Margins of Terror – Frank McNally on the Irish language editor and arch-pedant Risteard Ó Foghludha

The editor and language scholar Risteard Ó Foghludha (1871-1957) has earned a small but damning footnote in the history of Irish literature. In 1941, he was the official reader for Browne and Nolan who persuaded them against publishing Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), now considered a comic masterpiece.

In his first report, he called it “quite the craziest piece of Irish I have ever met”. Its author was incapable of composing an intelligible sentence, he suggested: “Constructions such as he writes have never before been seen in Irish, and one earnestly hopes that nothing of the kind will ever be repeated.”

Despite this, strangely, the report was not at first against publishing. The real-life Myles, Brian O’Nolan, had struck a “new note in Gaelic literature”, it conceded, and would make readers laugh. But Ó Foghludha suggested major changes first, including cutting certain sexual references.

Ó Foghludha and O'Nolan did have at least two things in common. Both had a proprietorial relationship with the Irish language

This the author did (leaving no trace of the sexual material, to the regret of his biographer Anthony Cronin). Then Browne and Nolan turned down the work anyway, saying their reader “did not understand it”.

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It was only a temporary setback for O’Nolan.

Unlike his previous novel, The Third Policeman, which never saw print during his lifetime, An Béal Bocht quickly found another publisher and sold well.

If not their senses of humour, Ó Foghludha and O'Nolan did have at least two things in common. Both had a proprietorial relationship with the Irish language. And as a new booklet from the Irish Texts Society confirms, both enjoyed finding fault with the language's most famous lexicographer.

Dineen and the Dictionary: The Life and the Afterlife by Pádraigín Riggs concerns the work of Fr Patrick Dinneen (1860-1934), Kerry-born compiler of the influential Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (published 1904, but revised and expanded in 1927), and with the various attempts to produce new editions after his death.

Chief among the scholars involved in those was Ó Foghludha, who had worked on the 1904 version and been warmly praised by Dinneen, before they fell out. By 1927, he was not deemed worthy of a credit in the revised edition, something about which, he wrote in 1935: “I feel not the slightest resentment, though it annoyed many of my old friends in Dublin.”

But in correspondence about contributing his researches to a new edition, as Riggs notes, “his bitterness is not concealed”. And his heavily annotated copy of the 1927 edition emphasised the many faults he found with his former colleague’s work.

Often he confined himself to simple corrections. Sometimes he was more disparaging, as when commenting on Dinneen’s gloss on the phrase Dia (is Muire) Duit, which prompted him to write: “This naoidhe marked opposite is surely very stupid in a dictionary”.

Elsewhere, he seized on the word Údas, claimed by Dinneen to mean “a Jew, a hard-hearted person” and corrected: “This is surely very absurd […] Of course it is nothing more or less than JUDAS.”

He went on in that case, typically, to quote poetry as evidence: "We have a well-known use . . . by Piaras MacGearailt on the pervert Augustinian – John Power of Ballyhane . . .: 'Ní sagairt do bhí againn in intinn ná i dteagasc? Acht Iúdas do dhíolfadh ar fee beag, na Flaithis'." ("What we had was not a priest, in mind or teaching. But a Judas who would sell the Heavens for a small fee.")

Born in east Cork, Ó Foghludha spent early years as a reporter with the Freeman's Journal, as which he covered Parnell's final public speech. Later he was a recording clerk at the first meeting of Dáil Éireann, and for many years also worked for the Underwood Typewriter Company.

But in an always-competitive field, whose entrants occasionally included O’Nolan himself, he must have been the supreme Irish language pedant of his era.

Ó Foghludha 'had a reputation for being particularly harsh on those who published Irish that was not of a high standard'

In a parallel universe, this might have secured him work at the specialist end of Myles na gCopaleen’s famous book-handling service, which offered to distress, annotate, and generally give the appearance of usage to the libraries of Ireland’s vulgar rich, who had no time or inclination for actual reading.

According to his entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, Ó Foghludha “had a reputation for being particularly harsh on those who published Irish that was not of a high standard, a stance which earned him numerous enemies”.

That, and his fondness for marginalia, was a suspected factor in the estrangement with Dineen (aka Ó Duinnín), as the DIB suggests: “When Piaras Béaslaí borrowed a copy of Ó Foghludha’s edition of Ó Duinnín’s Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, it is said to have been full of corrections . . . This may have been brought to the attention of Ó Duinnín.