A new documentary by David Marcus goes some way to dispel the misconception that all Irish Protestants view the Irish language with contempt, writes Hugh Linehan
Louis Marcus's new documentary, Na Gaeil Phrotastúnaigh, opens with footage of Gerry Adams addressing the opening session of the Northern Ireland Assembly in Irish, and being jeered by Ian Paisley. It's an extreme example of what many might see as the attitude of most Irish Protestants to the Irish language - at best, indifference, at worst, contempt. But Marcus's film sets out to dispel such preconceptions.
"When you meet people who ask what you're doing, and you say you're making a programme about Protestants and the Irish language, they glaze over and say: 'Oh, yes, Douglas Hyde . . .' That's the only person they can think of," says Marcus. "The language in the North now has become a political football, because of its espousal by Sinn Féin, which could alienate some of the other community from it. But people would generally accept that it was Sinn Féin's advocacy of the language which earned it formal recognition in the Good Friday Agreement."
That very identification of the Irish language with parity of esteem for nationalists, though, is hardly going to endear it to unionists - it's surely more likely to alienate them further?
"If that were the whole of the story, it would," says Marcus. "In fact, as I think the programme shows, there have always been Protestants who keep the language up, who hold services in it, and who espouse it. It's a very complex subject, but there is obviously on both sides a grasping for linguistic roots as part of your identity." The documentary includes footage of a monthly prayer service in Irish in Belfast. "It's a Presbyterian initiative, although they do get attendance from Anglicans and some Catholics. But one of the elderly men you see reading at that service learned his Irish in Belfast in the 1940s. There has always been that line of engagement with the language, which you could hardly describe as a popular wave or anything like that, but it is there. And who knows what it might become in the future, as circumstances change."
The idea for Na Gaeil Phrotastúnaigh (its working title was No Rootless Colonists, after a phrase by John Hewitt) was sparked at the launch of a film Marcus had made about Christ Church Cathedral, when he found himself talking with several Irish-speaking Church of Ireland members, including the former Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Donal Caird. "I became fascinated by this," says Marcus. "I did some skimpy research, and was quite amazed, so I began exploring this fascinating story, which began with Elizabeth I, and took in these remarkable individuals along the way. There was human interest and drama and conflict."
Na Gaeil Phrotastúnaigh charts the relationship between Irish Protestants and the Irish language over more than four centuries. What's most interesting is how the patterns seem to repeat themselves - for example, in the tension between the Protestant inclination towards using the vernacular language and British government policies of Anglicisation of the country.
In the early 17th century, the programme suggests, there was a distinct possibility the Reformation might take hold among the indigenous population, due to the efforts of individuals such as as William Bedell, the bishop of Kilmore, who were instrumental in translating the Old and New Testaments into Irish. "At that time, many of the Gaelic intelligentsia were for the Reformation," notes Marcus. But war, rebellion and the Counter-Reformation put paid to that.
As the Ulster Plantation took hold, however, a new form of Irish-speaking Protestantism began to emerge, as Presbyterian Scots planters began to assimilate into Gaelic culture. "I don't have the statistics, but it was widespread," says Marcus. "Some of it would have been perfectly natural, because some of the settlers who came from Scotland would have been Gaelic speakers themselves, and skipped very easily into Irish. Others would have had to adopt Irish in order to survive among the wider population. It certainly wasn't republican or nationalist; it was just the normal thing to do. It survived for a long time in places like the Ballymascanlon community, just south of the Border, where they had Irish-speaking clergymen for four generations.
"While it was Presbyterians who created Irish republicanism up until 1798, the fact that you spoke Irish did not necessarily mean you were republican," he says. "But some of the slogans of 1798 were in Irish, like Érin go Bragh."
In the 19th century, Protestants were instrumental in initiating the Gaelic Revival, arguably much more so than the burgeoning Catholic middle class which was ridding itself of Irish as quickly as possible. But the rise in nationalist and republican sentiment at the start of the 20th century, and its linking with the language revival movement, had a dampening effect on Protestant enthusiasm for the language, as well as causing divisions within the Church of Ireland itself. Even at the height of the Gaelic Revival, though, Irish-speaking Protestants would have been a minority of a minority. "Of course," says Marcus, "but the point is that they were a minority who made a hugely significant contribution to the preservation of the language, and to establishing it in the consciousness of the country. Certainly Thomas Davis was part of that, as was Samuel Ferguson. And if it weren't for Hyde and the Gaelic League, you wouldn't have had a State policy, no matter how right or wrong or misguided, on the preservation of Irish."
And what of the state of Irish among Protestants today? "I think you can say that Irish was pretty vibrant in the Church of Ireland up until the 1970s or 1980s," says Marcus. "What has happened since is really a mirror of what has happened in Irish society as a whole, an abandonment of the Irish language programme, particularly on the part of the State, which pays lip service while making sure that nobody leaves school with an ability to speak the language, which is a great hypocrisy. But one can't expect anything else from an establishment for whom a change of language would represent a revolution in society."
The complexity of this story only emerged in the course of the making of the programme, says Marcus. "It's partly the story of a community who began as planters and colonists, who settled, and looked for points of contact for themselves. Who asked, 'who are we, what are we?' And some of them discovered the Irish language for themselves. It represents a very long cultural tradition that politics cut across at times. It also shows how, when you get an encounter between a minority from a different culture, a fascinating cross-fertilisation can happen."