ABSTRACT
It is impossible to say why or when exactly the majority ofIrish-speaking people in eastern Ireland collectively decided that the English language would be more useful to them than Irish, but it plainly happened in much of Leinster first, and between 1800 and 1850 spread to most of the planted North, missing only the strongest pockets of Catholic survival in the Antrim Glens, Rathlin Island, the Sperrin Mountains, the Farney of Monaghan, the Omeath district of Louth, and below Slieve Gullion in south Armagh, in all of which it lingered until the 1940s or later. West Donegal is of course excluded from this generalization and still has its living Gaeltacht. Causation is often attributed to English schooling, to the influence of the Catholic Church, which accepted English as its language of mission once expelled from Douai by Revolutionary France and given finance for its Maynooth seminary by George III, and above all to the Great Famine which devastated Ireland from 1845 to 1849, killed around a million, and initiated mass emigration which halved the population by 1900.
