The movement can truly claim to have effected the conversion of a large amount of intellectual apathy into genuine intellectual activity.
The declared objects of the League--- the popularising of the national language and literature--do not convey, perhaps, an adequate conception of its actual work, or of the causes of its popularity.

It seeks to develop the intellectual, moral, and social life of the Irish people from within, and it is doing excellent work in the cause of temperance.
Its president, Dr.Douglas Hyde, in his evidence given before the University Commission,[29] pointed out that the success of the League was due to its meeting the people half way; that it educated them by giving them something which they could appreciate and assimilate; and that it afforded a proof that people who would not respond to alien educational systems, will respond with eagerness to something they can call their own.

The national factor in Ireland has been studiously eliminated from national education, and Ireland is perhaps the only country in Europe where it was part of the settled policy of those, who had the guidance of education to ignore the literature, history, arts, and traditions of the people.

It was a fatal policy, for it obviously tended to stamp their native country in the eyes of Irishmen with the badge of inferiority and to extinguish the sense of healthy self-respect which comes from the consciousness of high national ancestry and traditions.

This policy, rigidly adhered to for many years, almost extinguished native culture among Irishmen, but it did not succeed in making another form of culture acceptable to them.