Hyde, Douglas
Poet, scholar, and politician, Douglas Hyde (1860–1949) was born on 17 January at Castlerea, Co. Roscommon, and became a leader of the Gaelic revival and, from 1938 until 1945, president of Ireland. Hyde earned a law degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and collaborated with Anglo-Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, but his greatest achievement was his contribution to the preservation of the Irish language and literature.
He attained wide fame as president of the Gaelic League, the cultural nationalist body founded by Eoin MacNéill in 1893 in answer to Hyde's seminal speech "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland." Good-natured and witty, he was equally at home testifying before government commissions and appearing at
League festivals and meetings. In 1905 and 1906 he made an extensive tour of the United States, raising more than 10,000 pounds for the organization. Under his leadership, language enthusiasts successfully pressed the educational authorities to include Gaelic as a voluntary subject in the primary and intermediate school curricula and to make a knowledge of Irish a matriculation requirement at the National University of Ireland after 1913.
Hyde continually contended with factionalism in League ranks and, after 1910, with an increasingly vocal cadre of nationalists. When they associated the organization with calls for independence in 1915, Hyde resigned and applied himself to his post as professor of modern Irish at University College, Dublin.
Hyde's scholarship, though marked by a lack of philological training, testified to his skill as a folklorist and synthesizer of the first rank. He published several groundbreaking works, including the folklore volumes Leabhar Sgéulaigheachta (1889) and Beside the Fire (1890); the Love Songs of Connacht (1893), which inspired subsequent writers, including Yeats, Gregory, and J. M. Synge; the monumental A Literary History of Ireland (1899); and, with Gregory, the Songs Ascribed to [Anthony] Raftery (1903). In the 1920s he helped to inaugurate the Irish Folklore Society and established an Irish studies journal, Lia Fáil.
Hyde received numerous public accolades, including cooption into the Free State Senate in 1925 and appointment to the Irish Academy of Letters in 1931. His highest honor, however, came in 1938 when he was elected to the largely ceremonial position of president of Ireland. He died on 12 July 1949, having invigorated indigenous interest in Gaelic literature and established the Irish language as a symbol of national identity, if not as a practical medium of everyday discourse.
Bibliography
Daly, Dominic. The Young Douglas Hyde: The Dawn of the Irish Revolution and Renaissance, 1874–1893. 1974.
Dunleavy, Janet Egleson, and Gareth W. Dunleavy. Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland. 1991.
Hyde, Douglas. A Literary History of Ireland from Earliest Times to the Present Day. 1899, 1967.
Hyde, Douglas. Mise agus an Conradh (go dtí 1905). 1937.
