At its best, the League’s hope of uniting diverse elements in a common Irish nationhood founded on a revived Gaelic language and literature, albeit illusory, embodied a real generosity of spirit. Modern Irish nationalism, however, had been born with English on its tongue. It was ironic that the heights of the Gaelic movement were reached at the very moment when the nationalist community had irreversibly adopted and uniquely adapted English to its own uses, and Irish artists were beginning to create a new and fertile space within the canon of literature written in the English language.132
Officially, the League’s relations with the party were harmonious; Redmond had been personally supportive since its inception in 1893. In 1901, he confessed to a ‘deep sense of humiliation’ when he found that he could not reply in the same tongue to an address presented to him in Gaelic, and revealed that he was having his children taught the language.133 In March 1904, declaring the party’s ‘complete sympathy with the Gaelic movement’, he rejoiced that the first parliamentary defeat of the Government should have come on the question of teaching Gaelic in the schools; a defeat that signalled the downfall of ‘a system of primary education which for the best part of a century has well nigh crushed the life out of Ireland, which has banished the Irish language, which has hidden away Irish history, which has suppressed Irish song, Irish poetry and Irish art….’ His attempt to persuade Hyde to stand for Parliament suggests that he may have had the aim of turning the League into an ancillary organization of the party.134 There was sound politics as well as idealism behind such a desire, as he had confided to O’Brien in 1901:
He is no doubt a crank, but is a good fellow and his election [in a Galway by-election] might neutralize any dangerous tendencies of the Gaelic movement.135
Redmond’s own education, which had immersed him in Shakespeare and Dickens, as is evident in much of his oratory – his first biographer wrote that ‘from the first he contemplated the spectacle of Anglo-Saxon civilization with a sentiment akin to awe’136 – did not clash with his conviction that a self-governing Ireland must nurture the indigenous language and culture and reject the tawdrier aspects of imported culture.137 The League’s more Anglophobic activists, however, conceived of language revival as a shield for the purity of a Gaelic and Catholic nation against foreign influences. For the politicized among them, the parliamentary movement was not merely politically ineffective, but abetted the Anglicization of the country by its very attendance at Westminster. It was no surprise that the League’s membership overlapped with that of separatist groups. In particular, the Dublin Keating Branch of the League, a hothouse of cultural exclusivity, became a centre of clericalist ‘faith and fatherland’ nationalism that grew increasingly separatist.138 Redmond, embarking on his 1901 US tour, warned that certain Gaelic League members were ‘trying to sow the seeds of ill-will’ between the UIL and the League, each of which must have an interest in the goals of the other. This was ‘the most base and mischievous conduct’, and he asked those engaged in it to pause and consider the damage it would do to Ireland.139 The RIC Inspector General wrote to the Under-Secretary in early 1902 that, while theoretically there was nothing illegal in the League:
… in some places it is gradually slipping away from the control of those who initiated it, with bona fide intentions, and is becoming each day tainted with the views of extremists.140
At this time, the Gaelic Athletic Association rigidly enforced the rule that banned policemen, soldiers and sailors from participation in its games (and its own members from participation in the ‘foreign’ games of rugby, soccer and cricket), thereby importing the boycott weapon into sport and ensuring the exclusion of almost all Protestants (and much of the Catholic urban working class). Members of the IRB within the GAA did their best to advance their policies and recruit members, but made limited headway against the control of most branches by the Catholic clergy.141 While the Gaelic League and GAA were theoretically open to non-Catholics, other elements of the ‘Irish Ireland’ movement were less hesitant in identifying Irish nationalism with Catholicism. Most representative of this tendency was The Leader, an incisively written weekly, edited by the Dublin journalist D.P. Moran, which began life in September 1900. Moran is described by Maume as a ‘cultural chauvinist, encourager of political debate and spokesman for economic nationalism’; his journal was, according to Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘broadly, though never uncritically or sycophantically, supportive of the reunited parliamentary party, and… militantly Catholic.’142 Its targets were English influence in Irish life, anti-Catholic job discrimination and Protestant predominance in the business and cultural fields. Its lexicon of abuse included the terms ‘shoneen’ and ‘Castle Catholic’ to refer to Catholics seen as insufficiently attached to Irish Ireland, and the new term ‘sourface’ to refer to Protestants. Protestant nationalists, such as Yeats, were fair game if they did not show sufficient deference to Catholic hegemony within the movement. Protestant bigotry was condemned, but no Catholic equivalent was admitted to exist. As the leading Irish Ireland publication, The Leader achieved a widespread popularity for its willingness to say things that the Freeman, constrained by its closeness to the party, could not say.143 Yet, as Owen McGee has pointed out, the sheer force of its populist rhetoric influenced the journalism of other nationalist newspapers in a manner comparable to the influence of United Ireland on its contemporaries in the early 1880s.144
One of the unsayables articulated by The Leader was the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Irish life (not confined to nationalists), its middle-class form a backwash of the French ferment over the Dreyfus case and the Action Française campaign against secularism in the Third Republic; its plebeian version a prejudice against immigrant Jews as traders. Griffith’s mild form of the disease has been mentioned, but Moran could write of his physical repulsion at Jews, while several party MPs and the Fenian Devoy were openly anti-Semitic.145 Redmond and Davitt, however, divided by other matters, were at one in their attitude to anti-Semitism, both condemning the attacks on, and boycott of, Jews in the Limerick area in 1904. Redmond authorized the Limerick rabbi, E.B. Levin, to publish a letter from him declaring ‘no sympathy whatever with the attacks on the Hebrew community’ and looking to ‘the good sense and spirit of toleration of the Irish people’ to protect them.