“I have just been reading the first bit of Irish in the ‘Lochrann,’ Deire Fomhair, 1919. Having read the article, I liked it so well that I just thought it possible that I had made a mistake regarding its goodness, so I read it again. I liked it better. I read it a third time. I liked it better still. It is a bit of simple, direct, full sustained narrative. It is simple. The writer tells his story with a simplicity of style in which there is not a shadow of the consciousness of effort. It is direct. You follow him along a direct road. It is full. He leaves none of the substance of the narrative untold. He forgets nothing that ought to be said. The narrative is sustained. The flow of it is as strong towards the end as it is at the beginning, and you feel that throughout the whole narrative Jimin is really only eleven years old.
“It is refreshing to get such a bit of Irish as that from a living writer of Irish after our long and weary experience of writers who strut through the Irish language on stilts and give us a ponderous mass of stuff which they call ‘classical Irish,’ but which no Irish speaker ever spoke.
“Why will they not, sooner or later, write Irish like Jimin’s Irish? The real answer to that question is, they could not do it! They are not able. If they were to make the attempt, they would produce something which would set all the old Irish speakers laughing at them….”
An tAṫair Peadar Ó Laoġaire,
sa Cork Weekly Examiner,
1-XI-1919.
