It is not poverty that bears so hardly on us but the contempt in which we are held that is beyond our power of endurance
Owen Roe O’Sullivan (1748 – 1784)
Courtesy, kindness, and generosity are endemic to the Irish people. And while it has never been claimed that these qualities are passed on genetically, it can definitely be claimed that by strict example, and by the love and study of Irish literature, they were passed on from generation to generation.
Patrick Pearse, writing in 1912, said that had Irish literature been rediscovered four centuries ago, instead of Greek and Latin literature, modern letters might have received a nobler, more humane inspiration than they did receive. He believed that Irish literature was more heroic and at the same time more gentle than the old Greek literature, that its inspiration of chivalry and spirituality made it more delicate and mystical. And certainly, we know, from internal evidence in plenty, that it influenced the Irish mind with a whole lot of colour and fantasy, of chivalry and humanity, of pitiful tragedy and exultant romance.
The Irish people were receptive to the message St Patrick brought them because they understood mysticism and had an immense love of nature. The Irish mind was in sympathy with the Galilean, the rebel Jew who had been publicly rejected as a king by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who had turned Him over to his troops to be flogged, spat upon, slapped in the face, crowned with thorns and forced to carry His cross through the streets to be the centrepiece of a Roman crucifixion.
These events were akin to the heroic sagas of the Ulster Mythological Cycle, akin to the story of the death of Cú Chullain, who, when wounded, tied himself to a standing stone by the belt of his sword, to die fighting though hopelessly outnumbered. Moreover, the Irish mind understood symbolism. They understood that not every story was meant to be taken literally; they understood that there was poetry and there was prose. The Bible to them was full of symbolism.
This was the stuff of ancient Irish sagas, where it was thought better to live nobly for a day in freedom than to live a life of ignominy in slavery. This was the stuff of the Land of Tir-Na-n’Og, the Land of Eternal Youth, the World of Life Everlasting – the world for which the Irish Celt most yearned. This was the land that Brendan the Navigator (484 – 578) set sail for in the sixth century on his way to discovering America.
Like all people that have passed through seas of sorrow, they abounded in mercy. Tenderness and chivalry, quite unknown in the classical originals, are commingled with the characteristics of the Irish tales whenever possible. But the most remarkable fact lies in the emergence of the love story, pure and simple. This form of narrative is one of the glories of ancient Irish literature, wherein feminine influence sheds a glow of sweetness and dignity, of benignity, chastity and refinement.
There is an old myth that around the year 500 B.C., Ireland was invaded by hoards of Celtic warriors brandishing Iron Age technology, but there is no evidence for this; Irish scholars now believe that the process of change was a gradual one. No archaeological evidence of any kind has been found for an invasion of Celtic people. The strongest evidence for a Celtic presence in Ireland lies in the Irish Celtic language. This is the conundrum of early Ireland: the Celtic culture and language arrived but it is even possible that no, or very few, Celtic settlers came.
Ireland itself is the only Celtic nation-state in the world today; all the other Celts have been absorbed by larger political entities.
It is effectively argued that the Irish language and spirituality are intimately related to Hindi, Sanskrit and Indian spirituality and philosophy.
It is cited by Dr. Peter Berresford Ellis, in his seminal writing, THE DRUIDS. Dr. Ellis boldly puts forth a proposition that “…extraordinary parallels and similarities [exist] between the Celtic and Hindu cultures, occurring in the areas of language, law, religious attitudes and mythology, music and caste…”
THE world’s first lunar mapmakers lived in County Meath about 5,000 years ago, according to a Canadian scientist. Dr Philip Stooke, of the University of Western Ontario, is confident that he has found the world’s oldest map of the moon in the Knowth tomb in the Boyne valley.
‘I was amazed when I saw it. It is without doubt a map of the moon, the most ancient one ever found,’ he told BBC. Before Stooke’s discovery, the oldest map of the moon was by Leonardo da Vinci, drawn about 1505. The mysterious and remarkable complex of tombs at Knowth, Newgrange and Dowth are now a UNESCO world heritage site and a huge tourist attraction.
Stooke was puzzled that there was no map of the moon older than 500 years.
‘I simply could not believe this. I felt there must be an older map somewhere.’
His search of old manuscripts and records of Neolithic excavation led him to Knowth and a stone found there known as Orthostat 47. It contains a series of arcs on its right-hand side.
He placed a map of the moon over the markings and they lined up.
‘It’s all there in the carvings. You can see the overall pattern of the lunar features from features such as Mare Humorun through to Mare Crisium. The people who carved this moon map were the first scientists. They knew a great deal about the motion of the moon. They were not primitive at all.’ It has already been known that the Neolithic tomb architects paid close attention to the heavens and had a sophisticated knowledge of the motions of the sun. It is thought to have been part of their worship.
Newgrange, in the Boyne Valley, is the oldest known astronomically aligned megalith in the world. The impressive passage graves at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth are 500 hundred years older than the oldest Egyptian pyramids. The huge construction contains a 19m passageway to a central chamber. Above the entrance there is a small opening that is aligned so that the first rays of the sun on the winter solstice will enter the passageway and fill the chamber inside with light. The remainder of the year it is in total darkness.
The remains of the hearths of the wooden houses that stood at Mountsandel near Coleraine in County Derry over 9000 years ago can still be seen today. The site is a 61m mound with a hollowed centre that the Normans used as fortification in the 12th century. The Ceide Fields in County Mayo, is the site of the largest Stone Age community to have been unearthed in Europe. The farming community that lived there until around 5000 years ago probably numbered as many as 5000.
In earlier Ireland, the people lived on a varied diet: cultivated crops, both cereal and root, meats, fish, wild fowl and other products of the forests. Survival was relatively easy. And if the English were later to consider the Irish to be lazy, it was because the Irish lived well without the drudgery necessary in England.
A society in which existential needs (the need for warmth, shelter, food, clothing and human companionship) are satisfied, and the means to maintain these guaranteed, can turn its attention elsewhere, to ‘culture’ for instance. Before military and cultural invasions deprived the Irish of their land, resources and tools by which they could satisfy these existential needs, they were a cultured people.
Once their needs were met, they did not become obsessed with the acquisition of more of the same. The fanatical devotion to work as an end rather than a means had not yet stifled the freethinking Irish mind. It is a legacy of this spirit in the form of ‘an easy-going attitude to life’ which visitors find so charming a facet of Irish life. Until the Famine, communities such as these were to be found all over the West of Ireland. By the time the Famine was over, they were for the most part swept away.
The German scholar, Zimmer, speaks of the Old Irish monks as ‘instructors in every known branch of the science and learning of their time’. They were, he says, ‘the possessors and bearers of a higher culture than was to be found anywhere in the Continent’ and it is to them that he accords the honour of having laid ‘the cornerstone of western culture on the Continent’.
It was in 635 that Irish monks, led by Aidan, set out from Iona to convert the English – ‘a barbarous, stiff-necked, intractable race’ – and at the request of the King of Northumbria established the first monastery at Lindisfarne.
The Venerable Bede was born in 670 and he portrays in his writings the life of the Irish monk Aidan. ‘He neither sought after nor cared for worldly provisions but he rejoiced to hand over at once, to any poor man he met, the gifts which he had received from kings or from rich men of the world. He used to travel everywhere, in town and country, not on horseback but on foot, unless compelled by urgent necessity to do otherwise, in order that as he walked alone, wherever he met people whether rich or poor, he might at once approach them and, if they were unbelievers, invite them to accept the mystery of faith or if they were believers, that he might strengthen them in their faith, urging them by word and deed to practice alms giving and good works.’
The Irish monks carried with them the art of illumination and the Irish script. It was through the medium of the Irish script that reading and writing were brought into use among the English; the earliest extant manuscript of the earliest English epic, ‘Beowulf’, and the early Anglo-Saxon chronicles were written in what today is still the Irish alphabet.
Even the English poet Spenser, (His masterpiece is the epic allegory The Faerie Queene, written to honour Queen Elizabeth I, which was written in Ireland.) in his State of Ireland had to grudgingly admit, ‘For it is certain that Ireland hath had the use of letters very auntiently [anciently] and long before England; that they had letters auntiently is nothing doubtful, for the Saxons of England are said to have their letters and learning, and learned men from the Irish’.
He was possibly not aware that even before the English began to value learning, and flocked to Ireland to obtain it, for centuries Ireland’s valleys were dotted with schools, and her hillsides hummed with studying scholars.
In ‘A View of the Present State of Irelande’ (1596) Spenser argued that Ireland needed to be ‘cured’ of its native customs, laws, and religion, proposing a ‘scorched earth’ strategy, including forced famine to enforce English rule. He acquired over 3,000 acres of land, including Kilcolman Castle in County Cork, as part of his contribution to the plantation of Munster.
(The term ‘Plantation’ had nothing to do with bananas, or tobacco, or pineapples, or agriculture of any description. The ‘Plantation Policy’ in Ireland referred to the confiscation of lands from the native Irish and ‘planting’ the confiscated territory with new settlers from England.)
In his View of the State of Ireland, Spenser graphically pictures a little of what Elizabeth accomplished:
Notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corne and cattel, yet ere one year and a half, it was brought to such wretchedness as that any stony heart would rue the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glenns, they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves … if they found a plot of watercress or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time; yet, not able to continue there withal; that in shorte space, there was none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful countrey suddainlie [suddenly] left voyde of man and beast.’
He thought that Ireland could never be subdued until the Irish race was exterminated and to that end he suggested that they be not allowed to till their soil or pasture their cattle and that way they would quickly ‘devour one another’.
How close did Britain come to exterminating the Irish race? Sir William Petty, in his Political Anatomy of Ireland estimates that during the Cromwellian Settlements the population had been reduced to 610,000. (Prendergast estimates that the population had been reduced by five-sixths.) They probably died more quickly in the years immediately after that estimation, when they were cooped up in Connacht west of the Shannon river, without houses, cattle, or implements of tillage – as it were, to live off the wind. Most estimates put the Irish population as having been reduced to around 500,000.
Petty, writing twenty years after the Cromwellian Settlements of the early 1650s, also tells us that, whereas before 1641 the British in Ireland were to the Irish as two to eleven, after the settlement was effected three‑quarters of the land and five‑sixths of the houses belonged to the British settlers. He records that the Irish population lived off milk and potatoes, and lived in cabins that had neither chimney, door nor window. ‘So’, exclaims Sir William, and we can almost see the pious and gallant Englishman as he rubs his hands for glee, ‘they will never rise again’.
The superior Britisher in Petty allowed him to see no paradox in the situation whereby, after the people were reduced to a life of unparalleled hardship and misery, they could then be criticised and ridiculed for being in such conditions as were forced upon them.
Prendergast gives us a terrible picture of the condition of Ireland then:
Ireland, in the language of Scripture, lay void as a wilderness. Five-sixths of her people had perished. Women and children were found daily perishing in ditches, starved. Wolves preyed upon the bodies of many wandering orphans, whose fathers had been killed or exiled, and whose mothers had died of famine. In the years 1652 and 1653, the plague, following the desolating wars, had swept away whole counties, so that one might travel twenty or thirty miles and see not a creature. Man, beast and bird were all dead, or had quit those desolate places. The troops would tell stories of the place where they saw smoke, it was so rare to see either smoke by day or fire by night.
(If all this seems too long ago to be of any significance to civilisation, as we know it, remember that William Shakespeare was already dead by 1616.)
In September 1653, the British Parliament issued the order for the great transplanting of the Irish, in their own country, to make way for the settlement of Britains. Under penalty of death, no Irish man, woman, or child, was to let himself, herself, itself, be found east of the River Shannon, after the 1 May 1654.
The English massacred the Basques and Italians, who landed at Smerwick in 1580, after they surrendered.
Spenser believed that in the land of the little piggies the butcher was king. But the little pigies blew him out of his castle from whence he returned to London where he died after a short time. His barbarous butchery in Munster was swept away and it died with him.
And, again, we have the testimony of the Venerable Bede, the Saxon ecclesiastical historian, who, writing in the very shadow of the time of which he spoke, and describing the great plague of 664, says: ‘This pestilence did no less harm in the neighbouring island of Ireland. Many of the nobility, and of the lower ranks of the English nation were there at the time, who in the days of Bishops Finan and Colman, forsaking their native land, retired thither, either for the sake of divine studies, or of a more continental life; and some of them presently devoted themselves to study, going about from one master’s cell to another. The Irish willingly received them all, and took good care to supply them with food and drink free of charge, and also to furnish them with books to read, and their teaching, gratis.’
Repeatedly the records intimate that several of the schools in ancient Ireland had thousands of scholars in attendance. We are told that there were two thousand students at Kevin’s school at Glendalough, three thousand at Finian’s school at Clonard; three thousand at the school of Comgall at Bangor – and that Cloonmacnois at the height of its fame was attended by between six thousand and seven thousand students. There the dust of students representing every clan in Ireland, and many from overseas, mingle underneath the green sod of the old cemetery.
The common languages of the schools were Latin and Irish. Archbishop Usher, however, says that he himself saw positive proof that Hebrew was taught in the schools. George Stokes (supported by many other scholars) holds that Greek was also well known to the Irish teachers. Greek prayers, Greek glosses and Greek quotations are found accompanying various ancient Irish manuscripts, both at home and in the old libraries on the Continent of Europe.
With the Latin language, all the Irish scholars of those early days show an equal familiarity as they do with their own language. The Latin classics were at their fingertips. They wrote in that language with a masterful ease and read it voraciously.
A single illustration, of numberless ones available, is the famous letter of St Cummian (seventh century) written to Segenius, Abbot of Iona, concerning the Easter date controversy that nearly rent the church.
In this letter there is a wealth of classic learning, and an intimate familiarity with things Latin, Grecian, Egyptian, Hebrew, that justly amazes the scholars of today – ‘a marvellous compilation’, says Professor Stokes, ‘because of the vastness of its learning’. Cummian quotes such commentators as Jerome and Origin, and many Fathers of the Church; discusses the opinions of Augustine, Cyprioan, Pachomius (founder of Egyptian monasticism), Gregory the Great, etc; refers to the views of the Irish saints; and balances the decrees of the Councils of Nice and Arles. He gives the Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian names of the first lunar month and ‘refers to almost every cycle and emendation of a cycle that we know of – the Paschal cycle, and those of Anatolius, a Theophilius, Dionycius, Cyril, Morinus, Augustine, Victorius, etc.’.
D’Arbois de Jubainville in the introduction to his Study of Gaelic Literature, speaking on the subject of Irish classical knowledge, says of the early Irish missionaries and scholars in Europe: ‘What surprises us most about these Irish Emigrants was that they knew Greek, and were probably the only people in Western Europe, then, who knew it. They have Graeco-Latin glossaries, grammars, and books of the Bible in Greek … It was considered good taste among the Irish then, to mingle Greek words throughout the Latin text which they composed.’
The medievalist, Arsene Darmesteter notes: ‘The classic tradition, to all appearances dead in Europe, burst into flower in the Island of Saints. The renaissance began in Ireland seven hundred years before it was known in Italy. And Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was at one time the metropolis of civilisation.’
- Darmesteter expresses his astonishment at finding Greek taught in Ireland when it had been forgotten elsewhere, and when even such a noted scholar as Pope Gregory the Great was ignorant of it. But Zimmer acknowledges that in Ireland, ‘the standard of learning was much higher than with Gregory and his followers … besides [there was] the opportunity of free access to the first sources of Christianity.’
‘The knowledge of Greek’, says Professor Sandys in his History of Classical Scholarship, ‘which had almost vanished in the West was so widely dispersed in the schools of Ireland that if anyone knew Greek it was assumed he must have come from that country’. And the eminent Celtologist, De Jubainville, talking of the Irishman Columbanus, who, in the sixth century, was evangelising and teaching in Burgundy and Lombardy, says: ‘We only need to glance at his writings to be at once convinced of his wonderful superiority over Gregory and the Gallo-Roman scholars of his time’.
In 575, when Columbanus (543 – 615) arrived in France, with 12 followers he immediately began denouncing bishops and royalty for their moral shortcomings. That he was able to do this, with little or no fear, testifies to the strength of the Irish church in Europe at that stage. It was then widely believed that it was only a matter of time before the Irish Church took over from Rome as head of Christendom. It was Columbanus himself who ended these speculations when he dedicated Ireland to the Universal Church of Rome and Ireland to the papacy. He and his followers established over 100 monasteries, and Bobbio in Italy, where Columbanus died, flourished as a centre of European learning for 12 centuries until it was closed by Napoleon in 1802.
St Gall, Parton Saint of Switzerland, was a companion of Columbanus. When they parted, Gall set up a monastery in Switzerland, and it remained a centre for Irish missionaries for many centuries. It is still the site of one of the great abbeys of Europe. The Irish scholar Moengal, considered the finest of his time, worked there and in the middle ages the Abbey was one of the main centres of Gregorian chant due to the Irish music teacher Tulito. The first Latin – German dictionary, written by an Irish monk in the 8th century, is still housed there. The Swiss city of St Gallen is named after St Gall.
Doheny, in his Memoir of Keating puts it as gracefully: ‘The early literary history of Ireland stands out distinct from that of any other country in Europe. While the revel of the Goth profaned the Roman forum and he stabbed his steeds in the Colosseum, the pilgrims of learning from every darkened land found shelter, sustainment and inexhaustible sources of information, in Ireland.’
And again the late Professor Zimmer, most eminent of Celtologists, states in his remarkable work, The Irish Element in Medieval Culture: ‘Ireland can indeed lay claim to a great past; she can not only boast of being the birthplace and abode of high culture in the fifth and sixth centuries, at a time when the Roman Empire was being undermined by the alliances and inroads of German tribes, which threatened to sink the whole Continent into barbarism, but also of having made strenuous efforts in the seventh and up to the tenth century to spread her learning among the German and Romance peoples, thus forming the actual foundation of our present continental civilisation.’
He further states: ‘They laid the cornerstone of western culture on the Continent, the rich results of which Germany shares and enjoys today, in common with all other civilised nations’.
Kuno Meyer, in his Introduction to Ancient Irish Poetry says:
Ireland has become the heiress to the classical and theological learning of the Western Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, and a period of humanism was thus ushered in which reached its culmination during the sixth and following centuries. For once, at any rate, Ireland drew upon herself the eyes of the world, as the one haven of rest in a turbulent world overrun by hordes of barbarians, as the great seminary of Christian and classical learning. Her sons, carrying Christianity and a new humanism over Great Britain and the Continent, became the teachers of whole nations, the counsellors of kings and emperors.
Says Dr Wattenbach in his Congregation of the Irish Monks in Germany: ‘It was thus, when the whole world seemed irrecoverable sunk in barbarism … the Irish went forth into every part of the world, to spread Christianity and knowledge’.
It was not just religion that the Irish scholars brought with them to the Continent. The French authority, Montalambert, paid tribute to their work in a sphere that was purely material: ‘It is due to their untiring energy that half of France and of ungrateful Europe has been restored to cultivation’. With typical irony the peaceful ‘invasion’ of the Irish scholars has been left out of, or given no emphasis in, history, while the history of warmongers is constantly glorified.
The Irish scholars and Continental scholars of Celtic lore, like Zimmer, agree that when St Patrick came, around 432, he found there a plenitude of learning and learned men as required a background of previous centuries of educational progress. When the reputation has descended to us of at least two most notable pre-Patrician Irish scholars on the Continent, it is a practical conclusion that there were dozens of others abroad also, whose memories have been submerged in the sweep of the ages.
For most of us, the picture of a white-bearded personage banishing a wriggling snake covers a great deal of what we know about Saint Patrick. However, there were never any snakes in Ireland, and so our saint was under no necessity to banish them. The Norse word for toad is paud; coming to Ireland they noticed there were no such creatures there. They heard of a man whose name was Paudrig, and they thought that this meant ‘toad-expeller’, and out of this misunderstanding came the legend of Patrick’s banishing not only toads but snakes. Of course that helped to add veneration to his name, for the snake was the emblem of evil. And so the most popular of the stories about Ireland’s apostle has a Norse and not an Irish origin.
He was not an Irishman although he spent much of his life in Ireland.
While St Patrick was unquestionably the evangeliser of Ireland, there is no doubt that Christianity had a foothold long before he came. Palladius, a bishop, was sent by the Pope to administer to the Irish believing in Christ before St. Patrick. ‘It is universally admitted’, says George Stokes, ‘that there were Christian congregations in Ireland before Palladius came’.
What is even more interesting is to find recorded by Eusebius and Nicephorus, that some of the apostles visited Ireland. Julian of Toledo says that James addressed a letter from Ireland to the Jews in Spain. In Irish tradition there is mention of Conal Cearnach visiting Jerusalem and bringing back the faith to King Connor Mac Nessa and of several Irish going to Jerusalem to be baptised. There is record from Vincentius of Bauvais that James, the son of Zebedee, preached in Ireland and when he returned to Jerusalem, where he was martyred, he took with him seven Irish disciples.
Abingdon, in Berkshire England, is said to have been founded in AD 165 by Abban, the earliest known Irish saint. St Guinifort, an Irish missionary, was martyred in Pavia, Italy, in AD 300. His relics continue to be venerated to this day. The first bishop of Toul, St Mansuetus, was reputed to be Irish. The Pope appointed him in AD 340. An Irish monk, St Eliph, also of Toul, France, was beheaded with his brother and two sisters in AD 362. Mount Eliph, near Toule, in named in his memory. All of these were before St Patrick.
According to Ptolemy, the second century Greek geographer, Ireland in his time already possessed ten cities, two of them termed ‘illustrious’, and of these, one corresponds with the location of Tara, the historic capital of early Ireland and the setting of many of the finest pieces of early Irish literature.
Despite the indisputable weight of evidence that Ireland had a highly civilised culture, why is it that most people would believe that the wellspring of culture overflowed from its source in Britain, who in its typical benevolent stepmotherly fashion, allowed the water of enlightenment to flow over the savage and barbaric Irish.
A few simple illustrations will suffice to explain how this is achieved.
From a children’s book entitled The Dark and Middle Ages, first published in Great Britain in 1975 by Mills and Boon, and aimed at schools and school libraries, comes the following quotation from the chapter ‘St Patrick of Ireland’: ‘It was AD 400. Ireland had never been occupied by the Romans and was far less civilised than Britain. There were no towns or villas in that remote land, nor had the Christian religion reached the Irish people. Their gods were in the mountains, the forests, and the lakes. Their priests were the mysterious Druids, who claimed magical powers over life and death, and sacrificed slaves to appease the wrath of god…He [Patrick] remembered his father, Calpurnius, a Roman official whose small villa had been far more luxurious than the thatched hall where Miliuc [his captor] and his followers slept on filthy rushes around a smoking fire.’
That ‘Ireland was never occupied by the Romans’ is the only provable correct statement in the quotation – indeed it seems clear from the Agricola of the Roman historian Taticus that the Romans did not know where Ireland lay. There was a vague notion that it was somewhere near where Iceland is situated. It was not until AD 82 a century after the Roman invasion of Britain that they worked out where it was. And although the bias of the writer against Ireland is obvious, (‘less civilised than Britain’, ‘sacrificed slaves’) in fairness to the author, Paul Titley, it could be said that it is not a history book, but rather a children’s storybook.
(English children, with their superior intellect, would no doubt be informed and enlightened enough to sort the fact from the fiction.) Unfortunately, the book is to be found in the history section of school libraries through the English-speaking world.
Where better to get some of the facts than from the literary work of St Patrick himself, which was preserved in the ancient Book of Armagh from the original manuscript in Patrick’s own handwriting? In his famous work, The Epistle to Coroticus, he first gives utterance to that cry against British oppression that was to be echoed every year for the following eighth hundred years. ‘Is it a crime’, he says, ‘to be born in Ireland? Have ye not the same God as we have’? He asks of the British prince.
He demands return of captives, young men and women – among them some of Patrick’s newly baptised children of the Church, and mercilessly castigates the tyrant who sacrilegiously carried them off. ‘With my own hand’, he says, ‘have I written and composed these words, to be given and handed to, and sent to, the soldiers of Coroticus. On the day following that on which the newly baptised in white array were anointed with the chrism, it was still gleaming on their foreheads, while they were cruelly butchered and slaughtered with the sword.’
There is a legend that when Patrick found that his old master was dead, he shed floods of tears. However, the son of his master lived to become a bishop and two daughters became nuns. There is some evidence from St Patrick in his most famous work, The Confession, that he found himself in Ireland in the midst of very learned men: ‘For this reason I have long been thinking of writing, but up to the present I hesitated; for I feared least I should transgress against the tongue of men, seeing that I am not learned like others, who in the best style therefore have drunk in both laws and sacred letters in equal perfection; and who from their infancy never changed their mother tongue; but were rather making it always more perfect’.
It appears that there was no love lost between the Roman Empire and the people of Ireland and Scotland who were known under the collective names of Scotas, Scoti or Scots. The Romans recorded the destruction of all the principal Roman stations between the Severn and the Dee. In the year 396, Stilicho gathered a large army for a new war against the Irish antagonisers. Although the Irish were driven back, the Venerable Bede says: ‘The insolent Irish invaders returned home only to come again after no long interval’.
Within a few years the Romans had abandoned Britain altogether.
There is no shred of evidence to suggest that slaves were sacrificed then or at any time in Ireland. (No missionary of any religious persuasion was ever martyred by the Irish, even by the so-called slave-eating pagans of ancient times.)
If Paul Tilly was not writing a history book, the same cannot be said for the Irishman JF Lyndon who in his book The Course of Irish History says in praise of the English colony: ‘Our legal system and our courts of law are in a large measure inherited from them. So too is our legislature…Our civil service and our system of administration…’
Lyndon, like so many historians, is wrong in attributing these institutions to the English. They are French institutions, which the Normans brought directly from feudal France to England, and then to Ireland. The institutions, which Lyndon considers were an advance on what the Irish had, came to Ireland only a hundred years after they came to Britain. Nevertheless, if we look for Ireland’s golden age we have to look to a time before these wonderful institutions were conferred so compassionately on Ireland.
The Cambridge Economic History goes so far as to assert that the medieval Irish were a nomadic herding people. From the description one could easily get the idea that the Irish were akin to the Masai of Africa.
Lastly, Bryony Orme, (best known for her work studying the large area of land submerged beneath the North Sea around 8000 years ago and naming it Doggerland) who should know better, in her important book Anthropology for Archaeologists says on page three: ‘By the end of the sixteenth century, however, a change in attitude towards Britain’s remote past can be discerned, a change due to the Elizabethans’ direct contact with primitive man in Ireland and North America’. Twenty-three pages later, Orme goes on to say that the term ‘primitive’ is not belittling but merely used by anthropologists to describe societies that are ‘small scale, pre-literate, non-urbanised and pre-industrialised’. At a quick glance this definition would seem to have been put there to help us.
But on closer inspection it does not help us at all. To take point number four first, in Elizabethan days the whole world was pre-industrialised, so the point is totally irrelevant. Regarding point number two, as a written language Irish is older than English, French, German, Italian and just about every other European language. Orme neglects to say whether a society has to be characterised by all four of these traits to be ‘primitive’. However, a brief look at urbanism in Europe is confusing to say the least. Italy was highly urbanised while the rest of Europe was not. So was the rest of Europe ‘primitive’?
Warsaw, for example was the only urban centre in the entire Polish lands. Lastly, ‘small scale’. In a political sense Irish society was ‘small scale’. But so too were Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy as well as Germany before Bismark, and no one would dream of calling these societies ‘primitive’ just because they were ‘small scale’.
Dr Douglas Hyde (the Protestant founder of the Gaelic League, and first president of the Irish Republic, who could speak French, German, Irish, Hebrew, Greek and Latin fluently as well as being an award winning poet in the English language), tells of the Munster poet Eoin Ruadh (Owen Roe) O’Sullivan (1748 – 1784) who, while still a common farm-hand, amazed his master’s son (just returned from a Continental college) by constructing for the latter a Greek passage that had puzzled him.
Eoin Ruadh summed up the feelings of his people in an Irish poem around 1780: ‘Ní hé an bochtanas is measa liom …’ It is not poverty that bears so hardly on us but the contempt in which we are held that is beyond our power of endurance.
Owen Roe lived at the worst time in history for an Irish poet, when the Penal Laws were killing the ancient way of life and when Catholics had no legal way to make a professional living. He was a brilliant, red-haired, hard-living brawler, called “Owen of the Sweet Mouth”.
He could write and speak fluently in several languages and in Gaelic Ireland as a poet he is the equivalent to Robbie Burns in Scotland.
