"All creeda and all classes"? Just who made up the Gaelic League?

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2002 by Timothy G. McMahon

SCHOLARS studying the role of the Gaelic revival in recasting modern Irish identity have generally focused their research on three main areas: specific controversies between Irish-Irelanders and Anglo-Irish litterateurs; descriptions of ideological polemics (such as Douglas Hyde's "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland" and D.P. Moran's The Philosophy of Irish-Ireland); or the careers of a relatively few revivalists who gained prominence in public affairs. (1) In the main these treatments have failed to investigate who joined the major organizations associated with the revival, including the membership of the Gaelic League, choosing instead to extrapolate rather broadly from a few incidents or individuals about the part that the revival played in redefining the everyday lives of Irish men and women.

On the other hand, Tom Garvin and John Hutchinson have offered important and somewhat broader interpretations of the Gaelic revival. The former has claimed that the Dublin-based league was initially dominated by a coterie of "middle-class scholars and dilettantes," only to be overtaken by a lower-middle-class cabal whose narrow political aims distinguished them from the more broad-minded founders of the movement. (2) Hutchinson, meanwhile, has argued that the league in its mass phase became "a movement of the relatively educated young against both the established and relatively uneducated strata--farmers, publicans, and shopkeepers." (3) Men and women of the younger generation, according to Hutchinson, turned to Gaelicism (and ultimately to Sinn Fein) because they were frustrated by limited career opportunities and faced the choice of being incorporated into a modern "scientific state" or remaining loyal to their traditional culture.

Such conclusions situate the revival in the mainstream of European romantic or reactionary nationalist movements, particularly those of central and eastern Europe, where researchers have long identified members of the middle and lower-middle classes as key ideologues, organizers, and participants. Essential to these portrayals is a sense that men and women joined nationalist movements precisely because they were caught "in the middle": Although relatively well off in terms of their educations or their earnings, they recognized that their potential for significant social and political advancement was limited by the circumstances of their respective multinational states. Ultimately, when a movement developed under such conditions, widespread recognition of "blocked mobility" created the potential for revolutionary--and paradoxically conservative--events like the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-21. (4)

But three objections can be raised to this line of argument. First, Hutchinson and Garvin base their conclusions on virtually no empirical study of league membership and therefore on the untested assumption that the social composition of the league changed after an unspecified period of time, so that frustrated lower-middle-class members preponderated. Second, even if such a change occurred, it is--as Crossick, Haupt, and Koshar have shown--short-sighted to assume that persons of the lower-middle classes responded to the uncertainty of their situations in an explosive manner. (5) Third, the claims of Garvin and Hutchinson run contrary to the contemporary claim made repeatedly by league proponents that they appealed to "all creeds and all classes" in Ireland.

All of this suggests several questions central to understanding the impact of the Gaelic revival: Who joined the Gaelic League? Did the character of its membership change over time? And did the league have an impact in Irish-speaking districts, or did it remain solely an urban phenomenon confined primarily to the eastern half of Ireland? As will become clear, the answers to these questions are interrelated. After beginning with an estimate of the size of the organization at its height, I investigate the social class, gender, and religious backgrounds of several hundred Gaelic Leaguers. What these data indicate is both that the revival was very much like its European counterparts in terms of the social composition of its leadership and that it was more representative of turn-of-the-century urban Ireland than has hitherto been appreciated. Moreover, as will be seen, this very representativeness was the result, at least in part, of calculated appeals by the leadership of the league rather than simply of some predilection of various elements of society to join the movement. Finally and ironically, these calculations had the unintended effect of mitigating the impact of the revival in the very areas that it was supposed to influence most--the Irish-speaking districts.

Answering the question of who joined the league is perhaps the most difficult issue because specific information about membership is scattered and often problematic. For example, the original rosters of league branches are housed in two separate locations and display numerous weaknesses as source material. (6) Although the logs contain some valuable data, such as the names of branch officers and the dates on which a branch (or craobh) affiliated with the central executive committee (or Coisde Gnotha), the information was not entered systematically. Thus, when an officer was replaced through resignation or election, his or her name was simply crossed out and the name of the successor written in, without any recorded date. Branches were also listed sequentially, based on their date of affiliation. If, as often happened, a branch folded and later reaffiliated with a new name or new officers, the "new" craobh appeared as a separate entry. Further, branches outside Ireland, including those in Britain, the empire, or the Americas, are listed along with those in Ireland. The resulting number of craobhacha included in the final account runs to more than 1,500, while the actual number of domestic branches at any given time was considerably smaller than this total. (7) Even after the national congress (or Ard Fheis) determined to professionalize its headquarters staff in 1902, the best-informed contemporaries, such as league secretary Padraig O Dalaigh and treasurer Stiofan Bairead, inconsistently reported the number of affiliated branches. (8)