Strange Ireland

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Book excerpt

Chapter One - A Brief History Of Ireland

In the beginning, was the ice, and there was rather a lot of it. When it began to melt away, animals swarmed in, followed, around 8,500 BC, by people. These early Irishmen and Irishwomen were hunter-gatherers, gleaning what they could from the plants and trees, fishing the many rivers and loughs (that’s Irish Gaelic for what English speakers call a lake), and hunting the plentiful wildlife. Academics call this period Mesolithic, but we have no means of knowing what these people called themselves if indeed they had any collective nouns to describe who or what they were.

These Mesolithic people roamed around the island, hunting, gathering and producing little copies of themselves for a few thousand years, and then, around 3,500 BC, a fantastic array of now megalithic tombs sprung up across Ireland. The craftsmanship (or craftspersonship if you are politically correct) is as astounding as the astral knowledge. We will meet some of these places later.

These peoples lived in Ireland for another couple of thousand years before the Celts arrived, in approximately 600 BC. The Celts undoubtedly had a significant impact on Ireland, and the language and much of Irish culture, tales, myths and legends come from Celtic roots. When the Romans came to what is now Britain, they overran the island as far as the waist of Scotland, until the Picts repulsed them. Agricola said he could conquer Ireland with a single legion and auxiliaries, but did not have the chance to prove his boast correct. His failure to invade Ireland probably saved the Roman Empire from a great deal of grief, given the difficulties faced by later invaders.

While the Romans eventually brought Christianity to Britannia, Ireland, like Pictland, remained pagan. When the Romans withdrew, and possibly before then, Irish slavers raided Britain. One such raid captured a man that history has made an icon of Irishness; his name has been remembered as Patrick and legend says he was born in Dumbarton, then the capital of Strathclyde. After six years of slavery as a shepherd, Patrick escaped to Continental Europe from where he returned to Britain. According to an Irish poem, St Caranoc baptised him in Candida Casa, now Whithorn, in South West Scotland. Although historians debate the dates, it is likely that he returned to Ireland sometime in the fifth century, possibly in 431 AD. Patrick and his disciples spread Christianity through Ireland, founding a network of monasteries that also served as distribution centres for writing and other civilised culture. Pope Celestine had sent a man named Palladius to Ireland sometime earlier, although his influence seems to have been less than that of Patrick.

With the withdrawal of Rome from Britannia, hordes of Germanic tribes named Saxons, Junes and Angles, invaded their old territories, bringing paganism with them. There was a raid or two from the Anglo-Saxons who had invaded Great Britain, but nothing the Irish could not handle. As Christianity took root, Ireland became a shining light of hope for the western world.

This happy period of growing civilisation lasted until the end of the eighth century when a new force burst into the European theatre, spreading carnage and horror along the seaways and rivers. The Norsemen - or Vikings - had arrived and Ireland would never be the same again. The Norse' first victims were the monasteries, depositories of richly decorated manuscripts as well as of profound knowledge. The pagan Norse destroyed what they could not steal and murdered those they could not enslave. Celtic Christianity wilted under the onslaught. Worse was to come as rather than raiding, the Norse began to settle. Norse colonies sprang up along the coast, forming settlements for trade that in time would become Ireland’s major cities. After more than a century of intermittent warfare, the Irish got the Norse under control, and then came the next and even more dangerous invasion.

Ireland was not a single country, but a loose assembly of rival kingdoms, with a High King above all. This High King ruled from Tara, dispensing justice as he tried to establish some sort of order on the unruly sub-kingdoms who theoretically bowed before him. The primary kingdoms were: Munster in the south, Connaught in the west, Leinster in the east, Meath in the centre and Ulster in the north. It was a dynastic dispute in Leinster which led to the next traumatic event in Irish history.

Diarmais Mac Murchada had been king of Leinster until a rival grabbed his throne. Diarmais was aware of the century-old Norman conquest of England and later occupation of much of Wales and asked for Anglo-Norman help to regain his kingship of Leinster. That decision was to prove costly for Ireland and altered the course of Irish history for the next seven hundred years.

The Anglo-Norman lords agreed, with their soldiers defeating the incumbent king of Leinster and placing Diarmais on the throne. Not content with that, the Normans began to attack the other Irish kingdoms. Worse, King Henry II of England supported his knights’ interference in Ireland, and the Pope also thought it a good idea. The following year, more Normans invaded Ireland, with Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, leading them.

Ireland being the strange place it is, the effect of the Norman-English upon Ireland was foretold by a now-unknown scribe.

Wicked is the time which will come then; envy, murder, oppression of the weak, every harm coming swiftly… the hypocrites will come, they will assume the shapes of God – the slippery ones, the robbers.

The Norman- English invaders conquered much of the country, lost some to a counter-attack led by Ruaidri Ua Conchobair, the High King, but retained the main ports and hinterland. In 1171 Henry of England led another Norman- English invasion and grabbed more Irish land. After that disaster, the Norman-English aggression and expansion were met with increasingly bitter Irish resistance. Treaties were made and broken as the Norman-English treated Ireland as if they had a right to own the country and the Catholic Church supported the invaders.

However, although the mailed Normans had an obvious military advantage, the Irish refused to give up. Year after year, decade after decade, Irishman fought the invaders, with gradual success. As in Scotland, the Normans intermarried with the local women, and the children spoke Gaelic and became as Irish as the natives. The Irish slowly rolled the English back until they were enclosed within the ‘Pale’ – Dublin and the immediate hinterland. Only when the Tudors were on the English throne was there another concerted English attempt to conquer Ireland.

Henry VIII of England, he of the many wives, self-declared that he was King of Ireland and sent over his armies and the Protestant faith. Decades of fighting saw an English occupation by the end of the sixteenth century. When King James VI of Scotland added England to his thrones, he tried a new tactic to quieten Ireland. He settled Protestants from both Scotland and England in the north of the island, Ulster. King James wished to place a Protestant barrier between Catholic Ireland and the Western Isles of Scotland, from where many thousands of fighting men had sailed to help the Irish in their struggles. A secondary reason was that Ulster had been the part of Ireland most resistant to English control. The native Irish watched the spread of the Scots-English colonists until 1641 when they rose against them in war as bitter as any in history. A Scottish army was sent to Ulster, with mixed fortunes, and later Oliver Cromwell crossed the Irish Sea. By 1652 Cromwell’s soldiers had reduced much of Ireland to a smoking ruin and heaped the dead in piles. More land was taken from the Irish and given to Protestant settlers.

As the Protestants tightened their grip on Ireland, new laws struck at the Roman Catholic majority. For instance, Catholics were not allowed to hold public office, follow a professional career or own arms. Despite the repression, the vast bulk of the population remained loyal to the Roman Catholic faith. The island seethed with frustration that occasionally boiled over into risings against the Protestant rulers. Politically, things altered in 1707 when the Scottish and English parliaments merged to form the union known as Great Britain although Ireland had her own parliament, with only Protestants allowed to make the laws.

In 1798, with Europe aflame with the French Revolutionary War, thousands of Irishmen rose against the administration. The British crushed it with some brutality got rid of the Irish parliament and united Ireland with Great Britain. That move was not altogether negative, for in 1829 a Catholic emancipation bill gave more equality to that faith. For centuries, famine had been a constant threat to the largely rural economy of Ireland and in the 1840s a series of bad years helped blight spread across the potato crop, the staple crop of much of the island, particularly in the west. Around a million people died, and another million or so emigrated. Many blamed the British government for the tragedy, intensifying the bitterness already felt. In the 1880s, demand for land reform led to increased violence, and as the nineteenth century ground to its finish and moved into the twentieth, the British government promised Home Rule for Ireland. The First World War intervened, Home Rule was put on the back burner, and Irish anger erupted in the Easter Rising of 1916. To the British authorities, heavily involved in the First World War, this rising was seen as treason, and when the smoke cleared from Dublin, they ordered the execution of the leaders. Ireland watched, seethed and remembered.

Two years later Sinn Fein, ‘We Ourselves’, the party for Irish independence won the democratic vote and formed a government in Ireland rather than sitting in Westminster. In 1919 the War of Independence began, lasting until 1921. The result was a treaty between Ireland and Great Britain that set up the Irish Free State for most of the island, with the Six Counties of Ulster voting firmly to remain British and forming Northern Ireland. However, there was still no peace as civil war disrupted the new Free State between those who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who wanted more. In 1949 the Irish Free State declared itself a Republic. The majority of people in Ulster wished to remain British.

Behind the politics, the people struggled on, each intent on his or her own life and worries. And all the time, people lived with their superstitions and strange happenings.