Mairtin O'Cadhain

Mairtin O'Cadhain, a barefoot boy become scholar, journalist, University professor and freedom fighter, was one of the most vital figures in modern Ireland. He was at the centre of every political cyclone, battling for the survival of his own Gaelic-speaking people by the western sea. But he also found time to become the greatest writer of fiction in Gaelic.

O'Cadhain was born in 1906 in Cois Fharraige, that part of the Connemara littoral flanking Galway Bay. Beginning in 1926 he worked as a teacher in the tiny schools in the west of Ireland. Convinced that the long struggle for Irish independence must continue he joined the outlawed I.R.A. His republicanism was of the positive kind, with two primary objects: to check the physical erosion of a people who by then were going by whole households to America; and to check the even more terrible erosion of mind and a culture, one of the oldest in Europe, which he saw on the brink of extinction.

In 1936 for his subversive activities he was dismissed from his post as a National Teacher by and blacklisted. During World War II the State had him interned in the Curragh Camp, the Irish Siberia. He conducted classes in the Irish language, culture and literature among the internees, and in his enforced idleness read widely in the Celtic languages, and in English, French, German, and some Russian.

Behind barbed wire he began to develop his own particular kind of Irish short story --influenced in one direction by Gorki, to deal with the Cois Fharraige life he knew-- but determined to preserve the peculiar insights from medieval and even pre-Christian times which had survived in folk memory.

In the late forties he found employment in the Government Translation Department, nut he continued the economic and cultural fight. Trinity College, Dublin, recognizing his scholarship and his service to the nation, gave him a post as lecturer and later as Professor in the Irish Department. To his own people he was still plain 'Mairtin', still learning from them, still in the forefront of every battle, in the thick of every dogfight, and on every available platform agitating for their civil rights and the survival of their tongue. And still the enfant terrible of Irish letters. At his death in 1970 the man was already a myth.