Part 2 A bit more detail:
When the French Revolution began and the revolutionaries
closed the Irish seminaries on the Continent, the English took the opportunity
to "make a deal" with the Irish. “We'll give you a seminary in
Ireland (that would be Maynooth) and allow you to have bishops and even build
churches, all that, but in return you have to stop all this independence
nonsense, and that includes suppressing the Irish language and the native
culture.” Why? Why make that a condition? Because the Irish language and the
Irish-Gaelic culture it embodied made the people <i>NOT
English</i>. The Irish could never become "West Britain" while
speaking a "foreign" language and having an outlandish culture.
I mean a culture, you must remember, that was rooted so long
ago, and tested so brutally in the 300 years previous to the Famine in the
1840s, that it had made one people (excepting the Orangemen in the North, who
were Scottish implants) where before they had been an endless series of tribes,
clans, and ancient kingdoms. (Here’s a tidbit for you: if you want to see what
Ireland looked like on a map in terms of tribes and kingdoms, look at a map of
the Irish dioceses; forget the counties – those were English creations.
https://www.catholicbishops.ie/dioceses/
Raphoe was the O'Donnell territory, Derry the O'Neill, and so on.)
So, the Church agreed with this pact with the
Freemason-ruled Mother England. They made a pact with the Devil Himself, and --
aside from a few famous exceptions such as Archbishop MacHale of Connacht, born
when the French Revolution began, 1789, and dying in 1881) the Church leaders
bent over backwards to get rid of anything 'Irish" -- the language, An
Ghaeilge, agus gach rud eile go leor, i.e., the whole that made the Irish a
"community" connected to their past. This was psychological warfare,
and a preemptive attack on the Irish national identity. It is part of the
reason why Ireland isn't like Poland or where I reside now, Hungary. In these
two countries, the Church supported their indigenous populations and their
ancient languages. But the Irish Church drove a stake through the heart of
Éire.
Then the Famine hit, <i>an t-Ocras Mór</i>. Now,
here are some stats you've never heard, not least because the Irish are loathe
to know them. In 1840, the country had a population of about 8 million people,
and of those, we don't know (no question about language existed on the census
in those days) how many spoke Irish, but the Guesstimate is that about 4 to 5
million of them spoke Irish. The entire western half of the country (with a
high-density population and where people married very young and had lots of
kids) spoke Irish, and it was also existing in strong pockets throughout the
east side, and even in what is now the Six Counties. In other words, and read this
twice, there were more people speaking Irish in Ireland than the entire
population of Holland and Sweden combined, or that of Holland and Portugal.
Think about that.
Ten years later, in 1850, the population was 5 million. Most
of those who died (either starved or dying of the resulting diseases) were
Irish speakers. So were those who managed to emigrate on the "coffin
ships". This is, my friends, the greatest language shift in European
history, bar none (in terms of numbers and the short time in which it
occurred). AND the English exported food from the country throughout the
Famine. (The only country in Europe where that occurred; the potato blight
infested all Europe.) The Famine was intentional. John Bull took advantage of
his opportunities.
And the Irish seem to have either forgotten it entirely or
have some in-built psychological block not to "get it" or even care.
It's a ghost that only haunts the hills, not the nightclubs. No doubt the
Church's position -- well established by then -- played a significant role in
this.
No comments:
Post a Comment