Douglas Hyde (Castlerea, Co. Roscommon 1870 – Dublin 1949) was born into an affluent Anglican clergy family and was home-schooled at Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon, where he became fascinated by the Irish-Gaelic language still spoken among the old people in that area. Refusing a clerical career, his studies at Trinity College Dublin were mainly historical and philological; in this environment he became active in the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language and published, throughout the 1880s, in their journal Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge; inspired by the cultural radicalism of the young W.B. Yeats, his thoughts on the position of Irish turned from preservationism to revivalism, and in a 1892 lecture before the Irish National Literary Society he proclaimed his agenda under the telling title The necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland. Positioning the Irish language not as a subsisting and subsidiary cultural tradition within an English setting, but as the polar opposite of English in a relationship of outright, irreconcilable antagonism, turned language politics into the spearhead of Irish nationalism, and allowed language nationalists to see their revivalist aims as a programme for cultural regeneration and for redeeming Ireland from the corrupting modernity imposed through the English language.

Hyde’s lecture accordingly sparked off a movement which turned out to have very broad popular appeal and very far-reaching political impact: the Gaelic League or Connradh na Gaedhilge, founded within months of Hyde’s lecture and with Hyde as its first president. It attracted a huge following of middle-class and white-collar Irishmen and -women who sought to reconnect with a culture that they identified with affectively and in terms of historical memory, but whose language, rapidly dying out, had become alien. The Gaelic League provided language classes, organized excursions to the remaining Gaelic-speaking districts in the west of Ireland, and provided, with its periodicals, activities, and public presence, a public and collective (“national”) identity platform for those who wished to identity themselves as Irish, as opposed to British.

Hyde himself always saw his revivalist programme as a matter of social and cultural regeneration, not as a “political” (i.e. party-political, partisan) matter or an issue in the contentious religious-social politics of turn-of-the-century Ireland. Himself a product of the privileged Protestant (Anglo-Irish) elite, he resisted the radicalization of the Gaelic League under Patrick Pearse in the period 1900-15, which turned the association into a cultural think-tank and consciousness-raising hatching ground for separatists. Hyde resigned the Gaelic League presidency in 1915.

Meanwhile, Hyde had contributed in many ways to a revival of Irish-Gaelic culture. His fieldwork among rural Irish speakers resulted in collections of folktales (Leabhar Sgéaluigheachta, “Story-book”, 1889) and folk poetry. The love songs of Connacht (1893, initially serialized in the press) was hugely influential on the style and thematics of the fin-de-siècle poets and playwrights around Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, who in English sought to achieve the effect of simple pathos and spontaneous lyrical intensity they found in this material. Hyde’s translations, which were meant to be as faithful as possible to the Gaelic speech-patterns and left any Gaelic-inflected words and idioms intact, also alerted the poets and playwrights of the Irish Literary Revival to the expressive power of this “Hiberno-English” dialect, hitherto only used for comic effect (mocking rustic yokels). Many plays for the Abbey Theatre (the Molière translations and kitchen comedies of Lady Gregory, the Ibsenite comedies of Synge) were to employ this “Hiberno-English” to mark the power of cultural and emotional authenticity, and to gesture at the bedrock of Gaelic culture and language underlying Irish life. Hyde himself collaborated with the Abbey Theatre playwrights by producing short one-act plays in Irish, performed by Gaelic League amateur actors (e.g. the one-act farce Casadh an tsúgáin, “Twisting the rope”, based on a folktale).

Hyde also wrote the first sustained history of Gaelic-language literature (A literary history of Ireland, 1899), which he dedicated to the members of the Gaelic League and which evoked a well-established historical trajectory of ancient glory (pre-1600), oppression and decline (1600-1880), and nationalist revival at the eleventh hour. It fixed the idea that contemporary folklore, with its recollections of itinerant begging poets, held the last vestigial echoes of an ancient bardic tradition, thus bridging the gap between an ancient aristocratic culture and contemporary folklore, between past and peasant; witness also his edition of the folk-transmitted work of the early-19th-century mendicant blind poet Antaine Raiftearaí, Songs ascribed to Raftery (1907). While this provided modern Irish poets with a national-Romantic role model, it implied a call to revive this languishing literature by mobilizing an urban, middle-class, educated readership.

Hyde was made professor of Irish at Trinity College Dublin in 1905, and withdrew into that academic shelter in the radical dissensions and violent battles of the years following his resignation of the Gaelic League presidency. Once an independent Irish Free State had emerged from the insurrections and civil wars of the period 1916-1923, Hyde was called to public functions as a consensus figurehead for the new state’s commitment to its cultural identity. Together with Yeats he became a senator in 1925, and when a constitutional change provided for Ireland its own head of state, the first president to occupy that office was the ageing Hyde (1938).