Come Here To Me!

Evening Herald, 2 October 1920.

In the early twentieth century, some of the most interesting voices in Irish public life, including Socialist leader James Connolly, expressed their support for the idea of an international language.

A constructed international auxiliary language (differing from natural languages, which develop over time), Esperanto was the brainchild of Polish inventor L. L. Zamenhof. In 1887, under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful) he published Unua Libro, in which he introduced and described this new international language. Zamenhof did not believe that his constructed language would replace existing national tongues, but that it could exist alongside them and make human communication easier. The father of this ambitious project was twelve times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and there are streets named in his honour all over the world, including in Israel, Italy, Brazil, Catalonia, the UK and Poland. Zamenhof’s vision of international parity was certainly a romantic one, telling one gathering in 1905:

In our meeting there are no strong or weak nations, privileged or unfavoured ones, nobody is humiliated, nobody is harassed; we all support one another upon a neutral foundation, we all have the same rights, we all feel ourselves the members of the same nation, like the members of the same family, and for the first time in the history of human race, we -the members of different peoples- are one beside the other not as strangers, not like competitors, but like brothers who do not enforce their language, but who understand one another, trustfully, conceitedly, and we shake our hands with no hypocrisy like strangers, but sincerely, like people.

Writing to the Freeman’s Journal in 1902, E.E Fournier expressed a belief that “it is high time that the attention of the Irish people should be directed to a language which appears to have completely solved the problem of providing an international means of communication without prejudice to the use and study of an existing national language.”  Anyone curious about “a movement so full of possibilities for good” was encouraged to attend classes at the offices of the Celtic Association, 97 Stephen’s Green. Fournier, a distinguished intellectual and physicist, was at the very forefront of the Celtic Revival in Ireland and an early champion of Esperanto.

James Connolly

Even earlier that this in 1899, James Connolly used the pages of his weekly The Workers’ Republic to outline his own belief in the need for a universal language, though not one that stood in conflict with existing languages:

I believe the establishment of a universal language to facilitate communication between the peoples is highly to be desired. But I incline also to the belief that this desirable result would be attained sooner as the result of a free agreement which would accept one language to be taught in all primary schools, in addition to the national language, than by the attempt to crush out the existing national vehicles of expression.

Connolly was by no means alone in the global socialist movement in his support for a universal language, the very idea of a language not imposed by imperialism or colonialism but rather built by people themselves had great appeal to working class leaders. As Peter Glover Forster notes in his history of the language, the “democratising spirit” of the language appealed to the labour movement, and publications like Der Arberiter Esperantist (Germany, 1911) and Le Travailleur Esperantiste (France, 1912) reflected this. In the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Esperanto Union (SEU) was founded in 1921, believing in the revolutionary capability of a world language.

As well as socialists, language academics were centrally important to the Esperanto movement across Europe, something that is reflected in contemporary newspaper reports on the meetings of the Dublin Esperanto Club which was driven by the prior mentioned E.E Fournier. He wrote keenly in the Irish press on international conferences and efforts to advance the language, heralding the first International Esperanto Conference in 1905. In 1907, La Irlanda Esperanto-Asocio was born, with 1916 proclamation signatory Joseph Mary Plunkett among its committee members.

Freeman’s Journal, 22 February 1906.

When the 1912 British Esperanto Conference was held in Belfast, its delegates enjoyed a brief sojourn in Dublin, visiting the National Museum, Trinity College Dublin and more besides, as well as meeting local politicians and even the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

The first Esperantist in the English speaking world had strong connections to Dublin, though born in Chesire in England. Richard H. Geoghegan’s (1866-1943) family were Irish, and had lived for many years at 41 Upper Rathmines Road before his father emigrated to England for work. Geoghegan was responsible for the first published translation of L. L. Zamenhof’s work.

Post-independence, there remained an active community of Esperanto speakers in Ireland, something well documented by the Esperanto Association of Ireland. Their history notes the 1930s to have been something of a golden age for the language, in a city where there were now “six shops selling Esperanto books. Browne & Nolan, Nassau Street, opened a special Esperanto Section in its shop.” If there was an E.E Fournier of these times, it was Lorcán Ó hUiginn,  a stenographer in the Dáil by trade who brought an incredible new spirit of life into the movement in Ireland. Ó hUiginn taught popular classes on the language in the city and distributed publications in the language. Today, the work of Fournier, Ó hUiginn and others like them is continued by Esperanto Association of Ireland. Worldwide, there are some 2 to 10 million speakers of the invented language today. It is thus much more than just a historical curiosity.