Why did the fact that someone had gone out shooting, bring to mind our first President - Dr Douglas Hyde? Partly because an old army friend, with some exaggeration, used to tell of his aides-de- camp leaping from tussock to tussock, exhausted, as the seventy-odd year old Uachtaran blazed away at his woodcock or mallard or whatever. Douglas Hyde, in old age, was a marvel of vitality and wisdom. In youth he was something of a prodigy. His schooling was mostly at home, presumably from his father, a Church of Ireland minister. If Hyde was remarkable in old age, he was outstanding by today's standards, anyway, in his childhood and youth as Dominic Daly has brilliantly shown in his book, The Young Douglas Hyde, which, perhaps, the Irish University Press might reissue.
To young people of the day, the precociousness of the boy Hyde would be almost unbelievable. At thirteen he wrote a poem in French. He not only mastered Latin but read widely - as many books of Ovid or Livy or Horace as would make up almost a university course of reading. German, too, he mastered. A great background for the approach to Irish. He was, from early on, a scholar, but also a devoted sportsman; especially a shooter. Where does the Irish language come in? Very early on, he was acquainted with the Gaelic-speakers around the Roscommon rectory, and learned the language, you might say, from the grassroots up. He had, obviously a gift for languages. When he went to Trinity College Dublin in 1880 he studied Divinity but decided not to go for the Church; instead he took a degree in Law. His diaries, according to Dominic Daly, were a chart to his development. He loved John Mitchel's book The Last Conquest of Ireland, Perhaps. He loved him as a stylist and as a man who had done his bit for Ireland. Wrote the young Hyde in his diary: "My hundred thousand curses on England and her rule." That was in 1881.
But the Gaelic League was the great turning point. Patrick Pearse wrote in February 1914: "The Gaelic League will be recognised in history as the most revolutionary influence that has ever come into Ireland. The Irish Revolution really began when the seven Proto-Gaelic Leaguers met in O'Connell Street . . . the germ of all future Irish history was in that back room in O'Connell Street."
And it was an influence that reached even into young Protestant minds in the North. One young Methodist wrote of learning the history of his country for the first time and "the splendid hopes of an ancient nation's rebirth". More another day.