11 Radio and the Irish Language

This essay explores the ways in which Ireland's sacralised national language figures in Beckett's work. Oblique references to Irish in the Beckett oeuvre are read against a history of Anglo-Irish investment in the language as a mode of ‘impatriation’, a means by which to circumscribe anxieties surrounding an identity fraught with socio-political anomalies. In addition, the suspicion of ‘official language’ in Beckett's work is considered in light of his awareness of the ‘language issue’ in his native country, particularly in relation to the powerful role of the Irish language in the reterritorialisation of the civic sphere in post-independence Ireland.

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The Changing Face of Irish Ireland: Séamus Ó Grianna's and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fictions of the Donegal Gaeltacht

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2014.0129 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 44 (2) ◽

pp. 357-380

Author(s):

Ríona Nic Congáil

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Women's Movement ◽

Irish Language ◽

Shared Interest ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Rural And Urban ◽

Historical Fact ◽

Insight Into

Séamus Ó Grianna and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, whose lifespans overlapped only briefly, rank among the most prolific Irish writers of the twentieth century. Their bilingualism, moreover, offers them access to two languages, cultures, and viewpoints. Their shared interest in the Donegal Gaeltacht during the revivalist period, and their use of fiction to explore and represent it, provide their readers with a remarkable insight into the changing ideologies of twentieth-century Ireland, and particularly Irish-Ireland, touching on broad issues that are linguistic, cultural, political, gendered, and spatial. This essay begins by analyzing the narrative similarities between Ó Grianna's Mo Dhá Róisín and Ní Dhuibhne's Hiring Fair Trilogy, and proceeds to examine how both writers negotiate historical fact, the Irish language, the performance of Gaelic culture, the burgeoning women's movement, and the chasm between rural and urban Ireland of the revival. Through this approach, the essay demonstrates that the fictions of these two writers reveal as much about their own agendas and the dominant ideas of the epoch in which they were writing, as they do about life in the Donegal Gaeltacht in the early twentieth century.

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