The Celts

The Vikings were the first foreign invaders for nearly a thousand years and Gaelic Ireland found itself without any political structure for facing a common foe. When Brian Boru, from the obscure sept of Dal gCais in east Clare overthrew the Norse city of Limerick and later made himself King of Munster, he was technically a usurper. But the Uí Néill king of Tara felt unable to resist him and from 1002 on Brian was in effect king of Ireland, or, as he preferred to put it Imperator Scottorum - Emperor of the Irish. In a sense he was the first Ard-Rí, the first who was strong enough to overthrow the Vikings.

Clontarf in 1014 was not a clear-cut engagement between Irish and Norse, but from then on the Vikings no longer presented a formidable challenge to Gaelic Ireland. Soon the Dublin Norse were largely Christian and sent their first bishops to Canterbury for consecration. But the reopening of links with Europe had convinced a new generation of Irish churchmen of the need to bring their ecclesiastical structures more fully into line with Rome and the continent. Because the twelfth-century Reform of the Irish Church took place in the same century as the Anglo-Norman invasion, we are sometimes inclined to forget that the reforming Synods of Cashel (1101), Rathbreasail (1111) and Kells (1152), the work of Celsus and Malachy, and the introduction of the Cistercians and Canons Regular all owed their success to Gaelic Ireland.

Like the Vikings, the Normans will also be dealt with in a separate chapter. Here it is sufficient to point out that even more than the Vikings they revealed the fatal Gaelic flaw of inability to unite. It was the interminable struggle for political supremacy between the provincial kings in the 1150s and 1160s that allowed Dermot Mac Murrough to make his appeal to King Henry II in the first place and induced the English king to encourage his subjects to go to Dermotís aid. De Lacy in Meath and de Courcy in east Ulster easily overcame any resistance there. In Connacht and Munster the young Norman barons proceeded to divide up Galway, Mayo and Kerry. So within a century of the invasion, the native Irish held only about a quarter of the land, mainly in central and west Ulster. Many of the new religious houses now excluded the natives, and a number of the bishoprics, including the primatial see of Armagh, were henceforth barred to them.

Yet from this limited base Gaelic Ireland fought back. A futile attempt to revive the high kingship was made in the 1250s, which led to the death of Brian O'Neill at the battle of Downpatrick in 1260. Perhaps its importance lay in the fact that Gaelic Ireland once more failed to unite around a single leader. Edward Bruce, brother of King Robert of Scotland, was no more successful at the battle of Faughart in 1318 and it was in the cultural rather than the political field that the great Irish revival of the fourteenth century was most effective. One wonders if any of the Normans really became more Irish than the Irish themselvesí. In an effort to prevent further cultural assimilation the Statutes of Kilkenny sought to enforce a policy of apartheid on the Anglo-Irish from 1366 on.

But the Gaelic advance continued and by 1500 Gaelic lordships like those of O'Neill, O'Donnell, Maguire, McMahon and O'Reilly in Ulster, O'Byrne, O'More and O'Connor in Leinster, the various branches of the MacCarthys and O'Briens in Munster and the O'Connors in Connacht were semi-independent principalities - about sixty in all.

It was these chieftains and their followers, side by side with the two Fitzgerald houses, that put up the stiffest resistance to the Tudor conquest in the sixteenth century. First the Fitzgeralds of Leinster and then those of Munster were overthrown and by the end of the century Ulster was the only place left where the Old Irish were still in the ascendant.

In the final struggle against the Tudor monarchy Hugh O'Neill prove himself in many respects the greatest of all leaders of Gaelic Ireland. His vision of politics, at first confined to central Ulster, was soon broadened to include all Ireland and ultimately had a European dimension as well. An unusual combination of Gaelic chieftain and Renaissance prince, he recruited both Gael and Anglo-Irish in his service. The recently published book by Micheline Kerney Walsh, Destruction by Peace, shows him still unbowed after Kinsale and not the blind, drunken, melancholic exile in Rome whom some of his biographers have depicted. But when he went to his lonely grave in San Pietro in Montorio in July 1616 - now unfortunately lost - the poets recognised that much of Gaelic Ireland had been buried with him:

There is a pall. . .
Which quenches the glory of the Gaels of Ireland.

Yet the effects of a millennium and a half are not wiped out by a single battle or the overthrow of one leader. The Celts had left many indelible marks on Ireland and its people which have remained - thousands of habitation sites dotting the landscape, the bulk of the country's place-names and family names, the majority of its saints and missionaries, its finest manuscripts, sculptures and metalwork, one of the earliest vernacular literatures in Europe, the majority language of the island until the Famine and the only widely-spoken minority language today, a splendid native music, one of the richest folklores in the world. Later settlers added to them and adapted them, but the core remains unmistakably Celtic. They now provide a rich inheritance for the whole people of Ireland.

Click here for part 7, or here for part 5.
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From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print).
Also see A Little History of Ireland.