Cuimhní cinn a breacadh 1918-19 : an dara cuid

nobody who is working voluntarily for a cause likes to be abused as though he were working for his own interests, and first as the Lee branch being cut off caused a lot of Cork people, I think, to drop the language movement, or at least to cease from pub-licly working for it so these attacks upon Keawell had their natural affect upon him also. He [gradually] soon withdrew from all G League work and dropped out of the move-ment altogether.

When a person is working unselfishly for any cause, it is perfectly easy to drive him out of it by getting some one to abuse him for what he is doing or has done. A man finds it much easier and much smoother for himself to simply drop the work he was doing. He says to himself “Why should I expose myself to abuse for [nothing] others. If that is the way I am to be treated let them do without me.” I have seen this exemplified in the G League time and again. It was the personal abuse that was showered on Dr. O' Hickey by Sceilg (O' Kelly) and his friends of the Keating Branch in that narrowest, meanest and most bitter of

all Irish publications [that] Banba . . . . . . that drove him out of the G League, the election of Pearse to the editorship of the Claidheamh being only the last straw. Dr O Hickey called these men footpads so incensed was he at his treatment by them. The same thing happened with John Mac Neill. He very kindly undertook on behalf of the G League, and at my request, to act as arbitrator or ad-judicator with some members of the Irish National teachers association about the case of a teacher at King who could not teach Irish. We wanted to get rid of her but the teachers were all up in arms against this, saying, with truth, that it was not the teachers fault that she was there, and that to hunt her out of the place [was] after many years service would be unjust and unfair to her now. John Mac Neill with a great deal of difficulty effected a compromise with the angry teachers, doing I believe the only thing that was possible under the circumstances, leaving, if I [remembered] remember rightly the [King] teacher still there, but adding an assistant who knew Irish. [by] (botun) Immediately he was attacked by a man called Diarmuid O Cruadh-laoich who was on the Executive at one time, in the most

monstrous and violent language, and not in the G League Journal alone but in other papers, and he returned the attack on poor Mac Neill again and again, holding him up as a renegade and a traitor and I don’t know what else. At the same time I think it was Michael Foley (botún) (a brother of Richard Foley who was on the executive) who attacked him in the [Daily papers] Freeman’s Journal. Those attacks had their national consequence. Mac Neill gradually dropped out of the G League, ceased apparently to take any in-terest in it, and finally although he was Vice President [he] deserted the meeting altogether. This played into the hands of people like Crowley and Foley, for Mac Neill if he had continued to attend could have kept things pretty straight. He was the longest[?]-headed and most clear sighted man in the G League and had great moral influence with the members. In vain I went to

his house over and over again to beg of him to attend some meeting or other where ticklish questions of politics or something of the kind were on the agenda, and implored his assis-tance in helping me to keep things straight; but it was all to no purpose. He would say he would come if he could, and then in the end he would not [turn up] come, and would leave me to do the best I could by myself. This was I believe the consequence of the open and shameless abuse showered on him by people who were not fit to tie his shoe-strings. When having got rid by this simple process of abuse first of O’Hickey and then of Mac Neill they [turned] proceeded to play the same game with me I turned on them furiously and appealed to the branches of the League all over Ireland to protect me, and succeeded in quenching them for the time, for the branches rallied round me almost to a man, and [they] the mischief-makers were really people of no account, only good at writing letters anonymous or other, to papers that would print them.

The G League, which was really a delightful body of men and women so long as it was actuated by only one desire, that of res-toring the Irish language, began to lose its charm when it became powerful. It was then worth capturing, and people, notoriously Griffith, set about to do so. But it’s pleasure began to depart from it even before that. One of The first unpleasantness connected with it which struck me as leaving a bad taste upon [it arose] the mouth came with the advent of Larkin the Labour leader. In a very short time after his rise to power in Dublin it seemed to me that quite a number of the Coiste Gnótha made him their patron[?]. It is certain, [that] I think, that while up to this time we used all to be delighted (botún) if anybody of wealth and position joined us, this now ceased to be the case. The bulk of the Coiste Gnótha became apparently Larkinites