Gaelic revival

The Gaelic revival (Irish: Athbheochan na Gaeilge) was the late-nineteenth-century national revival of interest in the Irish language (then known as Gaelic, which is more often applied to Scottish Gaelic today) and Irish Gaelic culture (including folklore, sports, music, arts, etc.). Irish had diminished as a spoken tongue, remaining the main daily language only in isolated rural areas, with English having become the dominant language in the majority of Ireland.

Interest in Gaelic culture was evident in the middle of the nineteenth century in the scholarly works of John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry, and the foundation of the Ossianic Society. Concern for spoken Irish led to the formation of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language in 1877, and the Gaelic Union in 1880. The latter produced the Gaelic Journal. Irish sports were fostered by the Gaelic Athletics Association, founded in 1884.

The Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) was founded in 1893 by Eoin MacNeill and others. Its first president was Douglas Hyde. The object of the League was to encourage the use of Irish in everyday life, to counter the ongoing anglicisation of the country. It held weekly meetings and conversation evenings, published a newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis, and successfully campaigned to have Irish included in the school curriculum. The League grew quickly, having more than 400 branches within four years of its foundation. It had fraught relationships with other cultural movements of the time, such as the Pan-Celtic movement and the Irish Literary Revival.

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