An Irish Speaking Island

This groundbreaking book shatters historical stereotypes, demonstrating that, in the century before 1870, Ireland was not an anglicized kingdom and was capable of articulating modernity in the Irish language. It gives a dynamic account of the complexity of Ireland in the nineteenth century, developments in church and state, and the adaptive bilingualism found across all regions, social levels, and religious persuasions.

On an Irish Island tells the remarkable story of a remote outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel brings to life this wildly beautiful island, notable for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke well into the twentieth century. With the Irish language rapidly disappearing, Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars, linguists, and writers during the Gaelic renaissance. As we follow these visitors—among them John Millington Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World—we are captivated both by the tiny group of islanders who kept an entire country’s past alive and by their complex relationships with those who brought the island’s story to the larger world.

Island Cross-Talk, first published in 1928, was the first book to come out of the Blasket Islands, that remote, tiny community off the West Kerry coast speaking a dying language. In these pages from his diary, Ó'Crohan jotted down snatches of conversation, anecdotes, descriptions of the landscape and the sea.

"The Aran Islands" by John Millington Synge. Published by DigiCat. DigiCat publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each DigiCat edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

This book offers the first full-length study of the education of children living within the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking communities in Ireland, from 1900 to the present day. While Irish was once the most common language spoken in Ireland, by 1900 the areas in which native speakers of Irish were located contracted to such an extent that they became clearly identifiable from the majority English-speaking parts. In the mid-1920s, the new Irish Free State outlined the broad parameters of the boundaries of these areas under the title of ‘the Gaeltacht’. This book is concerned with the schooling of children there. The Irish Free State, from its establishment in 1922, eulogized the people of the Gaeltacht, maintaining they were pious, heroic and holders of the characteristics of an invented ancient Irish race. Simultaneously, successive governments did very little to try to regenerate the Gaeltacht or to ensure Gaeltacht children would enjoy equality of education opportunity. Furthermore, children in the Gaeltacht had to follow the same primary school curriculum as was prescribed for the majority English speaking population. The central theme elaborated on throughout the book is that this schooling was one of a number of forces that served to maintain the people of the Gaeltacht in a marginalized position in Irish society.