Pádraic Pearse

The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.

I knew one boy who passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants, that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation__hat, in short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist.

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.