start was made at once with the transfer of authority to the new administration; on Jan. 16 Lord Fitzalan, at Dublin Castle, handed over the reins of Government to Mr. Michael Collins, as acting Premier; and the Irish Free State came formally into being.
Here, at a dramatic turn in Irish history, our record breaks off in Jan. 1922. The igth-century Union had been definitely dissolved. Ireland, under the Act of 1920 or under the Treaty of 1921, had been given self-government. Southern Ireland, under Sinn Fein, had been granted a constitution which put her on , practically the same footing as Canada. Northern Ireland, under its separate Government, had, however, declined so far to make common cause with it. The future would have to show how this latest experiment in the loose federalism of the British Empire would succeed.
AUTHORITIES. Of the vast mass of literature on the Irish question published in 1910-21 very little has any independent critical value. The numerous books or pamphlets written on one or other of its aspects are for the most part useful only as reflecting particular points of view. Subject to this last limitation, it may be said that the Sinn Fein propaganda works are almost wholly useless for purposes of scientific history, and must be used with extreme caution. The Government publications are valuable as " sources," in so far as they either reprint original documents or, as in the case of the Re- port of the Royal Commission on the Rebellion of 1916, provide evidence of first-hand witnesses under judicial examination. These publications, however, only coyer a very small field.
By the courtesy of the Chief Secretary the present writer was given access in 1921 to the unpublished documents in thearchivesof the Castle, without conditions or censorship of any kind. Among these he found the confidential reports submitted annually by the county inspectors of the R.I.C., and they are of exceptional value for the light they throw on the general conditions of the country and the shifting phases of popular sentiment in the several counties. These reports are printed, together with an annual statistics of crime and other matters with which the police are concerned. In addition to these, the enormous number of unprinted reports on special cases, dossiers of the depositions of witnesses, recommendations of par- ticular policies by the police and military authorities, with the departmental comments upon them, and so on, were freely placed at the writer's disposal for the elucidation of particular points.
Of great value, especially as affording some sort of check on the official records, are the Sinn Fein official publications, especially Sinn Fein and, later, the Irish Bulletin. As a record of Sinn Fein policy and activities they are indispensable, but, as propagandist publications, they must of course be used with caution. As regards the Irish Press it may be said generally that the local newspapers are more valuable as historical material than those published in Dublin, since they throw a more intimate light upon the life of the people.
Of the publications referred to in the text, Notes from Ireland needs some comment. This was published monthly, and later every quarter, by the Irish Unionist Alliance. Its intention is, therefore, to present the case from the Unionist point of view. Subject to this caution, its volumes provide an invaluable supply of historical material. It gives a. whole series of quotations from speeches and from the Press of all political complexions, which may be relied on as accurate; it also provides in its " Diurnal " a very full chronological record of events. For this record the weekly editions of the more important Irish newspapers, e.g. The Irish Times, may also be re- ferred to. A complete collection of all published materials for the recent history of Ireland is preserved at the National Library in Dublin. (W. A. P.)
IRISH (GAELIC) LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE The decade following 1910 was a period of much activity in the publication of literature written in the Irish language (see 5.622 seq.). This activity took two forms, one the editing of older texts which had never seen the light before, and the other the creation of wholly new works. The Irish Texts Society in London, the learned mag- azine Erin published in Dublin, the Zeitschrifl fur celtische Philologie, published at Halle, the Revue Celtique of Paris, and the Celtic Re- view of Edinburgh (which ceased publication after 1915) were the principal media for the publication of the older texts. The Irish Texts Society in especial published a number of handsome volumes, all editiones principes of important works, the Poems of Daibhi o Bruadair in three vols., the Contention of the Bards in twovols., an ancient Irish book on astronomy, the fourth vol. of Keating's history, the poems of Carolan, an Irish version of the wars of Charlemagne, and some lives of saints. The Cath Catharda, an extended Middle Irish version of Lucan's Pharsalia, had already been finished by Whitley Stokes in 1909. It was the last work of that great scholar and was published posthumously in Leipzig as one of the Irische Texte series. In the following year Kuno Meyer printed his researches into the Finn Saga, with the oldest texts bearing upon it, in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Todd Lecture series. The same scholar published in the Preussische
Akademie der Wissenschaften a masterly article on the early Irish poetry of the first half of the seventh century, in 1913. He died in 1919, and in the same year appeared the first half of his work on Fragments of the Oldest Lyrics of Ireland. Two other works which have lately appeared are Manus O'Donnel's Life of Columcille and O'Clery's recension of the Book of Conquests. The first was published in America in a sumptuous volume by the Irish Foundation of Chicago, and edited by Father Kelleher and Miss Schoperle; the second was published by University College, Dublin, and edited by Professors MacNeill and Macalister.
The Gaelic Journal, which had been founded in 1882, came to an end in 1906, with the I9?th number, and the want of a scholarly magazine dealing with the phases and difficulties of the more modern language was keenly felt. In 1912 T. O'Rahilly started a magazine Gadelica, to which he himself was the chief contributor, which re- produced all the best and most scholarly features of the old Gaelic Journal. Unfortunately this magazine came to an end in 1913, and nothing of quite the same kind has since taken its place.
Other editiones principes of valuable Irish texts published by various scholars are Sean O'Neachtain's Adventures of Edmund Clery, edited by O'Neachtain; the poems of Padraigin Hackett, many of which had been wrongly ascribed to the historian Keating, edited by Prof. O'Donoghue; a collection of One Hundred Ulster Poems by Morris; the romance of The Son of the Eagle by Brian O'Corcorain, who died in 1487, edited by Digby and Lloyd ; Art Mac- Cooey's poems, edited by Morris; the poems of John Murphy " na Raithineach," edited by O'Donoghue; The Maguires of Fermanagh, an historical tract, edited by Dinneen; The Flight of the Earls, edited by Walsh; The Book of the MacSweeneys, by the same; and many others. All these works, now for the first time given to the press, have had a considerable effect in directing the eyes of the Irish people to their own past. They showed them what their language was capable of doing, and they stimulated modern writers.
It would be invidious to mention the names of some of these new authors while leaving out others whose claims to mention may be just as good. But the name of the late Canon Peter O'Leary, parish priest of Castlelyons, must be mentioned above all others. Although he began to write late in life, after the rise of the Gaelic League, he produced an amazing number of excellent works, of which his first book, Seadna, is nearly sure to live. He wrote another long Irish novel, Niamh, about the battle of Clontarf ; he retold the old stories of Ireland in several volumes; he translated much of Don Quixote, The Catiline Conspiracy, the Imitatio Christi (of which two other Irish versions have been also printed), the Fables of Aesop and other works. He also wrote two volumes of sermons. His great merit is that he was the first to turn his back resolutely upon every- thing that was bookish and old and unclear, and to turn for his mode of expressing himself to the folk speech of his native county of Cork, which he wrote with a clarity and power that have never been surpassed. How suitable the speech of the people became in his hands to express the whole gamut of the emotions was to many a revelation. He died in 1920, and has left his trace upon the lan- guage more deeply than any other writer of his time. Father O'Leary stands for the most representative writer of the Southern half of Ireland. Padraig O'Conaire (or Conry) would probably be re- garded by many in 1921 as the best living writer of the Northern half. No two people could well be more different. Coming from Connemara, he had spent a considerable time in England, and many of his stories, notably the powerful tale called Exile, deal with life outside of Ireland. In him we see a determined tramp camping out beneath a tent or the stars, and walking all over the country, stick in hand, or driving a donkey before him with his belongings. Entirely fin de siecle, he never resorted to the past for his subject-matter, which he draws wholly from his own experience or imagination. In many ways he reminds the reader of Maupassant.
Of late many stories have been translated from modern European languages into Irish, and these have helped to make the idiom flex- ible, although they are not original work. Irish literature got a great set-back during the political troubles following the rebellion of 1916. Two monthly magazines which published stories and folk- lore were burnt, one in Munster and one in Cpnnacht. The Con- nacht editor was " on the run " in the mountains, and of the joint editors of the Southern paper one was " interned " and the other had his house burned, with all the MSS. which he had spent half a lifetime collecting, and all the songs and music he had taken down from old people, now for the most part dead. Padraig O'Conaire too had his little hut in the Dublin mountains burnt and several plays destroyed. The most scholarly work, and the latest upon Irish saga literature, is that of Thurneysen published at Halle in 1921, Die Irische Helden- und Konigsage, a volume of over 700 pages, the first part of which contains a general treatment of the subject and the second the Ulster saga.
It is difficult to say with any certainty how far the Irish language has maintained itself in Ireland since 1910. The action of Dail Eireann (the " Irish Republican Parliament ") in making it the official language of their first meeting, nothing else being spoken on that day, gave it a great lift in popular estimation. Many people might have been noticed, especially young men and women, wearing a gold ring on their dress, in the streets of the bigger cities and towns. This was to show that they spoke Irish and wished to be
