The history of Ireland
Imagine that you are standing on a windswept headland, a country of lush green glens behind you, the tumultuous sea at your feet. A beautiful girl approaches you, an orphan, she says, but of noble lineage, who tells you a tale so full of romance and heroism and piety and cruelty that you cannot decide whether to laugh or cry, but still find yourself listening enraptured to her compelling voice.
This is Ireland, and the Irish themselves are inclined to surrender to her charms. For centuries, they have been compounding a political and social mythology out of songs, legends, and history, and the heroes of that mythology Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, Patrick Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, Daniel O'Connell, and Charles Parnell remain the controlling models for modern Ireland's political and social behavior.
When Patrick Pearse, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, invoked the Ulster hero Cu Chulainn while British troops besieged his little band in the Dublin General Post Office, he rallied his men with an image from the nation's antiquity. The revival of the Irish language, a cornerstone of government policy, affirms the continuity of the Irish Republic with its remotest antecedents. It is a nation that requires an understanding of its most distant past to complete an understanding of its present.
The Celts were a family of Indo-European warrior aristocracies related by language, religion, mastery of horsemanship, and a flammable temperament that kept them always at each other's throats. From their arrival in Ireland between 500 and 50 BC, the Celtic clans warred ceaselessly among themselves for territory, tribute, and cattle.
Sensitive and superstitious, they were terrorized by their priests (druids) and masterpoets, whose curses carried weight with the gods and in whose memories reposed the only record of tribal histories, genealogies, and myth. These learned, almost Brahmanic castes maintained their own training academies and provided the only source of social unity among the various tribes.
The Celts of Ireland
The family was the fundamental Celtic social unit from which all rights and authority flowed. Tribal alliances were matters of military convenience rather than treaty, and not until the 5th century AD did the Irish establish the semblance of a central power. Even then, the high king, ruling from the Hill of Tara, drew his authority not from law but from the tacit consensus of the legislative assemblies of tribal chieftains and nobles.
The O'Neill high kings, whose dynasty endured until the 11th century, invoked a national spirit by convening the first such assembly though each tribe had previously conducted its own and continued to do so. The O'Neills also raised a standing army (the Fianna), but even after they had subdued the Ulaid of Ulster last of the Celtic tribes to resist Gaelic dominance in 851, their control of Ireland remained tenuous.
The Roman Empire and Ireland
Gaelic civilization flourished unconsumed by the Roman Empire in what W. B. Yeats would call the Celtic Twilight. Its decentralized social structure evolved without interference, and when, in the 5th century, Christianity was introduced by St. Patrick, the new church adapted itself at once to this structure.
Abbeys and monasteries patronized by local chieftains and entirely independent of diocesan authority became the seats of church power; out of touch with Rome, the Irish clung to old doctrines long after they had been abandoned or revised elsewhere in Christendom. Yet the monasteries nourished a lively intellectual life; graduates of the poetic academies, attracted by the ascetic ethos, flocked to the monasteries and abbeys, learned to write, and created the stunningly illuminated manuscripts in which the oral literature of the nation was first recorded. By decree of St.Columba (Columcille), a Gaelic prince, poet, and founder of the first native order, lay poets were officially employed in every royal court after 575. The literary arts thus enjoyed the patronage of both church and state.
When the barbarians inundated Europe in the 5th century, Christian learning crawled to high ground in Ireland. As the deluge subsided, Irish missionaries ventured over the European continent, founding monasteries, restoring literacy, and resuscitating the faith amid the ruins of Hellenic civilization.
John Scotus Erigena (which means Irishborn) and his contemporary Sedulius Scotus taught in the palace schools founded by Charlemagne, and the monasteries ofIreland received students from abroad; but while this lively traffic earned Ireland the epithet Isle of Saints and Scholars, it turned Rome's efforts to reforming the doctrinally wayward church and bringing it under central control.
The Vikings in Ireland
In 795, Ostmen, the predatory Vikings, commenced their raids along the Irish coast, leveling monasteries and torching whole libraries. These Norse pirates built a string of garrisons along the eastern coast, proclaiming themselves kings and establishing Ireland's first cities and ports. The fractious' Gaels were helpless to dislodge these ferocious and well-organized intruders. Late in the 10th century, Brian Boni, an obscure chieftain from Clare, overthrew the Danish King of Limerick and, by three usurpations, dispossessed the O'Neills and declared himself High King of Ireland.
For a few short years, Brian united the tribes of Ireland behind his leadership; he routed the Danes from their chief stronghold, Dublin, at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Brian, alas, lost his life in the battle, and the Irish relapsed into squabbling over succession to the Tara monarchy.
Though their dominance had been broken, the Norsemen remained in Ireland as sailors and merchants, intermarrying with the Gaels and assimilating the native culture. In 1166 they joined with the chiefs of Leinster to overthrow their king, Dermot MacMurrough, who fled to England where he formed an alliance with some Norman adventurers who he hoped would restore him to his realm.
In 1169, these mailclad buccaneers landed on the Baginburn headland in Waterford and in 2 years had seized Leinster for their leader, Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, known as Strongbow. MacMurrough died soon after. Before these brilliant, methodical soldiers the Irish had no defense. In 1171, Strongbow and the rest of the Normans resentfully acknowledged themselves subjects of Henry II, and the High King Rory O'Connor recognized Henry as his sovereign in return for control over all unconquered areas. Ireland had become the property of the English crown.
The Normans marked their holdings with a line called the Pale, a thin stnp of land on the eastern coast. But as Norman and Gael intermarried, the former became, as the saying goes, more Irish than the Irish themselves.(The Irish referred to the Normans as old foreigners, while the English called those who had gone native degenerate English.) By 1261, the Gaels had adopted Norman military techniques, putting an end to their conquests, while the Normans had taken up the Gaelic language and culture, mamtaming poets and commissioning manuscripts like native chieftains.
The rapprochement displeased the English. In 1297, to consolidate the colony and muster troops from it for his Scottish wars, Edward I convened an Irish Parliament at Kilkenny, which was hostile to the Gaels and assimilated Normans. By 1366, the Parliament had promulgated statutes to separate the races, but these were largely ignored by a very mixed populatio.
The Normans had built cities, introduced English common law, and introduced names like Bourke, Butler, and Carey with O'Brien, O'Neill, and O'Donnell. Culturally distinct from England and uncomfortable as colonials, the Normans declared parliamentary independence in 1460.
Henry XIII and Ireland
The Reformation and the Tudor monarchy put an end to the Norman's adventure. In 1541, Henry VIII compelled the Irish Parliament to recall his sovereignty. He then asserted his authority to govern the Irish church, as he had already done in England, and Imposed the Plantation policy, under which native Irish and some degenerate English landholdings were seized and re-granted to loyal English fortune seekers.
Resistance to the policy centered in Ulster where the chieftains Red Hugh O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill, setting aside old rivalries, formed the Tyrone Confederation and, in the first of Ireland's revolutions, rose against Henry's new earls (as those who literally bought titles and rights to the land were called).
Promises of Spanish assistance were obtained, and from 1594 to 1603 the Tyrone Confederation rebelled with some success against the English. In 1601, a Spanish fleet sailed into Kinsale on the southern coast, and the English Lord Mountjoy turned to attack them, whereupon O'Donnell and O'Neill swept down from the north to besiege the besiegers.
The Battle of Kinsale Ireland
The Spanish pressed for a decisive engagement; O'Neill argued for attrition, but O'Donnell forced the issue. The Batle of Kinsale was fought on Christmas Eve, 1601, and the Hispano-Gaelic alliance, insufficiently prepared, went down in defeat. The defeated earls, O'Donnell and O'Neill, were permitted to return to Ulster; but after a few years of suffering English rule, they sailed in self-imposed exile to the Continent in 1607, an event often called the Flight of the Earls.
The Plantation policy went forward apace. In Ulster, barely one-tenth of the land was retained by its native inhabitants; the rest was planted with Presbyterian colonists from Scotland, dissenters in their own country. In 1641, Norman soldiers, unemployed and wandering the countryside, enlisted with the Irish chiefs of Ulster in another uprising.
The Irish Parliament, now sitting at Dublin, expelled its Catholic members, who gathered at Kilkenny to proclaim a provisional government. Presiding over this revolution was Owen Roe O'Neill, nephew of Hugh and a statesman of some sophistication; he envisioned for Ireland a centralized and autonomous native government.
Things to do in Ireland
Whether you want to make the most of the countryside, or enjoy the vibrant cities of Dublin and Belfast, there is plenty to do and see in Ireland. Car hire in Irish airports can be pre-booked before you travel and picked up when you arrive, so you can make the most of the sights and sounds of this diverse land at your own pace.
This is Ireland, and the Irish themselves are inclined to surrender to her charms. For centuries, they have been compounding a political and social mythology out of songs, legends, and history, and the heroes of that mythology Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, Patrick Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, Daniel O'Connell, and Charles Parnell remain the controlling models for modern Ireland's political and social behavior.
When Patrick Pearse, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, invoked the Ulster hero Cu Chulainn while British troops besieged his little band in the Dublin General Post Office, he rallied his men with an image from the nation's antiquity. The revival of the Irish language, a cornerstone of government policy, affirms the continuity of the Irish Republic with its remotest antecedents. It is a nation that requires an understanding of its most distant past to complete an understanding of its present.
The Celts were a family of Indo-European warrior aristocracies related by language, religion, mastery of horsemanship, and a flammable temperament that kept them always at each other's throats. From their arrival in Ireland between 500 and 50 BC, the Celtic clans warred ceaselessly among themselves for territory, tribute, and cattle.
Sensitive and superstitious, they were terrorized by their priests (druids) and masterpoets, whose curses carried weight with the gods and in whose memories reposed the only record of tribal histories, genealogies, and myth. These learned, almost Brahmanic castes maintained their own training academies and provided the only source of social unity among the various tribes.
The Celts of Ireland
The family was the fundamental Celtic social unit from which all rights and authority flowed. Tribal alliances were matters of military convenience rather than treaty, and not until the 5th century AD did the Irish establish the semblance of a central power. Even then, the high king, ruling from the Hill of Tara, drew his authority not from law but from the tacit consensus of the legislative assemblies of tribal chieftains and nobles.
The O'Neill high kings, whose dynasty endured until the 11th century, invoked a national spirit by convening the first such assembly though each tribe had previously conducted its own and continued to do so. The O'Neills also raised a standing army (the Fianna), but even after they had subdued the Ulaid of Ulster last of the Celtic tribes to resist Gaelic dominance in 851, their control of Ireland remained tenuous.
The Roman Empire and Ireland
Gaelic civilization flourished unconsumed by the Roman Empire in what W. B. Yeats would call the Celtic Twilight. Its decentralized social structure evolved without interference, and when, in the 5th century, Christianity was introduced by St. Patrick, the new church adapted itself at once to this structure.
Abbeys and monasteries patronized by local chieftains and entirely independent of diocesan authority became the seats of church power; out of touch with Rome, the Irish clung to old doctrines long after they had been abandoned or revised elsewhere in Christendom. Yet the monasteries nourished a lively intellectual life; graduates of the poetic academies, attracted by the ascetic ethos, flocked to the monasteries and abbeys, learned to write, and created the stunningly illuminated manuscripts in which the oral literature of the nation was first recorded. By decree of St.Columba (Columcille), a Gaelic prince, poet, and founder of the first native order, lay poets were officially employed in every royal court after 575. The literary arts thus enjoyed the patronage of both church and state.
When the barbarians inundated Europe in the 5th century, Christian learning crawled to high ground in Ireland. As the deluge subsided, Irish missionaries ventured over the European continent, founding monasteries, restoring literacy, and resuscitating the faith amid the ruins of Hellenic civilization.
John Scotus Erigena (which means Irishborn) and his contemporary Sedulius Scotus taught in the palace schools founded by Charlemagne, and the monasteries ofIreland received students from abroad; but while this lively traffic earned Ireland the epithet Isle of Saints and Scholars, it turned Rome's efforts to reforming the doctrinally wayward church and bringing it under central control.
The Vikings in Ireland
In 795, Ostmen, the predatory Vikings, commenced their raids along the Irish coast, leveling monasteries and torching whole libraries. These Norse pirates built a string of garrisons along the eastern coast, proclaiming themselves kings and establishing Ireland's first cities and ports. The fractious' Gaels were helpless to dislodge these ferocious and well-organized intruders. Late in the 10th century, Brian Boni, an obscure chieftain from Clare, overthrew the Danish King of Limerick and, by three usurpations, dispossessed the O'Neills and declared himself High King of Ireland.
For a few short years, Brian united the tribes of Ireland behind his leadership; he routed the Danes from their chief stronghold, Dublin, at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Brian, alas, lost his life in the battle, and the Irish relapsed into squabbling over succession to the Tara monarchy.
Though their dominance had been broken, the Norsemen remained in Ireland as sailors and merchants, intermarrying with the Gaels and assimilating the native culture. In 1166 they joined with the chiefs of Leinster to overthrow their king, Dermot MacMurrough, who fled to England where he formed an alliance with some Norman adventurers who he hoped would restore him to his realm.
In 1169, these mailclad buccaneers landed on the Baginburn headland in Waterford and in 2 years had seized Leinster for their leader, Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, known as Strongbow. MacMurrough died soon after. Before these brilliant, methodical soldiers the Irish had no defense. In 1171, Strongbow and the rest of the Normans resentfully acknowledged themselves subjects of Henry II, and the High King Rory O'Connor recognized Henry as his sovereign in return for control over all unconquered areas. Ireland had become the property of the English crown.
The Normans marked their holdings with a line called the Pale, a thin stnp of land on the eastern coast. But as Norman and Gael intermarried, the former became, as the saying goes, more Irish than the Irish themselves.(The Irish referred to the Normans as old foreigners, while the English called those who had gone native degenerate English.) By 1261, the Gaels had adopted Norman military techniques, putting an end to their conquests, while the Normans had taken up the Gaelic language and culture, mamtaming poets and commissioning manuscripts like native chieftains.
The rapprochement displeased the English. In 1297, to consolidate the colony and muster troops from it for his Scottish wars, Edward I convened an Irish Parliament at Kilkenny, which was hostile to the Gaels and assimilated Normans. By 1366, the Parliament had promulgated statutes to separate the races, but these were largely ignored by a very mixed populatio.
The Normans had built cities, introduced English common law, and introduced names like Bourke, Butler, and Carey with O'Brien, O'Neill, and O'Donnell. Culturally distinct from England and uncomfortable as colonials, the Normans declared parliamentary independence in 1460.
Henry XIII and Ireland
The Reformation and the Tudor monarchy put an end to the Norman's adventure. In 1541, Henry VIII compelled the Irish Parliament to recall his sovereignty. He then asserted his authority to govern the Irish church, as he had already done in England, and Imposed the Plantation policy, under which native Irish and some degenerate English landholdings were seized and re-granted to loyal English fortune seekers.
Resistance to the policy centered in Ulster where the chieftains Red Hugh O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill, setting aside old rivalries, formed the Tyrone Confederation and, in the first of Ireland's revolutions, rose against Henry's new earls (as those who literally bought titles and rights to the land were called).
Promises of Spanish assistance were obtained, and from 1594 to 1603 the Tyrone Confederation rebelled with some success against the English. In 1601, a Spanish fleet sailed into Kinsale on the southern coast, and the English Lord Mountjoy turned to attack them, whereupon O'Donnell and O'Neill swept down from the north to besiege the besiegers.
The Battle of Kinsale Ireland
The Spanish pressed for a decisive engagement; O'Neill argued for attrition, but O'Donnell forced the issue. The Batle of Kinsale was fought on Christmas Eve, 1601, and the Hispano-Gaelic alliance, insufficiently prepared, went down in defeat. The defeated earls, O'Donnell and O'Neill, were permitted to return to Ulster; but after a few years of suffering English rule, they sailed in self-imposed exile to the Continent in 1607, an event often called the Flight of the Earls.
The Plantation policy went forward apace. In Ulster, barely one-tenth of the land was retained by its native inhabitants; the rest was planted with Presbyterian colonists from Scotland, dissenters in their own country. In 1641, Norman soldiers, unemployed and wandering the countryside, enlisted with the Irish chiefs of Ulster in another uprising.
The Irish Parliament, now sitting at Dublin, expelled its Catholic members, who gathered at Kilkenny to proclaim a provisional government. Presiding over this revolution was Owen Roe O'Neill, nephew of Hugh and a statesman of some sophistication; he envisioned for Ireland a centralized and autonomous native government.
Things to do in Ireland
Whether you want to make the most of the countryside, or enjoy the vibrant cities of Dublin and Belfast, there is plenty to do and see in Ireland. Car hire in Irish airports can be pre-booked before you travel and picked up when you arrive, so you can make the most of the sights and sounds of this diverse land at your own pace.
Labels: Things to do in Ireland
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