Language, monuments, and the politics of memory in Quebec and Ireland

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Kathleen O'Brien

On one level the presence of the Irish text pays tribute to or purports to speak for the Irish speakers who came from some of the regions most severely affected by the famine. Of the nearly one million who died in the famine, the majority carne from poorer areas populated by Irish speakers. Moreover, Michael Cronin notes that many of the five million who left Ireland between 1846 and 1901 were also from these regions (1996:106). One might extend a lament for the famine dead and losses caused by emigration to a lament for Gaelic cultural decline after the famine, but several factors complicate this interpretation. Cronin notes that by 1801 only about half of the five million people living in Ireland spoke Irish. By 1831, the sharp rise in population among the poor had raised the number of Irish-speakers to the highest level it had ever been, but the introduction of the national education system that year forbade the teaching and speaking of Irish in primary schools funded by the Board of Education. (2) Thus, even though the population in Irish-speaking regions had grown rapidly for forty-five years, a decade before the famine the growth of Irish as a language of literacy was actually reversing. Irish was not admissible as a subject in Irish schools until 1878 and was not widely embraced even then.

Cronin also observes that the defense of the French language that followed the implementation of the Quebec Act had no parallel in Ireland. For much of the nineteenth century, despite efforts of the Christian Brothers and other clergy, the Catholic church was more concerned with gaining control of the Irish education system than with issues of language (Cronin 1996:106). Moreover, Protestant populations of Ireland were generally not Irish speakers or were minimally competent in Irish for specific purposes such as landlord-to-tenant communication. Between the mid-1840s and 1909, Irish immigrants were second in number to the French Canadians in some parts of Quebec, but literacy in the Irish language was low. Although the famine was a devastating trauma, to attribute the evocation of shared famine experiences through the display of the Irish language per se would be a gross simplification. Nevertheless, for most monument visitors, the Irish panel was a visual code to suggest the presence of a distinct Irish community. The script framed that presence as not-English, not-French, and not readable. In the post-famine turmoil of immigrant communities struggling to gain new footholds, such an unreadable visual display could also inadvertently reinforce other negative characterizations of desperate famine-era Irish immigrants as a group "apart" from more advantaged newcomers.

In the context of Irish cultural nationalism in the 1890s, display of the Irish language also suggests other configurations of Irish identity and Catholicism. Following Douglas Hyde's return to Ireland after teaching in Canada, his 1892 lecture, "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland," helped insert the Irish language into the nationalist message, leading to the formation of the Gaelic League in the same year. Under Hyde's presidency (1893-1915), the popularity of Gaelic League at all levels of Irish society spawned numerous chapters and language classes, including many in North America. Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, was an ardent Irish speaker and hardly emblematic of the poverty and illiteracy often associated with native speakers of the language.