After the creation of the Irish Free State, and limited advances with respect to the teaching and official use of the language, many members transferred their commitment to the new institutions, political parties and education system.

Spoken mainly by peasants and farm labourers in the poorer districts of the west of Ireland, Irish was widely seen, in the words of Matthew Arnold, as "the badge of a beaten race.

The late 20th-century Gaeilgeoir activist Aodán Mac Póilin notes, however, that "the main ideological impact of the language movement was not in the Gaeltacht, but among English-speaking nationalists".

[5] The League's first president, Douglas Hyde (Dúbhghlás de hÍde), the son of a Church of Ireland rector from County Roscommon, helped create an ethos in the early days that attracted a number of unionists into its ranks.

Citing Giuseppe Mazzini (the Italian nationalist who had been the inspiration for the rare language enthusiast among the Young Irelanders, Thomas Davis), Hyde argued that "in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light heart the best claim we have to nationality".

[11] Among the League's few campaign successes in its first decade was acceptance by the Post Office of parcels and letters addressed in Irish, and the recognition of St. Patrick's Day as a national holiday.

"[16] Although the League took this non-political principle seriously enough to decline participation in the unveiling of a 1798 centenary monument to Wolfe Tone, much like the Gaelic Athletic Association the organisation served as an occasion and cover for nationalist recruitment.

Seán T. O'Kelly recalls that, as early 1903, as a travelling manager for An Claidheamh Soluis, he was in a position to recruit young men for Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in every one of 32 counties.

Under a system of foreign rule that made the people "forget to look to themselves, and to turn their backs upon their own country", it did "more than any other movement to restore national pride, honour and self-respect".

[22][23]: 86–87  Claiming to afford a "common platform to Catholic and Protestant", by 1899 the League had nine branches in the city including one in the unionist Shankill ward where, in the 1911 census, 106 people recorded themselves as Irish speakers.

In the north, in Ulster, she focused on the more difficult task of recruiting Protestants, working with, among other activists, Hyde, Ada McNeill, Roger Casement, Alice Stopford Green, Stephen Gwynn, and Seamus McManus.

[24] James Owen Hannay (better known as the novelist George A. Birmingham), originally of Belfast, was co-opted onto the League's national executive body in December 1904 while a Church of Ireland (Anglican) rector in Westport in County Mayo.

[28] Offence taken at his successful play General John Regan, and his defence of Crawford's opposition to church control of education, strained Hannay's relations with nationalists and he withdrew from League.

Meanwhile, in North America, Crawford (who had found no political home in Ireland) went on to campaign with Eamon de Valera for recognition and support for the republic proclaimed in 1916.

[29] Ernest Blythe, who joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1909 with the distinction of maintaining for three years his membership of the Orange Order,[30] had as his first Conradh na Gaeilge teacher Sinéad Flanagan, de Valera's future wife.

All the priorities of the larger Irish-Ireland movement which developed around the revival of the language, including teaching children a national history and literature, and the use and consumption of Irish-made products, were associated with the sphere of home and community in which women were accorded initiative.

[33][34] Máire de Builtéir, who is credited with suggesting the term Sinn Féin to Arthur Griffith,[35] made it clear that women could make their contribution to the cultural revival without relinquishing their traditional roles.

[36] Formed in the wake of the disgrace and fall of the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell and defeat of the second Home Rule Bill, the League drew upon a generation frustrated and disillusioned with electoral politics.

[37] Writing in Alice Milligan's Belfast monthly, labour and socialist leader James Connolly maintained that in the absence of a creed capable of challenging the rule of the capitalist, landlord and financier, the nationalism of the Irish language movement would achieve little.

Most leaders of the Gaelic League desired "a return to medievalism in thought, in literature, in pastimes, in music and even in dress", but a nation, he argued, is not morally raised by dwelling on its past.

They ceased their League activities and were absorbed into the new political parties and into state bodies such as the Army, Police, Civil Service, and into the school system in which Irish was made compulsory.

Conradh na Gaeilge was among the principal organisations responsible for co-ordinating the successful campaign to make Irish an official language of the European Union.

[48] The decision of the Democratic Unionist Party to resist a stand-alone Irish Language Act, in part by insisting on compensating provisions for Ulster Scots, became one of the principal, publicly acknowledged, sticking points in the three years of on and off again negotiations required to restore the power-sharing executive in 2020.

[49] The 2020 New Decade, New Approach agreement promised both the Irish language and Ulster-Scots new Commissioners to "support" and "enhance" their development but does not accord them equal legal status.