Language and Culture

Patrick Pearse’s ability as a liturgist was certainly tied to his passion as an educator, as Zelenetz so summarizes from Ó Buachalla and Le Roux, two authors whose focus was on Pearse’s educational work and on his biography, respectively:

Séamas Ó Buachalla entitled his 1980 edition of Pearse’s educational writings A Significant Irish Educationalist, thus paying a solid enough, if stolid, compliment that is seconded, though somewhat more extremely, by Louis Le Roux, Pearse’s 1930s French biographer (or hagiographer, to be, perhaps, more accurate). Le Roux concludes with characteristic hyperbole that “had [Pearse] accomplished nothing more than [his work in Irish education] he would have remained nevertheless the most remarkable man of his time.”7 Without going so far as Le Roux does to make of Pearse a second Saint Patrick, we, nonetheless, ought to pay his words some heed, because the simple fact is that Pearse spent a greater portion of his brief thirty-six years concerned with Gaelic school games than with gun-running from Germany. [1]

Patrick Pearse was primarily a school teacher, poet, and dramatist. He participated in the organization, the execution, and the punishment for a revolution, to be sure; however, most of his rather short life was spent in the classroom either as pupil or master. Ó Buachalla’s compliment in the form of a book title is a most appropriate designation, as Pearse’s opinions on education were carefully constructed. While it may appear that Pearse had an ulterior motive to educating the boys at St. Enda’s in the tradition of Cú Chulainn – that he would somehow brainwash them into serving an unjust cause which he believed in so mightily – it should be noted that Pearse’s ideas on education were rooted in what he and many other thinkers of his time considered a worthy ideal: freedom through education. It was through the education Pearse provided at St. Enda’s that each young boy could grow into the sort of Irish nationalist Pearse wished roamed the streets of every village and parish in Ireland, one connected to a long and rich history, full of story and heroism, heroes and kings.

In his capacities within the Gaelic League, Pearse advocated for making Irish mandatory at the new Catholic universities, including the National University of Ireland and the Catholic University, St Stephen’s Green, to reinvigorate a love of Irish in every educated man who was educated in Ireland. He believed that the love of Irish and love of country existed within every Irish man and woman, but that systematic English oppression had stamped it out. In fact, he questioned whether one of the new Catholic universities and their resistance to making Irish mandatory just represented a “desire to see Ireland become a ‘cultured English province.’” [2] Pearse fought so hard for compulsory Irish because he believed that any university in Ireland would operate as a “nerve-centre for the whole education system of Ireland.” [3] A university in Ireland would educate lawyers to defend Gaels in courts, scholars to study Gaelic culture, and most importantly teachers to impart the wisdom and understanding of Ireland’s unique and powerful Gaelic culture on to students the nation over. And Pearse fully believed that before Ireland could enjoy any political freedom, an “intellectual freedom must precede” [4] it. Pearse felt that the “first care of every race struggling to maintain their national existence is to educate their people on national lines and through the medium of their own language.” [5] He would live out that belief in his work at St. Enda’s.

St. Enda’s was meant to be a bilingual school teaching Irish as a subject as well as other subjects in Irish. This was meant to help bring on an intelligentsia of Irish-fluent poets, actors, lawyers, and scholars. Pearse took his cues from the bilingual schools in Belgium where two culturally distinct languages were increasingly necessary for citizens to do business and communicate. Teaching his boys to read and write both English and Irish as useful and important languages allowed Pearse to teach Irish culture in a way unavailable to a purely English-speaking pupil. Learning the tales of Cú Chulainn in Modern Irish carried much more cultural weight to Pearse and his boys than to learn them in English. To speak the words of Sétanta in Sétanta’s own tongue bore with the act some of the weight of Sétanta’s very own voice. To remember Ireland Gaelic was to remember her free.

Footnotes

[1]	Zelenetz, “Education and the Gael: Padraig Pearse’s Scoil Eanna.” p. 446

[2]	Brendan Walsh, “Frankly and Robustly National: Padraig Pearse, the Gaelic League and the Campaign for Irish at the National University,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 103, no. 411 (2014): 318?30. p. 319

[3]	Pearse, Patrick. “The New University: Irish Essential for Matriculation.” An Claidheamh Soluis. August 22, 1908.

[4]	Pearse, Patrick. “The University and the Schools.” An Claidheamh Soluis. December 19, 1908.

[5]	Pearse, Patrick. “The University and the Schools.” An Claidheamh Soluis. December 19, 1908.