Free De Valera's Irelands by Dermot Keogh, Keogh Doherty Page B

choice between two ap­proaches to the definition of its identity. The state could have founded it­self on the tradition of the leaders of the Rebellion of 1798 and 1848 who, influenced by the French and American revolutions, had proclaimed that the national objective must be to unite Catholic, Protestant and Diss­enter in the common name of Irishman. This would have entailed adopt­ing an overtly pluralist approach, both in religious and in cultural matt­ers, plac­ing the different religions on a genuinely equal footing, and rec­ognising the Irish and English languages as equally valid alternative means of ex­pressing the Irish identity.
    However, the path actually chosen by the new state in these matters was a very different one. In relation to the language, a clear policy had already begun to emerge during the period of office of Cumann na nGae­dheal, at a time when de Valera was still in unconstitutional opp­osition. The language policy then adopted was determined by the sense of in­debtedness felt by the leaders of the national political movement that had begun in the late nineteenth century, towards the language move­ment in which so many of them had found their inspiration – and had in many cases (including that of my own parents) found each other.
    The pursuit of the objective of Irish language revival had led, even before the First World War, to the introduction of an Irish language re­quirement for entry to the colleges of the new National University of Ire­land, to which the Catholic majority in the greater part of the island al­most exclusively went, in search of university education until the 1960s. This had a profound influence on the teaching of the language at secon­dary level. But in the early days of the new state, W. T. Cosgrave’s Cum­ann na nGaedheal government decided to make the Irish language a basic, required subject at primary level and to make it also a required sub­­ject in the national intermediate-level school certificate examinations taken at age 15-16.
    De Valera, when he came to power, went on to make the Irish lan­guage an essential element in the school Leaving Certificate itself, taken at age 17-18, which was the qualification traditionally used by most em­ployers as the educational test especially for clerical employment. More­over, as mentioned earlier, in his speeches de Valera elevated the revival of the Irish language to the status of the first national aim, taking prece­dence even over national re-unification.
    By thus making Irish an essential requirement for so many pur­poses, and by requiring a knowledge of Irish for entry to and promotion within the public service, in the hope of reviving a language which had been moving towards extinction for several centuries before the state was founded, successive governments were effectively making a choice against a culturally pluralist society. For this process involved a de facto – though unintended – discrimination against people of the Protestant tradition, north or south, whose culture had effectively always been ex­clusively English-speaking. And this was of course also true of other sub-cultures that had developed amongst those who maintained their adherence to Roman Catholicism but who in the cities and towns and throughout most of the province of Leinster and parts of other provinces had been English-speaking for several centuries.
    By the 1950s the removal of this Irish language requirement for the purposes of school examination certificates and entry and promotion within the public service had started to become a political issue, provok­ing controversy, but during the long continuous period in office of the Fianna Fáil party from 1957 to 1973 no change was made. De Valera’s successors as Taoiseach after his elevation to the constitutional presidency in 1959, Seán Lemass and Jack Lynch, were unwilling to tackle this prob­lem,