SEARC'S WEB GUIDE - Edward Walsh (1805-1850)

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19th Century Ireland - Edward Walsh (1805-1850)

Edward Walsh was born and educated in Sliabh Luachra, Cork where he became a teacher. He was imprisoned during the Tithe War of the late 1830's and was dismissed from his teaching position for articles he contributed to The Nation. On his release Walsh collected songs and poems throughout Ireland and in 1847 he published Irish Popular Songs dedicated to 'the people of Ireland, as a tribute to their many virtues and with ardent admiration of their poetic genius as evidenced in their songs and legends.'
Walsh was unable to secure a regular teaching post and became a teacher on Spike Island prison colony. In 1848 he was again imprisoned for speaking with John Mitchel who was being held at Spike Island before his transportation to Tasmania. Walsh afterwards became a teacher in the Cork Workhouse where he died of tuberculosis in 1850. This extract is from Walsh's Irish Popular Songs (1847).©

These strains of the Irish Muse are to be found in the tongue of the people only; and while, for past centuries, every means had been used to lead the masses which had partaken, even in the slightest degree, of an English education, into a total disuse of the mother tongue; when the middle and upper ranks, aping the manners of the English settlers located among them, adopted a most un-national dislike to the language of their fathers; when even in the courts of law the sole use of the venacular was a stumbling-block in the way of him who sought for justice within their precincts, and the youth who may have acquired a smattering of education found it necessary, upon emerging from his native glen into the world, to hide, as closely as possible, all knowledge of the tongue he had learned at his mother's breast; it is no wonder the peasantry should, at length, quit this last vestige of nationality and assist the efforts of the hedge-school master in its suppression.
The village teacher had long been endeavouring to check the circulation of the native tongue among the people, by establishing a complete system of espiery in these rustic seminaries, in which the youth of each hamlet were made to testify against those among them who uttered an Irish phrase. This will easily account for the very imperfect knowledge which the rising population of the various districts have, at this hour, of the tongue which forms the sole mode of communication among their seniors. The poor peasant, seeing that education could be obtained through the use of English only, and that the employment of the native tongue was a strong bar to the acquirement of the favoured one, prohibited his children the use of the despised language of his fathers.
This transition was, and is still, productive of serious inconvenience to the young and the old of the same household in their mutual intercourse of sentiment. The writer of these remarks has been often painfully amused at witnessing the embarrassment of a family circle, where the parents, scarcely understanding a word of English, strove to converse with their children, who, awed by paternal command and the dread of summary punishment at the hands of the pedagogue, were driven to essay a language of which the parents could scarcely comprehend a single word, and of which the poor children had too scant a stock to furnish forth a tithe of their exuberant thought. © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2007

19th Century Ireland
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