And now for something completely Irish...

Myles na gCopaleen was the nom de plume of Flann O'Brien, a columnist for the Irish Times before and during World War II. That's a bit like saying that Walter Cronkite was a reporter for CBS News. Many Irishmen [and Irishwomen! Ed.] bought the paper for no other reason than to see whose ox was the latest to be gored by Mr O'Brien's alter ego.

Myles na gCopaleen sometimes wrote in Irish, at a time when doing so was neither popular nor profitable. He held that the Irish language had far more colour and richness than the language imposed on the Emerald Isle by the English occupiers. He supported with a heart-and-a-half the movement to revive the language. Here is an excerpt from the section of The Best of Myles entitled "Irish and Related Matters".

Irish...provides through its literature and dialects a great field for the pursuit of problems philological, historical and ethnological, an activity agreeable to all men of education and good-will. Moreover, the language itself is ingratiating by reason of its remotesness from European tongues and moulds of thought, its precision, elegance and capacity for the subtler literary nuances...

True Irish prose has a steely latinistic line that does not exist in the fragmented English patois. Here is a literal translation of a letter addressed by Hugh O'Neill to a hostile captain:-

'Our blessing to ye, O Mac Coghlin: we received your letter and what we understand from her is that what you are at the doing of is but sweetness of word and spinning out of time. For our part of the subject, whatever peson is not with us and will not wear himself out in the interest of justice, that person we understand to be a person against us. For that reason, in each place in which ye do your own good, pray do also our ill to the fullest extent ye can and we will do your ill to the absolute utmost of our ability, with God's will. We being at Knockdoney Hill, 6 februarii, 1600.'

That seems to me to be an exceptional achievement in the sphere of written nastiness and the original exudes the charm attaching to all instances of complete precision in the use of words....

It is...dangerous to discourage the use of Irish because the revival movement...is a valuable preservative of certain native virtues and it is worth remembering that if Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England, and it would stop there only because it could go no lower.

Further reading: "Clichés for the age of the coronavirus" (click on the sidebar at right), and "Two Irishmen discuss the coming election", WWW 29/7/20.