Education and the Irish Language in the Longue Durée

Abstract

Nationalist-minded historians have long argued that the “golden era” for the Irish language was, as they have tended to put it, when Ireland’s monastic schools served as “lights of the north” during Europe’s dark ages. They have also been wont to point out that, concurrently, the Bardic Schools worked at preserving and transmitting the associated literary tradition. Successive invasions resulted in the introduction first of Norse, then Norman French and, finally, English, to the country. Nevertheless, Irish was still by far the most dominant language by 1500. In order to contextualise developments in relation to both education and the Irish language since then and specifically for the period under consideration in later chapters, this chapter opens with an account of the fate of Irish in Ireland up to advent of the independent Irish Free State in 1922. A consideration of Irish and education from the Reformation until the establishment of the National School System in 1831 follows. The final section of the chapter provides an overview of the place of the language within the national school system until 1904, the year in which National Board of Education introduced a bilingual programme for Irish-speaking districts.