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One of the buildings destroyed in the 1916 Rising in Dublin was that which housed the premises of the printing firm of Messrs Sealy Bryers & Walker, in Middle Abbey Street. Among the contents lost in the destruction of the building were the plates which were to be used to reprint Dinneen’s dictionary.
The dictionary had been published by the London-based Irish Texts Society in 1904. In 1915, with only 400 copies still on hand, a reprint was being considered.
However, having been deemed by the council of the society not urgent, the proposed reprint was postponed, with unfortunate consequences.
The dictionary project had begun in 1898 with the appointment by the newly established Irish Texts Society of a dictionary sub-committee. Eoin MacNeill was initially appointed as general editor, with David Comyn and Fr Peter O’Leary (An tAthair Peadar) as assistants – though O’Leary subsequently resigned owing to pressure of work.
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The proposed deadline was 1902, but in 1901, when MacNeill found himself unable to complete the work on time, owing to ill-health, the council wrote to Fr Dinneen asking him to undertake the task. He accepted the offer, ultimately exceeding the original deadline by two years.
Boyhood dream
In his editor’s preface, Dinneen wrote: “Although this work was laid upon my shoulders quite unexpectedly, it is curious to recall that the production of an Irish Dictionary was one of the dreams of my boyhood. If the realization of that dream be not as splendid as the original conception, it is of some compensation to reflect that the work, in spite of many imperfections, will be useful to thousands of students, and will help the work of cultivating the rich and vigorous, but sadly neglected, language of the Gael.”
Dinneen had no illusions about the limitations of his achievement. In 1904, replying to his most celebrated critic, Fr MP O’Hickey, he said: “Neither the editor nor the Council of the Irish Texts Society intended to put this book on the market as a work infallibly perfect, or sufficiently full for all purposes. From the nature of the case the work has no pretensions to that practical infallibility which can be attained by works of a similar size in modern highly cultivated languages, works that are but condensations, over and over again edited and corrected, of voluminous and encyclopaedic dictionaries, on which treasures are expended, and which it took generations to compile.”
As early as 1904, therefore, he was implying that a subsequent improved and enlarged edition might be desirable but it was the loss of the original plates in 1916 that actually set the idea in motion. By the end of March 1917, only seven copies of the dictionary remained on hand, and Dinneen was consulted by the Council of the Irish Texts Society about the possibility of an enlarged reprint. This time he was the only editor they had in mind for the task.
While he readily accepted the challenge, he constantly complained about the lack of resources at his disposal.
Writing to the Council of the Society in February 1919, he pointed out that: “Every kind of labour is high in price and on account of so many Irish scholars (more or less) being in prison, or perhaps hiding, labour of this kind is exceedingly scarce.”
Difficult negotiation
His contract was finally signed in September 1919, following a great deal of difficult negotiation on both sides. The first item stated that: “The editor agrees to prepare, peruse, correct, alter, edit and superintend through the press a complete and perfect alphabetical Dictionary known as the larger
Irish-English Dictionary
within a period of about four years from the date hereof.”
The word “about” was significant. In fact, the work, took twice that time. “Dinneen” – for, indeed, the dictionary and its editor have become synonymous – eventually appeared in 1927.
Though described in an understatement by one member of the council as “a difficult person to deal with”, Fr Patrick Dinneen laboured diligently, in very difficult circumstances.
The editor referred to in the following quotation is not Dinneen, but rather, James Murray, who compiled the Oxford English Dictionary for the Philological Society, but the words describe Dinneen's situation with uncanny precision: "... it became increasingly clear that the initial outlay was going to be very much greater and the period during which there were no profits very much longer than had been estimated. Henceforth the worried, discouraged Editor was to be confronted by equally anxious, dissatisfied Publishers, trying to solve their economic difficulties by dictating to the Editor how he should do his work."
Unlike Murray, Dinneen lived to see his great work in print.
Dinneen's dictionary is still in print and, although it has been superseded by the more modern Ó Dónaill's Irish-English Dictionary and by many excellent online facilities, the squat green volume, with its gold lettering, remains the "go to" resource for genuine browsers who seek the meaning of a word and come away with an unexpected insight into folklore, history, geography, placenames and much more.