‘To speak with justice, I would say this letter from Mr Casement is, for the most part, a string of falsehoods’ ….begins a letter of harsh criticism concerning the efforts of committed Irish language enthusiasts on the island of Tawin to build a new school where ‘Irish will be the language.’ It was to replace the English-speaking school, and its teacher, which was closed for years because the islanders refused to send their children there.
In the first decade of the last century when the Irish language was being promoted as one of the nationalists’ call for pride in our nation, the new school for Tawin became a cause célebre throughout Ireland and beyond.
Sir Roger Casement, who had completed a brief holiday in the west of Ireland, had observed the ‘dull , apathetic, dead heart of the Irish-speaking Ireland’, and in a widely published letter observed that ‘parents had kicked the language out of doors’. He urged support for Tawin, which was taken up by such influential men as Douglas Hyde and Padraic Pearse, resulting in a successful campaign that within a year there were sufficient funds to build a small school and a library.
But the letter-writer, who gives his name as John FS Costello Sheppard, * scorns Casement’s praise for the islanders as if ‘one would be convinced that Tawin is the real home of the Irish language, that the Tawin people are model patriots, and that the teacher is some imported traitorous wretch, bribed and paid to Anglicise these people, but she has failed, and she is now cast ruthlessly aside by these brave few…
‘ This teacher who laboured strenuously for twenty-two years removing ignorance and savagery, spreading education and religion in this pestilential island, educating and enlightening the Tawin children, eradicating vices and ill-doing, and undergoing much privation and misery while earning her honest living; and yet after so many years of toil and hard living, and after having rendered such good services in this lone and backward island, to be maltreated, to be boycotted, to be insulted, to be degraded, to be ruined, to be deprived of her living, and to be hunted like a wild beast…..’
and so on for pages, listing the poor teacher’s success that while ‘teaching in a schoolroom unfit to shelter beasts in winter she scored 95 at the Annual Results Examination - a record which has not hitherto been held by any school in Connaught.’
Nevertheless, despite this fearsome attack, the following month the local parish priest, Fr James J Keane, wrote to Pearse’s An Claidheamh Soluis saying that plans for the new school were in the hands of a competent contractor, and work on the building would start soon.
A ‘lively meeting’
In the meantime, in what seemed like a real-life enactment of Séamus Ó Beirn’s play An Dochtúir, was the appointment of a doctor for the dispensary at Oranmore. The people of Tawin requested that the doctor appointed must have Irish as that is the language of the village. The advertisement was written in Irish, on the assumption that only an Irish speaking doctor would apply, but two doctors did so, one a fluent Irish speaker, Dr Tomás Breathnach, and an application written in English by a doctor with no Irish whatsoever.
The appointments came before the Galway Board of Guardians, which by all accounts was a ‘lively meeting’ reported with some relish in the Connaught Champion, October 14 1904. The public gallery was full to capacity from which interruptions frequently contributed to the meeting.
It appears that the chairman, Mr P Cannon, had no Irish whatsoever, and was impatient to move things along. Someone shouted: ‘Irish will be here after you’. The clerk of the board, who also had no Irish, was unable to read the application from Dr Breathnach. A member proposed that ‘anything not written in plain English should not be read’. This caused consternation in the room. Among the cries of indignation, was heard ‘this was an utterly anti-Irish remark.’
The workhouse master was asked to read the Irish language application which he did so only to be interrupted ‘by various exclamations’. Comments among the crowd included ‘Shut your mouth there!’
Dr Breathnach was elected by 32 votes to 27.
Sense of irony
The little school was built with one door, and two windows situated high enough so the children could not look out and be distracted from their work. In the summer, when the school was closed, it became one of several Irish colleges, run by Conrad na Gaeilge, aimed at helping teachers to teach Irish effectively, and was a great success.
There was one final blow probably from those who ‘had kicked the language out of doors’, and that was, the disappearance of one of the plaques that was to be erected over the door. In a gesture of reconciliation, there were to be two plaques, one inscribed in Irish and one in English. Mysteriously, during the night before the official opening, the Irish plaque was hacked off its position. It was never found. Today, in an interesting sense of irony, only the English language plaque remains.**
The rebuilding of the Tawin national school, however, became a symbol of the gathering storm, represented by the resurgence of Irish music and literature, Gaelic games and athletics, language and politics, and the growing acceptance that foreign rule was detrimental to native interests.
Next week: Éamon de Valera’s time in Tawin
NOTES: *The Galway Observer November 16 1904.
** The school still stands at the very end of the village, and has been incorporated, with great sensitivity, into an attractive home owned by Tom Bartlett, emeritus professor of Irish history at the University of Aberdeen, and his wife Rebecca, a writer, teacher, and founder of Galway Youth Theatre.
