This chapter demonstrates forms of belonging to place in Irish-language poetry and prose.Louis De Paor utilizes Mike Cronin’s term “denizen” to understand alternative forms of belonging in place and notes the military advantages for Irish nationalist fighters traversing the Irish landscape that arose from being able to access local folklore. The essay suggests that “The extent to which intimate knowledge of the local terrain facilitated the kind of guerrilla warfare prosecuted so successfully by Ó hAnnracháin and his comrades (of the Gaelic League) is evident in a significant body of writing in Irish by veterans of the Irish revolution.” This essay spans a wealth of Irish-language writers – from Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910–88), to Cathal Ó Searcaigh (1955–), Colm Breathnach (1961–), and many others. De Paor suggests that the aim of reclaiming “a more secure sense of belonging, of being at home in a place where landscape, language, history and community are fully integrated” is the defining characteristic of Irish-language revival.

The publication of Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s Margadh na Saoire in 1956 marked a revolutionary moment in Irish women’s poetry. Mhac an tSaoi came from the elite stock of the new state, and as the daughter of politician Sean McEntee experienced Irish history as very much a family affair. Her childhood experiences of the Kerry Gaeltacht were heavily formative, and her intimacy with folk songs and the dán grá tradition leave a strong influence on her early work. This work stood out strongly for its frank and radical treatment of sex, love, and the female sphere in Irish life. Her writing on themes of motherhood situates itself in the currents of debate over subsequent decades on reproductive rights, and paints a withering portrait of patriarchal control over women’s bodies. Subsequent poems tackle issues ranging from commemorations of the 1916 Rising to the Holocaust, and confirm her as one of the great modern Irish lyric poets.

Across its many forms, from lullabies to laments and songs, the oral tradition in Irish women’s poetry is rich and various. The oral tradition constitutes a body of subjugated knowledge, in the Foucauldian sense, having been subjected to cultural relegation and erasure in the modern period. Addressing the gaps in the tradition has been a significant challenge, then, as witnessed in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘What Foremothers?’, or attempts to unearth the work of Máire Ní Chrualaoich, ‘the Sappho of Munster’. The celebrated case of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill occurs at the intersection of the tradition and the individual talent, as a unique personal occasion collides with long-established traditions of communal mourning (the caoineadh). Subsequent oral performers too have been no less outspoken on questions of marriage, women’s rights, the Famine, and other defining issues of their times, and no history of Irish women’s poetry is complete without an assessment of their contribution.

Modern women poets writing in the Irish language occupy a unique place, historically, between the vibrancy of the Irish folk tradition and the frequently encountered sense that they are lonely workers in a dying language. Their place in the canon of modern Irish poetry thus differs subtly from that of writers in English, but their contribution to the tradition has nevertheless been central. In mid-century, Máire Mhac an tSaoi writes poems of startling modernity and outspokenness at a time of proverbial cultural conservatism, belying conventional identifications of the language with patriarchy and puritanism. The emergence of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Biddy Jenkinson in the 1980s marked another dramatic moment. In a satirical poem, Jenkinson inverts the conventions of the aisling and speaks from the position of the female apparition, or embodiment of the nation. In both Jenkinson’s and Ní Dhomhnaill’s work what was static comes unexpectedly to life, bristling with submerged, unruly energy. Their contemporary successors, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and Aifric Mac Aodha, have ensured that women remain in the forefront of the contemporary tradition.

Although a major Irish-language poet, Biddy Jenkinson is perhaps best known for forbidding the translation of her work into English, calling her decision ‘a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland’. Yet the picture that emerges from her work is anything but that of a Gaelic puritan. Jenkinson’s world is not one of loss and lamentation for a vanished past, but of vibrant immersion in mythopoeia of sex, myth, and monstrosity. In her work on County Wicklow, where she has long been resident, she excavates colonial history, exploring the points of connection between the colonial Pale and its wild Gaelic Other. In her work on the cannibal hag figure Mis, she vividly recuperates feminine monstrosity as a poetic force to be reckoned with. The linguistic energy of Jenkinson’s work combined with the obscurity it inhabits, as difficult and scholarly work (though often very funny too), makes her an exemplary representative of the submerged Gaelic bardic tradition.

Where do we start when thinking about literature in transition? This chapter uses the volume’s start date, 1700, as the basis for interrogating both the ideas of ‘literature in transition’ and ‘early modern’. Taking Edmund Spenser’s ruminations on change and permanence in the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’ as its own point of departure, the chapter shows how the paradigm of transition is illuminated by writing in Irish, Latin, and English produced in the century or so preceding 1700. If political turmoil, linguistic contestation, and ethnic strife are the drivers of narrative and self-articulation, of literary resilience, innovation, consolidation, and decline, then the crucible of early modern Ireland has an arresting claim to the concept of transition. Writing in a period of irreversible change generates genealogical firsts – precursors of what is to follow – but also genres specific to their own time. The chapter probes the relationship of literature with transition: as representing change, as its written record, as the document of response to a new world taking shape, or of self-assertion in that world. Finally, it considers questions of perspective, arguing that scholarship is immersed in its own moment and that this directs us to the determining role of the end point in identifying beginnings.

Where once scholars were prone to seeing the decades prior to the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893 as a period of little output in the way of Irish-language literature outside of the pre-Revival productions of antiquarians, recent years have seen a growing interest in the vernacular writings of this period across a range of textual formats. Nineteenth-century printed texts and manuscripts – often, more like handmade books than pre-modern codices, akin to their printed counterparts – in fact constitute the majority of the surviving corpus of Irish-language writing for the pre-1900 period. These works consisted of a mix of original writing, creatively edited collections and, above all, selected re-copied texts from earlier centuries. Fenian lays, histories of dispossession, and religious prose dominated the contents of these texts, a popularity that often encouraged antiquarians to select these same writings for publication in early scholarly editions. As such, the overlap between vernacular literary output and that of the antiquarian and proto-Revival practitioners was often greater than the contrasting backgrounds of these two communities would suggest.

This chapter describes the influence of the Gaelic Revival on the creation of a Protestant nationalist counterculture during the first decade of the twentieth century. It discusses the manner in which cultural activism, by means of literature, the theatre, and learning the Irish language, tended to radicalise Protestants, and led them to convert to nationalism. It charts the development of a largely Dublin-based network of Protestant activists, whose development towards nationalism was largely actuated by means of immersion in the Abbey Theatre, the Gaelic League and various literary societies. Irish nationalist opposition to the Second Boer War, which radicalised some Protestant Gaelic Leaguers, is discussed. This chapter describes the attitude of two prominent Catholic newspaper editors, Arthur Griffith and D. P. Moran, towards Protestant nationalists, with Griffith seeking to incorporate Protestants into the nationalist movement, and Moran seeking their exclusion. The final section analyses Protestant Gaelic Leaguers’ attempts to form their own associational culture, which led to tensions within the movement. Ultimately, this chapter shows how Protestant involvement in the Gaelic League sometimes led to conversion to nationalism, but could cause unease among other Protestants, who sought an apolitical organisation.