The decline of Irish language began in the seventeenth century. Today, it remains practically unwritten in Ireland’s literature, and is only found spoken in remote corners along the Western shores of Ireland. The language has passed through rough centuries of events that have challenged Irish culture and undermined its foundations. English has been a dominating influence in the demise of the Irish language, linguistically, socially, and politically. The colonial presence of the English gentry in Eastern Ireland was antithetical to was redefined as Ireland’s national identity. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century, those who have become Ireland’s many famous writers, rose to speak against the English presence, whose imperial nature was swallowing what little remained of Ireland’s song – their voice, and national identity. It was this period of Irish literature whose strong revival transformed Europe’s understanding of the English hegemony, and reshaped a lasting definition of the Irish character.

Since the 1650’s the Irish language has in one way or another been a demarcation of poverty or low-class status. Intellectual conversation was no longer sustained at any considerable length in Irish, and left to its lowly status, was stagnant and at the whim of the tides. Ireland, a partially English-ruled state as of 1541, was caught in a conflicting balance between maintaining their national heritage and accepting the English world. The famine of the nineteenth century withered what remained of Celtic identity, and left the native populations ashamed both in speaking Irish and learning English. Irish culture continually degenerated, while the English hegemony sustained in strength. A network of privately funded schools, the National Schools, offered an English education to Ireland in the 1830’s.

The Potato Famine of 1845 displaced a large potion of the Irish population: over a million by starvation, and over two million as emigrants, to America and European countries – refugees of the Great Famine. The economic discrepancy within Ireland’s population, between the peasants and the land-owning upper-class, determined the fates of the lesser fortunate. Landowners were of no help to their tenants, and little pity was given to those in need. The potato blight, which came as a fungus to the national crop, took a vital dependence away from the Irish people, who were left at the mercy of the land. By 1850, most traces of Irish culture had been vanquished by the famine, and along with a large potion of the population, the Irish language “whose associations were all with the country, withered and died in the towns” (154, F. O’Connor).

Many other factors during the 1840’s and 1850’s contributed to the loss of the Irish language and culture. Although Irish antiquarian societies were established, proceedings occurred in English (the common language of business and official forum), and their objectives had little to do with the preservation of the Irish language, but rather concerned with the salvation of material heirlooms: books, manuscripts, and other tangible antiquities. The cultural importance of salvaging the Irish language was afforded by none. Affiliated with the Irish culture was the rural landscape and defiled peasantry, with which was associated poverty and ignorance. Whatever grounds that Irish nationalism had to that point pursed, were washed away by the crippling affects of the famine by 1851. And as were the linguistic attributes of the country left to the tide, so too was the damaged Irish race upon its native land, between external parties who passed between their hands the Irish population – accessories to their bidding.

Ireland had became a pawn of the Roman Catholic Church during the 1850’s as an asset in the furthering of Catholicism. Catholicism has been historically the religion of the Irish people, and the Church began to plot the conversion of England through Ireland. Both the Catholic Church and the British government had their separate, though equally self-motivated reasons for repressing national identity, an objective the Church viewed as crucial to the integration of Irish and English life. The British had their own imperialist reasons for the suppression of Irish identity and thought religion an affective means to their end. Their interests were mutually pursued, as the Irish language and identity was suffocated by both its church and colonially administered state.

Dublin, Ireland’s capital and center of British Ireland, by the 1880’s had become (to the Church’s dismay) strongly divided on Irish Catholic and the English Protestant lines. The city had been built in grandiose display of classic architecture, proportionally balanced and placed to the surrounding landscape creating a “feeling of harmony [that] prevailed in the dancing marine light between them and the sky” (86, U. O’Connor). The physical beauty and balance of Dublin reflects what environment the British wished to reflect. As what became images to the world, “panoply was conceived visibly to demonstrate the presence of an imperial administration in a city which was largely hostile to it” (88, O’Connor). The reality of Dublin for Irish Catholics were the effects of a colonial administration upon its subjugated peoples, whose lives within the city bore the ramifications of an alienated race.

“The protestant ruling class controlled the banks, the civil service, the major industries, though they numbered themselves only one in five of the population. As a privilege obtained at all levels clerical jobs in the civil service were not awarded on a competitive basis, and it was impossible for a Catholic to get an appointment. Protestant workers were assured of what jobs were available… Their children where taught to look on Catholics as a different class – even to speak French with an English accent so as to show contempt for foreigners.” (88, U. O’Connor).

While the Irish endured oppression, the English occupancy rested upon the foundations that they themselves had created and upheld.

The English colonial society in Ireland had maintained its occupancy for centuries in part through an accompanied imagination of the Irish people. Orientalism would be a similar foundation for the British in India, for it prescribed the denunciation of cultural value, viewing Asian populations as generally inferior and negating their culture before further inquiry. Their assumptions of superiority were reinforced by their strength as an industrialized nation; for several centuries the British exploited India and South Asian trade. Concurrently, in Ireland, it was the ‘stage-Irishman’ which objectified the Irish through the recurring theatrical dunce who spoke in crude un-intellectual rhyming verse. The Irish were also typified as “the stereotypical Paddy” (29, Kiberd), with characteristics galore all antithetical to what the English maintained in dignity and strength. Imperialism had long been the nature of the English-State in Ireland, and the political and economic inferiority of Ireland to its great industrialized counter-part permitted the colonial relationship, provincialism, and exploitation.

The aspects embedded in these justifications were taken socio-psychologically when interpreted by the writers of the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde, for example, was a controversial Irish writer of the 1880’s, whose education and life’s work was composed in England. His life’s work highlights the “tendency of Victorian Englishmen to attribute to the Irish those emotions which they had repressed within themselves” (35, Kiberd). Wilde was conscious of the nature of such tendencies, and his life and work drew on categorical inversions to highlight irony and the irrationality of many social codifications. For instance, if the English were portrayed as:

“industrious and reliable, Paddy was held to be indolent and contrary… if the English were adult and manly, the Irish must be childish and feminine. In this fashion, the Irish were to read their fate in that of two other out-groups, women and children; and at the root of many an Englishman’s suspicion of the Irish was an unease with the woman or child who lurked within himself” (30, Kiberd).

An imagination of their own began to foster in the minds of Irish intellectuals as their concepts bred unto Ireland and greater Europe. Fictional comparisons, expressed Wilde’s otherwise intangible thoughts of the European societies, which rigidly enforced what was accepted as social normalcy.

The Irish literary movement that began in the late nineteenth century was that of a minor literature, or “a literature written in a major language by a minority group in revolt against its oppressors” (115, Kiberd). Their audience was largely English, for not all of Ireland was by the 1880’s entirely literate or purchasing of books. Irish literature of this period is most considerably creative. Though it offers itself to literary criticism, critical text was rarely a forum of Irish literature. As the nationalists were in search of national identity, Irish authors were similarly in search of understanding, and some pursed a definition of the self that ran parallel to that of the nation. Many authors developed relationships with nationalist groups. W. B. Yeats’ was a good friend of Irish nationalist John O’Leary, and he would join officially “the [nationalist] movement, with which in one way or another he was to remain associated all his life” (108, U. O’Connor). The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a nationalist group, would hence consider Yeats, ‘their man in the literary movement” (108, U. O’Connor).

Yeats collaborated with many writers throughout his literary career. In London, as a young writer, Yeats jumped into Irish literary circles and held lengthy discourse with contemporaries. Yeats, as did Wilde, and most all of the other Irish writers who lived and work abroad, found that it was distance from his homeland, an external view of Ireland within Europe, that solidified his understanding of Ireland’s identity. It was similarly understood, that a strengthened personal identity was found for those Irishmen who lived abroad, amongst English societies, and found their character an antithesis to their environment, or some rather contrasting form thereof. Within literary societies, Irish writers bred national confidence and called into question England’s actions as a colonial state.
Irish literature of the late 1800’s would bloom from what Wilde pursued in the 1880’s to become a resistance literature and the makings for an Irish cultural renaissance. In an inquisition of the British imagination, the Irish intellectual transcended its constraints on the Irish people, and studied it from a distance.

“A colonized people soon comes to believe that approved fictions are to be imitated in life, and this notion in due time proves vitally useful to the exponents of resistance literature… The most inspiring lesson which the resistance writer learns from the occupier is that the society around him or her may be no more than the institutional inferences drawn from an approved set of texts” (115, Kiberd).

The Irish thus traced the foundations of Ireland’s colonial realities to their origins, to all that the English imagination had stated true and outwardly acknowledged as truth. With an “approved set of texts,” the he narrow-minded approach of English colonial provincialism became result of a society that has lost interest in any cultural value beyond their own.

It had been many centuries in the making for the Irish to acknowledge the wrongfulness of the English colony that had created for their imperialist pursuits an accompanying consciousness to embody their enterprise. In spite of Ireland’s existing realities, Irish writers acknowledged, in varying ways, that:

“For most of the nineteenth century, and for some time before that, England and the English had been presented to Irish minds as the very epitome of the human norm. Now it began to be clear that, far from being normal, England’s was an exceptionally stressed society, whose vast imperial responsibilities were discharged only at an immense psychological and social cost” (135, Kiberd).

And though despite these many aspects of their social reality and the English they had realized, Yeats wrote of the difficulty in expressing his notions to the world in a letter to John Synge: “Can a man of genius make that complete renunciation of the world necessary to the full expression of himself without some vice or some deficiency” (118, U. O’Connor)? The epic task of Irish writers became the pursuit and communication of a greater truth.

With a stronger hold on an Irish resistance literature, Yeats moved back to Ireland and contributed with George Moore, John Synge, Lady Gregory, and others to establish Ireland’s first national theatre, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which opened on December 27th, 1904. It was a difficult transition towards intellectual literary theatre for Ireland, which Yeats and his company pursed throughout the development of the theatre. The country’s population was accustomed largely to second rate, or ‘sham’ product, and this quality had become indistinguishable from that of their work – one effect of social degradation that Ireland had endured over the centuries and post-famine. But Ireland grew more accustomed to the idea of a national literary theatre, and upon the theatre’s opening, with plays instilled with nationalist voice, Ireland’s interest reflected in sell-out shows, their pride reflected within the plays themselves. The shows were marveled by the press, and noted by some as “the best drama of our time in the method of a lovely ritual. Their art is unlike any to be seen in England… One thinks of it as a thing of beauty, as a part of life, as the only modern dramatic art springing from the life of a people” (367, U. O’Connor).

Moving with Yeats and other Irish writers from England to Ireland at this time was also the shift of Europe’s literary center, which after the introduction of the Abbey theatre soon became Dublin. London deadened in it’s literary and art correspondence, and a majority of travel and exchange of the arts tended between Dublin and Paris after this time. A great transformation had occurred within Ireland. Though the Irish language had slipped into the backgrounds, the Irish voice had prevailed in spite of colonial occupation, and through the English language restated its national identity in the face of its oppressors. Nationalist groups such as the United Irishmen, National Council, Gaelic League, and Irish Republican Brotherhood furthered the fight against the British, and grounds for Irish independence seemed stronger than ever throughout what had been nearly four centuries of colonial rule.

For reasons of audience accessibility, and its modern prevalence, the Irish literary movement developed through the English language, a major sacrifice to Irish culture, whose native language was left in decline, and remains spoken today on a daily basis by less than 300,000 people. The near disappearance of the language was perhaps inevitable as Ireland received the Western influence of European neighbors to the East. The Irish language was greatly discredited, as was Irish culture or anything of cultural value, by British colonial provincialism. After the Great Famine the Irish were left with little of cultural importance or understanding, a ground-zero from which they would rebuild in the relentless pursuit for Irish Nationalism. Independence came on December 6th, 1921. And though it came not before blood had marked the streets of Dublin, the political and violent struggle that ensued spoke the many found words of Irish.