This week: Language learning in 19th century Ireland; The shooting of Richard Bertles during the Irish Civil War; and Thomas Keneally on his latest novel focusing on John Mitchel

Foreign Tongues: Victorian Language Learning and the Shaping of Modern Ireland

Long before apps like Duolingo brought language learning to our fingertips, Ireland was leading the charge in European language education. During the second half of the 19th century, further education in Britain and Ireland experienced many changes – as increasing attention was paid to the study of modern European languages, especially in the upper echelons of society.

This process was more pronounced here than it was in Britain. Ireland's colleges embraced language study — ancient and modern, Irish and European — more eagerly than their British counterparts, and Ireland saw an influx of European teachers.

Irish educators were instrumental in this period of change, welcoming modern language learning, and later playing an important role in the rise of the Gaelic League, forging a bond between language, education and politics. To learn more about this, Myles is joined by author and historian Dr Phyllis Gaffney, author of the recently-published Foreign Tongues: Victorian Language Learning and Modern Ireland. The book is published by UCD Press.

The Shooting of Richard Bertles

During the Irish Civil War, there were numerous cases in which anti-Treaty IRA volunteers were killed after being captured by the National Army; whether they were formally executed by firing squad, or in well over a hundred cases, killed after being taken prisoner.

The circumstances of those killings are often unclear, but they left a lasting legacy - subsequently becoming integral to how republicans recalled and commemorated the conflict.

In this piece, Ian Kenneally explores an example of those commemorations - reporting from County Longford on the case of Richard Bertles, and two songs inspired by his life and death. Ian speaks to Eoghan Burke, an actor and singer-songwriter who explores the subject in his song When the Carnival Returns. We also hear from historian John Dorney who explains the context of this type of Civil War killing, and how they are remembered and comemmorated.

Thomas Keneally on John Mitchel

The great Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally - winner of the Booker Prize, for his 1982 non-fiction novel Schindler's Ark - has long cherished his Irish roots. His monumental work of non-fiction, The Great Shame, deals with the transportation of some of his own ancestors, and highlights the achievements of the Young Ireland generation of Irish nationalists of the mid 19th century.

In his latest novel, Fanatic Heart, he tells the story of the most controversial of those patriots - John Mitchel - a committed white supremacist, and an apologist for the Confederacy during the American Civil war.

Myles spoke to Thomas Kenneally on the line from his home in Sydney, Australia, as part of the West Cork History Festival in August 2024.

That conversation ranged over Mitchel’s life, his radical journalism, his transportation to Tasmania and his escape to the USA - before focusing on his co-founding of the Irish Citizen newspaper in New York with Thomas Francis Meagher; his feud with the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher and his increasingly racist journalistic output, before his move from the north to the south in the 1850s. Kennealy explains his view that Mitchel’s opposition to capitalism informed his approach to the anti-slavery movement in the north – which included arch capitalists he viewed as hypocrites for their exploitation of labour.

Thomas Keneally's book Fanatic Heart is published by Faber & Faber.