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most of them spoke Irish, and often taught Irish grammar, they did not teach the language as a subject, and in many cases all other subjects were taught through English. Being him- self one of the people, the master naturally shared their opinions on questions of politics, while at the same time he was also an exponent of the national literary tradition and so did whatever he could to promote the culture of his pupils and of the people in general. As one chronicler of the times said, ‘during the eighteenth century this literary tradition had become the heritage of the tiller of the soil.’
In Penal Times, the hunted Catholic priests too often used the vastness and inhospitalble safety of parts of the countryside to say the Mass, sometimes at a rock on a mountain-side, oftentimes in the dark of night, using the same look-out system as the Hedge School. Even today, several such ‘Mass Rocks’ can still be pointed out throughout the country.
As young men, these postulants had gone abroad secretly to the continent where they re- ceived their education and ordination, before returning to Ireland to carry out their priestly oices and lead hunted lives. In most instances, they were stalked by professional priest- hunters, men who made a good living by the rewards obtained for bringing in priests-dead or alive. The hunted priests often made their homes in remote caves and recesses, or in man-made bunkers dug into the earth and camoulaged, and in one famous case, it is docu- mented, how the celebrated Catholic preacher and scholar, Bishop James O’Gallagher, lived for many years in a sod-covered lean-to, built against a turf bank in the Bog of Allen, county Kiladre, from where, as his writings informs us, he made a ‘wretched and secluded spot in the Bog of Allen the centre of his apostolic labours.’
It should also be remembered and recorded that back in those terrible days of Catholic/ religous persecution, there existed in Ireland many good Irish Protestants, true Christians and neighbours, who, at the pain of death, hid, and saved from capture and execution, scores of hunted priests. Furthermore, it is documented that many also took over the lands of poor Catholic neighbours in a ruse to prevent the land being coniscated and handed over to land-robbers. It was to discourage genuine Protestants from aiding and abetting their Catholic neighbours and to encourage persecutors, that in 1705, the Irish Parliament passed the resolution which stated “That the persecuting of and informing against Papists is an honourable service.” Many years later, when Lord Charlemont introduced in the Irish Parliament a bill to make it lawful for a Catholic to lease a cabin and a potato garden, he was physically and verbally attacked before being voted out of the chair.