On April 24, 1916, Patrick Pearse entered the General Post Office in Dublin as the first step of a plan to forge an Irish Republic through armed rebellion against British rule. Part of Pearse’s justification for such bold action came from his belief that the Irish nation, as an expression of Irish culture, was in decline. The only way a distinct Irish identity could be preserved was through the establishment of an independent government that would foster and cherish the Irish language. Pearse had spent much of his adult life championing the cause of the native language of Ireland. Although he was not an Irish speaker from birth, Pearse developed a passion for the language from spending time with his Irish speaking relatives. He had joined the Gaelic League as a teenager, and quickly became one of the most active members of that organization. Pearse received a B.A. in modern languages, including Irish, from the Royal University of Ireland, before becoming editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, the Gaelic League newspaper, in 1903. He wrote stories and poetry in the Irish language, and in 1908 Pearse established St. Enda’s, a bilingual school in which students were encouraged to develop a deep love of the Irish language and culture. Pearse’s perception of Irish identity, therefore, was inexorably bound up with the Irish language, and his belief that it needed to be saved ultimately led him to take up arms against Britain.
On December 7, 1916, David Lloyd George became the prime minister of Britain at a time of monumental importance, with the country embroiled in a furious war against Germany. Among many other things, Lloyd George is remembered as the only British prime minister whose first language was not English. Lloyd George was born in Manchester, but raised in a Welsh speaking household. Having trained as a solicitor, Lloyd George became active in politics, and was elected to parliament as the representative of Caernarfon in 1890. He became quite interested in Welsh issues, and helped coordinate an unsuccessful effort to organize a Welsh home rule party in the 1890s. Despite this failure, Lloyd George retained his distinct Welsh identity throughout his career, regularly addressing political rallies across the Principality in the Welsh language. Welsh was also the language of his home when he lived in Downing Street during his premiership. But for Lloyd George, nothing about his identity as a Welsh man or Welsh speaker precluded his involvement from British politics. As a member of the Liberal party, Lloyd George championed causes for the benefit of Britain as a whole, not just Wales. In short, there was no contradiction for David Lloyd George in taking pride both in his Welshness and his Britishness.
1916, then, was a year of monumental importance in both Irish and Welsh history. On one level, it is possible to interpret the events of this year as evidence of significant differences between both nations. Certainly nationalists in both countries celebrated their national distinctiveness from England, based on their separate culture and language, but this had resulted in very different political expressions of nationhood. Pearse, a man who had learned Irish, believed that Ireland could only be a nation through rebellion and independence, while Lloyd George, the native Welsh speaker, was the embodiment of how Welsh identity was accommodated within a wider sense of Britishness. But in comparing the careers of Pearse and Lloyd George, the connections between Ireland and Wales are also apparent. Pearse had spent time in Wales, examining how the Welsh language had been introduced as a school subject in English-speaking schools in Cardiff. He was impressed by what he found, and wrote in An Claidheamh Soluis that the approach to teaching Welsh in Welsh schools could and should be adopted in relation to the teaching of Irish in Ireland. Lloyd George, for his part, had come to political prominence in Wales through his promotion of Welsh home rule in the 1890s. Although Lloyd George himself was always somewhat hesitant to link the cause of Welsh home rule to that of Ireland, it is undeniable that the push for Welsh self-government was heavily influenced by the success of the Irish Parliamentary Party in winning political concessions for Ireland. Furthermore, both Lloyd George and Pearse identified themselves, and their respective nations, as Celtic. Indeed, Pearse had taken part in the first Pan-Celtic conference in Cardiff in 1899, and tried to encourage the Gaelic League to take a more active part in the Pan-Celtic movement. Lloyd George was not as interested in fostering connections between the respective Celtic countries, but he did deliver a speech at the Pan-Celtic congress held in Caernarfon in 1904. Pearse and Lloyd George then, were Celts, and Wales and Ireland were Celtic countries, but as 1916 had ably demonstrated, Celtic nationalism meant different things on either side of the Irish Sea.
The relationship between Ireland and Wales stretches back into the mists of time, before entities known as “Ireland” or “Wales” even existed. Anyone who studies the two languages which are indigenous to these countries is struck by their similarities, despite the fact that speakers of both are mutually unintelligible to one another. Linguists disagree as to when Irish and Welsh became different languages, and whether this separation occurred before or after the languages travelled from Europe to Britain and Ireland. Regardless, the linguistic relationship suggests that the origins of the Irish and Welsh nations can be traced back to a common point of origin in the remote past. Prionsias Mac Cana has observed that the major factor “in shaping the historical relations between Ireland and Wales is the geographical one, the fact that they face each other across the Irish Sea…and by now it is something of a cliché to say that in ancient times the sea served to join lands rather than to separate them.” In early modern Wales, there was a tradition that the original inhabitants of that nation were Irish speakers, who were driven out of the territory by invading Welshmen. While few scholars support this viewpoint today, it is widely acknowledged that Irish settlements had developed in Wales by the fifth century CE. This is demonstrated by the presence of approximately forty stones inscribed with ogham, an early Irish alphabet, across parts of Wales. These stones are mostly found clustered in two areas, namely in Pembrokeshire in the south-west, where the ancient kingdom of Dyfed stood, and in Gwynedd, in the north-west of Wales. That Irish settlers should arrive in these particular areas is not surprising, as these are the parts of Wales that are physically closest to Ireland. Little is known about the nature of these settlements or what became of them, although Iwan Wmffre has suggested that the Dyfed region may have been home to Irish speaking aristocrats ruling over a Welsh speaking population from the fourth to sixth centuries. The Welsh poet, Thomas Gwynn Jones, reported that even in the twentieth century, there were old people living in Carmarthenshire who counted sheep up to twenty in Irish. Jones appeared to be implying that this was the legacy of Irish settlement in the area dating back to the fifth century, but this seems highly unlikely.
(excerpted from introduction)
