Mairtin
O Cadhain (1906-1970) has been called by Declan
Kiberd the greatest 20th century prose writer in
Irish, and his work has been compared to that of
Joyce and Beckett. He is also the major Republican
Socialist theorist of the language and culture question.
However very few would be familiar with his name
and work. A search on Google will bring only 124
hits for his name, and one on Cre na Cille,
his masterpiece, will bring up a scandalous 306
hits –most relating to a restaurant of the
same name! It is time that his importance and contributions
be recognised.
Mairtin
O Cadhain was born in 1906 in the Conemara Gaeltacht.
He studied to become a teacher, and joined the IRA
in 1927. In 1937, he got sacked from the school
he was teaching in for his Republican sympathies.
A 1980 RTE documentary revealed that in revenge,
the local IRA carried out a ‘punishment beating’
on his successor. In April 1938, he was elected
to the Army Council of the IRA. He was arrested
in 1940 following his oration at the burial of Tony
D’Arcy who had died on hunger strike. Subsequently,
he was interned in the Curragh until 1944. Disagreeing
with the IRA over its lack of political and economic
programme, he drifted out of the organisation. After
his release, he worked in the translation department
of the Dail, before integrating the department of
Irish at Trinity College Dublin. Over the years,
O Cadhain was involved in a number of organisations
defending the rights of the Irish speakers, such
as Muintir na Gaeltachta, Misneach, and the Gaeltacht
Civil Rights Movement, as well as the Gaelic socialist
newspaper An tEireannach. A fellow traveller
of the CPI, O Cadhain is reputed to have first translated
the Communist Manifesto and the International into
Irish. He died in 1970.
The
greatest prose writer in Irish, O Cadhain uses his
native language with skills not found among many
writers. He was a great stylistic innovator, enriching
his colloquial speech Irish with constructed neologisms
and words from other languages and dialects. His
masterpiece is the novel Cre na Cille (“The
Graveyard Clay,” 1949). As Eoghan O Tuairisc
noted, he shaped a vitriolic style, using the most
shattering idioms of the living Irish speech laced
with phrases from the 17th century literature and
new coinages from the thinking of Darwin, Einstein,
Marx and Freud. His writings attack the dehumanising
of life and the castration of culture with a blistering
invective and scurrility unsurpassed since Swift.
This is the sort of literature Republicans should
aim to produce.
O
Cadhain developed a Marxist analysis (with strong
Gramscian elements) on the language question and
the depopulation of the Gaeltacht. The cultural
hegemony of English was the outcome of socio-economic
interests inherent in the power structure; the breaking
of this cultural hegemony therefore would require
a revolution in the power structure. He summed his
position as: “Irish is the Reconquest of
Ireland and the Reconquest of Ireland is the salvation
of Irish. The people’s own language is what
will save them.”
The
revival of the Irish language depends on the revival
of those who speak it. He saw Irish as the means
of expression and cultural medium of the most downtrodden
social group in Ireland. It is through the revolutionary
Reconquest of Ireland that the Irish speaking community
could be revived. When he writes that the people’s
own language is what will save them, he expresses
his belief that revolution should be a development
immanent to the life and culture of the community
and vice-versa. The revival of the Irish culture
depends on the revival of the Irish people, the
revival of the Irish people depends on the revival
of the Irish culture. The struggle for the Irish
language should be part of the Reconquest of Ireland,
if the Irish language movement fails to be active
leaders in that struggle, then the whole Irish revival
will fail:
“It
is the duty of the Irish speaking people to be socialists.
The Irish speaking community of the Gaeltacht is
the poorest and most beaten down class of our people
in Ireland. For me, to revive that class, the Irish
speaking community, is the same as to revive the
Irish language. This revival can only be achieved
through the Reconquest of Ireland –the reacquisition
by the people of Ireland of the ownership of Ireland
and all its wealth. So for me the revival of Irish
is the same as the revolution that is needed for
that Reconquest. So any act which will increase
the spirit of the Irish speaking community is a
part, and an important part, of the Reconquest.”
