/7/96), in the
Club in Ráth Cairn, a local person, returned on holiday from the United States,
asked Máirtín to dance, and as part of his dance he did a step I had never noticed
before, which turned out to be from the dancing of this woman’s late husband’s
father, long deceased. She recognized and appreciated this gesture, which was
clearly directed at her. On occasions like this the dead are made present in
performance. People talk in small groups, the silences retreating as the occasion
warms up. Conversational topics ripen until someone sums them up with a
concise, witty statement that draws laughter and approval from the others.
People begin to quote others, animating their voices, framing their statements
with “...mar a déarfadh/dúirt X...” (“...as X would say/ said...” -- see Chapter 6).
These quoted others, not present, are often the “old people,” the local dead. The
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insertion of quoted others into conversation continues into the telling of stories
(“yarns”16), which have a similar structure to these conversations: the teller
relates a narrative, building a dramatic scene for the punch line: a witty, apt,
powerful, or hilariously pathetic sentence spoken by the main character, directly
quoted. Sometimes these stories are told in Irish, with the punchline delivered in
English “because he was speaking English at the time” — but the real reason is
that wit is untranslatable, and that in this kind of quotation, as with poetry, it is
the actual form of the utterance that counts. Henry Glassie (1982) and Gearóid Ó
Crualaoich (1992) have shown the pervasiveness in Ireland of this type of talk,
and of this general pattern of conversation, as the first step in transforming an
ordinary occasion into an occasion of perfomance. Such occasions may continue
with the participants reaching further back in time and deeper into the culture’s
symbolic universe,17 as the characters quoted now are the poets (such as
Raiftearaí, Aindí Ó Ceallaigh, Colm de Bhailís, Máire ní Chlochartaigh), and their
words, sung as songs, eclipse and replace the accompanying naratives. Singing
breaks through the isolated groups of talkers, more or less uniting all those
present, and transcending the conversational base. Shared understandings that
were worked out explicitly in conversation are now left unspoken, and quotation
is no longer explicitly framed as such. The silence that now returns is more that
16. Called “bids” in Fermanagh (Glassie 1982).
17. cf. Ó Crualaoich (1989).
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of the unsayable rather than of the unsaid, of what Gibbons (1996) terms
“allegory.”
Now we are at the situation described by Joe Heaney, the ritual-like use of
song to project the joys and sufferings of the poets onto one’s own personal
history of hopes and sorrows. But while this certainly happens, there seems to
me to be much more going on. The conversational impulse is too strong, and
except on very rare occasions, this simple projection is overlain with what could
perhaps be be called “carnival.”
Allegorical lamination of contexts
Irvine (1996:146) proposes that the complexity of reported speech
performance is best understood as the lamination of two or more sets of
participant relations, for example the “I” and “you” of the here and now
interaction and that of the reported speech event. She proposes that all instances
of speech involve
a set of basic participation relations consisting of Speaker,
Addressee, and Third parties. Complex pragmatic effects then
derive from signs implicating other participation frames as
alternative or supplementary deictic fields. One such complexity
concerns how the participation frame which is grammatically
constituted relates to a field which is visually suggested (visually
evidenced at least by who is present/absent, but also manipulated
through body position, gesture, and gaze). Special effects and
combinations are also accomplished by person-switches and by
code-switches, as well as by a presumptive history of discourses.
These example suggest to me that the complex laminations
of participant roles are best thought of as the result of multiple
framing processes.
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One can come up with many examples in Irish song performance of this
complexity being mediated through “body position, gesture, and gaze.”
Performers often disengage themselves visually from their audience—by
averting their gaze, pulling a hat down over the forehead, not standing up or
moving to the “front” of the performance (often there is not any “front”), etc.;
likewise listeners may not look directly at performers. All these gestures may
serve to keep the reported context of the song, the dramatic encounter between
its characters, separate from the here-now event of performance, a separate
world. Audience silence, so beloved by Joe Heaney, can perform the same
function, as can the singer’s speaking the last few words of a song (Ó Canainn
1978; Shields 1993:121). On the other hand, singers can, subtly or dramatically,
direct songs “at” a particular audience member, by looking directly at them,
taking their hand, or by choice of songs whose narrative backgrounds or
performance histories or even a proper name or place-name in their texts, can be
made to connect them in some way with that person. All of this can also be
instigated by the “target” or by other audience members. The “complex
pragmatic effects” alluded to by Irvine take over as comments on the song and
compliments to the singer begin to flow. Depending on the mood of the occasion,
the whole interaction may be carnivalised with singers even changing words in
the song to meet the needs of the moment. I have heard Máirtín change the
penultimate line of Joe Heaney’s macaronic song One Morning in June from
“Then we will take the road home with all speed” to “Then we will take the road
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home from Áth Buí.” Inserting the Irish name of Athboy, the nearest town to Ráth
Cairn, humorously localises the song and casts it retrospectively as a Ráth Cairn
person’s voice—a local accent, as it were.
Irvine (1996:148-49) discusses this type of situation in terms of “leakage”
between participation frames—the distinction between the quoting and quoted
contexts is blurred, or one is projected onto the other. As Irvine shows, the
variety of forms and functions of “leakage” (including sometimes its near-total
avoidance) are great, and offer valuable insights into the specific local workings
of culture. Joe Heaney’s account of singing is an example of this leakage or
projection, ie., between the singer’s life and that of Sweeney, or in the case of the
singers of Lenten laments for whom “the sadness and sorrow of their own life
helped them to make it even better.” Angela Bourke (Partridge 1983:101-103) has
shown that these sacred songs, which portrayed Mary as an Irish bean chaointe
(keening woman), could substitute for the caoineadh at wakes and funerals. Note
that their effectiveness in this case involved a leakage between the “original”
context (Mary keening Christ) and the performance context (women mourning
the dead). By projection, the power and ritual efficacy of the caoineadh
(suppressed by the Church) was brought to bear on the present, while not
violating the letter of the Church’s law. At the same time, songs like Caoineadh na
dTrí Muire gave a retrospective charter and authorization for keening: in Christ’s
words (in Joe Heaney’s version), Tá mná mo chaointe le breith fós, a Mháithrín; ie.,
“There are women yet to be born who will keen me, Mother.” Thus the singer in
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the here-and-now sings Christ’s words, which refer back to the singer and
portray her singing as the keening of Christ, and by projection, as the keening of
the here-and-now dead.
Another kind of “leakage” occurs when a song has more than one “story,”
or a “story” with more than one reading as in the so-called “political” aisling
genre. Part of what Joe Heaney called the “secret” of these songs is that there is
more than one participation framework, ie. more than one possible set of
characters in the dialogue—two lovers conversing or a poet being addressed by
the goddess of sovereignty (Éire herself). For these songs, a “literal” reading on
any of these levels fails to do the songs justice, flattening out their true meaning,
which happens between all the various possible readings—meanings from one
framework leak into those from another. What Luke Gibbons terms “allegory” is
the sum of contingent (ie, indexical) relationships between an instantiation of a
text (in a particular performance for example) and the set of its various other
instantiations, historically true, imagined, or implied:
For allegory to retain its critical valency, it is vital that there is an
instability of reference and contestation of meaning to the point
where it may not be at all clear where the figural ends, and the
literal begins. ... [T]he instability of reference is such that it may not
always be possible, on textual grounds alone, to decide whether a
work is functioning allegorically or not, and hence we have to go
‘outside’ the text itself, to its historical conditions of meaning, in order
to give full scope to its semantic potential. The multiple references
are not, in the strict sense, inherent in the text, nor are they simply
added by ingenious critics in retropect: rather they derive from the
historical contiguity of the text to other narratives and symbolic
forms that are working their way through the culture. (Gibbons
1996:20-21, his emphasis).
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Allegory involves complex relations within discourse histories. In Gibbons’
example, taken from James Joyce’s story The Dead, Gretta hears the singing of a
ballad, The Lass of Aughrim, and is overwhelmed by memories of Michael Furey,
the childhood love who died for her sake and who used to sing that same song.
The song, heard by chance, carries memories of Michael, but also of the West of
Ireland that Gretta left behind her when she left for Dublin. It also carries
memories of the defeat of the Gaelic order in the Battle of Aughrim, and the
theme of the peasant woman forsaken by a nobleman (Gibbons 1996:144). There
is an additional complexity: The Lass of Aughrim, (a local version of Lord Gregory)
is sung in the words of the woman, who stands outside in the rain addressing
her lover. Michael Furey used to sing this to Gretta, and then died from exposure
after he himelf stood in the rain waiting to see her on the eve of her departure to
Dublin. Joyce’s story powerfully brings together three sets of relationships—the
lovers in the ballad, Michael and Gretta, and Gretta and her husband Gabriel
Conroy. To these sets of relationships must be added Joyce’s own relationhip
with his wife, Nora, who came from Galway and who used to sing The Lass of
Aughrim to Joyce (Ellmann 1982:248, 286).
As Gibbons argues, the contingency of relations in allegory—the veiling of
reference—as well as their multiplicity and complexity, is what gives allegory its
ability to convey powerful and complex emotions. I would like to suggest that
this is but one instance of a more general phenomenon in which an enigmatic
form is the manifestation of an underlying narrative or memory of a person, and
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embodies its sublimated essence. Perhaps the best example of this is in the role of
place-names in cultures such as that of rural Ireland, and in the Irish Gaeltacht in
particular. Here, particular places in the landscape are named and connected to
historical narratives (seanchas) of events which happened there or were
connected to that place in some way. The moral force of these stories is
sublimated into the places themselves:
Every bend in the road, every lane, bush, hill, outcrop and almost
every rock was a living thing to us with a personality of its own [...]
They were part of our dead: our visible history. […] A few years
ago I was speaking in America to a woman who hadn’t seen for
sixty years the townland where we were both raised. There was no
field or path, rock on the shore, hillock or gully on the mountain,
that she couldn’t name without any hesitation. She had that place
going around in her head for sixty years. I have it also. I don’t
recognse some of the younger generation now, but I recognise the
clay and the rocks and I remember the stories that worked every
square inch of clay and rock inseparably into my character, for
ever. (Ó Cadhain 1969:8; my translation).
The power of these stories seems to be augmented by the very contingency of
their relationship to their visible manifestations in places—it is the place that is
affecting, and it is the place that becomes part of a person’s moral character. As
for Máirtín Ó Cadhain, so also for Nick Thompson, a Western Apache living in
Cibeque, Arizona, who compared stories to arrows shot at those who stray from
right behavior:
... you won’t forget that story. You’re going to see the place where it
happened, maybe every day if it’s nearby and close to Cibeque. If
you don’t see it, you’re going to hear its name and see it in your
mind. It doesn’t matter if you get old—that place will keep on
stalking you like the one who shot you with the story. Maybe that
person will die. Even so, that place will keep on stalking you. It’s
like that person is still alive. Even if we go far away from here to
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some big city, places around here keep stalking us. If you live
wrong, you will hear the names and see the places in your mind.
They keep on stalking you, even if you go across oceans. The names
of all those places are good. They make you remember how to live
right, so you want to replace yourself again. (Basso 1990:125).
As with allegory in Ireland, the power of Western Apache place names derives
from the complexity of their references: to mental images of the places
themselves, to stories of events which happened there, to the tellers of those
stories, and to a person’s own moral conduct, or lack of it, which lead to his
“targeting” by the storyteller. Once again we have a situation where multiple
contexts are linked by one enigmatic form, which becomes a powerful
instrument of expression.
Narrative, naming, and dance music
The examples I have discussed so far all involve processes where forms
are linked in discourse to other times, places, and persons. It is important to note
that these linkages are not automatically given, but are created and reaffirmed in
discourse, through a process of remembering and attribution. It is equally
possible to ignore, forget, deny, or dismiss the histories of forms. Both tendencies
are evident among Irish traditional musicians. Quite possibly the majority of
musicians don’t know the names, origins, or histories of the majority of the tunes
they play.18 The names of dance tunes would seem to be as arbitrary and
18. This situation is changing as most tunes are now learned from commercial recordings
or printed texts, which usually include names; ironically, while strenghtening the relation
between tunes and names, it weakens what I argue below is the traditional function of naming.
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nonsensical as those of racehorses (although both types of naming are governed
by implicit conventions). This should alert us to the fact that naming, like
quotation, is a social practice rather than a given; we should turn our attention to
what is done or accomplished by naming tunes. As with proverbs, the parodies
and humourous tune titles play upon the underlying assumptions about naming.
“Hold the candle Mary while I shave the gander’s leg’, “The hoor in the nettles’,
“upstairs in a tent’, and the like all refer to absurd or unimaginable stories. Names
like “Tell her I am’, “Ask my father’, and so on are quotations which refer back to
conversations; they function exactly like the quoted punchlines of “yarns” or
“bids.” Without belaboring the point: naming tunes is part of the “crack;” dance
music is thus to varying extents caught up in the same processes of quotation,
projection, and allegory we have seen elsewhere. Very commonly names of tunes
identify persons—musicians who composed the tunes, or more likely, who
impressed their own distinctive personal form on them. Naming functions like
quotation to carry images of persons along with distinctive forms. This brings up
another important function of naming: As Cowdery (1990) has shown, traditional
dance tunes form continua, with large “families” of related melodies blending
into one another. Added to this is the improvisational nature of performance
(which includes improvising on the basic melody as well as ornamentation) and
the borrowing of phrases or whole parts from other tunes. Dance music exists,
then, in a kind of perpetual flux, with the distinction between one “tune” and
another being somewhat arbitrary. Naming acts to take a particular version and
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give it an identity, making it more text-like, more able to be re-performed
elsewhere as the “same” tune. The use of names has the power to invoke other
persons or occasions.
Another name for the processes I have been discussing might be “myth.”
As Barthes (1972) maintains, myth acts to discover the “essences” of its objects. In
Joe Heaney’s account of singing, for example, we discover a common form in
both the musical surface of a song performance and in the persons and events of
the song’s “story.” This common form is a shared substance, a consubstantiality;
some aspect of the past is made really present in performance. Micho Russel
(R.I.P.) from Doolin, Co. Clare was well-known for narrating (or mythologizing)
tunes. John Williams (a Chicago musician) once told me that Micho liked to play
the hornpipe “Napoleon crossing the Rhine,” while maintaining that “you can hear
the drums and the keening of the dead” in the music of the tune. Once so
prepared, it is quite easy to hear it, but it is doubtful that one would hear the
same things with any of the other names the tune goes under! Sound symbolism
acts as condensed narrative. It is worth noting here also the process of
transmission: John taught me the tune while telling stories about the musician he
learned it from, along with Micho’s own “story” about the tune.
Conclusions
Scholarly inquiry into the “sean-nós” tradition has quite consistently
focused on ornamentation (see for example Bodley 1973, Williams 1985, Linzee
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1984, Coleman 1996). Likewise, the popular media in Ireland as well as the folk
and Gaelic revival movements have taken ornamentation as a sign of the
uniqueness, antiquity, or “other”-ness of the tradition.19 This has led some critics
to comment on the “fetishization” of ornamentation (Lillis Ó Laoire, personal
communication, 1996; Vallely 1996). In anthropological literature the term
“fetish” is used to refer to a process where material forms are felt to embody social
relationships. For Marx in his analysis of commodity fetishism, the commodity not
only embodies but substitutes for and conceals the exploitative social relations of
its production under capitalism (Taussig 1980). Ignoring for the moment the
negative connotations of the term, its accuracy and usefulness is apparent; style
is a type of fetish to the degree in which it is felt to embody the essence of others.
In Ireland, attention to style forms the basis of what Bauman (1992) terms
traditionalization. For scholars (including this writer), “traditionalization has
overwhelmingly been a resource of intellectual outsiders, a means of selectively
valorizing, legitimizing, and managing aspects of culture frequently not their
own...” (Bauman 1992:140). For enthusiasts and the popular press it is often a
means of valorizing the romantic distance or otherness of the tradition and its
bearers as well, perhaps as a symbol of national or regional identity. But as
Bauman shows (1996:141), traditionalization is also practiced by the bearers and
transmitters of tradition, being
19. Bob Quinn’s film The Atlantean goes so far as to use ornamentation in sean-nós singing
as evidence for the non-Irish origins of Connemara’s people and traditions.
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...a complimentary strategy at the folk level, the active construction
of links tying the present to the past. Oral tradition, in these active
and local terms, is a particular strategic form of the
contextualization of speech vis-à-vis other speech, a way that those
who use spoken art forms as equipment for living invest what they
say with social meaning, efficacy, and value.
In this chapter I have argued that in Irish tradition, not just speech but all
expressive forms are part of this process. The process of transmission is intensely
personal—style is the immediately felt presence of others, and of other stories, in
one’s own thoughts, deeds, and performances. Quotation can be used negatively
(as in the case of “mar a déarfá”) to distance oneself from or acknowledge the
stylistic inappropriateness of something one is saying. More typically though,
quotation, attribution, and narratization tie the present occasion to other
occasions and persons.
The song tradition as a form of discourse is thus an important site for the
social construction of the subject and subjectivity in general. Direct poetic
discourse with its potential for masking and projection offers a surprising range
of possibilities for the subject (Ó Baoill 1990; Ní Annracháin 1994). In the song
tradition, allegory allows a great expansion of and subtlety of expression; with it
one can “say” what is otherwise emotionally, intellectually or politically
unsayable.
CHAPTER NINE
CONCLUSION
Constructions of the person and personal constructions
One way of approaching basic phenomenon described in this dissertation
is to see it as the complex social and historical playing out of the principle that
Máirtín Ó Cadhain called his “psychology” (aigneolaíocht)—the idea that speech
is the mirror of the soul. As should be clear by now, this apparently simple
metaphor conceals myriad complexities (Fernandez 1986, ch. 6). Such a mirror
could be dark and obscure, offering us nothing but a view of its own obdurate
self. Or it could be bright and polished, offering a clear view of a luminous world
within.
“A person’s own speech” could turn out to be Joyce’s “cracked lookingglass of a servant” (Kiberd 1996), reflecting a hopelessly divided postcolonial
self. Or it could turn out to only reflect back a distanced image of the
anthropological observer (Fabian 1983). Yet again, it could be the gateway to a
cosmological or literary Otherworld (Chapters 5 and 7), more real than the world
itself.
Before I break this metaphor, incurring not only the wrath of the reader
but years of bad luck for myself, I should mention something about speech,
which might even illuminate the nature of mirrors. This is the unavoidably
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dialogic nature of even the most private thoughts. With speech, one is always
engaged, minimally or maximally, with another. This brings up the most
disturbing thing to me about mirrors: Ever since I was a child, looking in a
mirror always seemed like looking into the back of a mask (this was my solution
to the trick question of why mirrors “reverse” left and right, but not up and
down). As Fernandez (1986:166) reminds us, not only do mirrors enable selfobjectification—the ability to relate to ourselves as objects, but objects themselves
act like mirrors. We discover ourselves “by recognizing a convincing association
with objects which reflect us... which we are well satisfied to let stand for us.”
With this, at least, we can change metaphors. Fogelson (1982:72-7) notes
the utility of the mask metaphor in comparing ethno-theories of the self. Mauss
saw a universal principle of the development of human nature in the
transformation of the Greco-Roman conception of persona or mask:
Originally a mythic representation (personalité mythique), the
mask in later Roman drama comes to signify a social personality
(personne moral). The implication is that the mythic mask is a
manifestation of a religiously-based collective representation, while
the latter use of masks has become desacralized and represents a
differentiated social status.
Fogelson notes that Mauss’ theory carries the debatable assumption that
“because primitive society is undifferentiated, therefore individual personality
and selfhood must be similarly undifferentiated.” Such societies are
characterized by mechanical solidarity. Implicit in this is the assumption that
“primitive” peoples cannot form an articulate philosophy of self or of
individuality. But we cannot assume this before looking at the ethno-logic of
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specific other cultures (whether or not we care to label them “primitive”—a most
mirror-like term).
Fogelson notes that we should not assume that other cultures have the
same sense of masks as disguises that we do. Iroquois false faces were social
persons in the Maussian sense. The wearer of the mask unites with this person
rather than impersonating it. Furthermore, it might be more accurate to say that
the false face spirit “impersonates the mask wearer” than the other way around.
Arguably, the direct voice of lyric sing in the Irish sean-nós tradition
functions somewhat like a mask, but in a way distinct from the forms of masking
mentioned above. As Joe Heaney maintained, singers sing lyric songs “in the
name” of the songs’ protagonists. But the performance of direct speech does not
necessarily imply direct access to quoted others.
As we have seen, quotation in conversation and poetic satire can involve
typification—taking persons as obdurate objects, making them stand in for social
types. But quotation in lyric song affects a calibration of point of view, the
coordination of common experience and suffering. It implies the transparency of
poetry as a visionary medium.
But at the same time, lyric poetry is felt to perform an obscuring role,
sometimes relying almost exclusively on indexical relationships in allegory. Such
conceptions reinforce a sense of the opacity of language.
The poetic tradition frequently identifies linguistic opacity with misrule.
In a failed political collectivity, poets must speak allusively or even
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nonsensically, as in the aisling (vision) genre or in satire. I was often told that
certain songs were obscure because they were composed in colonial times; thus
they carried “secret” allegorical meanings.
In parodic verbal art (as opposed to some forms of political satire) speech
is directly represented as a mirror of social relations. Thus, Ó Neachtain’s satire
on bureaucratic speakers of “standard” Irish (Chapter 6), or Ó Cadhain’s portrait
of the class ambitions of Nóra Sheáinín (Chapter 7), directly connect these
characters’ speaking styles with their social and political positions and cultural
values.
Maybe the best way to think about language forms in the Gaeltacht is that
they are felt to embody selves. The question of whether or not language is a
semiotically transparent medium belongs to discourses that are much more
salient elsewhere—in academia, or in the discourses of nation-builders (Chapter
6). Throughout this dissertation, Gaeltacht people, even the great and learned
Máirtín Ó Cadhain, have had one thing in common—when they have to reflect
on what makes the Gaeltacht tick, they end up spending a lot of time talking
about things, rather than language per se—bonfires, tunes, pigs, rabbits, bicycles,
dance steps, candles, bags of flour. Or shops, pubs, churches, grants,
cooperatives, money, land. Even when they do mention speech, it is usually also
speech in the form of concrete things: songs, proverbs, particular words, names,
accents, stories.
370
But even more than with objects, these things made of talk have to do with
people, and after a while, when you get to know them, they start to feel a lot like
people themselves. Rather than, with Sapir, calling speech a personality trait, ask
in what ways these speech-objects are like miniature personalities themselves. In
this sense, language-things are a lot like Fogelson’s living Iroquois masks. They
are carved out of living things and have a life of their own. And we can put them
on for ritual purposes, though this carries risks. I don’t know if they need to be
fed.
In what I’ve been calling a personalist regime of language, speech forms
as valued (and dis-valued) objects are invested with social life. To switch
metaphors again, they are like icebergs. Enigmatic surface forms stand in for
more or less hidden narratives, complexes of social relations, histories. These
surface forms aren’t necessarily linguistic—dance steps and bits of music do the
same thing.
These objects, especially the more elaborate forms of speech-objects, like
songs, have another notable feature: they are felt to contain time, to exist in more
than one time, and sometimes, in more than one history. And this inherent
temporality has a lot to do with emotion and sentiment. Like persons, songs
won’t give up their histories. They have the temporal shiftiness characteristic of
allegorical objects (Chapter 5). A song like Caoineadh na dTrí Muire (Chapter 8) is
“nothing but” the words of a conversation between Mary and her son. But it also
always has to do with other relationships, and other conversations that are going
371
on, both in the past and in the here-and-now. Songs reside in history, and bind
together disparate histories.
This has a lot to do with feeling. Eamon Ó Conghaile, a storyteller from
Carna and a neighbor of Joe Heaney’s, wrote this about the Irish language and
sean-nós singing:
Without fear of contradiction I would go so far as saying that
nowhere else in the world can folk songs of deeper feeling be found
than those of the Gaelic language. But this is not surprising, for the
people who composed them were deeply romantic people living in
possibly the most romantic setting in the world such as
Connemara, Tír Chonaill, Muigheo, Ciarraí etc. with their toes in
the sea and their backs to the mountains. Yes, and more, they were
masters of a language of love and emotion intertwining with
Religion, strong principles, honour and devotion. A language so
full of expression that all that was needed was “ábhar” for “údar”
[subject-matter for an author].
He wrote this for the program of a local boat festival in what is now a
predominantly English-speaking village (Kinvara) in Co. Galway. Starting off in
English, he gives an unabashedly romantic picture of the Gaeltacht. Then he
switches into Irish to talk about the nitty-gritty of sean-nós song. I translate what
follows:
And the subject [ábhar] that caused the most trouble, strife, and
sorrow was the same subject which settles matters [between
people] and forgives every misdeed. Love. There are three kinds of
love song: lamenting love, seductive love, and tortured heartbroken
love. The lament songs are very popular because they remind us of
the sadness and sorrow of life, and because of the story connected
to the song itself and the way the talk is put into it, it is able to
372
change our spirits [or disposition] even without being sung
[literally, without any voice added to it] (Ó Conghaile 1985:5).1
Here is a different picture. Although still going along in a fairly romantic vein,
Ó Conghaile shows “us” (the Irish speakers, since he’s writing in Irish now) what
makes sean-nós songs tick. They are made of three different kinds of talk: First is
“the story connected to the song.” This is what is often called its údar, its
“authority,” but literally speaking, its authors. So these stories are closely
connected to people, and we suspect they may, in some ways, stand in for the
people themselves. Then there is “the talk that is put into” the songs, what makes
them texts. And this is the speech of these people, preserved as song-texts. Finally,
he mentions a “voice” (guth), which can be “added to” (curtha leis) the song. This
is the musical voice of a singer—another concrete linguistic form which is really
an aspect of a person.
So songs are full of people, if not actually person-like themselves. But the
main thing is that they move us. In words very close to those used by his former
neighbor in Carna, Joe Heaney (Chapter 8), Ó Conghaile tells us that songs
“remind us of the sadness and sorrow of life.” We can’t help taking these songs,
which are aspects of other people, and relating allegorically to them, treating
them as indexes of other suffering.
1. Agus bhí an t-ábhar is mó a tharraing trioblóid, achrann agus crá croí agus an t-ábhar céanna a
dhéannan réiteach agus a mhaitheann gach mí-ghníomh. An Grá. Tá trí chineál de na h amhráin grá ann.
An grá caointeach, an grá mealltach agus an grá céasta cráite. Tá an-tóir ar na h-amhráin chaointeach mar
go gcuireann siad brón agus buairt an tsaoil i gcuimhne dhúinn agus de bharr an scéil a bhaineann leis an
amhrán fhéin agus an chaoí a bhfuil an chaint curtha ann, tá sé i ríocht athrú meannamna a chur orainn
fiú is gan guth ar bith a bheith curtha leis.
373
This is why songs are “able to change our spirits.” The word he uses for
spirits, meanmna, also means disposition, inclination or desire. The implication
here is that songs have the power to affect our emotional dispositions—not just
our immediate feelings, but our habits of feeling or tendencies to feel.
This may answer Fogelson’s question about the nature and roles of
masking as ethno-psychologies. In Irish-speaking culture, the treatment of
language forms as objects which are also, in some way, persons, implies a whole
ethno-psychology. Songs, as portable and performable things made of that most
powerful, durable and valuable material (Chapter 4), poetic speech, embody
sentiment.
Switching gears again, we can ask how the sean-nós tradition embodies
sentiment. Taken in themselves, Sean-nós songs exemplify persons and their
emotional responses to situations. A penumbra of ‘stories’ about a song acts as a
meta-text; stories identify the subject of a song and by contextualizing it, give an
explanatory interpretation of the meaning and appropriateness of a song’s
utterances. A series of performances over time amounts to an evolving social
interpretation of a text, as a developing (but not necessarily coherent) symbol in
social discourse.
Such a description of sentiment privileges the role of meta-discourses
which socially ‘construct’ the meaning of the text. One of the most challenging
aspects of Peirce’s semiotic, however, is to regard semiosis as due to the agency
of the sign itself rather than to the agency of an interpreter (Ransdell 1992). Peirce
374
does not distinguish radically between the subject and object of semiosis; the
subject or self is only a moment in a wider process—-the locus of “ignorance and
error” when the functioning of habit is interrupted by the surprising facts of the
world. In the encounter between performers and song-texts, the constraints of
the material leave a degree of agency inherent in the texts themselves: Indexical
elements in the text project singers and listeners into the point of view of a song’s
protagonist(s). At the same time, songs are mysterious, “edifying by
puzzlement” to use Fernandez’ (1986:181) term. The indeterminacy and
sketchiness of song’s texts pushes performers and audiences to make indexical
connection to other contexts.
As in a riddle, the images of these sermons send us elsewhere to
obtain our answers. They are rich in images which must, however,
be contextualized by extension into other areas of Fang culture. The
interpretive task is, therefore, to move back and forth between text
and context.
As incomplete symbols, sean-nós texts invite interpreters to connect with familiar
objects. Thus sean-nós texts construct their own contexts, including within
themselves our own emotional and imaginative musings as well. These same
texts are the product of a culture of speaking with a tradition of extemporaneous
verse composition and of a sense of poetic discourse as being fundamentally
dialogic and dramatic, as a powerful response to a situation in medias res.
Learning to sing and appreciate the songs introduces one into a world of
Joycean epiphany, of indexical icons which call forth images of other persons,
times and places. These are what Peirce would call degenerate aspects of a
375
symbolic order which is never fully realized as an explicit argument -- the future
of sean-nós is located in the past. We learn how to feel from our cultural world,
insofar as it is the manifestation of sentiment, which is to say, embodied (ways
of) feeling.
The analysis of voice developed in this dissertation represents a
preliminary exploration of an Irish ethnopsychology. We have seen how the
personalist regime of Gaeltacht discourse objectifies and valorizes the voice,
speech and actions of particular persons, socially constructing personhood and
laying down a set of possibilities for action, though and feeling. At the same
time, the analysis of voice has helped us come to grips with the role of the unique
individual in linguistic culture and society.
“Language” and community
This project was originally conceived, in part, as a study of the role of
poets and poetic speech in promoting metalinguistic consciousness in a local
community. But the metalinguistic consciousness I discovered was not
consciousness of abstract grammar. The speakers we have encountered have
only occasionally reflected on “languages” as objects in themselves, abstracted
from their social life and functions. Instead, we have seen how political and
ideological conflicts have been mediated by various types of performance, giving
participants a heightened awareness of connections between ways of speaking
and forms of sociality—ways of being in the world and being in community.
376
Terms like nádúr (nature), dúchas (heritage or patrimony), gaelach (the quality of
being Irish) are used in reference to a set of ways of speaking which are
conceived first and foremost as forms of sociality. Bilingual speakers often attend
more closely to differences in forms of (linguistic) sociality than they do to
differences in “language” considered in the abstract. Notions about the nature of
both “Irish” and “English” language thus emerge from a wider, more or less
shared, culture of speaking. Gaeltacht communities are thus part of what
Silverstein (1998:407) terms a wider “speech community” in which “there are
perduring, presupposable regularities of discursive interaction.”2 This
dissertation represents a step towards understanding the nature and history of
Irish society as such a complex speech community.
Irish-speaking communities and the nation-state
On another level, this dissertation is a holistic study of the imaginative
responses of a minority language community to its incorporation in a modern
nation-state. As a case study, it calls into question the givenness of things like
languages and communities. The boundedness of Ráth Cairn as a community
represents a temporary compromise between Gaeltacht activism and the logic of
the State, which seeks to geographically define Irish-speaking populations. The
state’s practice is backed by the mythology of the nation, for which the Gaeltacht
2. As opposed to “language communities” constituted by group “allegiance to a
determinate denotational code.”
377
is a sacred space, removed from the centers of power. From this point of view,
the Gaeltacht is seen as a natural, static “treasure,” “storehouse,” or “national
asset,” functioning as a retribalization center where children are sent to learn
Irish and absorb the national essence. Ráth Cairn, as a consciously created rural
Irish-speaking community located in the prosperous East, does not fit well into
this framework. Its founders saw themselves as breaking free from the “Black
Pig’s Dyke” that romantic nationalism puts around Irish-speakers.
The experience of Irish speakers calls into question the validity of
Benedict Anderson’s (1983) theories for analyzing the Irish situation. The Irish
state has never been able to achieve the political unification, economic
independence, or linguistic revival felt to be the nation-state’s due. The lack of fit
between romantic, “Gaelic” nationalism and the ideology of modernization
(reinforced by the exigencies Ireland’s place in the world system) is too great.
The result in a linguistic and cultural stratification in which the Irish language is
formally and functionally divided in two. On the one hand, Irish takes the form
of a regimented “national” language, used in formal and “symbolic” contexts by
the state. On the other hand, Irish as it lives in Gaeltacht communities is
constituted as a reflexively “local” and personal entity, in opposition to the
languages and practices of the state. Irish as a “national” language gets very little
support from either habitually monoglot English speakers or from Gaeltacht
people. Urban Irish speakers tend to be aligned with the language in a
particularly “local” form, while maintaining social relationships with one or
378
more particular Gaeltacht localities. Habitual users of Irish, both urban and rural,
reject the Andersonian ideology of modernization that seeks social and national
unity in the unity of a single regimented code—an official national standard
register.
Ireland’s consolidation as an imagined community—through “printcapitalism,” broadcast media, and the growth of the modern state—has occurred
almost exclusively through English. At the same time, this consolidation has
been ideologically dependent on the revival of the Irish language and the
continuing symbolic role of Irish-speaking communities. But as Haeri (1997:79596) demonstrates for the case of Classical Arabic in Egypt, the Irish language is
“embedded in histories and ideologies that may challenge the hegemony of the
state.” Irish-speaking communities have not fully assimilated, either to the
anglophone norms of surrounding communities or to state institutions which
attempt to regiment standard Irish as “state speech.” Nor has the Gaeltacht
surrendered its moral and historical high ground. As this dissertation shows, the
discursive culture of the Gaeltacht is a site of resistance to the national narrative
of modernization. The Gaeltacht has its own histories. Gaeltacht
activism—whether aiming to establish new communities like Ráth Cairn,
broadcast media like Raidió na Gaeltachta, forms of social organization such as
local coops, or new literary forms like Cré na Cille—succeeds to the extent that it
calls in the symbolic debts owed to the Gaeltacht by the nation-state while
developing and extending the historical forms of Gaeltacht discourse.
379
The Irish language, in its various “local” and “national” forms, represents
symbolic capital in Bourdieu’s (1991) sense. But in contrast to the prestigious
standard registers of other European languages, Irish as symbolic capital is not
very readily convertible to straightforward economic capital. As Johnny Chóil
Mhaidhc put it (Chapter 4), Gaeltacht wits don’t become millionaires. Likewise,
the economic value of controlling the bureaucratic register of standard Irish isn’t
what it used to be. 3 These facts are symptoms of the Irish state’s failure to
consolidate itself either territorially, ideologically or linguistically—its failure to
unify its own economic, “symbolic,” or linguistic markets.
More fundamentally, Bourdieu’s economism, while perhaps offering an
explanation of the historical decline of Irish, doesn’t get us very far in explaining
the historical maintenance of Irish—the reality of Irish-language discourse and
sociality as a symbolic system which, in Peirce’s (1976 4:243-4) phrase, has the
power to “create defenders and animate them with strength.” In response, this
dissertation has aimed to show ways that both “language” and “community” are
performatively constituted in discourse.
Irish-speakers in Gaeltacht communities often participate in a cognitive
universe which is at odds with both romantic nationalism and the modern
nation-state. Several chapters of this dissertation have explored the incongruity
between Irish-speakers’ relationships to time and space and the Andersonian
3. The system of mandatory Irish exams for entry to third-level education, the Civil
Service, and the teaching profession has been almost completely phased out.
380
“homogenized, empty, linear” space-time of the nation-state and the ideology of
modernization. We have seen Ráth Cairn people’s attempts to imaginatively
come to grips with their anomalous position within the nation-state—how they
used the framework and resources of their own verbal-artistic traditions to
critique the social relations they found operating in County Meath in the 1930s.
We have used the concept of “voice” as a tool to map out a complex
dialogue between Irish speakers, their nation, and their state. Poetic voice
occupies the center of a personalist regime of language. As Chapter 4
demonstrates, poetry since the middle ages has been identified with direct
speech. The use of direct voice is a typical constitutive principle, not just of
poetry but of textuality in general. On the most mundane level, this amounts to
saying little more than that “texts” are typically associated with “authors.” But
particular cultures go far beyond this in their elaborations of specific practices
and beliefs about authorship and textual authority in general. As Chapter 8
shows, these practices and beliefs about authorship have their counterparts in
practices and beliefs involving the performance of poetic texts. As a whole, these
textual practices engage with a felt sense of the material or substantial nature of
language as constitutive of human sociality. This dissertation thus contributes, in
a small way, to a better understanding of the historical development of what
Jameson (1981) termed “the ideology of form” in Irish-speaking culture.
The main contribution of this dissertation is its attempt to relate the
aesthetics of both ordinary talk and verbal art to political action and the historical
381
experience of both a nation-state and a small rural community. We have seen
that even in a small relatively homogenous state like Ireland, there are several
conflicting discourses at work—that everything is contested, that, as Bakhtin
says, in language, culture, and even within the person, everything takes place on
the boundaries. This dissertation thus represents an attempt to write a
Bakhtinian ethnography of both a minority language community and the nationstate it engages with.
Theories of modernity and the ideology of modernization
Romantic and nativist views of the Gaeltacht tend to ignore the fact that it
seems to have been “modern” for a very long time. The Irish monastic regime
generated a series of ideological and discursive oppositions between “pagan”
versus “Christian” and “oral” versus “literate” elements of Irish culture, which it
historicized in a manner that prefigured the ideology of modernization. Later,
Ireland became the first modern colony and the ideological template for future
colonies (and anticolonial movements) worldwide. During the famine of the midNineteenth Century, Ireland became the testing ground for new theories of
political economy. All of these events happened when the island was
predominantly Irish-speaking. In the late Nineteenth and throughout the
Twentieth Century, Irish-speaking populations experienced the dislocations of
emigration to as great or to a greater degree than predominantly Englishspeaking populations.
382
In spite of or because of their long historical experience of modernity,
Irish-speakers continue to resist and subvert the ideologies of modernization
promulgated by the Irish nation-state. Thus we have seen how Ráth Cairn
storytellers reversed the ideological association of the West with backwardness
(Chapter 5). We have examined the role of indexicality and allegory in poetry,
narrative, and lyric song (Chapters 4, 5 and 8), noting how verbal artists use
these elements to situate discourse in a time opposed to the “homogenous,
empty time” of modernism. We have noted strategies of encompassment in
which English-language forms are possessed by Irish-language discourse
(Chapter 6). We have seen how ideologies of linguistic standardization and
linguistic purism are both subverted and directly challenged in the satiric verbal
art of the Gaeltacht (Chapters 2, 6, and 7). And we have seen, in the work of
Máirtín Ó Cadhain, an alternative literary “modernism,” developed directly out
of Irish-language discourse, which is at odds with both the romanticization of the
Gaeltacht by conservative nationalism and the ideology of progress promoted by
the Irish state.
Ireland has also been central to theories of modernity and post-modernity.
The works of “modernist” writers like Beckett and Joyce has inspired generations
of theorists and literary critics, many of whom remained ignorant of the degree
to which these works are grounded in a wider Irish culture of speaking. Recently,
critics such as Kiberd (1993, 1996), Lloyd (1993), and Gibbons (1996) have
demonstrated the extent to which Irish literary modernism is embedded in
383
discourses eccentric to those of European modernism. The work of these critics
demonstrates the need to reevaluate the relationship between “tradition” and
“modernity” to arrive at a better understanding of the possibilities for agency
offered by linguistic cultures, like those in Ireland, which are embedded in the
long-term historical experience of colonization and resistance (cf. Comaroff
1992). Such a critique would also necessarily challenge various entrenched
theoretical dichotomies—the aesthetic and the political, reason and emotion,
rhetoric and social action.
This dissertation is a contribution to such a project. Along with Glassie’s
(1982) study of the linguistic culture of a community in Co. Fermanagh, it
demonstrates the value and potential of linguistically aware ethnographic
research which takes as its object the entire range of verbal and aesthetic culture
of both a locality and the wider community surrounding it.
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