Although Irish has been used as a literary language for more than 1,500 years (see Irish literature), and modern literature in Irish dates – as in most European languages – to the 16th century, modern Irish literature owes much of its popularity to the 19th century Gaelic Revival, a cultural and language revival movement,This is discussed in Williams, J. E. Caerwyn and Ní Mhuiríosa, Máirín (1979), Traidisiún Liteartha na nGael, An Clóchomhar Tta, Baile Átha Cliath, pp.345-350, and more generally in Ó Conluain, Proinsias and Ó Céileachair, Donncha (1976 – reprint), An Duinníneach, Sairséal agus Dill, Baile Átha Cliath. and to the efforts of more recent poets and writers. In an act of literary decolonization common to many other peoples seeking self-determination, writers in Irish have taken the advice of Patrick Pearse and have combined influences from both their own literary history and the whole of world literature. Writers in Modern Irish have accordingly produced some of the most interesting literature to come out of Ireland, while being both supplemented and influenced by poetry and prose composed in the Irish language outside Ireland.
Early revival By the end of the nineteenth century, Irish had been reversed from being the dominant language of Ireland to becoming a minority language, which reduced the literature being produced. The Gaelic Revival sought to reverse this decline. In the beginning, the revivalists preferred to write in Classical Irish, and were notably inspired by Geoffrey Keating's (Seathrún Céitinn) Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (History of Ireland), a much-read 17th-century work. Classical Irish, however, was soon ousted by the living dialects actually being spoken in the Gaeltacht areas, especially as championed by a native speaker from the Coolea-Muskerry area, Father Peadar Ua Laoghaire, who in the 1890s published, in a serialised form, a folkloristic novel strongly influenced by the storytelling tradition of the Gaeltacht, called Séadna. His other works include the autobiography Mo Scéal Féin and retellings of tales from Irish mythology, as well as a recently reissued adaptation of Don Quixote.
Pádraic Ó Conaire was a pioneer in the writing of realistic short stories in Irish; he was also to the forefront of Irish-language journalism. His most important book is his only novel, Deoraíocht (Exile), which combines realism with absurdist elements. He was to die in 1928, not yet fifty years old. Ó Conaire became something of a mythical figure in Irish literary folklore because of his highly individual talent and engaging personality.
Early twentieth-century writing from the Gaeltacht From the end of the 19th century, researchers were visiting the Gaeltacht to record the lives of native speakers in authentic dialect. This interest from outside stimulated several notable autobiographies, especially on Great Blasket Island, located off the Dingle Peninsula: Peig by Peig Sayers, An t-Oileánach ("The Islandman") by Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and Fiche Bliain ag Fás ("Twenty Years a-Growing") by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin.
Although he greatly admired these Gaeltacht memoirs and particularly that of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, novelist Flann O'Brien also chose to satirize their cliches quite mercilessly in his modernist novel An Béal Bocht ("The Poor Mouth"), which is set in the fictional, desperately poor, and constantly raining Gaeltacht of (); a parody of , the name in Munster Irish for the Dingle Peninsula.
Micí Mac Gabhann was the author of Rotha Mór an tSaoil ("The Great Wheel of Life"), dictated in his native Ulster Irish. The title refers to the Klondike gold rush, ruathar an óir, at the end of the 19th century, and the hardship Irish gold-seekers endured on their way to tír an óir, the gold country.
Another important figure was the prolific writer of rural novels, Séamus Ó Grianna (pen name "Máire"). Séamus Ó Grianna's most important contribution to modern literature in the language might be the fact that he persuaded his brother Seosamh (who called himself Seosamh Mac Grianna in Irish) to write in Irish. Seosamh was a less prolific and less fortunate writer than his brother. He was stricken by a severe depressive psychosis in 1935 and spent the rest of his life – more than fifty years – at a psychiatric hospital. Before his psychosis, however, he wrote an impressive novel about the difficult transition to modernity in his own Gaeltacht, called An Druma Mór ("The Big Drum" or "The Fife and Drum Band"), as well as a powerful and introspective account of his travels called Mo Bhealach Féin ("My Own Way"). His last novel, Dá mBíodh Ruball ar an Éan ("If the Bird Had a Tail"), a study of the alienation of a Gaeltacht man in Dublin, was left unfinished, a fact suggested by the title.
Both brothers were acknowledged translators. In addition to translating Walter Scott's Ivanhoe into Irish, Seosamh's work in this field includes the Irish versions of Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly, in Irish Díth Céille Almayer, as well as Peadar O'Donnell's Adrigoole, in Irish Eadarbhaile.
Irish-language modernism Patrick Pearse, who was executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, learnt Connaught Irish in Rosmuc, while continuing to write in Munster Irish. He also wrote idealised stories about the Irish-speaking countryside, as well as nationalistic poetry in a more classical, Keating-esque style.
According to Louis De Paor, Pearse's reading of the experimental free verse poetry of Walt Whitman and of the French Symbolists led him to introduce Modernist poetry into the Irish language. As a literary critic, Pearse also left behind a detailed blueprint for the Decolonization of Irish literature, through drawing not only upon Irish mythology and folklore, but also from the whole of world literature, both past and present. For these reasons, Liam De Paor has called Pearse's execution by a British Army firing squad after the defeat of the 1916 Easter Rising a catastrophic loss for Irish literature which only began to be healed during the late 1940s by the modernist poetry of Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Direáin, and Máire Mhac an tSaoi.
Ó Direáin, a native Irish speaker and passionate autodidact from Inishmore in the Aran Islands, spent his life as a career civil servant in Galway City and Dublin in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War. He began publishing his work in the early 1940s as a poet of homesickness and urban angst and ended, quite similarly to his literary hero T.S. Eliot, as a harsh cultural critic of escalating Secularization, hedonism, and excessive consumerism.
Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who was also an accomplished Celticist and literary scholar, published several collections of lyric verse beginning in the 1950s. These display her mastery of both the strict metres (Dán Díreach), once taught and widely used before the 17th century closing of the Irish bardic poetry schools, and of the colloquial folk song metres (Amhrán) that replaced them until the early Gaelic revival. In 2013, she also published a literary translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies from Austrian German into Modern Irish.
Ó Ríordáin was born in the Ballyvourney breac-Gaeltacht: his poetry was experimental enough in metre to draw attacks from literary traditionalists, while also being intensely personal in content. He was also a notable prose writer, as evidenced by his published diaries.
Modernist literature was developed further by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, a schoolmaster from Connemara, who was the Irish-language littérateur engagé par excellence. He was an active service in the IRA, and spent The Emergency years (i.e. the years of Irish neutrality in the Second World War) interned in the Curragh Camp, County Kildare, together with other IRA men and Allied and Axis military personnel. At the camp, he taught Irish language courses to fellow internees and began his modernist masterpiece, the novel Cré na Cille ("Graveyard Clay"). Reminiscent of some Latin American novels (notably Redoble por Rancas by Manuel Scorza, or Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo), this novel is a chain of voices of the dead speaking from the churchyard, where they go on forever continuing the now pointless social and political quarrels from when they were alive. Similarly to those of Flann O'Brien, Ó Cadhain's novel lampoons the rose-coloured depiction of life in the Gaeltachtaí favored by the romantic nationalist writers of the early Gaelic revival.
In addition to Cré na Cille, Máirtín Ó Cadhain wrote several collections of short stories (one 'short' story, "Fuíoll Fuine" in the collection , can count as a novella). An important part of his writings is his journalism, essays, and pamphlets, found in such collections as Ó Cadhain i bhFeasta, Caiscín, and Caithfear Éisteacht.
Máirtín Ó Cadhain's prose is dense, powerful and (especially in his early work) difficult for the novice. His style changed and became simpler with time, in part reflecting the urban world in which he settled. Like the poet Liam Gógan, Ó Cadhain was a linguistic moderniser and wrote in an experimental form of the Irish language, even in contexts where a less obscure style would have been appropriate. He enriched his own Connemara Irish with neologisms and loanwords from other dialects, including Scottish Gaelic.
Modernism and renewal are also represented by several writers not of Gaeltacht background, such as Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin, and Breandán Ó Doibhlin (the last influenced by French literary theory). Ó Tuairisc, a stylistic innovator, wrote poetry and plays as well as two novels on historical themes: L'Attaque, and Dé Luain. Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin sought to adapt Irish to the urban world: An Uain Bheo and Caoin Thú Féin offered a depiction of a middle-class environment and its problems. Ó Doibhlin's Néal Maidine agus Tine Oíche is an example of introspective modernism.
Contemporary literature in Irish Among modern Gaeltacht writers, Pádraig Breathnach, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Pádraig Ó Cíobháin are three of the most important. They adhere in general to the realist tradition, as does Dara Ó Conaola. The work of Joe Steve Ó Neachtain, from the Conamara Gaeltacht, has proved consistently popular.
Caitlín Maude (d. 1982), a native speaker from Conamara, wrote fluent and elegant verse with a distinctively modern sensibility. One of the best known poets is Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who was raised in the Munster Gaeltacht and was part of the new wave of the sixties and seventies. She is particularly interested in the mythic element in reality. Biddy Jenkinson (a pseudonym) is representative of an urban tradition: she is a poet and a writer of witty detective stories.
Others of Ní Dhomhnaill's generation were the mordant Michael Hartnett (who wrote both in Irish and English) and Michael Davitt (d.2005), a lyric poet whose work is both whimsical and melancholy. Others of his generation are Liam Ó Muirthile and Gabriel Rosenstock. Among those who followed are Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Tomás Mac Síomóin, Diarmuid Johnson and Louis de Paor. Ó Searcaigh, a lyric poet, is also a traveller: this bore fruit in his engaging travelogue about Nepal, Seal i Neipeal. A younger generation is represented by such poets as Doireann Ní Ghríofa (b.1981).
There is now more emphasis on popular writing in Irish, and among the writers who have had considerable success with lighter genres is Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, novelist, playwright and short story writer. Lorcán S. Ó Treasaigh has written a popular autobiography called Céard é English? (What is English?) about growing up as a native Irish speaker in the predominantly English-speaking city of Dublin. Colm Ó Snodaigh's novella, Pat the Pipe - Píobaire, describes a busker's adventures in Dublin's streets in the nineties.