Is Leinster Irish really totally forgotten?

Fitzgerald's famous estimate of pre-Famine Irish-speaking areas by district electoral division (DED), worked back from those over 60 in 1911. The mass of white in the south-east wrongly implies the region was devoid of Irish (it in fact shows areas where less than three per cent returned themselves as Irish-speaking, and the author deliberately excluded Dublin, incorrectly presuming it only contained 'revival Irish' and migrants, so Glenasmole is not shown). Many scattered Irish speakers, often elderly and isolated, remained, and many bilinguals did not return themselves as Irish-speaking. (Source: Fitzgerald 2003).

Memories of Irish and Irish-speaking areas in Leinster

Since starting this blog, I have been lucky enough to be contacted by readers in or connected to Leinster who have told me that elderly relatives either spoke some Irish, or recounted to them (as children) tales of other elderly individuals in the area who knew Irish. These elderly relatives or individuals referred to by them were typically born in the late nineteenth century, and lived well into the twentieth century.

These statements concur with the findings of local historians and researchers in the 1930s and 1940s, and in some parts of north Leinster well into the 1970s, for whom it was no great difficulty to find people who either remembered Irish spoken by the old people when they were young, or who remembered fragments of Irish themselves. Moreover, the English spoken by the elderly - even in Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare et al - was usually peppered with words, and often whole sentences, from what had been the local dialect of Irish.

Local remnants, easily ignored

Such memories of Irish are far more important than they at first might seem. Yet what they represent in 2014 is a direct link to the Irish-speaking past of places far removed from Irish-speaking areas of our own time and - where the odd sentence and word can be remembered (no matter how seemingly garbled by time and failing memory) -  consequently, to the local dialect of Irish spoken there. 

Someone born in 1930, for example, would remember the old people of their childhood; in many cases these might have been born as early as 1850. In 1850 many parts of Leinster still had remnant Irish-speaking communities, and many more areas had individual, elderly Irish speakers. Even knowing that Irish was not spoken in a certain area among the old people can be a valuable clue as to when Irish died out in that area.

In many cases we have little otherwise recorded of the Irish of these locations. Remarkably, I sometimes see glossaries of Irish words in local dialects of Irish English that try to 'correct' these words in spelling and pronunciation to make them conform to today's standard Irish. The dialect aspect of them is ignored unless you know what you are looking for.

Yet time marches on. Many people still believe that 'no one is interested' in what they remember of their old granny's tall tales, or the sentences that old Seán down the road in 1960 used to insist were Irish. They do not tell anyone what they remember. They believe that Irish was not spoken in their area for hundreds of years, and that the words they heard as a child were just slang or gibberish.

The importance of acting quickly

Consequently, much of the remnants of Leinster Irish has been and is still in the process of being lost. This is nothing new; in 1933, Donn Piatt could plead:

"[You] can visit Shannonbridge, Ballykilty (Wexford) [...] and South Dublin, and I can offer [you] every help in seeking out old people - moreover, in nearly all cases the words on which my arguments are based are words current in the speech of people of forty to fifty or under, so that for twenty years to come it will be possible for other workers to test their accuracy - the words I get from the Ballykilty area being in the greatest danger, owing to the age of my informants." (p. 31)

 and:

"I would suggest that the RIA [Royal Irish Academy] try to have records made at given points in Leinster and North Tipperary, old people to speak through the microphone and give a list of Irish words used natively, in some form such as 'This is so-and-so, of such an age, speaking at _______. The following are the only words used here which seem to be Irish...' - and give the natural pronunciation. This work is vital, as no man's ear is infallible." (ibid.)

To my knowledge - and I would be delighted if I were wrong - the Royal Irish Academy never followed up on Mr Piatt's suggestion, and no records of the Irish remnants in the English spoken in Leinster were ever systematically made (although a number of individual studies were). This is a great shame.

Maybe you can help!

Yet all is not lost. If you know of an elderly relative or acquaintance who knows what they think might be Irish, or who can tell you of when they think Irish was last spoken natively in a district, or are able to direct you to someone who can, you will be doing very great and important research work. If you can record these words in any way - if you can actually record the conversation - then you will be providing us with valuable data on not just whether Irish was spoken in your area but also when and of what type.

Everything is of value, whether you at first recognise it or not.

My thanks to those who have contacted me already on this matter. It is not easy to pluck up the courage to send an e-mail or a tweet into the dark, especially when you might think that your family's memories of Irish are of no importance; but if you happen to suspect that you might know someone who knows something about the Irish that was once spoken in your area, do get in touch with them and in turn with this blog.