DE VALERA PLEADS TO SAVE THE LANGUAGE OF IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, 24 July 1919, Page 29

DE VALERA PLEADS TO SAVE THE LANGUAGE OF IRELAND.

From the pen of Professor de Valera, leader of the Sinn* Fein Party and hope of the new Irish movement, comes an ardent plea to the Irish people the world over to save the national language of their country. The stirring message follows : To save the national language is the especial duty of this generation. The ultimate winning back of our Statehood is not in doubt. 'Sooner' or later, Ireland will recover the sovereign independence she ’once enjoyed. Should we fail, a future generation will succeed. But the language, that must be saved by us, or it is lost for ever. It is fortunate that the more pressing duty is the one easier for us to accomplish. To recover our national independence we must bend the wills of other nations to ours ; to restore the language we need the concurrence of no will but our own. Let the men and women, the boys and girls of Ireland to-day only will it strongly enough, and our national language can be made as safe as our nationhood. The language is dying. To-morrow it will be too late. Shall we not save it to-day when we may? Think how President Wilson, when M. Clemen - ceau greeted him with, “I speak American,” must have regretted that America has not truly a distinctive language of her own. What would he have felt, what would every young American have felt, had some past generation wilfully let such a language die and left them with only a borrowed tongue ? Are we, who are ready to make sacrifices that the future generations may be free, going to rob these generations of that

they would most fondly cherish—of that they would be proudest of as the very crown of their Freedom ? Are we going to doom them to bemoan for ever that which they themselves can never by any means restore their own distinctive, their own traditional, their own beautiful Irish tongue ?