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Tag Archives: Gaelic Journal (magazine)


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Birth of Eoin MacNeill, Gaelic Revivalist, Nationalist & Politician

Eoin MacNeill, Irish scholar, Irish language enthusiast, Gaelic revivalist, nationalist and politician, is born John McNeill in Glenarm, County Antrim, on May 15, 1867.

MacNeill is one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta McNeill (née McAuley), also a Catholic. He is raised in Glenarm, an area which “still retained some Irish-language traditions.” His niece is nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.

MacNeill is educated at St. Malachy’s College and Queen’s College, Belfast. He is interested in Irish history and immerses himself in its study. He achieves a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics, jurisprudence and constitutional history in 1888, and then works in the British Civil Service.

MacNeill co-founds the Gaelic League in 1893, along with Douglas Hyde. He is unpaid secretary from 1893 to 1897 and then becomes the initial editor of the League’s official newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis (1899–1901). He is also editor of the Gaelic Journal from 1894 to 1899. In 1908, he is appointed professor of early Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD).

MacNeill marries Agnes Moore on April 19, 1898. The couple has eight children, four sons and four daughters (though the 1911 census entry for MacNeill notes eleven children, seven of whom are still alive).

The Gaelic League is from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal is put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation. MacNeill strongly supports this and rallies to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigns immediately afterward.

Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill meets members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O’Rahilly, runs the league’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asks MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. He submits a piece called “The North Began,” encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier in the year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland. In July 1915, he comments on the threat that the unarmed nationalists in Ulster might face: “…a demented…English driven Orange Army would be let loose upon the helpless Catholic people of Ulster, who would be driven out of the province or massacred where they stood.”

Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approaches MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill becomes chair of the council that forms the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, he is opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.

The Irish Volunteers have been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which plan on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into World War I is, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials plan a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they present MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British are going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—is a forgery.

When MacNeill learns about the IRB’s plans, and when he is informed that Roger Casement is about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he is reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action is now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers will be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment has been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refuses to relent, MacNeill countermands the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned “manoeuvres.” This greatly reduces the number of volunteers who report for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.

Pearse, Connolly and the others agree that the uprising will go ahead anyway, but it begins one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities are taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the Rising lasts less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill is arrested although he has taken no part in the insurrection. The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warns her on the day before his execution, “I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him.”

MacNeill is released from prison in 1917 and is elected Member of Parliament (MP) for the National University and Londonderry City constituencies for Sinn Féin in the 1918 United Kingdom general election. In line with abstentionist Sinn Féin policy, he refuses to take his seat in the British House of Commons in London and sits instead in the newly convened Dáil Éireann in Dublin, where he is made Secretary for Industries in the second ministry of the First Dáil. He is a member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland for Londonderry between 1921 and 1925, although he never takes his seat. In 1921, he supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In 1922, he is in a minority of pro-Treaty delegates at the Irish Race Convention in Paris. Following the establishment of the Irish Free State, he becomes Minister for Education in its second (provisional) government, the third Dáil. He strongly supports the execution of Richard Barrett, Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey and Rory O’Connor during the Irish Civil War.

In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, is also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversees Ireland’s entry to the League of Nations.

MacNeill’s family is split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, takes the anti-Treaty side and is killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922. Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, serve as officers in the Free State Army. One of his brothers, James McNeill, is the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.

In 1924, the three-man Irish Boundary Commission is set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. MacNeill represents the Irish Free State. He is the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as being “pathetically out of his depth.” However, each of the Commissioners is selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On November 7, 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, publishes a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that is to be transferred to Northern Ireland, the opposite of the main aims of the commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty, MacNeill resigns from the commission on November 20. Hus performance in the Boundary Commission has been deemed highly negative in a 2025 study The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission.

On November 24, 1925, MacNeill also resign as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the commission.

On December 3, 1925, the Free State government agrees with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom’s “imperial debt” and, in exchange, agrees that the 1920 boundary will remain as it is, overriding the commission. This angers many nationalists and MacNeill is the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the commission have been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal is approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on December 10, 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour. He loses his Dáil seat at the June 1927 Irish general election.

MacNeill is an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times are coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He is also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.

MacNeill is a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy‘s Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter’s book Ireland under the Normans, generate controversy.

MacNeill is President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) from 1937 to 1940 and President of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) from 1940 to 1943.

MacNeill retires from politics completely and becomes Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devotes his life to scholarship and publishes several books on Irish history. He dies in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78, on October 15, 1945. He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.

MacNeill’s grandson Michael McDowell serves as Tánaiste, Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, TD and a Senator. Another grandson, Myles Tierney, serves as a member of Dublin County Council, where he is Fine Gael whip on the council.


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Death of Dr. Douglas Hyde, First President of Ireland

Dr. Douglas Hyde, Gaelic scholar and the first President of Ireland, dies in Dublin on July 12, 1949, at the age of 89.

Hyde is born at Longford House in Castlerea, County Roscommon, on January 17, 1860. In 1867, his father is appointed prebendary and rector of Tibohine, and the family moves to neighbouring Frenchpark, in County Roscommon. He is home schooled by his father and his aunt due to a childhood illness. While a young man, he becomes fascinated with hearing the old people in the locality speak the Irish language.

Rejecting family pressure to follow previous generations with a career in the Church, Hyde instead becomes an academic. He enters Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), where he gains a great facility for languages, learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German, but his great passion in life is the preservation of the Irish language.

After spending a year teaching modern languages in Canada, Hyde returns to Ireland. For much of the rest of his life he writes and collects hundreds of stories, poems, and folktales in Irish, and translates others. His work in Irish helps to inspire many other literary writers, such as W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

In 1892, Hyde helps establish the Gaelic Journal and in November of that year writes a manifesto called The necessity for de-anglicising the Irish nation, arguing that Ireland should follow her own traditions in language, literature, and even in dress.

In 1893, Hyde founds the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) along with Eoin MacNeill and Fr. Eugene O’Growney and serves as its first president. Many of the new generation of Irish leaders who play a central role in the fight for Irish independence in the early twentieth century, including Patrick Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, and Ernest Blythe first become politicised and passionate about Irish independence through their involvement in the Gaelic League. Hyde does not want the Gaelic League to be a political entity, so when the surge of Irish nationalism that the Gaelic League helps to foster begins to take control of many in the League and politicize it in 1915, Hyde resigns as president.

Hyde takes no active part in the armed upheaval of the 1910s and 1920s, but does serve in Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish Free State’s Oireachtas, as a Free State senator in 1925-26. He then returns to academia, as Professor of Irish at University College Dublin (UCD), where one of his students is future Attorney General and President of Ireland Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh.

In 1938, Hyde is unanimously elected to the newly created position of President of Ireland, a post he holds until 1945. Hyde is inaugurated on June 26, 1938, in the first inaugural ceremony in the nation’s history. Despite being placed in a position to shape the office of the presidency via precedent, Hyde by and large opts for a quiet, conservative interpretation of the office. In April 1940, he suffers a massive stroke and plans are made for his lying in state and state funeral, but to the surprise of everyone he survives, albeit paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. One of his last presidential acts is a visit to the German ambassador Eduard Hempel on May 3, 1945, to offer his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, a visit which remains a secret until 2005.

Hyde leaves office on June 25, 1945, opting not to nominate himself for a second term. He opts not return to his Roscommon home due to his ill-health, but rather moves into the former Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant’s residence in the grounds of Áras an Uachtaráin, where he lived out the remaining four years of his life.

Hyde dies in Dublin on July 12, 1949, at age 89. As a former President of Ireland he is accorded a state funeral which, as a member of the Church of Ireland, takes place in Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Since contemporary rules of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland at the time prohibit Roman Catholics from attending services in non-Catholic churches, all but one member of the Catholic cabinet remain outside the cathedral grounds while Hyde’s funeral takes place. Hyde is buried in Frenchpark, County Roscommon at Portahard Church.


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Douglas Hyde Inaugurated First President of Ireland

douglas-hyde

Dr. Douglas Hyde, Gaelic scholar from County Roscommon, is inaugurated as the first President of Ireland on June 25, 1938.

Hyde is born at Longford House in Castlerea, County Roscommon, on January 17, 1860. In 1867, his father is appointed prebendary and rector of Tibohine, and the family moves to neighbouring Frenchpark, in County Roscommon. He is home schooled by his father and his aunt due to a childhood illness. While a young man, he becomes fascinated with hearing the old people in the locality speak the Irish language.

Rejecting family pressure to follow previous generations with a career in the Church, Hyde instead becomes an academic. He enters Trinity College, Dublin, where he gains a great facility for languages, learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German, but his great passion in life is the preservation of the Irish language.

After spending a year teaching modern languages in Canada, Hyde returns to Ireland. For much of the rest of his life he writes and collects hundreds of stories, poems, and folktales in Irish, and translates others. His work in Irish helps to inspire many other literary writers, such as W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

In 1892, Hyde helps establish the Gaelic Journal and in November of that year writes a manifesto called The necessity for de-anglicising the Irish nation, arguing that Ireland should follow her own traditions in language, literature, and even in dress.

In 1893, Hyde founds the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) along with Eoin MacNeill and Fr. Eugene O’Growney and serves as its first president. Many of the new generation of Irish leaders who play a central role in the fight for Irish independence in the early twentieth century, including Patrick Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, and Ernest Blythe first become politicised and passionate about Irish independence through their involvement in the Gaelic League. Hyde does not want the Gaelic League to be a political entity, so when the surge of Irish nationalism that the Gaelic League helps to foster begins to take control of many in the League and politicize it in 1915, Hyde resigns as president.

Hyde takes no active part in the armed upheaval of the 1910s and 1920s, but does serve in Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish Free State‘s Oireachtas, as a Free State senator in 1925-26. He then returns to academia, as Professor of Irish at University College Dublin, where one of his students is future Attorney General and President of Ireland Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh.

In 1938, Hyde is unanimously elected to the newly created position of President of Ireland, a post he holds until 1945. He is inaugurated on June 26, 1938, in the first inaugural ceremony in the nation’s history. He sets a precedent by reciting the Presidential Declaration of Office in Irish. His recitation, in Roscommon Irish, is one of a few recordings of a dialect of which Hyde is one of the last speakers. Upon inauguration, he moves into the long vacant Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, since known as Áras an Uachtaráin.

Hyde’s selection and inauguration receive worldwide media attention and is covered by newspapers in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Egypt. Adolf Hitler “orders” the Berlin newspapers “to splash” on the Irish presidential installation ceremony. However, the British government ignores the event. The Northern Ireland Finance Minister, John Miller Andrews, described Hyde’s inauguration as a “slight on the King” and “a deplorable tragedy.”

Despite being placed in a position to shape the office of the presidency via precedent, Hyde by and large opts for a quiet, conservative interpretation of the office.

In April 1940 Hyde suffers a massive stroke and plans are made for his lying-in-state and state funeral, but to the surprise of everyone he survives, albeit paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. One of Hyde’s last presidential acts is a visit to the German ambassador Eduard Hempel on May 3, 1945, to offer his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, a visit which remains a secret until 2005.

Hyde leaves office on June 25, 1945, opting not to nominate himself for a second term. He opts not return to his Roscommon home due to his ill-health but rather moves into the former Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant’s residence in the grounds of Áras an Uachtaráin, where he lived out the remaining four years of his life.

Hyde dies in Dublin on July 12, 1949, at age 89. As a former President of Ireland, he is accorded a state funeral which, as a member of the Church of Ireland, takes place in Dublin’s Church of Ireland St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Since contemporary rules of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland at the time prohibit Roman Catholics from attending services in non-Catholic churches, all but one member of the Catholic cabinet remains outside the cathedral grounds while Hyde’s funeral takes place. Hyde is buried in Frenchpark, County Roscommon at Portahard Church.


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Death of Irish Priest Eugene O’Growney

eugene-o-growney

Eugene O’Growney, Irish priest, scholar, and a key figure in the Gaelic revival of the late 19th century, dies in Los Angeles, California, on October 18, 1899. He was born at Ballyfallon, Athboy, County Meath, on August 25, 1863.

The Irish language has largely retreated from Meath when O’Growney is born, and neither of his parents speak it. He becomes interested in the language when he chances upon the Irish lessons in the nationalist newspaper Young Ireland. He has help at first from a few old people who speak the language, and while at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, where he continues his studies for the priesthood. He spends his holidays in Irish-speaking areas in the north, west, and south. He gets to know the Aran Islands and writes about them in the bilingual Gaelic Journal (Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge). He is ordained in 1888. His proficiency in the language leads him to be appointed in the re-established Chair of Irish at Maynooth in 1891. He serves as editor of the Gaelic Journal between 1894 and 1899 and during his tenure ensures that more material is published in Irish.

For O’Growney, language, nationality, and religion are closely linked. In 1890, writing in the Irish Ecclesiastical Review, he describes literature in Irish as “the most Catholic literature in the world.” He is aware, however, of its other aspects, adding that “even if Irish were to perish as a spoken language, it would remain valuable from the pure literature point of view.”

O’Growney’s Simple Lessons in Irish, first published in the newspaper the Weekly Freeman, prove so popular that they are published in booklet form. There are five books in the series and, by 1903, 320,000 copies have been sold.

O’Growney is a founding member of the Gaelic League, which is created in Dublin in 1893 “for the purpose of keeping the Irish language spoken in Ireland,” and later becomes its vice-president.

In 1894, failing health causes him to go to Arizona and California, where he dies in Los Angeles in 1899. Some years later, with the aid of Irish sympathisers in the United States, his body is brought back to Ireland.

His funeral, held on September 26, 1903 at the Catholic Pro-Cathedral, Dublin, is attended by 6,000 people, including members of the trade guilds, clerics, politicians, members of the nationalist Gaelic Athletic Association, and students. Eugene O’Growney is buried at Maynooth.


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Founding of the Gaelic League

conradh-na-gaeilge-logo

The Gaelic League (Irish: Conradh na Gaeilge), a social and cultural organisation which promotes the Irish language in Ireland and worldwide is founded in Dublin on July 31, 1893.

Conradh na Gaeilge is founded by Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector from Frenchpark, County Roscommon, with the aid of Eugene O’Growney, Eoin MacNeill, Thomas O’Neill Russell, and others. The organisation develops from Ulick Bourke‘s earlier Gaelic Union and becomes the leading institution promoting the Gaelic Revival, carrying on efforts like the publishing of the Gaelic Journal. The League’s first newspaper is An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light) and its most noted editor is Patrick Pearse. The motto of the League is Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin amháin (Ourselves, Ourselves alone).

The League encourages female participation from the start and a number of women play a prominent role. They are not restricted to subordinate roles, but play an active part in leadership, although males are in the overwhelming majority. Local notables, such as Lady Gregory in Galway, Lady Esmonde in County Wexford, and Mary Spring Rice in County Limerick, and others such as Norma Borthwick, found and lead branches in their communities. At the annual national convention in 1906 women are elected to seven of the forty-five positions on the Gaelic League executive. Executive members include Máire Ní Chinnéide, Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh (who writes pamphlets on behalf of the League), Bean an Doc Uí Choisdealbha, Máire Ní hAodáin, Máire de Buitléir, Nellie O’Brien, Eibhlín Ní Dhonnabháin, and Eibhlín Nic Néill.

Though apolitical, the organisation attracts many Irish nationalists of different persuasions, much like the Gaelic Athletic Association. It is through the League that many future political leaders and rebels first meet, laying the foundation for groups such as the Irish Volunteers. However, Conradh na Gaeilge does not commit itself entirely to the national movement until 1915, causing the resignation of Douglas Hyde, who feels that the culture of language should be above politics. Most of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation are members. It still continues to attract many Irish Republicans. Seán Mac Stíofáin, the first chief of staff of the Provisional IRA was a prominent member in his later life.

After the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, the organisation has a less prominent role in public life as Irish is made a compulsory subject in state-funded schools. It does unexpectedly bad in the Irish Seanad election of 1925, when all the candidates it endorses are defeated, including Hyde.