| Chapter 1: | The Dying Gael |
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superiority of their own language. The Victorian historian Thomas Macauley, author of the great history that bears his name, in full confidence and apparently without the slightest apprehension of contradiction, wrote the following: “The claims for our own language…[are] hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent, even among the languages of the West” (as cited in Roberts, 1998, p. 54).
The despoliation of the Gaelic regions was not limited to enforced education in the English language. The English mercantile laws, which directly and indirectly were responsible for the starving of one-third of the Irish population during the mid-1800s and the emigration of another third from that Gaelic-speaking island, are well documented. Less well known are the series of measures collectively known as the Highland Clearances. Highland landowners, some of them the same chiefs or sons of chiefs for whom Highland Scots had fought and died just a few decades before, turned their own people out of their cottages, burning the thatched roofs over the heads of those who would not go, and so made way in the great glens for more economically viable inhabitants: sheep (Prebble, 1963).
Between 1763 and 1775, fifty-five emigrant ships sailed from the western Highlands, bearing on them 20,000 people—an enormous number when one considers that the entire Gaelic-speaking population today is approximately four times that number—for whom the cry, “cha till mi tuille” (I shall return no more) became an anthem (Prebble, 1963, p. 193):
The Highland Clearances were a series of deportations that, as O’Connor wrote, so severe that the human suffering was halfway between