No Craft More Privileged

Abstract

My education began, of course, at home with my parents. My mother, June Huyton, who left school at 14, never expressed any regrets about stopping lessons so young. But my father, Michael McEvoy, felt differently. Born in Cork in 1926, Dad was one of the generations of Irish people who suffered from the culturalnationalist policies of the De Valera governments. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population spoke no Irish at all (let alone as a first language), and despite a shortage of qualified teachers, from 1924 children in the Free State (and later the Republic) had to learn most of their lessons in Irish (see Foster, 1989, p. 518; Garvin, 2004, pp. 47–49).