How exactly did Dublin Irish die out?

'Dubline' in 1610, map by John Speed. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Updated: 11 August 2019 (information about punishment for speaking Irish, see below)

At first, the question 'How did local Irish die out in Dublin?' seems deceptively simple: the answer of course being that, as elsewhere, its speakers stopped passing it on to their children, making a conscious decision that they grow up speaking English instead. This is the so-called 'utilitarian' explanation most often favoured by those today who have the proudest contempt for Irish. 

The reality is more complex. Firstly, the abandonment of Irish took place only once its speakers had been so disempowered, marginalised, denigrated and impoverished - collectively punished - that they in turn associated Irish (their language) with the powerlessness, stigma, and poverty of their condition, and, by contrast, English (the state's language) with empowerment, prestige, economic advancement and relief.

This is but part of the process that took place throughout Ireland during (mostly) the nineteenth century; there are other central factors - most catastrophically the Great Famine (1845-1849), which killed very many Irish speakers and induced very many to emigrate, further undermining the demographic future of the language and associating it with national trauma.

Nevertheless, the situation in Co. Dublin, due to its longstanding role as the centre of (nominally English-speaking) bureaucratic government and commerce, was a little different.

Irish in Dublin - as Irish as the Irish themselves

Irish was certainly never a stranger to Dublin, as some have gleefully claimed; it was soon spoken, probably as a native language, by the bilingual Norse of Dublin; the mediaeval English of Dublin, too, seem to have known it alongside English (and a little Norman French for occasional administrative purposes); this quite aside from the communities of native Irish who resided in the Pale, and the incomers from throughout the country, for whom Irish was likely the only language.

'Donolle obreane [Domhnall Ó Broin] the messenger' depicted speaking Irish ("Shogh" i.e. seo - '...[take] this') directly to Henry Sidney in John Derricke's The Image of Irelande (1581). There is no reason to assume that the Lord Deputy (who had been in Ireland many years) would not have understood at least some Irish. Click to zoom.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Indeed, the relationship between Irish and English in Dublin city seems to have been essentially stable until the early eighteenth century: both languages would have been omnipresent throughout the city, intermingling in its streets and lanes. Irish may have even had the upper hand in everyday discourse; we repeatedly encounter references that Irish is thriving in Dublin, and in 1657 a complaint is made that city-dwellers, not just rural blow-ins, are speaking Irish - evidently as their preferred language (Ó Cuív, 1951: p. 18). 

Between 1600 and 1700 it seems the locally-raised upper and middle classes spoke English, and likely understood Irish if not spoke it natively too (as late as the early twentieth century the gentry of Connacht often learnt Irish to communicate with the peasantry); the urban working class would have spoken Irish (being often of rural parentage) and English; outside of Fingal, where a dialect of Middle English (Fingallian) was spoken alongside Irish, countryside even close to the city would have spoken Irish exclusively, perhaps only learning a little English in adulthood. (Notably, Dublin was a convenient meeting-place for circles of native Gaelic scholars from all over Ireland during at least the eighteenth century, and probably before as well.)

1700-1800: the shift begins

Nonetheless, for reasons that remain tantalisingly unclear, sometime after 1700 this situation began to shift throughout the country, at first imperceptibly but soon inexorably, in favour of English. By 1738 an observer could write of Ireland as a whole, with clear exaggeration, that 'there is now scarce one in twenty who does not understand and speak English well' (ibid.: p. 19).

Swift's satirical A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland (1729) would have been understood by very few of them.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Certainly after 1750 a sort of bilingualism was rapidly becoming normal: literacy, where it was acquired, was predominantly in English; extrapolating back from nineteenth century census data shows that half of males born 1770 claimed that they could read and write in English (Kelly and Mac Murchaidh, 2012: p. 33).

(Of course, during the nineteenth century, it was also a norm for Irish speakers to eagerly exaggerate their skills in English - the more prestigious language - and likewise downplay their abilities in Irish. We have many examples of monoglots being returned as English-speaking - something an English-speaking state dedicated to the advance of the English language was only too happy to take at face value.)

Details of language use in Co. Dublin between 1700 and 1800 are fewer still; O'Rahilly (1932: p. 6) reports 'Irish sermons being regularly preached in Dublin as late as the middle of the eighteenth century', yet by 1801 we learn from the Statistical Survey of the Royal Dublin Society that 'Very few speak Irish' in Dublin; in 1806 an observer notes only 'Scarcely any Irish speakers' in the county (quoted in Ó Cuív, 1951: p. 77). You can read these statistical surveys in full here.

It might seem likely that the English language took hold earliest in Co. Dublin (and the planted areas of the north east) and radiated outwards from there; yet, curiously, the earliest data (unfortunately at barony level, see Fitzgerald 1983) we have - extrapolated back to the 1770s - shows Irish must then have been spoken by at least up to a quarter of the population in parts of Co. Dublin* whereas the data from Wicklow and parts of Wexford, Laois, Kildare and Carlow show far lower levels of Irish-speaking.

*Fitzgerald (1983: 130) estimates that the minimum levels of Irish speaking by barony in Co. Dublin in 1771-1781 to have been: Balrothery East, five per cent; Castleknock, 12 per cent; Coolock, four per cent; Dublin, six per cent; Nethercross, four per cent; Rathdown, four per cent; Uppercross, four per cent; and City of Dublin, 10 per cent. Baronies are relatively large areas, so it is certain that in smaller areas within these baronies, quite high concentrations of Irish speaking would have been found.

Furthermore, the example of Glenasmole shows that even after 1770 there were significant if overlooked native Irish speaking communities in Co. Dublin at least until the early nineteenth century, and possibly a few isolated speakers thereafter, quite aside from the thousands of migrants speaking Irish in the city itself as well.

Can we trace how Co. Dublin Irish was lost?

It is extremely difficult to trace exactly how Irish receded in Co. Dublin, and at what rate and where, not least because we have no clear idea where exactly in the county it was strongest before its decline set in. Indeed, almost all the most detailed information I have about the decline of native Irish locally relates to the southwestern corner of Co. Dublin, and for even this I am deeply indebted to the work of three prolific local historians, Liam Ua Broin, Donn Piatt and Liam Price, writing mainly in the first half of the twentieth century.

This level of detail centred on south west Dublin is evidence itself, I think, that local Irish lasted longest and strongest there.

We learn from Ua Broin, for instance, that Irish must have been a community language in Rathcoole in Easter 1753 from a single report concerning a man about to be executed, who is ‘exhorted to’ by a Catholic priest in both Irish and English (Ua Broin, 1943: p. 25). Presumably the use of English was for the authorities present, whereas the Irish was for the crowd - drawn as we know at execution time from quite a wide local area for the spectacle - and (certainly) for the condemned man. Rathcoole, of course, is not so far north of where local Irish held out longest in Co. Dublin at Glenasmole, to which we again now turn.

Our next report, from 1837, is now quite well-known: the visit of native Irish-speaking Ordnance Survey man Eugene O'Curry to Castlekelly townland (i.e. the southernmost part of Glenasmole), where he meets 84-year old Uilliam Ó Reachtabhra [anglicised William Rafter] an elderly man 'with more activity and buoyancy of spirit than his son, a man of about 50 years of age' and his sister Úna, who both speak 'as good Irish as I ever heard spoken' (which, given that O'Curry was a Clare native speaker himself, and a folklorist intimately acquainted with Gaelic tradition, must be considered high praise indeed). They supply O'Curry with a list of names of local places and Ó Reachtabhra states:

that 40 years ago very few spoke English in this glen, except the Dublin car men, very few men of 40 years of age, even now, in the glen that don’t understand though they don’t speak the Irish. (cf: Healey, 2006, p. 11)

A copy of O'Curry's notes on his famed meeting with Ó Reachtabhra. The third line states, 'He knew many persons who read and wrote Irish, the last of whom was Andrew Smith, Aindrias Ó Gobhan [sic], who died three years ago at Glasamucky on the Glenside.' Note the extensive use of Gaelic script here. Click to zoom. (Source: Royal Irish Academy)

From this, it might seem possible Glenasmole was practically monoglot Irish-speaking around 1800, with a smattering of practical English for those who worked for extended periods in the city. Yet forty years later the glen is well on the way to becoming exclusively English-speaking; quite simply, the young prefer to speak English, and the older generations apparently Irish. If we take Ó Reachtabhra's statement uncritically, it seems both languages are understood by both groups (though Irish perhaps not so well by the young), yet language shift is taking place, or has already taken place, by 1840.

A major note of caution is required here, however. William Nolan, in his comprehensive and exquisitely detailed overview 'Society and Settlement in the Valley of Glenasmole' in Dublin City and County: from Prehistory to Present (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992), puts it well when he writes of the encounter between O'Curry and Ó Reachtabhra (ibid, p. 201):

Commentators have taken this single statement as definitive evidence of widespread Irish-speaking in the glen in the eighteenth century [sic: recte nineteenth]. However, other evidence does not necessarily lend support to this position. The appearance of English fieldnames in the late eighteenth century may pinpoint the period of language transition. 

Hogan (1900) has an interesting reference to Wade’s 1794 catalogue of Irish plants in Co. Dublin thus: 

[Wade] says he saw all those plants himself in the County Dublin, and as Gaelic was spoken in his time at Bohernabreena and on the slopes of the Dublin Mountains [i.e. Glenasmole], Wade may have got the Irish names from the people of that most romantic region. Mr. Kevin Doyle of Bohernabreena, or near it [see below], told me that his father was punished for speaking Irish on his way to or from school! Each boy had a tell-tale bit of stick round his neck; each infraction of the anti-Gaelic law was notched on the stick, then marked on the boy’s hands or back by the master and the parents!

Mr. Kevin Doyle is easily identifiable in the 1901 census, recorded as still living at Ballinascorney Lower in Glenasmole at 84 years of age (he is not recorded in the 1911 census and must by then have passed away). This means Doyle was born in 1817. Kevin Doyle’s own son, Mylis [i.e. Myles, recte Maoilíosa?] is recorded as being 44 years old in 1901; Kevin fathered him at 40 years old. This in turns suggests the incident that Kevin Doyle related to Hogan about punishment for speaking Irish – by parents (!) – in Glenasmole could have happened as early as 1787 or as late as 1807, depending on when Doyle’s father was born and how old he was when he had Kevin. 

(It is highly significant, too, that Doyle’s father was actually attending school at the time; unlike in other Irish-speaking districts in the late 1700s and early 1800s, illiteracy did not seem widespread in Glenasmole – and in fact, as the case of Andrew Smith above shows, literacy in Irish – while uncommon enough to be remarked upon – was not unheard of either.)

Why, then, should parents punish their children for speaking Irish in an area that at the same time had people literate in and apparently proud of speaking Irish? The answer, I suspect, is to be found in the gradual opening up of Glenasmole and in critical events outside the glen. In 1740 the first major road opening up Glenasmole was built; this connected Glenasmole to Dublin proper to such an extent that by the 1790s the main occupation of those men who were not farmers was that of ‘Dublin car-men’ who worked in the city, using English as they did so.

The 1790s to 1810s, however, were a period of severe tension in Ireland, and in Dublin in particular, including both the 1798 Rebellion and the 1803 Robert Emmet Uprising. In both cases fugitives fled (and were pursued) into the Dublin Mountains, to the extent that in 1803 a military road was swiftly constructed to prevent the area being used to shelter sedition. Dublin car-men in particular would have by then been utterly economically dependent on being seen as trustworthy by the authorities – otherwise they would not be allowed to travel into the city to work, depriving many in the glen of their livelihood. (It should also be borne in mind here that a secondary source of income in Glenasmole for many in the nineteenth century was to take in orphans and lodgers from Dublin city.)

So it seems that Glenasmole was a small community in which Irish was already being supplanted by English in the 1790s as the glen opened up to the metropolis on its doorstep; in the midst of this fragile socio-economic trend, political and military events intruded. A small, vulnerable community near Dublin of all places (!) finding itself in a general climate of suspicion, first in 1798 and then in 1803, seemingly had no wish to allow its use of Irish to single it out for any further risk and, accordingly, decided that it would hasten the decline of Irish already occurring among it by simply ceasing to pass the language on.

St. Ann's graveyard, Glenasmole. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

The people of Glenasmole in the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century were sometimes derided as ‘mountainy folk’ – a derogatory term that was apparently strongly linked to their association with the use of the Irish language (no matter how vestigial). I would venture that this term relates not to illiteracy and ignorance, as Kevin Doyle’s father’s case shows that the ‘mountainy folk’ were attending school early on and Malachi Horan relates that certain impressive traditional skills (the production of súgán ropes for horses) were the preserve of ‘mountainy folk’ in his time; rather, it seems, the ‘mountainy folk’, in being Catholic, (at least historically) predominantly Irish-speaking, and having harboured fugitives in 1798 and 1803 were seen by the authorities – and so by their lowland neighbours – as potentially disloyal, unreliable and all too ‘wild’. 

At the same time, the ‘mountainy folk’ of Glenasmole were in fact seeking ever closer integration with both their neighbours and the Dublin economy. The Irish language, as denigrated as it was, was apparently seen by the ‘mountainy folk’ themselves as the foremost obstacle to this integration.

Reports of Irish in Glenasmole and surroundings after 1850

We have further, perhaps tendentiously romantic, reports from the area: Piatt (1933, p. 6) gives a report he had heard that Irish was still spoken in 1850 in Ballymorefinn, Glenasmole - about five kilometres north of Castlekelly. Moreover, '[w]hen the new chapel at Bohernabreena was opened in 1870, the first sermon was preached in Irish, it being the language used in the district.' (Healy, 2006: p. 12, actually drawing on Piatt's 'Seanghaeltacht Átha Cliath' article in Feasta, March 1952). Does this confirm that Irish, even as late as the 1870s, was the preferred language of the oldest generation, and that younger members of the community acquiesced to this at socially important events - or are early twentieth century language enthusiasts, and their twenty-first century audience (us), merely wishing that this had been the case?

Piatt also reports claims of a kind of residual bilingualism 'south of Rathfarnham' in 1893 of 'mixed Irish and English phrases, almost half and half'. (Piatt, 1933: p. 6) This actually suggests Anglo-Irish, i.e. English very heavily influenced indeed by Irish sounds, syntax and lexicon; that is, the type of English spoken shortly after Irish had disappeared from a place.

In the same vein Piatt (ibid.) says that in 1900 there were memories of spoken Irish in Glencree in Co. Wicklow, ten kilometres to the east of Castlekelly, though clearly fluency belonged to the previous generation (i.e. those born after 1870 could not possibly have been native speakers).

Finally and perhaps most mysteriously one elderly lady purported to be a native speaker of Dublin Irish, who had not used the language since her Dublin Mountains childhood and who only spoke it 'when her mind was wandering' is identified in 1930, again by Piatt in his 'Seanghaeltacht Átha Cliath' article in Feasta (March 1952).

(It is relevant here to emphasise that the census records for Glenasmole for 1901, which can be freely accessed here, show that no one born locally returned themselves as having Irish; or, more accurately, the language box of virtually everyone born locally and resident in Glenasmole is either crossed through as irrelevant or left blank.

Perhaps most interestingly, the census also records that there were at least 13 elderly individuals still alive who would have been old enough to remember O'Curry's visit to the glen who, if they had been interviewed in 1901, certainly could have enlightened us as to the exact nature of Irish speaking in the glen in 1837 - whether it was confined solely to Uilliam Ó Reachtabhra and his sister Úna or more widespread.)

So what happened to Irish in Glenasmole between 1800 and 1900?

Judging from what O'Curry reports, it is highly tempting (cf: Nolan above) to surmise that the last generation that had Irish as its native, normative preferred language was born in Glenasmole around 1800 (and thus would have been 80 years old in 1880). It is equally tempting to propose that the generation born twenty years later (1820) - if we take a generation to be twenty years, although most at the time married at around 25 years old, and a generation may in fact have been 35 years - spoke both Irish and English with equal fluency, and can be considered truly bilingual, although in the circumstances of the time bilingual meant aiming for English. (This generation was 80 years old in 1900.) Thus the generation born twenty years later again (1840) might have had English as its native, normative language but understood Irish passively (i.e. semi-speakers as linguists call them), in order to communicate with the oldest people. (This generation was 80 years old in 1920).

According to this model, this would mean that the generation born twenty years later (1860) was the first to speak and understand only English. Nevertheless even then Irish may have been learnt by a few of that generation in exceptional circumstances (i.e. being looked after by a near-monoglot elderly relative for extended periods, often seen in 'final native speaker' scenarios, such as with Ned Maddrell on the Isle of Man in the 1970s) or to communicate with the very oldest people, who were either monoglots, who preferred to speak Irish, or who had again become monoglot with old age. (The 1860 generation would be 80 years old in 1940, thus accounting for the elderly lady in 1930) 

In other words, if we are to take the sources above at face value, local Co. Dublin Irish ceased to be passed on in any form in Glenasmole, but for exceptional individuals, around 1860. And so ended the transmission of any local Irish as a community language in Co. Dublin, although it would be a few decades until those born before 1860 passed away.

Turf cutting, Glenasmole, Co. Dublin. (Source: UCD Digital Library)

South West Co. Dublin outside of Glenasmole

To this must be added the note from Ua Broin (1942, p. 185) that Irish was used by adults in 'Clondalkin and surrounding districts' in 1870 to communicate with migrant workers (harvesters) from Meath who had no English (in order for this to be the case they would have had to have been from North Meath). This is backed up by Healey (ibid., p. 14), who writes of '[an] old man who died at Old Bawn in 1926, aged 90 years, never heard local people speaking Irish, but often heard it from farm labourers from Co. Meath harvesting in the district.' It should be pointed out that Old Bawn is about 10km north of Castlekelly. (This seems similar to the case of Ned Maddrell on the Isle of Man, who is known to have maintained his Manx fluency partly through interaction with Gaelic-speaking fishermen from Scotland and Ireland.)

Ua Broin (1871-1955) also states that his grandmother, born 1802 at Redcow near Clondalkin to a family from the Saggart-Brittas area about 10km west of Glenasmole, 'had some Irish', and would speak it as a play language to him as a child (c. 1877-1878) - though he barely remembered any of it and it was clear that English was the predominant language in the family whenever he was around.

His grandfather, a local man, did not speak Irish. Ua Broin’s parents’ generation was born c. 1837. It is unclear which of the generations described in the Glenasmole model above his grandmother might have belonged to, though given the nature of language use in his family I suspect it was at best to the first truly bilingual generation (i.e. 1820 in Glenasmole), suggesting Irish was decaying as a community language about a generation faster in Brittas-Saggart than in Glenasmole.