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Padraig O Conaire agus Eire a Linne: Padraig O Conaire lived through one of the most agitated and interesting period of irish history. He was a young school boy of 9 years olf when Parnell died: “We had arranged, us school children, to have a fight about Parnell when the news reached us about his death, because there was a group of us on his side and another group against him, according to the opinions of our families probably. But when we assembled together behind the old prison to wage battle there werent boys there meeting socially with the sadness we felt about the death of our leader. And it was that the disagreement and the bad blood between us, the sorrow won” After the deat of Parnell, the political field was very quiet, and it was from this quiet that the cultural revolution sprung when the irish people for the second time acquired knowledge of their native heritage that was in danger of being stifled. Not only did Padraid O Conaire have a part in this movement, but, as we see after a while, he had an influence that wasn't small. Despite the fact that O Conaire was in London from 1899 to 1914, he had a close connected with free Ireland and the Irish that were coming on the scene at the time through the active part he had in the Gaelic League in the same city. It was in London he went to write Irish, and he got to know people like Liam O. O Riain, socialist and writer, Michael O Coileain, P.S O hEigeartaigh, Sean P. Mac Enrí, Fionan, Art, agus Micahel, writer of Chois Farraige. O Conaire returned to Ireland at the start of the Big War and he saw with his own eyes the 1916 Rising and the troubles that continued on from it to the founding of the Free State- the realisation of everyone's dreams at the time. It might be true that no writer would have a mind as alive and as sharp as Padraig O Conaire without making mention of his travel works that were so close to his own heart. We get from his essays especially, that his creative works (except maybe his collection of short stoeris Seach mBua an Eiri Amach), a consciousness of Ireland at that time through the eyes of the natives. O Conaire is mostly known as a literary man. As Aisling Ni D interprets sooner in this stretch, it was mostly innocent simple literature that was written in irish during the Revival at the start of this time. Active love for one's country or pietas for a language and country made up the largest part of the writing that was done at the time and it was held together by the limited literature of folklore or this from old literature. The likes of this in the poem, for example, from Donncadh O Liathain, “The Grey King” The simple compositions of this type are lacking in personal notes- I wouldn't dare to call it poetry. The words of Padraic O Conaire and Padraig Mac Piarais were poetry in the modern sense. Padraig Mac Piarais was a man of the theory of modern literature, the person who said in relaiton to the standard of literature “the standard of definite art form as opposed to folk form”. The advice he gave to the literary fold of modern irish literature: “Let us move away from the heap of dung and manure; let us move away from the dingy

farmyard; let us try to make our irish souls and minds understandable for each other and for the wide world”. O Conaire got courage from this instruction from Mac Piarais: “Does Padraig Pierce not think that the mode of his own stories in Irish give courage to some of us that are sick and tired of sean-nós, however beautiful, and however fitting to the time and to the life that was there when it was founded?” If Pierce was a man of theory, he left the League these theories about modern literature, that he enforced in his own works. There was a literary community from time immemorial in Irish literature up to the start of this century, a place where the voice of the community was as important as the voice of an individual was modern literature. O Conaire understood this when he said “..When a person started studying their own and exposing it to his neighbour, the era of modern literature is forthcoming. It is not just to forget that the person themself is the whole of that modern literature”....