Rathcairn

History

The Meath Gaeltacht was formed when the Irish Land Commission redistributed large portions of the estates of landlords, and farmers from the Gaeltacht areas of the western seaboard were resettled in Meath in the 1930s. The migrants were from Cork, Kerry, Connemara, Mayo and Donegal. The government's goals were to relieve overcrowding and poverty in the western counties and to spread the Irish language. This "colony", as it was known, was also a social experiment to redress the 17th-century ethnic cleansing of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell's draconian action ‘To hell or Connaught’. However, due to the limited size of the Gaeltacht, the difficulty of providing a wide range of services through Irish led to bilingualism becoming necessary. Ráth Chairn was founded in 1935 when 27 families from Connemara moved east to live on land acquired by the Land Commission. The initiative promised potential migrants a higher quality of life, greater crop yields than Connemara and newly built homes. The proposal also aimed to stop the decline of the Irish language by creating an Irish-speaking community in a new location. Each family was provided with a Land Commission house and a farm of approximately 8.9 hectares (22 acres), a sow, piglets and basic implements. A further 11 families joined the original settlers in 1937. For the most part, when the migrants arrived, they were welcomed into a county where the ethos of the romantic Gaelic revival was in full swing. However, resentment manifested itself in local newspapers, that the migrants were given the land in preference to the local farmers. The Meath Chronicle reported on 27 April 1935 that a local Meath resident was arrested for threatening the life of a Land Commission employee but was released without charge and secondhand…