Timothy McMahon
Grandfather's birthplace in the Townland of Crossmore, Village of Clontibret, County Monaghan
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Festival Tradition Runs Deep In Ireland
By Susan Bence
August 15, 2008 | WUWM | Milwaukee, WI
Irish Fest is being celebrated this weekend on Milwaukee’s lakefront. Through the centuries, festivals have kept the spirit and culture of Ireland alive. WUWM’s Susan Bence spoke with someone who’s dedicated his life to the study of all things Irish.
Timothy McMahon is 100 percent Irish, or pretty darn close to it. I met him at a local pub over a turkey Reuben and a pint of Guinness. McMahon says, he could have chosen something more authentically Irish to eat.
“Chips with curry sauce, which is good pub grub, let me tell you,” McMahon says.
McMahon teaches history at Marquette University. He’s specialty, Modern Ireland and the British Empire. McMahon says his academic and personal quest is to discover what it means to be Irish. It’s taken him on a complicated path of tracing the survival of the its language, Gaelic.
“This is a beautiful tongue. That has, I think next to Greek and Latin, it has the oldest continuous literary tradition,” McMahon says.
But beautiful or not, beginning in the 1800s the use of the language declined drastically. For starters, when Great Britain embraced Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, the Irish were expected to speak English. At the same time, the vast majority of Ireland’s people were poor. It made sense that their children speak a dominant world language, like English, to give them a chance to build more secure lives.
“And for those kids to be successful emigrating to the U.S. to Canada, to Britain, to Australia, they needed English. And so the parents encouraged their teachers to teach them only in English,” McMahon says.
Ironically, even as struggling Irish families fought to give their kids better “English speaking” lives, others wanted to bring Gaelic back to life.
“They saw that very distinguished scholars from Germany and France were coming to Ireland to study the Irish language and they’re like, why don’t the Irish people do this? And so they started to gather together and strategize how to appeal to everyday folks,” McMahon says.
McMahon says one of the ways life was breathed back into the language was through festivals, they’re call feiseanna in Irish.
“The festival season at the turn of the 20th century usually ran from May until September and on any given weekend, you’d have six or seven of these feiseanna happening in different parts of Ireland,” McMahon says.
McMahon says large or small, these festivals were THE social event of the season.
“To prepare for a feis, let’s say you’ve got ten people who are doing a short play in the Irish language they’re working on it for weeks or month ahead of time, and their neighbors all know about it. You know, they might be going just to laugh at that person, but that’s part of the fun of it, isn’t it?” McMahon says
McMahon says competitions drew enormous crowds.
“You see people singing, you see people dancing. What you see at the festivals is a fantastic mix of what became 20th century Irish popular culture. You see people engaged in poetry readings and recitations. There were competitions designed to try and encourage people to use the language,” McMahon says.
He says this rich concoction of history and passion brought Milwaukee’s Irish Fest to life. McMahon, with the disclaimer that he is Irish and might exaggerate, says it’s the largest in the world.
“This is an occasion that is recognized by the irish around the world as sort of the premier language, and especially music feis. Irish Americans and Irish coming together and just having a knockdown drag out great festival,” McMahon says.
McMahon says, Gaelic can be heard at Irish Fest, inside the gaeltacht tent and in the air, through Irish song.
Dr. Timothy G. McMahon has just published Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910.
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