The scholarship, research and intellectual integrity which went into Michael Laffan's The Irish Revolution - The Sinn Fein Party 1916-1923 (Cambridge) are of such breathtaking proportions that even to begin to write about it makes one feel like an ant on Parnassus, and a not very nimble ant either. His bibliography contains well over 300 published works, 60 newspaper titles (consulting God alone knows how many editions), over 80 distinct archives, and more than 50 different primary sources.
To have mastered such a vast body of material is an astonishing achievement, opening more windows on the political and social upheaval of the time than may even be listed, never mind dwelt upon, in even a lengthy book review, never mind in this humble cabbage patch.
Take this revelation, for example. Can it really be true that in August 1921, Eamon de Valera told the Gaelic League ard-fheis that, if he could choose between having freedom without the language, and the language without freedom, he would rather have the latter? As Michael Laffan observes: "So, at least in theory, the country's freedom and unity were to be subordinated to the revival of `the national language' which was now spoken by a mere 13 per cent of the nation."
Rendered speechless
But of course, Dev was no fool: was his assertion about language not a recognition of the relative ease with which independence could be achieved compared with the enormous, and, we now know, insuperable difficulty of demotically reinstating a language? He - and the other Gaelic League enthusiasts of the time - would probably would have been rendered speechless in any and every language if they were to hear that the terms of a settlement between northern unionists and the rest of the people of Ireland would establish parity of official esteem between Lallans and Gaelic.
It was not intended to be an insult to Irish that Lallans was given such status, but was merely meant to be a political counterweight to keep unionists in countenance: yet in that parity, there is revealed a greater truth. Both are vanishing tongues which, though defended by ardent admirers, each year continue to lose their grip on the populations which have traditionally spoken them. Nor is it merely a question of a dialect such as Lallans, and a distinct language like Irish, perishing in demotic speech in the next decade or so. Many Irish local dialects and accents are probably under threat; and once gone, they cannot be retrieved, any more than it is possible to recover the Irish of Louth or Kilkenny or Wexford, or the mysterious argot of Ferns & Bargey.
It goes without saying that the loss of a language, a dialect or even an accent is never less than a cultural reverse, and in the case of an entire language, it is a calamity not merely for the culture involved, but for the stock of human wisdom. A language is in part the record of a people's unique experiences, irreplaceable by any other people in any other language. Once gone, it cannot be restored.
Not unique
The loss of language is often seen as a uniquely Irish phenomenon. It is not. We know now from DNA research that the Celtic population of England was not displaced, as was traditionally believed, by Anglo-Saxons, but was so culturally dominated by them that they completely ceased to speak whatever language was theirs - probably a hybrid Latin-Briton dialect - and learned to speak a form of Germanic instead. The language of their forefathers vanished probably as swiftly as has Irish.
We have a shrewd idea of the tongue of the ancient Britons; we know nothing whatever about ancient Prussian, which vanished entirely after the conquest of Prussian aboriginals by Germanic peoples who themselves came to be called Prussians. Nor is language-loss a uniquely Celtic-Germanic phenomenon. At the time of the revolution, only 40 per cent of the population of what is now France spoke French. Flemish was widely spoken in Northern France, and still was in the early years of this century; hunted by lycee, pursued by ecole superiore, it is now as vanished as the similarly oppressed Languedoc in the south.
English rules
Language is being metropolitanised and standardised according to the demands of popular culture, and it is all perfectly beyond the control of centralised political will. It is one thing to educate minority languages into extinction; quite another to police the dominant language into a single authorised version. Regularly the Academie Francaise and the French government issue dik-tats and ordinances against the use of English (in reality, American): and in vain. Today, even French grammar is beginning to conform to English grammatical rules.
And all this was happening before the cultural blizzard of the Internet, which will change communications, and means of thinking, perhaps more radically than anything in human history. What we are today, our patterns of thought, our intellectual habits and priorities, never mind, of course, our way of speaking, are under unprecedented attack. For all that the world of 80 years ago is sometimes difficult to understand today, it does remain accessible, especially in the hands of such a brilliant historian as Michael Laffan. In a very short time, the pre-Internet past might, I fear, be as culturally inaccessible to the rising generation as Pharaonic Egypt is to us. We are probably the last generation to be able to empathise thoroughly with history.