Sayers has often been unfairly held up as a scapegoat for the failure of Irish language education policy in the Republic of Ireland, as her autobiography, Peig, was a core syllabus text for many years. It is my personal opinion that if her presence on the curriculum had consisted less of accounts of the bleakness of Irish peasant life at the turn of the century and more farmers’ wives cuckolding their husbands with corpses possessed by the devil, the Irish language would be in rude and glowing health today. Ah well. The century is still young.
