“We Issue from everywhere” is how Greg Delanty chose to translate “Níl áit ar fuaid na cruinne nach ann a saolaiodh sinne”the final line of Seán Ó Ríordáin's beautiful poem NÍ Ceadmhach Neamhshuim; but a more direct translation might be “there is no place in the world where we weren't born”. This is the thesis of Ní Ceadmhach Neamhshuim and arguably it is the thesis of Ó Ríordáin's collected works. If there's no place on Earth that we weren't born in then nobody is a stranger, nobody is a foreigner, everyone is our community and everyone is our concern.
For a long time writing, and especially poetry, in the Irish language has been filtered and curated. Very little was discussed in schools that was not explicitly about the Irish language or the misery of the Irish people under British colonialism. Ó Ríordáin's poetry may give us an idea of why that was the case. Because while Ó Ríordáin certainly did write poetry about the Irish language, his relationship to it, his shame at it being his second language rather than his first and the way the language was looked down upon by society at large and especially the Church; he also wrote about sexuality, about solidarity about collectivism. In Ní Ceadmhach Neamhshuim Ó Ríordáin specifically mentioned South Afirca, a reference to Apartheid more than a decade before the workers of Dunnes Stores held their famous strike against Aparthied South Africa.
And Ó Ríordáin was not the only one. Seanchas Annie Bhán a collection of folktales collected from the seanchaí Annie Bhán begins with two back-to-back cautionary tales against hoarding wealth and features many stories about outsmarting and outdoing the ruling class. It seems plain to me that much Irish Language writing has been deemed too radical to be taught about or promoted for much of our nation's history. It's only in the past decade or so that Ó Ríordáin's poetry has been getting the recognition it deserves in the English speaking world, Seanchas Annie Bhán is out of print and difficult to find. Whereas the poetry of avvowed fascist and Hitler admirer W.B. Yeats has been freely available and actively taught in schools for decades. The latter affirms the state, the former affirms the people.