Does anyone know anything about the writings in Irish of Sean Mac a' tSaoir (John Carpenter) bishop of Dublin in the 18th cent ? He was born in 1729 in the center of Dublin.

Many years ago I saw a copy of some pages from a manuscript that he wrote. It came from the national library. Although I'm not certain about this, he may not have been a native Irish speaker, but learned it at some school nearby. He was assoicated with the Irish scholar Tadhg Ó Neachtain.

Nevertheless I find it difficult to believe that Irish wouldn't have been far away from Dublin in the mid eighteenth cent. surrounded as it was by Irish speaking counties. Dublin county itself must have been Irish speaking.

I wonder what kind of Irish did he use/write in ?

Try here, it has a collection of manuscripts from the national library:

http://www.isos.dias.ie/english/index.html go into collections and scroll down till you see the national library of Ireland archive.

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

Dublin city was never an Irish speaking city, it was founded as a Norse speaking city, which although began to become Gaelicisised to some extent for a couple of centuries by the influence of the surrounding Gael's, by the 13th century English has displaced both languages in the City. County Dublin, and most of the surrounding counties, would have been English speaking by John Carpenter's time, with a few pockets here and there surviving. Carpenter got his Irish from an Irish speaking school and was probably influenced by a mixture of dialects, Tadhg Ó Neachtain himself being from Roscommon. His writing was probably based upon the scholarly standard given that Ó Neachtain himself was from a bardic family, a tradition on its deathbed at the time. This standard bore little relation to the average man's spoken Irish, the written word of the poet, the priest or the scholar would have been alien to them, I was one told by somebody that the Irish of this class was equidistant to the Queen on England's English vs a Dubliner's English today, but multiplied many times.

Im not trying to be a pain here but just from what iv read and what we did in college i wouldnt say Irish was displaced by the 13th cent, It was thought the situation was bad enough regarding Gaelic customs and language that the Crwon felt the need to put together the Statutes of Kilkenny in the mid 14th cent and even later in the Tudor period that even in the Pale itself ‘all the common folk … for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit and of [the] Irish language’

I don't think we disagree, in the county of Dublin & the pale the language was still Irish by the Statutes of Kilkenny (not talking about the city), but by Johns time I don't think there would be much Irish, except a few pockets, in county dublin. As for the city, I'd argue it was never an Irish speaking city and even at the height of Gaelic influence over the city it was bilingual at best - that's not saying there weren't sub communities speaking Irish in Dublin, there were, but the city as a whole

I seem to remember reading that in the 17th and 18th centuries, some Dublin merchants found it made good business sense to acquire Irish so as to be able to deal with Irish speaking customers.

There is an account of an English traveller who heard a performance of Irish song. From the description that he left, it's obvious that what he heard was a sean-nós performance. It was in Port Mearnóg, in 1699.