The Celts

By 1901 less than one percent of the population were monolingually Irish-speakers, while the percentage who claimed to be able to speak the language had fallen to fourteen per cent. Moreover, by this time the areas where Irish was the normal community language were largely confined to enclaves on the western and south-western seaboard, and even these were becoming increasingly penetrated by English. In short, by the end of the nineteenth century the language-bound culture which was the most unmistakably Celtic feature of Irish culture in general, was in full retreat towards the Atlantic seaboard. It seemed a 'residual culture', the survival of which was to be explained by the geographical remoteness and isolation of the communities who had retained it, a culture whose final disappearance could only be a matter of time and the absorption of the peripheral, 'remote' areas of the west into the mainstream of economic and social life and into linguistic conformity with the rest of English-speaking Ireland.

However, as we mentioned at the outset, the linguistic dimension is only one aspect - albeit a crucial aspect - of the complex question of the Celtic element in modern Irish society. Indeed, in the conquest and colonisation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the key determinant of loss and gain, of dispossession and preferment, of victory and defeat, was religious loyalty and affiliation rather than ethnic or racial criteria. And, contrary to what is widely believed, there was not an exact or total correspondence between religious choice and ethnic background.

For example, with the defeat of the Gaelic political system, some of the Gaelic lords went into exile rather than accept a reduced role for themselves under the new English order; others of the old Gaelic aristocracy remained on, but generally under new and greatly diminished status, authority, or economic well-being. But a few of the old Gaelic stock succeeded in not only surviving the changeover to the new order, but in having themselves accepted and absorbed into the new ruling class - the new ascendancy - with remarkable skill and success. They did so by conforming to the reformed church, that is by becoming Protestants, thereby enabling themselves (if they played their cards right) to share in the privileged access to power and property determined by religious conformity and political chance.

Thus, we find some Gaelic families (like some branches of the O'Briens of Thomond) conforming to the reformed religion, and over a period of time becoming overwhelmingly anglicised not only in speech but in manners, habits and general cultural identification. On the other hand, there were those of Norman or English stock - heavily concentrated in the towns and especially in Dublin and its hinterland - whose cultural modes were overwhelmingly anglicised, but who in the great religious cleavage of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era remained Catholic. They suffered loss and discrimination because of this. They thus came to share in the common sense of grievance and of injustice which is such a strong mark of the Irish Catholic psyche from the seventeenth century. Indeed, it can be argued that because of the particular configuration of forces involved in the conflicts of the early modern period, religion was the key marker of community identity in Ireland from the seventeenth century.

The interplay between religion and the more specifically ethnic aspects of cultural identity became extremely complex. The Catholic sense of collective identity - based on a shared historical fate, 'a shared sense of grievance, dispossession and defeat' - either subsumed or eclipsed other marks of cultural identity. A sense of Catholic identity did not necessarily (and increasingly did not in fact) mean a sense of Gaelic identity.

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From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print).
Also see A Little History of Ireland.