Na gcláirseoirí agus an Ghaeilge / The harpers and the Irish language

One of the columns in my timeline of traditional Irish harpers through the long 19th century is for whether a harper did or did not have the Irish language. This post is to expand on that, to discuss which of the old harpers had Irish, which of them didn’t, and how we can understand the decline and suppression of the wire-strung Irish harp tradition alongside the decline and revival of the Irish language.

Looking at my timeline list of 71 traditional Irish harpers who were playing wire-strung harps in the inherited tradition between 1790 and 1910, the first thing that strikes me is that I only have information about Irish language ability for 16 of these (23%). For the other three-quarters, I have not found a statement that they either had, or did not have, Irish. We can of course guess based on the time and area that they grew up in, but that then becomes guesswork or opinion. We will discuss that later. For now I want to focus on the hard facts.

Of the 16 whose Irish language ability is mentioned, 12 had the Irish language, and four did not have any Irish.

There is a definite shift over time, with the 12 Irish speakers more biased to the earlier part of the study period, and the 4 monoglot English speakers biased to the later part. But I would hesitate to be to definitive about this, since three-quarters of these harpers do not have data points in this chart.

The harpers are presented here in the same order they are currently on my timeline, which orders them approximately from when they learned the harp. The ones on the left hand end learned during the mid 18th century, and were old when the study period starts in 1790. The ones at the far right end learned the traditional wire-strung Irish harp in Drogheda in the 1840s and in Belfast in the 1850s.

The problem with this data is that our sources often make no mention of the Irish language ability of our harpers. The ones on the left end generally are known to have had Irish language songs in their repertory. But many of the harpers are merely said to “sing” with no mention of language.

I have given Mr O’Connor from Limerick a marker for having the Irish language, purely on the basis that he is said to have sung the song “An Páistín Fionn” at a concert in Wexford on Monday 29th Sept 1845. Murphy gets an Irish language marker because of the reference to him reading the Irish-language address from a vellum scroll, to Daniel O’Connell in Cork City on Sunday 8th June 1845. You can see that these are very thin references and could be challenged or disputed. We can be a lot more certain about Patrick Byrne who was from the rural Gaeltacht area of Farney in County Monaghan, and who is said to have spoken only Irish until he left home in 1815. There are also a few references to him singing in Irish with the wire-strung Irish harp as part of his public performances through the mid 19th century.

Of the four who are explicitly said not to have had Irish, the last three (Peter Dowdall, Paul Smith, and George Jackson) were still alive at the time of the Census of 1901. The Irish census return forms had a column where the respondent was meant to mark if they had Irish language ability. On all three of these harpers’ census returns, the column is left blank, indicating that they did not. On the other hand we can’t rule out the possibility that they did have Irish but for some reason neglected to fill in this column.

James MacMonagle is more interesting; we have an anecdote about him travelling West to County Galway in 1812, and being treated badly by the locals there because “he could not speak Irish”. He was apparently born and raised in 1796, in Lifford, on the eastern edge of county Donegal, which I think was an English speaking area back into the 18th century.

I should add that my research question is whether the harpers did or did not have Irish. It seems obvious to me that every single harper on my timeline list was a fluent English speaker. There were monoglot Irish speaking people into the 20th century but the harpers in general were well educated and at least sometimes working in the middle and upper levels of society; in the earlier tradition in the 18th century, some of them were well educated “in Irish genealogy, in heraldry, and in bardic lore” (obituary of Arthur O’Neill, Belfast Newsletter Tue 5 Nov 1816 p3), and some were literate in English, Irish and Latin or other languages, like Thomas Shea. It is a different but also interesting question to wonder where and when the last monoglot Irish speaking harpers lived. I would guess maybe even as far back as the 17th century but I have no data on this,

I would be very interested to find definitive statements about some of the others, either that they did have Irish, or perhaps more interestingly that they did not. I will keep looking. This discussion is very much an interim work-in-progress, and may in time become embarrassingly out-of-date.

Teaching through the Irish language

We have generic statements from Edward Bunting, that the harpers active in the 1790s had learned through the medium of Irish. He mentioned this in the context of publishing the Irish-language technical terminology in his 1840 book (intro p20).

I only have a very few references to harpers being taught in the late 18th century and into the first decade of the 19th century. William Carr was taught by both Arthur O’Neill and Patrick Quin, possibly in the 1780s and certainly in the 1790s, but I have no reference to his language abilities. Bridget O’Reilly was apparently taught by Arthur O’Neill in his harp school in Virginia in 1793. A later description apparently of her, from Patrick Byrne in 1839, says that she was “the only person, whom he knows, now living who was taught to play thro the Irish language”. Patrick Byrne did know some of the Irish technical vocabulary, but obviously had not been taught through the medium of Irish.

When Arthur O’Neill started teaching in his harp school in Belfast in 1809, the school seems to have been run through the English language. Belfast would have been very much an English language town. The Gentlemen who ran and bankrolled Arthur O’Neill’s harp school in Pottinger’s Entry also tried to start Irish language classes, taught by the piper James Cody, but these classes were for the Gentlemen patrons not for the young harp students. The harp students were recruited without discrimination for sex, religion, or community background, and therefore a number of the students (like James MacMonagle) would have come from monolingual English-speaking families and communities. And so I think that this time was the big linguistic break, when the inherited tradition of wire-strung harp playing switched from being transmitted through the Irish language, to being transmitted through the English language. However, the playing and musical tradition itself continued to be transmitted, despite the language shift.

This was not something peculiar to the harp tradition, though. I think we have to understand this in the wider context of the decline (or perhaps rather the suppression) of the Irish language in Ireland under British rule.

As part of the revival of the Irish language, we are now in a position (thanks to Sylvia Crawford’s work on reconstructing the method of playing) of being able once again to teach and learn using the Irish-language technical vocabulary for the playing techniques.

Regional decline in Irish language and Irish harp

I made a set of maps collating the harp tradition and the Irish language over time. I used these maps as slides for a few lectures or talks, including at Scoil na gCláirseach in Kilkenny in 2024, and at Seachtain na Gaeilge in Lisburn in 2025. The language maps are from Aidan Doyle’s book, A History of the Irish Language (Oxford University Press, 2015). The harper maps are created by me from the information in my Long 19th Century project, and try to show where the harpers were from.

The harpers active in about 1790 (at the start of my Long 19th Century project) were mostly born and brought up in the early to mid 18th century. This first map shows the Irish language around 1700, beside a map of harpers based on my old post, harpers alive c.1790.

You can see that a majority of the harpers active in 1790 originated from the “transitional multi-lingual zone” (in dark grey), where English and Irish were used side by side as community languages (though I suspect their use was more stratified, with English the language of law, administration and the upper social classes, with Irish the language of the lower social classes). Fewer of these harpers originated in the core Irish speaking zone (in blue) The harpers in pale blue are only located to their county, not more specifically than that.

The next map shows traditional players of the wire-strung Irish harp who were active in 1819. All these maps of harpers are derived from an interactive online map I made for these slides.

These harpers mostly learned at Arthur O’Neill’s harp school in Belfast in the years around 1810, and so they were mostly born in the 1790s. The map from Doyle’s book shows the Irish language c.1800. There is no longer a “core Irish speaking zone” because in 1800 Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom as an integral part of the country; English was the language of administration and rule right down to the local level; and so while there undoubtably were monolingual Irish people born at this time, English was working its way into (or being enforced upon) every community.

You can see that the harpers active in 1819 were born and raised mostly in the pale grey English speaking zones of east Ulster and north Leinster. The Gaeltacht areas of these provinces were shrinking fast, though we see a few of our harpers from these Gaeltachts in the Glens of Antrim and the Oriel region.

The third map shows harpers active in 1840.

The language map is not quite right for this, because most of these harpers would have been learning under Edward McBride and Valentine Rennie in Belfast in the 1820s and 1830s, and so would likely have been born in the 1810s and 1820s. But the map shows the language in 1851. But you can also see that change has been slower since the c.1800 map. Still, apart from a couple of harpers from the Oriel Gaeltacht around Dundalk and Carrickmacross, our harpers are firmly originating in the core English speaking zone shaded light grey.

Our 4th map shows harpers active in 1871. The map is a more subtle and informative map, showing the percentages of Irish speakers recorded in the 1871 census.

As you can easily see, by 1871 the harpers have retreated north and east, and are focussed in Belfast, Dublin, Dundalk and Drogheda. Meanwhile, the Irish language is retreating Westwards, with different percentages of Irish speakers shown by different shades of red. The unshaded areas represent less than 10% of the population with Irish; the darkest areas have over 50%.

Our final map shows the harpers still alive in 1901; Doyle’s map is derived from the 1891 census returns.

Again the harpers are totally confined to Belfast, Drogheda and Dublin, while the language has retreated much further to the Western fringes of Ireland. The pale grey area is where the English language is the normal community language of the vast majority of people.

When I put these maps together last year I just thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what correlation there was. I did not expect to see such a stark divide between the retreat of the language to the west, and the retreat of the harp tradition to the north and east. Given such a geographical divide it is no surprise that the harp tradition became more English-speaking over the course of the 19th century.

Contexts for harpers to be Irish speakers

We can see that there was huge change over time. In the 18th century, Irish was still a significant community language for most of the areas where the harpers were from. We can see this from the information collected by Edward Bunting, which mention how all of the harpers in the 18th century were said to have learned only through the medium of the Irish language, and how we see information that many of them were singing Irish-language songs. Hugh Higgins, Daniel (Donald) Black, Dennis Hampson, Charles Byrne, and Arthur O’Neill are all described as singing Irish language songs. Patrick Lindon was “an excellent scholar who could read and write Irish very well“, and firmly embedded in the Irish language poetry and song traditions of the Oriel Gaeltacht area of south east Ulster. He taught the harper Patrick Quin, though I have seen no mention of Patrick Quin singing, or speaking Irish. Quin was born in Armagh town in 1746, and so I don’t know if it might be possible that he was a monolingual English speaker. His pupil William Carr or Kerr was born in Portadown in 1776-7 and so may have been bilingual or monoglot English speaking. I don’t know how to tell at this stage. The harper James Duncan was an aristocratic landowner in county Down, and I would not be surprised if he did not have Irish, though I have no actual information on this.

Valentine Rennie and Patrick Murney were both said to have been from the Glens of Antrim which remained a Gaeltacht area in the North East of Ulster long after the rest of the region had become mainly English-speaking, and so it is possible that both of them had Irish, but I have no references.

The Oriel Gaeltacht area around south east Ulster gradually shrank over our period, but it is interesting to see that there were significant harpers from this area. This is the area that Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin has studied intensively, and published about in her book A Hidden Ulster (Four Courts Press 2003) and on her website orielarts.com. I already mentioned Patrick Lindon, and Patrick Byrne, but a later harper from this area is Hugh O’Hagan who was associated with Dundalk for most of his life. He was born in 1822 and it seems very likely that he may have been an Irish speaker, but I have no information about this.

The Drogheda harp school, taught by Hugh Frazer for a few years in the 1840s, was part of Father Thomas Burke’s intense scene of religious and cultural revival. Learning to play the harp was part of a package including taking the temperance pledge, and there are some references to there being an Irish language revival in Drogheda as part of this scene. I think it is possible that the Drogheda harpers may have had some Irish, but at present I have no information about this. Two of them at least survived into the 20th century, and I have found Peter Dowdall’s census return. He does not mark any Irish language ability on the return, which implies that he either had never learned Irish or had lost or forgotten any that he did have.

Personal names

Our sources are mostly from English language contexts, in newspapers and official documents, and so it is no suprise that our harpers are usually referred to by English forms of personal names. Some people in the Gaelic revival have made a point of using Irish forms of personal names for some of the harpers, even when these are not attested in early sources. I have discussed this at length for Dennis Hampson (Hempson / O’Hampsey / Ó hÁmsaigh).

Of course, many of the harpers were illiterate and so we don’t have their own spellings; indeed; if they were speaking their name there is no spelling and so we are at the mercy of whoever was taking their name down in writing. The only harper I know of who signed their name in Irish is Thomas Ó Sheadha, and even then it is only his surname that he uses the Irish spelling for. He also writes his name in English, Tho. Shea, and in his printed advert it is written Thomas Shea; in his letter he is showing off his multiligual abilities in English, Irish and Latin.

We do have autograph signatures of three other harpers, Valentine Rennie, Thomas Hanna, and Peter Dowdall, all written like this, in English spelling. We could usefully look for the names of other harpers in Irish language contexts to see how their names are handled there. I already noted in Patrick Byrne part 5 how, when his name was entered for him in duplicate on his bilingual English and Gaelic masonic certificate, the English spelling Patrick Byrne was used on both sides.

Harp makers

When I did my presentation to Na Píobairí Uillean in Henrietta Street, Dublin, earlier this year, they kept asking about the harp making traditions. I understand that pipers are particularly interested in the transmission of the craft of pipe making, but the questions gave me a lot to think about. But anyway, we can think about Irish harp making from a language point of view.

The most obvious connection between the harps and the language is when there is an inscription on the harp. The oldest inscription I know of is on the Cloyne harp, made in 1621 by Donnachdh Mac Tadhg, in county Cork. The inscriptions are in Irish and in Latin; the maker’s name is in Irish. This harp is obviously designed for English or Continental Renaissance or Baroque music, i.e it belongs to the “classical” music world and not to traditional Irish music. It is also significantly older than we are interested in, from before the big 17th century shifts in music, poetry, language and politics.

Another older inscription is the graffiti on the soundbox of the Lamont harp, which reads “Al Ste(wat) of Clunie his harp 165(0)”. It is not clear if this graffiti was added in 1650 (or in 1656), or much later, but it is all in English.

Moving towards our study period, some of the big harps from the mid 17th to mid 18th century have inscriptions on. The Fitzgerald-Kildare harp has lettering in Latin on the pillar, next to the Fitzgerald coat of arms.

The Downhill harp has two inscriptions, a name on the pillar and a poem on the soundbox, all in English. The Castle Otway harp has just a name and date on the pillar, again with the name in English orthography. Both the Downhill and the Otway harps have the name of harpmaker Cormac O’Kelly written in the English form, “CR Kely” on the Downhill, and “Cormick O Kelly” on the Otway. I wrote about this when discussing the Downhill harp on my page about Dennis Hampson. Looking at my maps above this is even more interesting seeing how O’Kelly was based in Ballinascreen in the Sperrin mountains, which was very much a Gaeltacht area (it is marked pale pink on the 1871 map). So we would expect him, born in the later 17th century, to have been a first-language Irish speaker. We have drawings or descriptions of two other lost harps made by Cormac O’Kelly. The Jeffersonville harp had a Latin inscription on it; and Art Magennis’s harp had a mixed English and Latin inscription.

The Bunworth harp has an inscription stating in English that it was made for the Rev. Bunworth in county Cork by harpmaker John Kelly in 1734. Bunworth was a Church of Ireland minister who was a patron of Irish-language poets, and so surely was an Irish-speaker. Yet the inscription on his harp was in English. I suspect that this is connected to the different social roles of the two languages in the 18th century, with English used more as the public language of record and of inscriptions, even in this context. Another mid-18th-century English inscription is apparently shown in the portrait of Charles Byrne. There is lettering drawn up the forepillar of his harp, reading “Made for [Mr] Richd [Stavan] 1752”.

In the early 19th century, more of the traditional Irish harps had lettering painted on them. I think this may have been largely driven by John Egan in Dublin, who liked to display his name and his Royal appointments on his instruments. Most of his harps have the inscriptions all in English as we would expect for objects made in Dublin in the first half of the 19th century, but one of the traditional wire-strung Irish harps has its inscriptions in Irish. This harp is not signed by Egan, though it looks like it was made by him; its inscriptions are in Irish and in Latin. On the left side of the soundboard (harp right) is the motto “Ceol bin na hEirion”, and surrounding the cartouche is the O’Neill motto “Lamh dearg Eirion”. These can be translated as sweet music of Ireland, and red hand of Ireland. Nancy Hurrell has suggested (The Egan Irish harps p.89, with a credit to Nicholas Carolan for the initial suggestion) that the inscriptions are connected to 1st Earl O’Neill and his investiture into the Order of St Patrick, and the visit of King George IV to Dublin in 1821. I mentioned the bilingual programme of the traditional harpers who played wire-strung Irish harps for the King (perhaps including this harp), on my old and outdated Tune Lists post, but I really need to do a future post all about that programme.

The one harp that we know of that was produced in Drogheda in the 1840s, for the Drogheda harp school, has Irish language painted text on it. This Irish is a bit misspelled and unreliable. I don’t have a good photo of the inscription; the only view available is a photo in Nancy Hurrell’s article in History Ireland 21:1, Jan/Feb 2013, and one of the misspelled words is partly obscured in this view. The inscriptions appear to read “Eiren go bragh” and “Eire óg inis na no[ei]n”. These could be translated as the politial slogans, Ireland for ever, and young Ireland, isle of something. It is impossible to know whether the young harper or activist who decorated this harp was an Irish speaker with bad spelling, or was simply using these Irish language slogans in an otherwise English-speaking milieu.

I think in general, these examples remind us that for the whole of the long 19th century and for a century or more before, Ireland was a bilingual country, with Irish and English existing alongside each other, and occupying different social, cultural and political roles which shifted over time. I think that these language issues to do with the harpers are part of a much larger shifting pattern of language use and bilingualism which is complex and nuanced and quite hard to get a grip on. There is no simplistic answer, but the more we dig and discover and collate references the more we can understand the role of the languages and the role of the harpers in the life of the nation.

Gaelic revival

The Gaelic revival got going in earnest in the 1890s, with Conradh na Gaeilge founded in 1893, and the first Feis Ceoil and the first Oireachtas in 1897. These were all urban middle-class movements, mostly based in Dublin. The revivalists prioritised the revival of the Irish language, but they also broadened their revival activities to related arts. They argued about the nature of Irish music; some were opposed to traditional “peasant music” and wanted Irish music to be revived as a regional flavour of European art (classical) music. Others wanted to find old traditional singers, fiddlers, pipers, and harpers. There was general agreement that the uillean pipes were an interesting and “ancient” Irish tradition, and so pipers were brought to Dublin, and recorded on wax cylinders, and pipers’ clubs were set up so that tradition-bearers could teach the next generation of pipers, and so the pipes tradition is in rude health today with a continuous inherited tradition back through to before the revival.

There were still traditional harpers alive in the 1890s and early 1900s, but they were completely ignored and marginalised by the Gaelic revivalists. Michael Carroll drew my attention to a fascinating passage in Douglas Hyde’s influential book, A literary history of Ireland (1899)

… in Drogheda, “a concert was in preparation to be given next week at which seven harpers, mostly blind, were to play together” … An English tourist … mentions meeting a harper at Leenane in Connemara in in 1857 … From these instances it would appear that the race of Irish harpers did not quite die out with those who assembled at Belfast at the close of the last century when Bunting secured so many of their airs, but that some lingered on till after the famine. How far these latter harpers could be regarded as the genuine descendents of the old race is doubtful.

Douglas Hyde, A literary history of Ireland, 1899, p628-9 (footnote)

The concert in Drogheda was on Monday 19th February 1844; I discuss it in my post on one of the performers, Thomas Branagan. I have not yet tracked down the harper at Leenane inn in 1857; the reference is Charles Richard Weld, Vacations in Ireland (1857) p362, but tells us almost nothing useful about the musician at all. Although he is further west than usual for the mid 19th century traditional Irish harpers, he is working as a harper in an inn or hotel that was visited by an English tourist, which fits with the general patterns of how the traditional harpers were working through the 19th century. We can check my timeline to see that we know of 21 traditional harpers alive in 1857.

It is amazing how Douglas Hyde, someone so important and influential in Irish nation-building and the Gaelic revival, could have been so ignorant about the living tradition of Irish harp playing. Hyde wrote his great manifesto “The necessity of de-Anglicising Ireland” in 1892; and yet five years after that the playing of harps in Ireland was utterly and comprehensively Anglicised, when in 1897, the London harpmaker Morley sent new gut-strung lever harps to Dublin, and Conradh na Gaeilge organised lever-harp classes taught by classical pedal harpist Owen Lloyd, whose musical lineage traces straight back to the top English pedal harp teacher John Balsir Chatterton at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

In 1899, when Hyde’s book containing the quote above was published, there were four traditional Irish harpers still alive that I know of. Those four most certainly were “the genuine descendents of the old race”. Peter Dowdall and the unnamed mystery man had both learned in the 1840s from Hugh Frazer, who learned in the 1820s from Edward McBride and Valentine Rennie, who both learned around 1810 from Arthur O’Neill, who had learned in the 1740s from Owen Keenan of Augher. I am guessing that Paul Smith probably learned from Alex Jackson in the 1830s, who had learned from Rennie. George Jackson had learned from Patrick Murney in about 1850, who had learned in the 1830s from Rennie.

If influential leaders and writers like this had no idea that these tradition bearers were still alive and active, how could the Gaelic revivalists who followed and were influenced by him have had any hope of creating a revival of the traditional wire-strung Irish harp?

Two Gaelic revivalists, William Savage and Séamus Ó Casaide, both Irish speakers or learners, did seek out traditional harpers in the early years of the 20th century (George Jackson and Paul Smith), but neither of them actually followed though on their discoveries; neither gave their harper informant a performance platform; neither organised for the harper to demonstrate or record their playing techniques; neither thought to put these tradition-bearers front and centre as exemplars for revival harpists. Ó Casaide moved on from investigating Paul Smith, and instead got the classical harpist and Irish language activist Owen Lloyd to play at the pipers’ club concert in 1902.

Sin é ar fad. Grma as léamh a chairde.