It was the sweetest moment I’ve witnessed during the war.

Today in 1892, a Roscommon man walked into the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin and made a speech so controversial it set off one of the great cultural movements of modern Ireland. Douglas Hyde, son of a Protestant clergyman, lifelong devotee of the Irish language and future first president, delivered a talk with the ungainly title of ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’. Hydes provocative suggestion came from that perenial question. Why were the Irish, a people with one of Europe’s oldest vernacular literatures and ancient traditions, so determined to behave as a cultural colony of their nearest neighbour? As he sardonicaly put it Ireland displayed a ‘constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas’. His appeal to both the native intelligensia and common people alike, was not solely for the banner-waving patriot. It was for everyone with a stake in Ireland’s cultural dignity. Especially relevant now as we approach a truely United Ireland, he even appealed for to Unionists who saw their futures as bound to Britain. ‘This is a question which most Irishmen will naturally look at from a National point of view,’ he conceded, ‘but it is one which ought also to claim the sympathies of every intelligent Unionist and which, as I know, does claim the sympathy of many.’ Hyde spoke from lived experience. Growing up in Frenchpark, he fell in love with the Irish language through local speakers who visited the rectory. By fourteen, he was keeping a diary in Irish, pushing back against a tide that had already washed Bearla across most of the island. What he saw around him in the 1890s was Anglicised speech, Anglicised manners, Anglicised tastes and it convinced him that the nation was losing not only a language but an entire imaginative world. We all know the familiar hypocrisy of the contradiction of Paddys who profess contempt for British domination but ‘read English books, and know nothing about Gaelic literature’, yet still claimed to ‘hate the country which at every hand’s turn they rush to imitate’? Ireland, he argued, had forgotten what it once was, and what it could be again. But he wasnt being nostalgic or romantic like Pearse or Yeats. Hyde saw the stakes as entirely modern, especially in the political climate of the moment. With the prospect of Home Rule over the horizon, he imagined a future in which the language of Ireland would at last be treated with dignity. ‘Should Home Rule be granted,’ he said, ‘the Irish language… shall be placed on a par with or even above Greek, Latin, and modern languages, in all examinations held under the Irish Government.’ Within a year of this explosion speech, Hyde alongside Eoin MacNeill and Fr Eugene O’Growney, founded the Gaelic League, taking Irish cultural nationalism from the lecture hall into the streets, pubs and schools. For Hyde, this was the necessary first step in a much larger restoration. Only when Irish was once again the first language of the people, he told his listeners, ‘can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore. One of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe’.