How Irish Was Lost

1831 - 1911: The language went from the speech of millions to a minority tongue in two generations, and the reasons are harder than the story usually told.

In 1851, the first census that asked, about 1.52 million people in Ireland said they spoke Irish, roughly a quarter of the population. By 1891 that was down to about 680,000, and only 38,121 of those spoke Irish and nothing else. In Munster and Connacht the proportions had been far higher, around 44 and 51 per cent, and in Galway, Kerry, Mayo and Waterford above 60. Those numbers count anyone with any Irish, so they flatter the real position rather than overstating the loss.

The story usually told is the bata scóir, the tally stick: a notch cut for every Irish word a child spoke, and a beating when the stick was totted up. The practice is recorded in folklore accounts and there is no good reason to doubt it happened. But no genuine example is known to survive, nobody can say how widespread it was, and it seems to have faded by the late 1870s. What the accounts also record, and what is usually left out, is that parents frequently approved of it and sometimes insisted on it.

That is the harder part. The national school system from 1831 taught through English and did not teach Irish at all, which did real damage. But the language was also given up, deliberately, by people who had concluded it would not feed their children. English was the language of the law, the shop, the emigrant ship and the letter home from Boston. The politics of the century did not push the other way either: the great popular movements that filled fields with hundreds of thousands of people were conducted in English.

And then the Famine fell hardest on exactly the districts where Irish was strongest. The language did not simply decline. A large share of the people who spoke it died, or left.