The Irish Language and the Death of Plastic Nationalism

Where the nation lives

Callum McMichael explains why nationalism collapses the moment language ceases to matter.

There is no national revival more urgent than the revival of our language. Irish Gaelic is not merely one cultural element among many; it is the metaphysical ground of our people, the vessel of memory, the songline through which Ireland has spoken itself into being for thousands of years. Nations do not live by blood alone. Nations live by meaning, continuity, and the shared imagination of a people—all of which are encoded first and foremost in language.

To lose our language is not simply to lose words. It is to lose a worldview, a rhythm of thought, and a cosmology. It is to abandon the spiritual architecture that gave Ireland her distinctiveness long before any flag, constitution, or doctrine existed. No ideology—left, right, nationalist, or globalist—can replace that foundational inheritance.

Yet in recent years, a curious breed of self-proclaimed nationalists have arisen in Ireland: men who speak endlessly of identity while neglecting the very substance of identity. They invoke race, demographics, and political sovereignty, but rarely speak of the cultural, linguistic, and spiritual essence that makes the Irish people what they are. They have the posture of nationalists, the vocabulary of the right-wing internet, and the aesthetics of rebellion—but not the grounding, the rootedness, or the fidelity to our deepest inheritance. They replace cultural revival with identity rhetoric because the former demands discipline and sincerity, whereas the latter demands only assertion.

These individuals are what I rightly call plastic nationalists: hollow figures who imitate the shape of nationalism but lack its inner life. They speak of “saving Ireland” but are indifferent to the very soul they claim to defend. They say “our people”, but show little regard for the language in which our people have dreamed, prayed, sang, argued, made law, and imagined their destiny.

Among these figures, Keith Woods is one of the clearest examples—not because he is uniquely guilty, but because he represents a broader trend. Woods is articulate, intelligent, and outwardly concerned with Irish identity. Yet his conception of nationalism is almost entirely ideological and abstract, borrowed from continental racial theorists and American right-wing discourse rather than grown from the wellspring of Irish cultural life. His writings focus on ethnic purity, demographic anxiety, and political strategy, but he shows remarkably little interest in the revival of Irish Gaelic—the single most fundamental marker of Irish civilisation. Woods is not the problem; he is a symptom. A symptom of a nationalism that prioritises identity politics over cultural stewardship, and which borrows its intellectual framework from abroad instead of from the Gaeltacht,¹ the manuscripts, or the long memory of our ancestors.

A true nationalist understands that the Irish nation is not a statistics sheet, nor a biological category, nor a reactionary posture. It is a heritage—a spiritual, cultural, and historical inheritance handed down through centuries of suffering and endurance. And the Irish language is the core of that inheritance. It is the bridge between the Ireland of the monks and the Ireland of today; between the Ogham stones² and the schoolrooms; between the epics of Cú Chulainn³ and the modern poems of the Revival.⁴ Even those who are not fluent feel an instinctive reverence for its presence, knowing that it is the living link to something older, holier, and more continuous than we can articulate.

Yet many modern nationalists, including prominent figures online and in organisations like the National Party or Clann Éireann, refuse that link. They prefer imported rhetoric to native inheritance. They invoke Irishness but neglect the very form of expression that defines it. Their nationalism becomes performative, a costume rather than a calling. They shout about sovereignty while surrendering the inner terrain—the cultural soul—to decay.

It is easier to talk about identity in the abstract than to commit oneself to the hard labour of cultural continuity. It is easier to rant about immigration or demographics than to learn the language that our ancestors preserved in defiance of conquest, persecution, and famine. It is easier to repeat foreign ideological formulas than to immerse oneself in the ancient spirit of the island.

But true nationalism is difficult. It requires a man to root himself in the traditions that precede him—not in reaction, but in reverence. And for the Irish people, no tradition is older, deeper, or more essential than our language. Irish Gaelic is not a mere tool of communication; it is a symbolic universe, a spiritual homeland within the physical homeland. It carries the dreams of our saints, the laws of our clans, the songs of our villages, and the metaphors shaped by mountains, rivers, and mythologies unique to this island.

When the language dies, the nation becomes a ghost: present in body, absent in spirit.

This is why the revival of Irish must not be seen as optional or decorative. It is a duty—not only for those who call themselves nationalists, but for every Irish person who understands that identity without culture is meaningless, and that culture without language is incomplete. Our ancestors preserved this language in secret hedge schools,⁵ scribbled it in forbidden books, and whispered it to their children under penalty of law. They did so not because of ideology, but because they understood what we risk forgetting: that without our language, Ireland is merely geography, not a nation.

If modern nationalists cannot understand this, then they are not nationalists at all. They are consumers of identity politics, using Ireland as a symbol for online narratives that have nothing to do with the island’s ancient soul. Ireland does not need more rhetoric. It does not need more men posing as defenders of the nation. It needs guardians of memory: people who are willing to restore the living traditions that make Ireland more than a demographic unit.

A true nationalist does not merely defend the borders. He defends the spirit. And the spirit of Ireland speaks, unmistakably, in Irish.

What gives all of this a deeper historical resonance is that Ireland has already lived through a moment when cultural seriousness separated the genuine from the artificial, and that moment was the Gaelic Revival. When one revisits that era, one immediately recognises how small, cosmetic, and performative modern symbolic nationalism looks in comparison. The Revival was never an identity posture or a decorative gesture. It was a spiritual archaeology—a collective attempt to recover the original pattern of the Irish mind after centuries of suppression.

Douglas Hyde made the stakes clear in his 1892 lecture “On the Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish People”. His warning was painfully direct: “In Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim we have to nationality.”

He understood, with a clarity few possess today, that a nation does not lose its soul through force alone; more often, it loses it through carelessness. When the Irish people stopped guarding their language, they loosened their grip on the very essence of what made them a distinct civilisation.

The Revivalists, regardless of their political differences, shared a philosophical principle that modern identity-driven nationalism refuses to grasp: language is not a symbol of identity, but its foundation. The Irish language is not simply an instrument for communication; it is a way of perceiving, structuring, and inhabiting reality. Patrick Pearse articulated this repeatedly long before he became a revolutionary. He wrote obsessively about the spiritual necessity of the language in the newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis⁶ and insisted that a nation is defined not by what it imagines itself to be, but by the language through which it understands the world. Pearse’s most famous assertion was striking in its simplicity, but it was never meant as a slogan: “Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam” (“A country without a language is a country without a soul”).

Those words are often repeated without responsibility, but Pearse lived them. He built schools, wrote grammars, produced textbooks, shaped curricula, and treated Irish not as a cultural ornament but as the precondition for restoring the soul of the people.

The seriousness of the Revival becomes even clearer when one considers the sheer discipline its leaders displayed. Hyde, Pearse, Eoin MacNeill, Agnes O’Farrelly, Eleanor Hull, and others did not hide behind aesthetic nationalism. They created classes, founded societies, published journals, collected folklore, preserved poetry, reconstructed grammar, and physically entered the rural heartlands to record the last native speakers. They were rebuilding a civilisation from fragments—brick by brick, word by word.

Pearse’s frustration with half-hearted cultural posturing is evident in one of his most telling lines from The Murder Machine: “The words and phrases of a language are always to some extent revelations of the mind of the race that has moulded the language.”

He meant this literally: anything that does not seize the whole soul becomes a pastime, and pastimes can be discarded. A nation cannot build itself upon something its own people treat as optional.

It is important to recognise that the political revolution of 1916–1921 was downstream from the cultural revolution that preceded it. The Rising⁷ did not generate a national spirit out of thin air; it revealed one that had already been regenerated through the Revival. Those who fought in 1916 had been shaped by Conradh na Gaeilge [The Gaelic League] meetings,⁸ bilingual newspapers, the Abbey Theatre,⁹ the rediscovered epics, and the voices of rural storytellers who preserved the metaphysical worldview of pre-colonial Ireland. The Revival was the soil from which the revolution grew.

Hyde saw the consequences of cultural detachment long before they fully appeared. In a lecture at St. Enda’s College in 1909, he offered another line that remains prophetic: “You must not be ashamed or afraid to be Irish.”

That shame, once internalised, becomes a cultural reflex. It manifests today in the very people who call themselves nationalists yet recoil from the language because it demands discipline, history, effort, and continuity. Identity politics is easier than cultural responsibility. English slogans are easier than Irish syntax. Aesthetic nationalism is easier than spiritual inheritance.

And this is why the Gaelic Revival remains a permanent moral mirror. It reveals what Ireland is capable of when it remembers itself, and it exposes the hollowness of those who speak of heritage but avoid the one inheritance that requires genuine commitment. The Revival stands as a masterpiece of cultural self-restoration, and in its shadow, the modern reluctance to embrace the Irish language is nothing short of a quiet admission of defeat.

The Revival endures not simply as history, but as judgment. It shows that Ireland can reclaim its soul when it chooses to, and it reminds us that those who turn away from their language—whether from laziness, foreign fascination, or ideological cosplay—are not inheritors of the nation but custodians of its forgetting.

1. Editor’s note (EN): The Gaeltacht refers to regions in Ireland where Irish (Gaeilge) remains the primary community language and receives official state protection. These areas are concentrated mainly in the counties of Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Meath, and Waterford and represent the cultural heartland of the Irish-speaking population.

2. EN: The Ogham stones are medieval stone pillars inscribed with Ogham, the earliest known writing system for the Irish language. Most surviving examples date from the 4th to 7th centuries and are found primarily in the counties of Kerry and Cork.

3. EN: The epics associated with Cú Chulainn, the foremost hero of early Irish legend, belong to the Ulster Cycle, a group of medieval Irish tales centred on the kings and warriors of ancient Ulster, the northern Irish province. The core narrative is Táin Bó Cúailnge (“The Cattle Raid of Cooley”), often called “the Irish Iliad”, describing Cú Chulainn’s lone defence of the province against the invading army of Queen Medb of Connacht, the western Irish kingdom.

4. EN: The modern poems of the Irish Revival refer to the works produced during the late-19th- and early-20th-century cultural renaissance led by writers such as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Æ (George Russell). These poems drew on Irish myth, folklore, and national history to renew a distinct literary identity and helped shape the broader movement for cultural and political revival.

5. EN: Hedge schools were informal, often secret, rural schools in Ireland during the 18th and early 19th centuries, created when British penal laws restricted Catholic and Gaelic education. Taught in barns, private homes, or literally beside hedgerows, they preserved Irish language, literature, and classical learning at a time when formal schooling for most Irish people was forbidden.

6. EN: An Claidheamh Soluis (“The Sword of Light”) was the principal newspaper of the Gaelic League, the organisation founded in 1893 to revive the Irish language. Published from the late 19th to the early 20th century, the newspaper promoted Irish cultural nationalism and the aims of the language revival. Edited at times by figures such as Douglas Hyde and Patrick Pearse, it served as the intellectual and literary voice of the Irish Revival.

7. EN: The Rising refers to the Easter Rising of 1916, the armed insurrection in Dublin and several other locations in which Irish republicans attempted to end British rule and proclaim an independent Irish Republic. Although militarily unsuccessful, it became a defining moment in the struggle for Irish independence and transformed public sentiment in favour of the nationalist cause.

8. EN: These meetings served as local hubs for language classes, cultural events, and community organising, and they played a central role in the broader Irish Revival movement.

9. EN: The Abbey Theatre, founded in 1904 by Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and their collaborators, became the national theatre of Ireland and a central institution of the Irish Revival. It provided a stage for new Irish drama based on national themes and played a crucial role in establishing the careers of playwrights such as J. M. Synge and Seán O’Casey.