Many of the radical generation that led the struggle for Irish independence went to school, to borrow Patrick Pearse’s phrase, in the Gaelic League, the organisation set up in 1893 by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill to revive the Irish language and culture. On July 29th, 100 years ago, the league’s executive committee or Coiste Gnótha was taken over by the IRB, the underground revolutionary movement that planned the 1916 Rising. The cultural nationalist revival, instigated by the GAA (founded in 1884) and the Gaelic League, gathered enormous momentum, so that by 1908, when it was at its height, there were 800 GAA clubs and 671 league branches all over Ireland, with hundreds more among Irish emigrant communities abroad. Hyde, its Protestant founder, wanted the league to be non-political because he thought a shared interest in culture could reconcile sectarian divisions.
But the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret oath-bound Fenian organisation committed to achieving an Irish republic by violent means if necessary, saw in movements such as the league and the GAA an ideal recruiting ground. Therefore it set about infiltrating these movements from the outset. Many of the witness statements (WS) of those who participated in the independence struggle, given to the Bureau of Military History between 1947 and 1957 (these were released to the public in 2003 and have been available online since 2012), testify to this infiltration. One that gives an IRB insider’s account of the takeover of the Coiste Gnótha of the Gaelic League at its annual conference or ard-fheis, in Dundalk in late July 1915, is that of Diarmuid Lynch (WS 0004). He was a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB and its Munster organiser. He was also a member of the very active and influential Keating Branch of the Gaelic League in Dublin, where IRB influence was very strong. (Other members of the branch included Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha, Fionán Lynch, Piaras Béaslaí, Gearóid O’Sullivan and Diarmuid O’Hegarty.)
Lynch said that the IRB had always respected the non-political nature of the Gaelic League but that the Coiste Gnótha was too subservient to the Board of Education and Dublin Castle in matters affecting the language movement. This led to a growing divergence between what he called the right and left wings of the organisation, Hyde being the leader of the right wing. Whenever the left wing, to which Lynch and other IRB men belonged, objected to proposals coming from the other wing, it was accused of introducing “Sinn Féinism” or “politics” into the proceedings, he maintained. He was absent in the US for most of 1914 and when he returned, he said that the division between the two wings of the Coiste Gnótha had widened. He argued that up until then, the IRB had not tried officially to influence election to the coiste, although members might have done so to a very limited extent, which proved that the IRB had no wish to politicise the league.
UCD historian Conor Mulvagh would be unlikely to agree that the IRB's role was quite so neutral. He argued that the appointment of The O'Rahilly as manager of An Claidheamh Soluis, the Gaelic League newspaper, was "part of the ongoing campaign between 1913 and 1915 to radicalise the Gaelic League and to prepare a section of Irish men and women for revolution". To illustrate how those within the league saw it as a springboard to revolution, Mulvagh quoted the following from Pearse in November 1913: "We went to school in the Gaelic League. It was a good school . . . but we do not propose to remain schoolboys . . . To every generation its deed. The deed of the generation that has now reached middle life was the Gaelic League: the beginning of the Irish revolution. Let our generation not shirk its deed, which is to accomplish the revolution."
By summer 1915, preparations were under way for an insurrection against Britain, according to Lynch, and the time had come for the left wing of the Coiste Gnótha to stage a takeover. Lynch summoned IRB members of the league, and others sympathetic to the IRB, to attend the ard-fheis at Dundalk in late July. There they got a motion passed which stated that “the previous Gaelic League rule, that it be non-political, be abolished and a clause inserted stating that a free Ireland be included in the aims of the league”.
This change in policy caused Hyde to resign and the new IRB-dominated Coiste Gnótha elected MacNeill in his place. MacNeill was not a member of the IRB but was president of the Irish Volunteers, formed at the end of 1913.