Over the past few months, New Graphic has worked with the National Archives of Ireland on the naming and design of The Story of Us, the 1926 Census project.
Looking closer at the original census forms, you might notice nuances in the handwriting compared to the way we write Irish today. Many entries are written in traditional Irish lettering, or Cló Gaelach (Irish type), which is a writing system tied closely to the language and Ireland’s typographic heritage.
One striking example is the return for republican Máire Nic Shuibhne (Mary MacSwiney in English). She completed her form in Irish but refused to sign it in the standard way. Instead, she added an inscription translated in pencil by the census Garda as information given “by order of the Government of the Republic”; capturing both an ordinary household record and the political tensions that defined the new Free State.
Cló Gaelach has roots in seventh-century Irish script found in manuscripts. Alongside familiar features like the fada, it used the ponc séimhithe, a dot above consonants marking lenition (a softening of consonants in Irish grammar), later replaced by the letter “h” as Irish moved toward Roman letterforms: Cló Gaelaċ becoming Cló Gaelach.
A brief history of Irish type
Cló Gaelach forms part of a much longer timeline of writing systems designed for the Irish language. Ireland’s earliest writing system, Ogham, is over 1,500 years old. Often compared to runes, Ogham is made up of notches and lines carved into stone along a stem line, with each character representing a sound from early Irish. Interestingly, we can find both the later manuscript Ogham and Irish script together in the Book of Ballymote which details the grammar and use of Ogham using Irish script. A unique element is the circular composition that was titled Fege Fín (Finn’s Window) in reference to the folklore sagas of Finn and Brian Boru that part of the manuscript is devoted to.
The 1800s-1900s
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cló Gaelach was more than a writing system. It became a visible symbol for Irish identity, and a way of differentiating Ireland from its nearest neighbour.
Before independence, Irish-language street signs had little official standing, which made such signage inherently political. Irish lettering on signs, shopfronts and printed material became a quiet but powerful expression of representation for the language and national identity. Speaking about political connotations around street signs in Ireland before independence, Design and Cultural Historian Tom Spalding notes in his book Layers: “Street signage has a strange double identity of being commonplace, but also of carrying underlying messages about authority and control”.1 This dynamic is still visible today in the North of Ireland.
Many historic Cló Gaelach street signs are still in place across Ireland, with Dublin’s dark green street plates dating to before independence and the blue mid-century bilingual street signs as some of the last official street plates that use Irish lettering. A recent project which has been mapping Cló Gaelach street signs is Dr Nicole Volmering’s Clóscape project, which has also helped renew interest in their cultural significance.2
After Independence
Irish lettering kept its symbolic role after independence in Ireland. According to the National Library of Ireland, one of the first visual marks of the Irish Provisional Government in 1922 was the overprinting of English stamps with Irish lettering. By the 1926 Census, Cló Gaelach still carried strong associations with Irish identity, language and statehood.
It remained the national writing system for Irish until the mid-twentieth century, when it was replaced by Roman letterforms. This transition was primarily due to concerns surrounding modernisation and legibility, and so debates began over tradition versus modernisation in the form of which letterform should represent the Irish language.3
In hindsight, the loss of Irish lettering came at a considerable cultural cost too.
References
1 Spalding, T. (2013) Layers. Associated Editions.
2 Volmering, N. (n.d) Clóscape.
3 Bolger, MA (2016) Designing modern Ireland: the role of graphic design in the construction of modern Ireland at home and abroad (1949-1979) PhD thesis. School of Arts & Humanities. Royal Irish Academy.
Neylon, L. (2020) Documenting the History of Some of Dublin’s Mismatched Signs. Dublin Inquirer
Also see: Bolger, MA. (2008) Design Factory: On the Edge of Europe. Lilliput Press.
