ABSTRACT
If the Irish revolution changed little in the structure and control of Irish education, it yielded a vast change in one part of the school curriculum, namely in the position of the Irish language. From being just one subject of the school curriculum it became, overnight, the dominant subject. Two threads run through the discussion which follows. The first is that the language was given high priority, not for intellectual or educational reasons, but for nationalistic ones. Second, the politicians’ affirmation of the value of the Irish tongue and their insistence upon its becoming the central subject in the curriculum is not amenable to rational explanation. The embracing of Irish was an intuitive act. Irish was seen as a national panacea. The Irish language came to have mystical, nearly-magical properties, and in dealing with the educational aspect of the Irish language revival one has to treat it sympathetically, on its own terms. One can do so if one realizes from the beginning that we are dealing with a phenomenon which must be explained not by logic, but by psycho-logic.
