The Hidden Ireland – A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century

Daniel Corkery

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 1979
• ISBN:
  9780717165773
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Daniel Corkery's classic book The Hidden Ireland is a study of Irish language poetry and culture in eighteenth-century Munster. The 'Hidden Ireland' of the title is literary Ireland: Corkery's famous book is an attempt to reclaim Munster's Irish language poets from the hands of grammarians who read them only for their preposition and participle use and to restore them to their rightful place as vibrant and vital lyricists and visionaries. The Hidden Ireland, an instant classic when first published in 1924, was listed as one of the top 50 most influential Irish books in The Books That Define Ireland by Tom Garvin and Bryan Fanning. The Hidden Ireland was revolutionary in its recognition of the contribution of Irish language poets to Irish culture, a contribution that had previously been minimised or even erased in the Anglo-Irish versions of history that preceded it. Corkery's groundbreaking study of Irish poetry and culture in eighteenth century Munster is widely acknowledged as having had a profound influence on the shaping of modern Anglo-Irish literature in its foregrounding of the role of the Irish language in literature as a repository of Irishness and a specifically Irish worldview. Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland (1924), arguing for an Irish cultural revival based on the Gaelic tradition of Munster in the eighteenth century, became almost official dogma after 1924, and led to impassioned debate among Irish writers and academics for decades afterwards, including Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, Corkery's rebellious students.
Tom Garvin and Bryan Fanning, The Books That Define Ireland (2014)

Chapter 1: The Hidden Ireland

I

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, whether Catholics should be free to enlist in the British Army was warmly debated by the ruling caste in Ireland. It was, of course, the Penal Laws that stood in the way: according to these, no Catholic could do so, for it was not thought wise that Catholics should learn the use of firearms. However, Townshend became Viceroy, and took a new view of the matter. ‘He argued that “as the trade and manufactures of Ireland are almost totally carried on by Protestants, the number of whom is very small in proportion to the number of Papists,” it was of the utmost importance that Protestants should not be taken away for foreign service, and he proposed that Papists, and Papists alone, should be enlisted. “A considerable number of able men might be raised from amongst them in a short space of time in the provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught.” Rochford answered that the arguments of Townshend had convinced the King of the impropriety of drawing off a number of Protestants from those parts of the country where the chief manufactures were carried on; that he could not without a special Act of Parliament order the recruiting agents to restrict themselves to Roman Catholics, but that in the present very pressing exigency he authorised them to make Leinster, Munster, and Connaught their recruiting grounds.’1 In this manner, adds Lecky, the Catholics were silently admitted into the British Army. (1771.)

A few years later, among the Catholics who look advantage of this hoodwinking at the Law was a poor Munster peasant, a labourer, a wild rake of a man, named Eoghan Ó Súilleabháin. He had misbehaved himself whilst in the service of the Nagle family, whose place was not far from Fermoy, and enlisting in the Army was his way of escaping the consequences. From Fermoy he was sent to Cork, transferred to the Navy, and straightway flung into England’s battle-line, thousands of miles away.

If one dwell on the incident, a great deal of Irish history, Irish history in any century, may be realised. Townshend, the Viceroy, the representative of Law, rough-rides over it when it suits him. The penalised Catholic, living from day to day, is callous whether his act is thought lawful or unlawful, if only it helps him here and now. In between English Viceroy and Gaelic peasant, strongly contrasted types as they are, we have the Nagle family, not greatly surprised, it is likely, at all this, they having seen what they had seen.

If one could, with imaginative assurance, enter first the life of the Townshend circle, and explore it; enter then the life of the Nagle family — a house where Irish was spoken to their Kerry labourers and English to their visitors from Dublin — and absorb it; and from this circle pass on and make one’s own of the world of the labourer — that hidden, teeming and ragged world that threw him up, a genius! — then one should be qualified to tell the story of Ireland in the eighteenth century. As yet, unfortunately, no historian of it has been so qualified.

The story of the Townshend circle has been shredded out patiently enough by the historians, to be again woven into something like coherency and shapeliness. Novelists have dealt with such houses as that of the Nagles, chiefly Maria Edgeworth; and writers of history have discovered interesting matter in the memoirs such families have, in rare instances, left behind them. But neither novelist nor historian has dealt with that underworld which threw up the silver-voiced labourer, Eoghan an Bheóil Bhínn — Owen of the Sweet Mouth — as his own people named him then, as they name him still, affection warming the soft Gaelic syllables — for with that hidden land neither historian nor novelist has ever thought it worth his while to deal.

Lecky imagined he had dealt with it! Not without pity for them, he wrote of the people of that darkened land as an almost countless mob — plague-stricken, poverty-stricken, shiftless, thriftless, desperate. He numbered them, as best he might, and traced their sufferings to the causes — and what else remained to be told? Of a mob, what else is there to tell?

This book, too, must touch on their sufferings, their degradation; but afterwards will move on to hint, at least, that all the time much else remained to be told. If only one could do it with as much patience, with as much learning, as Lecky did his share of the work! But even to dream of that, much less to attempt it, is not the task for the day. The immediate task is to show that Lecky presents us, for all his industry and learning, with only a body that is dead and ripe for burial; to show that this is far from being the truth; that all the time there was a soul under the ribs of this death; that the music which was the life of that soul had strength and beauty in it; and that to remain a clod to that music is for us not only to misunderstand the period, but unnaturally to forego our happiness and our privilege.

To that Hidden Ireland of the Gaels, then, we turn our faces.

II

To reach it one must, leaving the cities and towns behind, venture among the bogs and hills, far into the mountains even, where the native Irish, as the pamphleteers and politicians loved to call them, still lurked. ‘The savage old Irish,’ Swift named them; and Berkeley wrote of them as growing up ‘in a cynical content in dirt and beggary to a degree beyond any other people in Christendom.’ So far down in the depths were they that to the law of the land, though three times more numerous than all the others, they had no existence at all! In times of peace even, they were referred to as ‘Domestic enemies.’ ‘The phrase “common enemy” was, in the early part of the eighteenth century, the habitual term by which the Irish Parliament described the great majority of the Irish people.’2 And elsewhere Swift wrote (1720): ‘Whoever travels through this country and observes the face of nature, or the faces and habits and dwellings of the natives, would hardly think himself in a land where either law, religion, or common humanity was professed.’3 ‘Torpid and degraded pariahs,’ is the epithet of the balanced Lecky, speaking for himself; and Chesterfield, a mind still more balanced, said: ‘The poor people in Ireland are used worse than negroes by their lords and masters, and their deputies of deputies of deputies,’ while Madden spoke of all Ireland as ‘a paralytic body where one half of it is dead or just dragged about by the other,’ which, perhaps, is the unforgettable phrase.

The Hidden Ireland, then, the land that lies before us, is the dead half of that stricken body; it is the terrain of the common enemy, ruled by deputies of deputies of deputies, and sunk so deep in filth and beggary that its people have been thrust, as torpid and degraded pariahs should, beyond the household of the law.

This Hidden Ireland we will first look at and see as the travellers who dared to open it up beheld it; that is, we shall see its face rather than its heart; its body, but not its soul. It will be only a glance; for the historians, Lecky especially, have made their own of this aspect of it, and their books are there for the reading. But that glance given, we shall make on for thresholds that they never crossed, in hope that what we shall further discover will not only complete the picture they have given, but frankly alter it, as a dead thing is altered when the spirit breathes upon it and it speaks.

III

The Hidden Ireland was in a sense coterminous with Ireland itself, bounded only by the same four seas. Even the children of the Cromwellians who themselves, hardly fifty years before, had come to live in it, could not now speak English.4 Into the very heart of the Pale, into Dublin itself, this Gaelic-speaking Ireland flowed in many streams. The nobility, coming from their big houses in the provinces, spoke Irish to their servants. Those society people were not Gaels either in blood or feeling, and many of their descendants have become bitterly anti-Irish, yet it is certain that the Colthursts of Blarney and the Lord Kenmare family in Kerry, were at this time speakers of Irish; it was necessary for them to be so, for otherwise they could not direct their workmen, who often knew no English; and those two families may be taken as typical of the county class. Among such people the new-born child was put out to nurse with a neighbouring peasant woman, and the intimacy thus established was frequently maintained in after years. It may also be taken as certain that the hangers-on about these large houses — the land stewards, agents, bailiffs, were frequently ignorant of English. We hear of a ‘well-bred boy’ in the County Down as speaking no language but Irish in 1744;5 while in the lives of the Gaelic poets we may note that many of them went into the cities and settled down in them, still singing their songs. Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara (MacNamara) completed his education in the city of Limerick; there in Mungret Street Seán Ó Tuama (O’Twomey) lived for a good many years; while Brian Merriman died there, in Old Clare Street, in 1805. Domhnall Caoch Ó Mathghamhna (Daniel O’Mahony the Blind, died 1720), lived in Cork city, as also did Father William English, a witty poet, whose songs are still favourites among Gaelic speakers. And Father English had scarcely died there, in 1778, when another Gaelic poet, Micheál Ó Longáin, settled in it for some time. These poets, unlike the Colthursts and the Browns (the Kenmare family), were of the Hidden Ireland; but we do not need such evidence to show that its Gaelic waters reached everywhere, either in occasional streams or concealed floodings. Into all these cities, as into all the towns, there was a never-ceasing flowing of the country people, an intercourse that was then far more human and intimate than it is to-day. The roads were always alive with traffic, for country produce was brought in on horse-back or, though not so frequently, in wagons and carts; and arriving at all hours of day and night, and stopping at a hundred different warehouses and inns, the trafficking kept up a chatter and bustle and give and take of mind and wit that similar commerce in our own day knows but little of. Even in Dublin those traffickers were Irish speakers, if necessary; while in places like Cork and Limerick and Waterford their business was very often carried on in that language, as it is in Galway to this very day.

Young, who made his tour in 1776–78, says he found the English language spoken without any mixture of the Irish language only in two places, in Dublin and in the baronies of Bargie and Forth in County Wexford6 — a statement easily credible when one thinks of the children of the Cromwellians themselves having had to make it their mother tongue.

For all this widespread use of their language, however, the Gaels never made their own of the cities and towns: many of them trafficked in them, lived in them, yet were nevertheless little else than exiles among the citizens. Gaelic Ireland, self-contained and vital, lay not only beyond the walls of the larger cities, if we except Galway, but beyond the walls of the towns, if we except Dingle, Youghal, and a few others in Connacht and Donegal. For Irish Ireland had, by the eighteenth century, become purely a peasant nation. Indeed not only did it lie beyond the walls of cities and towns, but its strongholds lay far away beyond all the fat lands, beyond the mountain ranges that hemmed them in. History had seen to that: the rich lands had been grabbed from the Gaels centuries before by successive swarms of land pirates who, in a phrase written by one of themselves (an Elizabethan Brown of Killarney) ‘measured law by lust, and conscience by commodity.’ In the softer valleys those land pirates had built their houses, and Irish Ireland withered in the alien spirit that breathed from them. Even to-day we come on the remains of this Gaelic Ireland only in places where there have been no such alien houses for some hundreds of years.

Irish Ireland, then, while in a sense coterminous with Ireland itself, had its stronghold in sterile tracts that were not worth tilling. The hard mountain lands of West Cork and Kerry, the barren Comeraghs in Waterford, hidden glens in the Galtee and other mountains, the wild seaboard of the South and West, the wind-swept uplands of Clare, the back places of Connemara, much of Donegal — in such places only was the Gael at liberty to live in his own way. In them he was not put upon. Big houses were few or none. Travellers were rare; officials stopped short at the very aspect of the landscape; coaches found no fares, the natives being home-keeping to a fault: ‘They seem not only tied to the country but almost to the parish in which their ancestors lived,’ Arthur Young wrote of the Catholics, who had not yet ...

Table of contents

• THE HIDDEN IRELAND
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Hidden Ireland
• Chapter 2: The Big House
• Notes
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan