THE STORY OF THE IRISH RACE

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THE STORY OF THE IRISH RACE

The Irish race of today is popularly known as the Milesian Race, because the genuine Irish (Celtic) people were supposed to be descended from Milesius of Spain, whose sons, say the legendary accounts, invaded and possessed themselves of Ireland a thousand years before Christ.


The races that occupied the land when the so-called Milesians came, chiefly the Firbolg and the Tuatha De Danann, were certainly not exterminated by the conquering Milesians. Those two peoples formed the basis of the future population, which was dominated and guided, and had its characteristics moulded, by the far less numerous but more powerful Milesian aristocracy and soldiery. All three of these races, however, were different tribes of the great Celtic family, who, long ages before, had separated from the main stem, and in course of later centuries blended again into one tribe of Gaels - three derivatives of one stream, which, after winding their several ways across Europe from the East, in Ireland turbulently met, and after eddying, and surging tumultuously, finally blended in amity, and flowed onward in one great Gaelic stream.

The possession of the country was wrested from the Firbolgs, and they were forced into partial serfdom by the Tuatha De Danann (people of the goddess Dana), who arrived later. Totally unlike the uncultured Firbolgs, the Tuatha De Dannann were a capable and cultured, highly civilised people, so skilled in the crafts, if not the arts, that the Firbolgs named them necromancers, and in course of time both the Firbolgs and the later coming Milesians created a mythology around these.

In a famed battle at Southern Moytura (on the Mayo-Galway border) it was that the Tuatha De Danann met and overthrew the Firbolgs. The Firbolgs noted King, Eochaid was slain in this great battle, but the De Danan King, Nuada, had his hand cut off by a great warrior of the Firbolgs named Sreng. The battle raged for four days. So bravely had the Firbolgs fought, and so sorely exhausted the De Dannann, that the latter, to end the battle, gladly left to the Firbolgs, that quarter of the Island wherein they fought, the province now called Connaught. And the bloody contest was over.


The famous life and death struggle of two races is commemorated by a multitude of cairns and pillars which strew the great battle plain in Sligo - a plain which bears the name (in Irish) of "The plain of the Towers of the Fomorians". The Danann were now the undisputed masters of the land. So goes the honoured legend.

http://homepage.eircom.net/~kthomas/history.htm

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THE TUATHA DE DANANN


Such a great people were the De Danann, and so uncommonly skilled in the few arts of the time, that they dazzled even their conquerors and successors, the Milesians, into regarding them as mighty magicians. Later generations of the Milesians to whom were handed down the wonderful traditions of the wonderful people they had conquered, lifted them into amystic realm, their greatest ones becoming gods and goddesses, who supplied to their successors a beautiful mythology. Over the island, which was now indisputably De Danann, reigned the hero, Lugh, famous in mythology. And after Lugh, the still greater Dagda - whose three grandsons, succeeding him in the sovereignty, were reigning, says the story, when the Milesians came. The Dagda, was the greatest of the De Danann. He was styled Lord of Knowledge and Sun of all the Sciences. His daughter, Brigit, was a woman of wisdom, and goddess of poetry. The Dagda was a great and beneficent ruler for eighty years.

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THE MILESIANS


The sixteenth century scholar, O’Flaherty, fixes the Milesian invasion of Ireland at about 1000 B.C. - the time of Solomon. It is proven that the Celts whenceover they came, had, before the dawn of history, subjugated the German people and established themselves in Central Europe. At about the date we have mentioned, a great celtic wave, breaking westward over the Rhine, penetrated into England, Scotland, and Ireland. Subsequently a wave swept over the Pyrenees into the Spanish Peninsula. Other waves came westward still later.


A celtic cemetery discovered at Hallstatt in upper Austria proves them to have been skilled in art and industries as far back as 900 B.C. - shows them as miners and agriculturists, and blessed with the use of iron instruments. They invaded Italy twice, in the seventh and in the fourth centuries before Christ. In the latter tie they were at the climax of their power. They stormed Rome itself, 300 B.C. The rising up of the oppressed Germans against them, nearly three centuries before Christ, was the beginning of the end of the Continental power of the celt. After that they were beaten and buffeted by Greek and by Roman, and even by despised races - broken, and blown like the surf in al directions, North and South, and East and West. A fugitive colony of these people, that had settled in Asia Minor, in the territory which from them (the Gaels) was called Galatia, and among whom Paul worked, was found to be still speaking a Celtic language in the days of St. Jerome, five or six hundred years later. Eoin MacNeill and other scientific enquirers hold that it was only in the fifth century before Christ that they reached Spain - and that it was not via Spain but via northern France and Britain that they, crushed out from Germany, eventually reached Ireland. In Caesar’s day the Celts (Gauls) who dominated France used Greek writing in almost all their business, public or private.

Of the Milesians, Eber and Eremon divided the land between them - Eremon getting the Northern half of the Island, and Eber the Southern. The Northeastern corner was accorded to the children of their lost brother, Ir, and the Southwestern corner to their cousin Lughaid, the son of Ith. The oft-told story says that when Eber and Eremon had divided their followers, each taking an equal number of soldiers and an equal number of the men of every craft, there remained a harper and a poet. Drawing lots for these, the harper fell to Eremon and the poet to Eber - which explains why, ever since, that the North of Ireland has been celebrated for music, and the South for song.

The peace fell upon the land then, and the happiness of the Milesians, was only broken, when, after a year, Eber’s wife discovered that she must be possessed of the three pleasantest hills in Eirinn, else she could not remain one other night in the Island. Now the pleasantest of all the Irish hills was Tara, which lay in Eremon’s half. And Eremon’s wife would not have the covetousness of the other woman satisfied at her expense. So, because of the quarrel of the women, the beautiful peace of the Island was broken by battle. Eber was beaten, and the high sovereignty settled upon Eremon.

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SOME NOTABLE MILESIAN ROYALTIES


All the stories say that the greatest king of those faraway times was the twenty first Milesian king, known to fame as Ollam Fodla who blessed Ireland in a reign of forty years, some seven or eight centuries before the Christian Era. His title, Ollam Fodla, Doctor of Wisdom, has preserved his memory down the ages. The legends indicate that he was a true father to his people, and an able statesman. He organised the nation for efficiency, dividing it into cantreds, appointed a chief over every cantred, a brugaid over every territory, and a steward over every townland. Some traditions say that he established a School of Learning. And as crowning glory he established the celebrated Feis of Tara, the great triennial Parliament of the chiefs, the nobles, and the scholars of the nation, which assembled on Tara Hill once every three years to settle the nation’s affairs. This great deliverative assembly, almost unique among the nations in those early ages, and down into Christian times, reflected not a little glory upon ancient Ireland. One queen, famous and capable, whom early Ireland boasted was Macha Mong Ruad (the red-haired, who reigned over the land about three hundred years before Christ. Her father, Aod Ruad was one of a triumvirate - the others being Dithorba and Cimbaoth - who by mutual agreement, took seven year turns in reigning. For many, the reign of Cimbaoth - which synchronises with that of Alexander the Great - marks the beginning of certainty in Irish history - because of the famed remark of the trusted eleventh century historian, Tighernach, that the Irish records before Cimbaoth were uncertain. When Cimbaoth died this able woman took up the reins of government herself, becoming the first Milesian queen of Ireland.

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IRELAND IN THE LORE OF THE ANCIENTS


SCOTIA (A name transferred to Alba about ten centuries after Christ) was one of the earliest names of Ireland - so named, it was said, from Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh, one of the ancient female ancestors of the Milesians - and the people were commonly called Scotti or Scots - both terms being frequently used by early Latin historians and poets. One of its ancient titles was Hibernia (used by Caesar) which some trace from Ivernia, the name, it is said, of a people located in the south of the Island. But most trace it from Eber or Heber, ther first Milesian king of the southern half, just as the much later name, Ireland, is by some traced from Ir, whose family were in the northeastern corner of the island. Though it seems much more likely that this latter name was derived from the most common title given to the Island by its own inhabitants, Eire - hence Eireland, - Ireland. It was first Northmen and then the Saxons, who, in the ninth and tenth century began calling it Ir-land, or Ir-landa - Ireland.

In the oldest known foreign reference to Ireland, it was called Ierna. This was the title used by the poet Orpheus in the time of Cyrus of Persia, in the sixth century before Christ. Aristotle, in his Book of the World, also called Ierna. It was usually called either Hibernia or Scotia by the Latin writers. Tacitus, Caesar, and Pliny call it Hibernia.

"This Isle is sacred named by all the ancients,
From times remotest in the womb of Chronos,
This Isle which rises over the waves of ocean,
Is covered with a sod of rich luxuriance.
And peopled far and wide by the Hiberni"

By Rufus Festus Avienus, who wrote this at beginning of the fourth century....

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CONOR MAC NESSA


At the time of Christ, as said, there reigned over Ulster - residing at Emain Macha (Emania) - a king noted in ancient song and story, Conor MacNessa. He was the grandson of Rory Mor, a powerful Ulster ruler who had become monarch of Ireland, and who was the founder of the Rudrician line of Ulster kings. The memory of Conor MacNessa is imperishably preserved in the tale of the sons Of Usnach and in the greater tale of the Tain Bo Cuailgne. His first wife was the Amazonian Medb (Maeve) just mentioned, a daughter of Eochaid the Ard-Righ of Ireland (High King). Conor separated from her and she became Queen of Connaught. He found his happiness with her sister, Ethne, whom he took to wife then, and who proved to all that was indicated by her name - Ethne, that is "sweet kernel of a nut". He was a patron of poetry and the arts, and a practical man who is said to have struck from learning, the oppressive shackles of tradition that hitherto had cramped and bound it. Till his day the learned professions, both for sake of monopoly and of effect upon the multitude used an archaic language that only the initiated understood, and that awed the mass of the people. Conor ordered that the professions should not henceforth remain in the hereditary possession of the ancient learned families - but should be thrown open to all, irrespective of family or rank. Conor’s reverence for poets was such that he saved them from expulsion, when, once they were threatened with death or exile, because having grown so vast numbers, and got to be lazy, covetous, tyrannous, they had become an almost unbearable burden upon the multitude. Conor gathered twelve hundred poets, it is said, into his dominion, and protected them there for seven years, till the anger of the people had abated, and they could scatter themselves over Ireland once more.

Conor died by a brain ball that sunk into his skull - fired by the hand of Cet MacMagach, the Connaught champion, whom he had pursued after a Connaught cattle raid. The legend attached to Conor’s death is curious. The brain ball fired by Cet did not directly kill him. It sank into his skull - and his doctor, Faith Liag, would not remove it, because that would cause instant death. With care, Conor might live long, carrying the brain ball. Henceforth, however, he must be moderate in all things, avoiding violent emotion, which was rare in those days for kings. Under his doctor’s wise care he lived for seven years. But one time, his court was thrown into consternation by finding broad day suddenly turned into blackest night, the heavens rent by lightning, and the world rocked by thunder, portending some dread cataclysm. Conor asked his wise men for explanation of the fearful happening. The druids and wise men told him that there had been in the East, a singular man, more noble of character, more lofty of mind, and more beautiful of soul, than the world had ever before known, or ever again would know - he was the noblest and most beautiful, most loving of men. And now the heavens and the earth were thrown into agony because on this day the tyrant Roman, jealous of his power over the people, had nailed him high upon a cross, and between two crucified thieves, had left the divine man to die a fearful death. Conor was so fired to rage at this thought, that he snatched his sword and tried to fiercely hew down a grove of trees. Under the strain of the fierce passion that held him the brain ball burst from King Conor’s head - and he fell dead....

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CUCHULLAIN


Those days when Conor MacNessa sat on the throne of Ulster were brilliant days in Ireland’s history. Then was the sun of glory in the zenith of Eire’s Heroic period - the period of chivalry, chiefly created by the famous Royal or Red Branch Knights of Emania. Though, two other famous bands of Irish warriors gave added lustre to the period- the Gamanraide of the West (who were the Firbolgs) and the Clanna Deaghaid of Mulster led by Curoi MacDaire. All three warrior bands had their poets and the seanachies, who chanted their deeds in imperishable song and story which, down the dim ages, have since held spell bound the clan of the Gael. But the greatest, the most belauded, and the most dazzling of all the heroes of the heroic age was undoubtedly Cuchullain, of whose life and wondrous deeds, real and imaginary, hundreds of stories still exist.


CUCHULLAIN was a foster son of King Conor. "I am little Setanta, son to Sualtim, and Dectaire your sister" he told the questioning King, when, as a boy, in whose breast the fame of the Red Branch warriors had awaked the thirst for glory, he came up to the court of Emania. When he arrived there and the youths in training were playing caman upon the green. Having taken with him from home, his red bronze hurl and his silver ball, the little stranger, going in among them, so outplayed all the others, that the attention of the court was drawn to him. And it was then that the little stranger gave the above reply to the question of the admiring king. The eager attention of the warriors of the Red Branch was drawn to the lad and they foresaw great things for him, when they heard him express himself nobly and wonderfully, on the day that, in Emania, in the Hall of Heroes, he took arms. He stood before the Druids in the Hall of Heroes and exclaimed "I care not whether I die tomorrow or next year, if only my deeds live after me". The greatest, most exciting portion of this hero’s stories is the account of his fight with his friend, Ferdiad, at the ford, where , single handed, he is holding at bay the forces of Connaught. Ferdiad is the great Connaught champion, chief, of the Connaught knights of the Sword, the Fir Domniann and a dear friend and comrade of CUCHULLAIN, since, in their youth, they were training for the profession of arms. And it is now sore for CUCHULLAIN to fight the soul friend whom the Connaught host has pitted against them. He would dissuade Ferdiad from fighting, by reminding him of their comradeship, when they were together learning the art of war from the female champion, Scathach, in Alba.

"We were heart companions,
We were companions in the woods,
We were fellows of the same bed,
Where we used to sleep the balmy sleep.
After mortal battles abroad,
In countries many and far distant,
Together we used to practice, and go
Through each forest, learning with Scathach".


But Ferdiad had not the tenderness of CUCHULLAIN, and would not let fond memories turn him from his purpose. Indeed lest he might yield to the weakness of temptation, he forced himself to answer Cuchullain’s tenderness with taunts, so as to provoke the Compat. An fight they finally did. They fought for four days. On the fourth day, CUCHULLAIN rallies to the fight more fiercely, more terribly, more overpoweringly than ever, and at length gives to his friend, Ferdiad, the coup de grace. CUCHULLAIN laid Ferdiad down then, and a trance, and a faint, and a weakness fell on CUCHULLAIN over Ferdiad there.

CUCHULLAIN died as a hero should - on a battlefield, with his back to a rock and his face to the foe, buckler on arm, and spear in hand. He died standing, and in that defiant attitude (supported by the rock) was many days dead ere the enemy dared venture near enough to reassure themselves of his exit - which they only did when they saw the vultures alight upon him, and undisturbed, peck at his flesh....

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CONN OF THE HUNDRED BATTLES

The celebrated Conn of the hundred Battles was a son of Feidlimid, the son of Tuathal - though he did not immediately succeed Feidlimid. Between them reigned Cathari Mor, who was father of thirty sons, among whom and their posterity he attempted to divide Ireland, and from whom are descended the chief Leinster families. As Conn’s title suggests, his reign was filled with battling. Conn’s strenuous militancy and the suggestive title that it won for him, made him famed beyond worthier men - the greatest pride of some of the noblest families of the land a thousand years and more after his time trace back their descent to him of the Hundred Battles. Conn’s life and reign were ended by his assassination at Tara. Fifty robbers hired by the king of Ulster, came to Tara, dressed as women, and treacherously despatched the Monarch. Conn’s son in law, Conaire II, who succeeded him as monarch - for his son Art was then but a child - is famed as father of three Carbris, namely Carbri Musc, from whom was named the territory of Muskerry, Carbri Baiscin, whose descendants peopled Corca Baiscin in Western Clare, and most notable of them, Carbri Riada, who, when there was a famine in the South, led his people to the extreme Northeast of Ireland, and some of them across to the nearest part of Scotland, where they settled, forming the first important colony of Scots (Irish) in Alba, and driving there the edge of the Irish wedge which was eventually to make the whole country known as the land of the Scots (Irish)....

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CORMAC MAC ART

Of all the ancient kings of Ireland, Cormac, who reigned in the third century, is unquestionably considered greatest by the poets, the seanachies, and the chroniclers. His father Art was the son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, and was known as Art the Lonely, as he had lost his brothers, Connla and Crionna - both slain by their uncles. It was at the court of Lugaid at Tara, that Cormac first distinguished himself, and gave token of the ability and wisdom, which were, afterwards, to mark him the most distinguished of Eirinn’s monarchs.
From his exile in Connaught, Cormac, a green youth , had returned to Tara, where, unrecognised, he was engaged herding sheep for a poor widow. Now one of the sheep broke into the queen’s garden, and ate the queen’s vegetables. And King Lugaid, equally angry as his queen, after he heard the case, ordered that for penalty on the widow, her sheep should be forfeit to the queen. To the amazement of Lugaid’s court, the herd boy who had been watching the proceedings with anxiety, arose, and, facing the king, said, "Unjust is thy award, O king, for, because thy queen hath lost a few vegetables, thou wouldst deprive the poor widow of her livelihood?" When the king recovered from his astoundment, he looked contemptuously at the lad, asking scathingly: "And what, O wise herd boy would be thy just award?" The herd boy, not one little bit disconcerted, answered him "My award would be that the wool of the sheep should pay for the vegetables the sheep has eaten - because both the wool and the green things will grow again, and both parties have forgotten their hurt." And the wonderful wisdom of the judgement drew the applause of the astounded court. But Lugaid exclaimed in alarm: "It is the judgement of a King." And, the lad’s great mind having betrayed him, he had to flee. He returned and claimed the throne when Lugaid was killed, but at a feast which he gave to the princes whose support he wanted, Fergus Black Tooth of Ulster, who coveted the Ard Righship, managed, it is said, to singe the hair of Cormac - creating a blemish that debarred the young man temporarily from the throne. And he fled again from Tara, fearing designs upon his life. Fergus became Ard Righ for a year - at the end of which time Cormac returned with an army, and, supported by Taig, the son of Ciann, and grandson of the great Oilill Olum of Munster, completely overthrew the usurper in the great battle of Crionna (on the Boyne) where Fergus and his two brothers were slain - and Cormac won undisputed possession of the monarchy. Taig was granted a large territory between Damlaig (Duleek) and the River Liffi, since then called the Ciannachta. He became the ancestor of the O’Hara’s, O’Gara’s, O’Carroll’s, and other now Northern families. In Cormac’s time, the world was replete with all that was good and the food and the fat of the land, and the gifts of the sea were in abundance in this king’s reign. There were neither woundings nor robberies in his time, but every one enjoyed his own, in peace. Cormac rebuilt the palace of Tara, with much magnificence. He built the Teach Mi Chuarta, the great banqueting hall, that was 760 feet by 46 feet, and 45 feet high. Until quite recently, the outline of the foundations of this great hall with the traces of its fourteen doorways, were still to be observed on Tara Hill. In the Book of Leinster is related "Three thousand persons each day is what Cormac used to maintain in tara; besides poets and satirists, and all the strangers who sought the king; Galls, and Romans, and Franks, and Frisian, and Longbards, and Albanians and Saxons, and Picts, for all these used to seek him, and it was with gold and with silver, with steeds and with chariots, that he presented them. They used all to come to Cormac, because there was not in his time, nor before him, any more celebrated in honour, and in dignity, and in wisdom, except only Solomon, the son of David. The remarkable king died in the year 267 - more than a century and a half before the coming of St. Patrick. By reason of his extraordinary wisdom, the righteousness of his deeds, judgements and laws, he is said to have been blest with the light of the Christian faith seven years before his death. The traditions about Cormac also state that having been inspired by the faith he made dying request that he should be buried, not with the other pagan kings at their famous burying ground, whence would dawn the holy light that should make Eirinn radiant. Disregarding his dying wish, the Druids ordered that he should be interred with his ancestors at Brugh of Boyne. But when, in pursuance of this, the bearers were bearing his body across the river, a great wave swept it from their shoulders, down the stream, and cast it up at Ros na Riogh, where, according to his wish, he was then buried....

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TARA

Tara, which attained the climax of its fame under Cormac, is said to have been rounded by the Firbolgs, and been the seat of kings thenceforth. Ollam Fodla first gave it historic fame by founding the Feis or Triennial Parliament, there, seven or eight centuries before Christ. It is said it was under, or after, Eremon, the first Milesian high king that it, one of the three pleasantest hills in Ireland, came to be named Tara - a corruption of the genitive form of the compound word, Tea Mur - meaning "the burial place of Tea" the wife of Eremon, and daughter of a king of Spain. In its heyday Tara must have been impressive. The great, beautiful hill was dotted with seven duns, and in every dun were many buildings - all of them, of course, of wood, in those days - or of wood and metal. The greatest structure was the Mi Cuarta, the great banqueting hall, which was on the Ard Righ’s own dun. Each of the provincial kings had, on Tara, a house that was set aside for him when he came up to attend the great Parliament. There was a Grianan (sun house) for the provincial queens, and their attendants. The great Feis was held at Samain (Hallowday). It lasted for three days before Samain and three days after. But the Aonach or great fair, the assembly of the people in general, which was a most important accompaniment of the Feis, seems to have begun much earlier. At this Feis the ancient laws were recited and confirmed, new laws were enacted, disputes were settled, grievances adjusted, wrongs righted. And in accordance with the usual form at all such assemblies, the ancient history of the land was recited, probably by the high king’s seanachie, who had the many other critical seanachies attending to his every word, and who, accordingly, dare not seriously distort or prevaricate. This highly efficient method of recording and transmitting the country’s history, in verse, too, which was practised for a thousand years before the introduction of writing, and the introduction of Christianity and which continued to be practised for long centuries after these events was a highly practical method, which effectively preserved for us the large facts of our country’s history throughout a thousand of the years of dim antiquity when the history of most other countries is a dreary blank.

As from the great heart and centre of the Irish Kingdom, five great arteries or roads radiated from Tara to the various parts of the country the Slighe Cualann, which ran toward the present County Wicklow, the Slighe Mor, the great Western road, which ran via Dublin to Galway, the Slight Asail which ran near the present Mullingar, the Slighe Dala which ran southwest, and the Slighe Midluachra, the Northern road. "Great, noble and beautiful truly was our Tara of the Kings."....

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FIONN AND THE FIAN

It is only recently that we have realised the all important part played by legendary lore in forming and stamping a nation’s character. A people’s character and a people’s heritage of tradition act and react upon each other, down the ages, the outstanding qualities of both getting ever more and more alike - so long as their racial traditions are cherished as an intimate part of their life. Of all the great bodies of ancient Irish Legendary lore, none other, with the possible exception of the Red Branch cycle, has had such developing, uplifting, and educational effect upon the Irish people, through the ages, as the wonderful body of Fenian tales in both prose and verse, rich in quality and rich in quantity. Fionn MacCumail, leader of the Fian (Fenians), in the time of Cormac MacArt, is the great central figure of these tales. The man Fionn lived and died in the third century of the Christian Era. It was in the reign of Conn, at the very end of the second century, that was founded the Fian - a great standing army of picked and specially trained, daring warriors, whose duty was to carry out the mandates of the high kin - "To uphold justice and put down injustice, on the part of the kings and lords of Ireland - and to guard the harbors from foreign invaders". From this latter we might conjecture that an expected Roman invasion first called the Fian into existence. They prevented robberies, exacted fines and tributes, put down public enemies and every kind of evil that might afflict the country. Moreover they moved about from place to place all over the island. Fionn, being a chieftain himself in his own right, had a residence on the hill of Allen in Kildare. The Fianna (bodies of the Fian) recruited at Tara, Uisnech and Taillte fairs. The greatest discrimination was used in choosing the eligible ones from amongst the candidate throng - which throng included in plenty sons of chieftains and princes. Many and hard were the tests for him who sought to be one of this noble body. One of the first tests was literary for no candidate was possible who had not mastered the twelve books of poetry. So skilful must he be in wood running, and so agile, that in the flight no single braid of his hair is losed by a hanging branch. His step must be so light that underfoot he breaks no withered branch. In facing the greatest odds the weapon must not shake in his hand . When a candidate had passed these tests and was approved as fit for his heroic band, there were also vows to be taken as the final condition of his admission. There were three cathas (battalions) of the Fian - three thousand in each catha. This was in time of peace. In time of war the quota was seven cathas. Although the Fianna were supposed to uphold the power of the Ard Righ, their oath of fealty was not to him, but to their own chief, Fionn. The best stories of the Fian are preserved to us in the poems of Oisin, the son of Fionn, the chief bard of the fian, in the Agallamh na Seanorach (Colloquy of the Ancients) of olden time. This is by far the finest collection of Fenian tales, and is supposed to be an account of the Fian’s great doings, given in to Patrick by Oisin and Caoilte, another of Fionn’s trusted lieutenants, more than 150 years after. After the overthrow of the Fian, in the battle of Gabra in the year 280 A.D.,Caoilte is supposed to have lived with the Tuatha de Dannann, under the hills - until the coming of St. Patrick. Oisin had been carried away to the Land of mortal existence, and to Ireland, when Patrick is in the land, winning it from Crom Cruach to Christ....

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THE BREAK OF ULSTER

Of the line of Ir, son of Milesius, to whom Ulster had been apportioned, that Branch called the Clan na Rory (after its great founder, Fory, who had been King of Ulster, and also High King of Ireland) now ruled the province for nearly 700 years, namely, for more than 300 years before the Christian Era, and more than 300 years after. And their capital city and the king’s seat had been at Emain Macha. During practially all of ths time, from that fort’s first founding by Queen Macha, the royal Court of Ulster had been a court of splenour, and ever noted as a centre of chivalry and the home of poetry. But in the beginning of the fourth century, Ulster’s power was irrevocably broken, and by far the greater portion of her territory wrested from her - her people driven into miserably narrow bounds from which, ever after, they can hardly be said to have emerged.
It was when Muiredeach Tireach, grandson of Carbri of the Liffey, was High King of Ireland, that Ulster was despoiled and broken by his nephews, the three Collas, who, on the ruins of the old kingdom of Uladh, founded a new kingdom - of Oirgialla (Oriel) which was henceforth for nearly a thousand years to play an important part in the history of Northern Ireland. The ostensible cause of their attach upon Ulster was the ancient grudge borne that province because many generations before, the Ulster king, tiobraide, had sent to Tara fifty robbers discuised as women, who had slain Conn of the Hundred Battles and because, a generation later, the Ulster prince, Fergus Blacktooth, had, by setting fire to his hair at a feast, put a blemish upon Cormac MacArt, which, for a time, debarred him from the throne which Fergus then usurped. The Collas first went to their kin in Connaught and there gathered a great army for the invasion of Ulster. On the plain of Farney in Monaghan they met the Ulstermen under their king, Fergus, and on seven successive days broke battle upon them, finally slaying Fergus and putting the Ultach (Ulstermen) to complete rout. Of the conquered portion of Ulster, from Louth in the south to Derry in the north, and from Loch Neagh to Loch Erne, the Collas made themselves the new kingdom of Oirgialla (Oriel).

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NIALL OF THE NINE HOSTAGES

Niall of the Nine Hostages was the greatest king that Ireland knew between the time of Cormac MacArt and the coming of Patrick. His reign was epochal. He not only ruled Ireland greatly and strongly, but carried the name and the fame, and the power and the fear, of Ireland into all neighbouring nations. He was, moreover, founder of the longest, most important, and most powerful Irish dynasty. Almost without interruption his descendants were Ard Righs of Ireland for 600 years. Under him the spirit of pagan Ireland upleaped in its last great red flame of military glory, a flame that, in another generation, was to be superseded by a great white flame, far less fierce but far more powerful and the bounds of neighbouring nations to the uttermost bounds of Europe. That is the great flame that Patrick was to kindle, and which was to expand and grow, ever mounting higher and spreading farther, year by year, for three hundred years.

Niall was grandson of Muiredeach Tireach. His father, Eochaid Muig Medon, son of Muiredeach, became Ard Rich mid way of the fourth century. By his wife, Carthann, daughter of a British king, Eochaid had the son Niall. By another wife, Mon Fionn, daughter of the King of Munster, Eochaid had four sons, Brian, Fiachar, Ailill, and Fergus. Mong Fionn was a bitter, jealous and ambitious woman, who set her heart upon having her son, Brian, succeed his father as Ard Righ. As Niall was his father’s favourite, Mong Fionn did not rest until she had outcast him and his mother, Carthann, and made Carthann her menial, carrying water to the court. The child was rescued by a great poet of that time, Torna, who reared and educated him. When he had reached budding manhood, Torna brought him back to court to take his rightful place - much to his father’s joy. Then Niall, showing strength of character, even in his early youth, took his mother from her menial task, and restored her to her place. Of Niall’s youth there are many legends, but one in particular show the working of his destiny. One day, the five brothers being in the smith’s forge when it took fire, they were commanded to run and save what they could. Their father, who was looking on (and who, say some, designedly caused the fire, to test his sons), observed with interest Neill’s distinctiveness of character, his good sense and good judgement. While Brian saved the cariots from the fire, Ailill a shield and a sword, Fiachra the old forge trough, and Fergus only a bundle of firewood, Niall carried out the bellows, the sledges, the anvil, and anvil block - saved the soul of the forge, and saved the smith from ruin. Then his father said: "It is Niall who should succeed me as Ard Righ of Eirinn".

Niall’s first expedition was into Alba to subdue the Picts. The little Irish (Scotic) colony in that part of Alba just opposite to Antrim had gradually been growing in numbers, strength, and prestige - until they excited the jealousy and enmity of the Picts, who tried to crush them. Niall fitted out a large fleet and sailed to the assistance of his people. Joined then by the Irish in Alba, he marched against the Picts, overcame them, took hostages from them and had Argyle and Cantire settled upon the Albanach Irish. After obtaining obedience from the Picts, his next foreign raid was into Britain. When Maximus and his Roman legions were, in consequence of the barbarian pressure upon the Continental Roman Empire, withdrawing from Britain, Niall, with his Irish hosts and Pictish allies, treaded upon their hurrying heels. Yet did the Romans claim victory over Niall. For it is said his was the host referred to by the Roman poet, Claudian, when in praising the Roman general, Stilicho, he says Britain was protected by this bold general.

"When Scots came thundering from the Irish shores,
And ocean trembled stuck by hostile oars".


Niall must have made many incursions into Britain and probably several into Gaul. He carried back hostages, many captives, and great booty from these expeditions. Yet how often out of evil cometh good. It was in one of these Gallic expeditions that the lad Succat, destined under his later name of Patrick to be the greatest and noblest figure Ireland ever knew, was taken in a sweep of captives, carried to Ireland and to Antrim, there to herd the swine of the chieftain, Milcho. Many and many a time, in Alba, in Britain, and in Gaul, must Niall have measured his leadership against the best leadership of Rome, and pitted the courage and wild daring of his Scotic hosts against the skill of the Imperial Legions. Yet his fall in a foreign land was to be compassed, not by the strategy or might of the foreign enemy, but by the treachery of one of his own. He fell on the banks of the River Loire, in France, by the hand of Eochaid, the son of Enna Ceannselaigh, King of Leinster, who, from ambush, with an arrow, shot dead the great king.

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Irish Invasions of Britain

In spite of the apparently isolated position of the Irish, they seemed to have kept up contact with many foreign countries. Many foreign mercenaries were employed in Irish wars and foreign matrimonial alliances were common among the Irish royal families. The Irish, although not a sea going nation were well equipped for sea transit and quite expert in the art. The Book of Acaill contains sea-laws and defines the rights and duties of foreign trading vessels.
In the year 222 Cormac’s fleet sailed the seas for three years. Niall brought his fleet when he invaded Britain. St Patrick as a slave boy, quit his slavery and arrived at the sea just in time to find a ship about to sail for foreign lands. When Columbanus is deported from France, they readily find a ship just about to sail to Ireland. These happenings imply that there must have been fairly regular travel between Ireland and other lands.
In pre-Christian days, all Irish foreign military expeditions were into Alba and Britain.
The Romans never once ventured into Ireland - it was considered though - the want of a strong and permanent autocratic central authority in Ireland, commanding the respect and obedience of the various sub-kingdoms and unifying Irelands power, always left the nation open to the great danger of foreign conquest. Yet the Romans never attacked Ireland - their discovery of the fierceness of Irish fighters may have played a part in dissuading them from the Irish venture. The recklessness and persistency of Irish fighters taught them to respect Irish fighters and Irish commanders. The Romans even recruited Irish regiments for Continental service.
Though the Irish nation was weak for defence, it was strong for offence. It was only the Romans discipline and numbers that overcame the Irish attacks in Britain. When the Romans were called home, it was the Irish and Picts who drove them south and eventually out of Britain. Britain was now left at the mercy of her northern and western neighbours, and suffered greatly.

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The Irish Kingdom of Scotland

The terms Scotia and Scot were first applied to Ireland and Irishmen, but later came to be applied to Irelands northeastern neighbour, Alba and its inhabitants.
Our most ancient poets and seanachies claim that an early name for Eirinn, Scotia, was derived from Scota, queen-mother of the Milesians. The poet Egesippus tells how "Scotia which links itself to no land, trembles at their name" - the term Scotia is, by Continental writers, applied to Ireland more often than any other name. And Scot is the term by these writers most constantly applied to a native of Eirinn. Orosius, the third century geographer, uses "Hibernia the nation of the Scoti". An Irish exile on the continent, the celebrated Marianus Scotus referred to his countrymen as Scots.
The modern name of Ireland seems to have originated with the Northmen, in about the seventh century - being probably formed from Eire, they called it Ir or Ire, and after that the English called it Ireland, and its natives Irish. For several centuries longer, however, these terms were not adopted by Continental writers, who still continued to speak of Scotia and the Scot, and designated the Irish scholars on the Continent by the term Scotus. The new name Ireland was on the Continent, first used only in the eleventh century (by Adam De Breme).
To Alba (the present Scotland) was transferred the term Scotia, and to its people the term Scot, because the Scoti of Hibernia, having again and again colonised there, built in it a strong kingdom, which gave the Scotic (Irish) people dominance there, and soon made the Scotic kings the kings of the whole country.
The Picts naturally jealous of these usurpers on their soil, continued exerting the utmost pressure upon them, in the hope of crushing them out, till Niall of the Nine Hostages, going to their assistance with an army, overcame and drove back the Picts, establishing the Scotic kingdom in Alba on a solid foundation, and, it is said, got the submission of the Picts and the tribute of all Alba. Now that the Scotic people got complete dominance over all or the main part of the country, it began to be called Scotia - at first Scotia Minor, in contradistinction to Eire, which was called Scotia Major - but gradually the title Scotia fell away from Eire, and solely came to signify Alba.
In the eleventh century a number of leading English families who fled or were driven from the south, flocked into southeastern Scotland and came into favour at court. When, at the end of the eleventh century, Malcolm’s son, Edgar, English both by name and nature, was crowned king - the Gaelicism of royalty and of the court waned more rapidly, till in the thirteenth century it went out altogether; and the last of the Irish royal line became extinct with Alexander the Third, who died without heir in 1287.
So, though the greater portion of the country was, and still is, Gaelic - with Gaelic manners, customs, dress and language, still holding in the Highlands and the Islands - the end of the thirteenth century saw the end of the Scotic (Irish) rule in Alba.

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The Centuries of the Saints

The news impetus and aim that Patrick gave to the Irish nation, turning it from war-love to ideals much higher, wrought in the island a phenomenal transformation. While foreign warring and raiding ceased, and internal warring became more rare, tens of thousands of every rank and class in the nation vied with one another, not, as formerly, for skill in handling war weapons, but for ease in conning the Scriptures; not for gaining fame in fighting, but for gathering favour in the sight of God. The religious development and spiritual revolution were extraordinary.
Christianity and learning went hand in hand in Ireland. Almost every one of her multitude of holy men became scholars, and every holy scholar became a teacher.
Those centuries had three orders of saints, namely : the Patrician or secular clergy, missionaries who travelled and preached Christ to all the land during the hundred years succeeding the coming of Patrick ; the monastic saints, who, during the next hundred years, cultivated Christianity in, and radiated it from, their monastic establishments and monastic schools ; and the anchorites, the hermit saints, who, succeeding the great ones of the second order, cultivated Christ in solitude. On lonely islands, on wild mountain tops and in the impenetrable wilderness.
One of the most honoured and most beloved of the second order was Finian of Clonard. For, from his famous school at Cluain-erard - Clonard, on the river Boyne - went forth the twelve saints who were styled the Twelve Apostles of Eirinn : the two Ciarans, the two Brendans, the two Colms, Mobi, Ruadan, Lasserian, Ciannech, Senach and Ninnid of Loch Erne.

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Manner of Living in Ancient Ireland

In very early Ireland practically all residences were of wood or wicker work and most of them were in circular from. They were usually thatched with straw, rushes or sedge. Stone was very seldom used in building residences before the eighth century. The wooden and wicker work houses were washed with lime on the outside.
Linen sheets and ornamented coverlets were in use. Small low tables for serving meals were supplied with knives, cups, jugs, drinking horns, methers and occasionally napkins. Wheat meal, oat meal, eggs, meat, milk and honey, with some vegetables and few fruits supplied the table. Light was furnished by candles of tallow or of beeswax, rushlights, spails of bog fir, and sometimes oil lamps. All of the better class houses had basins for bathing. After their day’s exertion, and before taking their evening meal, hunters and warriors treated themselves to a bath. And a bath was always a common courtesy to which to treat a newly arrived guest.
The women had mirrors made of highly polished metal. They used cosmetics and had combs. Both sexes devoted the greatest attention to the care of their hair, which was often elaborately curled and plaited. Both women and men (of noble rank) wore beautiful wrought brooches, for fastening their mantle. Other ornaments were bracelets, rings, neck torques, diadems, crescents of gold and silver - all of which may be seen in the National Museum in Dublin.
The chief articles of dress were, in the case of women, one long robe that reached to the ankles, and of the men a short jacket combined with a sort of kilt. Over these both sexes frequently wore a cloak or mantle. The substance of the dress was usually either of linen or wool.
In the poem of the Bruidean de Derga, the Saxon chief Ingcel, in describing King Conaire Mor as he saw him in the Bruidean gives a glorified description of a king’s dress in the early days :

"I saw his many-hued red cloak of lustrous silk,
With its gorgeous ornamentation of precious gold bespangled
upon its surface,
With its flowing capes dexterously embroidered.

"I saw in it a great large brooch,
The long pin was of pure gold;
Bright shining like a full-moon
Was its ring, all around - a crimson gemmed circlet
Of round sparkling pebbles -
Filling the fine front of his noble breast
Atwixt his well proportioned fair shoulders.

"I saw his splendid line kilt,
With its striped silken borders -
A face-reflecting mirror of various hues,
The coveted of the eyes of many, -
Embracing his noble neck - enriching its beauty.
An embroidery of gold upon the lustrous silk -
(Extended) from his bosom to his noble knees."

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Structural Antiquities

The structural antiquities which we can still observe in Ireland arrange themselves under five heads : cromlechs, tumuli, the great duns of the west, ancient churches, and round towers.
The cromlechs, sometimes called dolmen, are each composed of three great standing stones, ten or twelve feet high with a great flat slab resting on top of them, and always inclined towards the east. Sometimes these are surrounded by a wide circle of standing stones. The cromlechs are of such very remote antiquity - ancient - at the beginning of the Christian era - that all legends of them are lost. The invariable inclination to the east of the covering slab suggests altars dedicated to sun-worship. The name cromlech may mean either bent slab or the slab of the god Crom. And this latter derivation suggests to some that they were sacrificial altars used in the very ancient worship of that god.
But some of the best authorities have concluded that they were tombstones - because beneath every one of them under which excavations were made, were found the bones, or the urns and dust of the dead. From this, however, we cannot necessarily conclude that they were erected as tombstones - any more than we should conclude that the various Christian temples and altars under which honoured ones have been interred were only intended as monuments to the dead beneath them.
The tumuli or enormous burial mounds found in the Boyne section of eastern Ireland show the race in a much more advanced stage of civilisation. These tumuli, as proved by the decorative designs carved upon their walls, were erected at least before the Christian era - and maybe many centuries before it. They are great stone roofed royal sepulchres, buried under vast regularly shaped, artificial mounds. Every one of the tumuli so far explored has shown urn burial. The greatest, most beautiful, of these royal tombs are those as Knowth, Dowth and New Grange, on the Boyne.
After the tumuli, the next structures in order of time are the great duns of the west coast, such as Dun Angus, and Dun Conor, on the Aran Islands in Galway Bay. The great duns were erected sometime during the first three centuries of the Christian era. They consist of enormously thick walls, of stone, which, though built before the discovery of any kind of cement, are of marvelously fine, firm and impregnable construction. These great walls, in the interior of which are sometimes chambers and passages, surround an amphitheatre of about a thousand feet in diameter. In the amphitheatre are stone huts, the residences of the dun - some of them are bee-hive shape, some of them are of the shape of an upturned boat. Tradition says that these great duns were erected by the Firbolgs who maintained themselves along the western fringe for long centuries after the Milesians possessed themselves of the land.
About the round towers, the antiquarians are now pretty generally agreed that they are of Christian origin always built as adjuncts to churches, and erected after the marauding Danes had shown the harassed ecclesiastics the need of some immediate, strong, and easily defended place of refuge for themselves, and of safety for the sacred objects, and the rich objects of church art which the Northmen constantly sought. The round towers of Ireland range in height from about a hundred to a hundred and twenty feet; they are from twelve to twenty feet in external diameter at the base, and a little narrower at the top. They are of six or seven storeys high; with one window usually to each floor - except in the upper most storey which has four. The lowermost of these openings is always about ten feet or more from the ground - giving good advantage over attackers. The walls are usually three and a half to four foot thick.
There are still eighty round towers in Ireland, twenty of them perfect. They are always found in connection with churches - and almost invariably situated about twenty feet from the north west corner of the church - and with the door or lowermost window facing the church entrance. Almost all of the earliest Irish churches were of wood. It was practically in the tenth century that the use of stone for building the large churches began. And it was only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that it became general. In these last named centuries the Romanesque style was introduced, and some beautiful churches erected, like that of St Caimin at Inniscaltra by Brian Boru, and Cormac’s chapel at Cashel. In the decorating of doorways and windows, sculpture began to show in the churches of the tenth century. But Irish sculpture is best exemplified probably on the high crosses of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There are some forty five of these high crosses still remaining, most of them very beautiful There was an Irish cross, having the circle of the Greek cross placed upon the shafts of the Latin. The sculpture on the high crosses include carvings of the saints, scriptural scenes, judgment scenes, royal processions, hunting scenes, stags at bay, horsemen, chariots etc
The sculpture of the Irish at this period was infinitely superior to that produced by their neighbours, the Welsh, the Anglo Saxons and the Scottish. But the soul of the artist breathed through the work of the Irish sculptor.

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Various Arts of Ancient Ireland

Save that of the scribe, there was no other art in ancient Ireland carried to such beautiful perfection as that of the metal worker. And we have, still remaining, hundreds of beautiful pieces of this work. These ancients objects are of various kind; articles of personal adornment, bell-shrines, cumdachs or shrines for books, croziers etc
Among the personal ornaments we have brooches, bracelets, rings, necklaces, torques (twisted ribbons of gold or silver) for wearing around the neck, minns or diadems, crowns, amulets, ear-rings, beads, balls, crescents, gorgets, the niam-lann (a flexible plate of burnished gold, silver, or findruine worn around the forehead) etc - a lavish wealth of beautiful ornaments exquisitely wrought, which, after a long count of centuries, tell us the story of the rarely skilled, noble artificers of Ireland, whose genius in metal was not only unsurpassed, but even unequalled, in western Europe. Of all the many beautiful articles of personal adornment that remain to us from those ancient times in Ireland, probably the most luxurious are the delgs or brooches - the size and costliness of some of which may be judged from the Dal Riada brooch, which was dug up in an Antrim field in the last century, contained two and one-third ounces of pure gold, was five inches long, and two and an eighth inches in diameter.
But for beauty none of them all equals the Tara brooch. Both the face of the brooch and the back are overlaid with beautiful patterns, wrought in an Irish filigree or formed by amber, glass and enamel. These patterns of which there are no less than seventy-six different kinds in this single article are wrought in such minute perfection that a powerful lens is needed to perceive and appreciate the wonderful perfection of detail. There are many other handsome brooches, such as the Ardagh brooch, the Roscrea brooch etc - each with particular beauties of its own.
Only by a very different kind of object, the celebrated Ardagh chalice, is the Tara brooch surpassed in richness and beauty of workmanship.
There are in existence many wonderful bell shrines, like that of St Patricks bell, St Cualanus bell - and shrines like the shrine of St Mogue, the cross of Cong, the crozier of St Dympna, the crozier of Liosmor etc all of them displaying the extraordinary work of the artist of those days.
The making of beautiful shrines called cumdachs, for prized books, rarely occurred in any part of the world except for Ireland. Some of the most finest and most celebrated cumdachs are those of the Book of Kells, the Book of Armagh, the Book of Durrow and many more.

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The English Invasion

It was in 1171 that Henry the Second invaded Ireland.
He received approval from the newly elected English Pope, Nicholas Breakspeare, Adrian the Fourth, on the grounds that morals in Ireland had become corrupt, and religion almost extinct, and his purpose was to bring the barbarous nation within the fold of the faith and under church discipline. But if we supposed Ireland to be irreligious then, strange indeed would be the choice of an apostle in Henry, a man of vicious life, a supporter of anti-Popes, and reasonably suspected of, and all but excommunicated for, instigating the murder of the holy Thomas a Becket. Those who contend that the Bull was an English fabrication for impressing the irreligious Irish and making easy their conquest point to the fact that the most ancient copies of the document discovered lack both date and signature.
In May 1169, with a small but efficient body of thirty knights in full armour, sixty horsemen in half armour and three hundred archers, Fitz Stephen landed at Bannow, Wexford - and another Knight Maurice de Prendergast with a company of about three hundred. On receiving the news of the landing, MacMurrough raised a body of five hundred from among his Leinster subjects and joined them. And, together they marched against the Danish city of Wexford, which, after repulsing two assaults, capitulated to the strange army with its armoured horses and horsemen and its wonderfully skilled and disciplined army. MacMurrough bestowed the city upon Fitz Stephen and settled near by lands upon de Prendergast and de Mont Maurice.
The Ard Righ and princes of the other provinces looked on inactive. Every prince, occupied as usual with his own problems was not much concerned about what did not immediately affect his own territory.
Strongbow followed in a few months with two hundred knights and a thousand men and immediately took over the city of Waterford. Then they marched into Meath and Breffni laying waste as they went. Henry hearing of Strongbows successes in Ireland grew jealous and summoned Strongbow and all his subjects to return to England. Eventually Strongbow went and laid his successes before Henry. As a result Henry himself went with five hundred knights and four thousand horse and foot soldiers, and landed at Waterford. Slowly the Irish chiefs submitted. When Henry left, the Irish began to wake up to what they had done and slowly began to rise up against the enemy. Now more familiar with the Norman discipline and equipment the Irish princes set strategy against skill and discovered that the Normans were not omnipotent. O’Brien of Thomond inflicted a big defeat upon them at Thurles. Every Norman chief warred on his own account, for purpose of extending his power and possessions and of course every Irish chief and prince, when opportunity offered, warred against the invader. But such demoralisation set in, that in short time not only was Irish chief warring upon Norman baron, but Irish chief was warring with Irish chief, Norman baron warring with Norman baron, and a Norman-Irish alliance would be warring against Normans, or against Irish. Or against another combination of both. The Normans not only marked their progress by much slaughtering and many barbarities, but signalised themselves by robbing and burning churches and monasteries, and oftentimes slaughtering the inmates. They harried, robbed, ravished and destroyed wheresoever they went. And against one another, in their own feuds, they oftentimes exercised as much barbarity as against the Irish. Fearfully true is the Four Masters’ word that MacMurrough’s treacherous act "made of Ireland a trembling sod".

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Trade in Mediaeval Ireland

In Spain and Portugal, the ‘noble Irish’, as they were called obtained more valuable privileges than the English. The great Italian financial houses, the bankers of Lucca, the Ricardi, the Friscobaldi, the Mozzi were active agents in Mediaeval Ireland. The wine trade, as shown by the Pipe Roll accounts and other sources was of great dimensions, with Clan and Town. Bordeaux, Dordogne, Libourne, St Emilian besides Spain, Portugal and Oporto, traded direct with the Irish ports. With France, the records of our trade go back to the days of St Patrick. Rouen was the chief port of Normandy and obtained from Henry II the ‘monopoly of Irish trade’. Bordeaux had a colony of Irish merchants - as had St Omar, Marseilles, Bayonne, St Malo, Nantes and other ports - who were importers of Irish wool skins, hides, fish, woollen cloth, fine linen, leather and corn, and they sent to Ireland their own manufacturers and products. The enterprising Flemings were stationed in many of the Irish ports. Their influence on maritime and inland trade was as beneficent here as it was in England. Irish merchants had their own settlements in all the leading ports of Flanders. Irish leather goods were renowned throughout Europe, so it is not a surprise that Irish names should figure on the Tanners Guild of Liege, then the most extensive and famous body of this craft on the Continent. Antwerp, too, had its Irish trade, linen being mentioned amongst other items. Lubeck had commercial intercourse with Ireland and Irish woollens were carried down the Rhine : Cologne being one of the marts. Through the Hansen Towns Irish commerce flowed on to Russia. Irish cloth, mantles, rugs and serges were highly esteemed in Spain and Portugal, likewise. The Irish merchants traded with the Canaries and pushed their way into the Land of the Moors. Prince Henry, the Navigator had his own agent in Galway. There is unimpeachable evidence that agriculture was skilfully and extensively pursued from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The exportation of enormous quantities of wheat, oats, barley, rye and of other cereals and of flax, beef, mutton, and wool point to intensive land cultivation and stock raising. To a modern Irishman, the quantities of these products exported to France, Scotland, Flanders and England seem incredible.

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Learning in Mediaeval Ireland

After the defeat of the Norsemen by King Brian at the Battle of Clontarf (1014) there was a flowering of the National Mind in literature. So the political freedom of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a re-birth of intellectual, as well as of agricultural and commercial activity in Ireland. It was a Golden Age of Gaelic Literature. As the wider gates of Irelands commerce opened on the South and West coasts, so her scholars, pilgrims. Clerics and craftsmen followed in the wake of her merchants, through the Gaulish seas into France and Italy. The universities of these lands knew a long succession of our brilliant scholars. In the knowledge of Astronomy mediaeval Ireland was in advance of most European lands. All the greater Lords of the Gaels and Sean Ghalls had their official astronomers. It was but natural that a nation of rovers and travellers should have maintained a sound standard of geographical learning in their schools.. In medicine, Europe could teach the Gaels but little. The King of England had not better pharmaceutical lore or more adept surgical skill at his command than the O’Briens’s in Munster or The Mac Cailin Mor in the Western Isles of Scotland. The Irish Brehon Law Code goes back to a much earlier epoch than the days of St Patrick. Its interpreters were deeply reverenced by the Irish people because of their even handed justice. There is not a single instance in recorded history of a brehon accepting a bribe. The Irish brehons were men of deep learning, of wide influence and of riches. Three signs marked their abodes, ‘wisdom, information and intellect’. In the Annals we read of many of them being professors of new and old laws, Civil and Canon Law. In history, Irelands fame stands high. She was justly styled a ‘Nation of Annalists’. Each sept, each province had its own genealogist and chronicler whose business it was to record the deeds of the clan and its princes and the deaths of its leading personages, lay and ecclesiastical. Truth and accuracy were regarded as of paramount importance. ‘To conceal the Truth of History’, ran one saying ‘is the blackest of infamies’. The scribes travelled throughout the whole country to verify their references and their facts. The Philosophy of History was unknown in those ages. The office of scribe and genealogist was usually continued in certain families, the son succeeding his father as a matter of course. The Annalists were held in the highest esteem, ranking next to the head of the clan; they fed at his table and were supported by his bounty. No important public business was conducted without their presence and their directing influence. The greater portion of the existing annals have been the resultant of the Revival of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

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The Geraldines

The history of the Gaelicised Fitzgeralds (the Geraldines) is in a sense the history of the fortunes of Southern Ireland for an extensive period. In Desmond, South Munster and the lands adjoining they ruled as absolute monarchs over a hundred miles of territory. The Geraldines of Kildare held the entire county of Kildare, with parts of Meath, Dublin and Carlow, while their castles stretched beyond Strangford Lough on the coast of Down to Adare. They had their own fleet to patrol the seas. Intermarriages with the great houses in England and with Norman and Gaelic families in Ireland were at first a settled part of Geraldine policy. When they tasted of the pure milk of Gaelicism they never forgot its savour, so they became kindly Irish of the Irish, root and branch. The Geraldines afford the most numerous instances of mere men of blood, apostles of the sword, turning, under the influence of Gaeldom into gentle sages and wise scholars.
The eight Earl of Desmond was the flower of the Southern Geraldine stock. The Irish people have taken this Thomas Fitzgerald to their hearts, and enshrined him there as a ‘Martyr of Christ’. He was the first of a long and fine line of Sean Ghalls to be martyred in the cause of Irish freedom. Thomas of Desmond tried to re-establish a National University and for that purpose had an Act of Parliament passed at Drogheda (1466). By precept and by practice he endeavoured to unify the two races in Ireland. He was a promoter and a patron of trade and commerce between Ireland and the Continent. He was murdered by the Earl of Worcester, afterwards known as ‘The Butcher’.
Gerald the eight Earl of Kildare (1477-1513) was named by Ireland ‘Gerait Mor’ - Gerald the Great. His mild just government drew the hearts of his people to him in passionate devotedness. By lines of blood-relationships he obtained great influence amongst the great Irish houses. Gerait Og ‘Gerald the Younger’, Ninth Earl of Kildare (1487-1534) although educated in England was even more Irish than his father. He continued the policy of intermarriage with the Irish and so consolidated the power of his house. Maynooth under him was one of the richest earls houses of that time. ‘His whole policy was union in his country, and Ireland for the Irish’. He was first appointed Lord Deputy by his cousin Henry VIII, in 1513. After seven years rule he was removed, charged by the English with ‘seditious practices, conspiracies and subtle drifts’. His cousin, the Earl of Desmond. Had entered into a solemn league and covenant with Francis I, King of France (1523) to drive the English out of Ireland, whilst Scotland was to render assistance to the cause by invading England. But the heart of the leader of the Scottish army, the Duke of Albany, failed him at the last moment and the gallant Scots dejectedly turned homewards. Kildare was summoned (1526) to England by Cardinal Wolsey to answer the charge of complicity in the plot. Wolsey denounced Kildare as a traitor. Before his departure from Dublin he appointed as vice Deputy his son, the famous Silken Thomas. Disregarding his fathers advice to be guided by his elders, he fell an easy prey to the veteran English of Dublin Castle, who had been secretly mining the foundations of the House of Kildare for generations. A forged letter was shown round in official circles in Dublin claiming his father was killed. Lord Thomas, having consulted with the young bloods, inopportunely raised the standard of revolt - against the entreaties of all the wisest heads. His enemies rejoiced - his well wishers were in despair. At first Lord Thomas swept all before him. Then England poured troops lavishly into Ireland - accompanied by the new invention, the canon, which proved the young leaders undoing. Eventually he submitted and was sent to the Tower of London - where his father had already died of a broken heart, on learning of Thomas’s insurrection. He was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn (1537). The extirpation of the Geraldines became policy and the Act of Parliament (1537) decreed all the Geraldines countries to be forfeited to the Crown.

[Fairlie]

Henry VIII’s Policies

From the beginning of his reign (1515) Henry VIII undertook to destroy the basis of Irish resistance. With this object in view he issued ‘most secret’ instructions to his officials to capture our trade and commerce, by every subtle device. All the laws against Irish civilisation, against marriage, fosterage and gossipred, against the use of native literature and its language, against every phase and aspect of National life was re-enacted. By a Parliament (May 1536) composed of English colonists only, and convened by fraud, corruption and terror, Henry was acknowledged as Head of Church and State; and the Catholic religion, with its ritual and teachings, declared null and void, ‘corrupt for ever’. Five years later the same body proclaimed Henry ‘King of Ireland’. The Lord Deputy, St Leger, preached and acted on this Gospel. The unfortunate result was the submission of O’Neill, O’Donnell, O’Brien, the MacCarthy, the Burkes, and all the rules of the Irish, Old and New. They went through the form of acknowledging Henry as King of Ireland, as Head of Church and State in Ireland, and promised to substitute English for Brehon Law, and English manners, and customs for Irish. ‘They have turned, and sad is the deed, their back to the inheritance of their fathers’. Yet in spite of ‘doing knee-homage, they would not get from the King of England for Ireland a respite from misery’. The people, faithful to Ireland in woe as in weal, resented, lamented, and even cursed their ‘diplomatic’ chiefs.
Another of Henry’s devices for the conquest of Ireland was the kidnapping of noblemen’s sons and having them reared and educated in England, hostile to every tradition and instinct of their nationality. Chiefs could be ensnared one by one in misleading contracts, practically void. A false claimant could be put on a territory and supported by English soldiers in a civil war, till the actual chief was exiled or yielded the land to the King’s ownership. No chief, true or false, had power to give away the people’s land, and the king was face to face with an indignant people, who refused to admit an illegal bargain. Then came a march of soldiers over the district, hanging, burning, shooting, ‘the rebels’, casting the peasants out on the hillsides. There was also the way of ‘conquest’. The whole of the inhabitants were to be exiled, and the countries made vacant and waste for English peopling: the sovereign’s rule would be immediate and peremptory over those whom he had thus planted by his sole will, and Ireland would be kept in a way unknown in England. Henceforth it became a fixed policy to ‘exterminate and exile the country people of the Irishry’. Henry hoped to have a royal army of Ireland as ‘a sword and a flay’ to his subjects in England and to his enemies abroad. His dream seem to be realised when Earl Con O’Neill and other Irish lords, in the full flush of faith and confidence in English justice, sent an army to aid Henry’s troops against Francis I, King of France - Ireland’s best Continental friend - at the siege of Boulogne (1544). The false, disillusioned Irish did not repeat this experiment.
Also, Henry believed he could raise a big revenue out of Ireland’s pockets for his sensualities and his political objects. But this likewise failed, because his ‘cormorants and caterpillars’ were too busy amassing wealth for themselves. The introduction of the Protestant Reformation principles added sources of fresh outrages, new oppressions. In Ireland Protestantism was not given a chance to appeal to the people by any ethical, religious or political ideals. The licentious unpaid English soldiery who had to maintain themselves by plunder and rapine, were accompanied by incendiaries who left not a homestead standing. The soul of Ireland, resurrected through the crucifixion of her body, became the most devoted daughter of the Catholic Church. Poets and historians were put to the sword, and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man ‘might know his own grandfather’. Henry’s well-defined policies were religiously pursued by his successors, Edward and Mary. The ministers of his, Edward VI, intensified the vigour of his religious crusade. Religion was to be made sweet to the heretical Irish - ‘with the Bible in one hand, in the other the Sword’. Mary’s Irish rule was no less merciless than that of her two predecessors.
The O’Connors of Offaly and the O’Mores of Leix having dared to defend their lands against the English invaders were outlawed and their countries forfeited to the Crown. A long and bloody warfare, conducted with terrible ferocity, was the result. Even in Ireland there is nothing so heroic, so persistent, so indefatigable as the efforts made by these two gallant clans to recover their homes and altars. The struggle was maintained for generations. Even to this day O’More and O’Conor are the principal families in the district, where their forefathers ruled as just, munificent princes.

[Fairlie]

Shane the Proud

Shane was a bad man in private life, but a born soldier, a sagacious ruler, and a believer in his rights. When Conn, the Lame, his father, accepted an English title, and became Baron of Dungannon, Shane went into rebellion. On his father’s death, he slew his half brother, the next baron, and was inaugurated the O’Neill. Shane the Proud, Ulster called him. He stood across England’s advance into the province. Elizabeth and her Lord Deputies tried to cajole him, to deceive him, to defeat him, to capture him, to murder him. Then when his soldiers had pierced to the Pale, they recognised him as the O’Neill. Sinner, soldier, chieftain, he was a strong figure in the century. Shane’s territory was now supposed to be safe from English interference or invasion. He and England’s queen were friends. Sussex, the Lord Deputy, wrote offering him his sister in marriage with a safe conduct to Dublin. His intention was to capture Shane. Later he sent him a present of wine. Elizabeth knew of the gift; knew what was in it.
Shane and his household drank the wine - and just escaped death. But Shane knew now forever with whom he had to deal. It was the second attempt that English statesmen had secretly made to assassinate him.
Shane flung off his allegiance. After that draught of wine he thought his sword was his best security. He won a victory notable of its name. They were three hundred English soldiers, not in buff but in scarlet coats. So that battle was called the battle of the red coats. But hard were the strokes of his enemies - ‘Queens’ O’Donnels, ‘Queens’ O’Neills, Elizabeths forces - and the Proud was left the choice of submission or an appeal to the Scots mercenaries. He choose the latter, freed Sorley Boy McDonnel, and went to a banquet they gave. To that banquet also went a man whom the Lord Deputy had maintained privately in Tyrone when he and Shane were in friendship and peace. The spy waited till the wine had made men drunk and think of their wrongs. Then O’Neill was slain. The spy hastened to Dublin Castle and received from Sir Henry Sidney a thousand marks from the public treasury.
So Shanes head went upon the north-west gate of Dublin.

[Fairlie]

Elizabeth continues the Conquest

The conquest of Ireland had been going on four centuries. The rock against which every attempt to complete it had broken was the immemorial laws of Ireland, the Brehon Laws. These bound Irishmen within the four seas to one social and legal rule. All attempts to plant the feudal system in Ireland by England went down before them.
The strongest Norman house in Irish history was the Geraldines. They must be suppressed. The Ormonds were castle men, guardians of English authority. The Black Earl of Ormond seized Gerald, Earl of Desmond, and sent him to London, and Elizabeth sent him to the tower. A little later his brother was seized and sent there too. Their cousin, James Fitzmaurice, drew his sword to protest against the seizures. They won victories; they routed a queens army. Then Elizabeth made peace with Fitzmaurice. And she then directed a plot for the treacherous murder of himself, his brothers and cousins - which by discovering in time, he escaped. After a time the new Earl had to fly to Spain for safety and succour. He visited Rome, too, got Italian mercenaries, fourscore Spaniards, a promise of more and returned to Ireland, where he vanished out of life in a skirmish. Spain remembered her promise. Eight hundred Spaniards landed on the coast of Kerry. Gray sent in his soldiers and massacred seven hundred men. The massacre was directed by Sir Walter Raleigh and an officer named Wingfield.
The Earl and his kinsmen, fighting now for their religion and their homes, joined hands with the MacCarthys, the O’Sullivans and other Munster chiefs. Carew, a Devonshire knight, claimed Desmond territory, and brought an army to seize it and ‘pacify’ the province. The Desmond war lasted three more years, altogether five. The Earl, finally defeated, was at last captured and beheaded.
English Law had made a breach in Connacht. The head of the Burkes, Clanrickard, a ‘queens’ man, was seized and sent to Dublin. Then all the Burkes loosened their swords in their scabbards and sprang into rebellion. The rebellion grew and strengthened, before the ‘strong measures’ of the Lord President. Soon, the disarmed Catholics were taken and hanged. Surrendered garrisons were put to the sword; a search for rebels in West Connacht saw women, and boys and old men, and all who came in Binghams way, slain.
Into Leinster, too, English Law had driven a wedge. Mary of Englands Deputies had seized Offaly and Leix, the territories of the O’Conors and the O’Mores. They had planted English settlers there; abolished the ancient territorial names and in Irish blood rechristened them Kings and Queens counties. The dispossessed chiefs and their clansmen bided their time. A noble boy grew up among them, and in manhood became an avenging sword. This was Ruari Og O’More. After six years of successful guerilla warfare he fell when reconnoitring a force brought against him. His soldiers avenged his death and put the army to flight. His name remained an inspiration to oppressed Irish, down to the present day. ‘God, and Our Lady, and Rory O’More!’.

[Fairlie]

Red Hugh

In the North the smouldering fire had flamed forth again. The predestined boy had come whose advent a Tir-Conaill seer had long ago foretold. Young Hugh O’Donnell, Aod Ruad, the golden-haired, minatory, deadly foe to England. The fame and renown of him had reached the ears of Lord Deputy Perrot, illegitimate son of Henry VIII. The dreaded lad was being fostered by MacSwiney, Lord of Fanat on the Northern sea’s verge. When the boy was fourteen a merchant ship sailed into Loch Swilly, and anchored under the stone castle of MacSwiney. The captain invited MacSwiney and his family aboard the ship where they were tricked and captured. All but Red Hugh were released. Red Hugh was carried away to Dublin and placed in the Birmingham tower of the castle. In Fanat, throughout all Tir-Conaill and indeed through Eirinn there was weeping, wrath, shame and anger. After three years the boy made a wonderful and daring escape on a December night - but alas ! was retaken. After another year, this time spent in irons, in company with Henry and Art, the sons of Shane O’Neill, both in irons also, he made another daring attempt - and this time succeeded in freeing all three. Red Hugh’s escape sent a thrill through Ireland. Messengers rode north and south and east and west with the joyous word. On a May day the lad was made The O’Donnell. Sir Hugh his father, gladly gave place to a son so fit to rule. Thus Red Hugh’s star rose and shone high in the north over Ireland; and still shines in the dark sky of her history.
The Nine Years War had begun. A spear darted through Tir-Conaill. The invader was driven out; chiefs who had given their allegiance to the foreigner were taught that the O’Donnell was their chief and prince. He swept through Ulster and drove out the English sheriffs. He entered Connacht and hurled Binghams forces before him. Hugh O’Neill watched events; waited, held his hand, still uncertain.
So the issue of an independent Ireland or a conquered country was now to be put to the sword. Almost for the first time since the invasion Ireland had a statesman who saw the root of her weakness, and who placed the politics of the nation before the politics of the clan.

[Fairlie]

The Nine Years War

The war was not only one of independence but a religious war as well. Men looked to Spain, the great Catholic country; would she help ? Messengers crossed and re-crossed the seas. The instinct of local freedom had gathered round the Norman houses in Ireland during the centuries. Thus Irish soldiers always true to their leaders marched with the Earl of Ormond, or the Earl of Kildare, or other Norman lord who paid allegiance to England. O’Neill cast off the title of Earl, and was proclaimed The O’Neill. Seven miles from his castle a fortress was held by the English. O’Neills men stormed the fortress, drove out the English garrison, levelled the fort and burnt the bridge. He marched to Monaghan, gave battle to Norris, the English general who was advancing to its relief and defeated him. England proclaimed O’Neill an enemy and a traitor. Armies were sent against him. He evaded and defeated the armies. He showed generalship of a high order. She recalled her best soldiers from the Spanish war in Belgium and flung them into Ireland. Generals and soldiers failed to break his power.
Red Hugh went like a flame through the west. He scattered his enemies, and drove Bingham before him. He re-captured Sligo castle; defeated Clifford, the English governor of Connacht, in the Curlew pass; brought the Burkes to his standard.

[Fairlie]

The Ulster Plantation

Within a decade of the ‘Flight of the Earls’ came the Ulster Plantation. It was the excuse needed for the wholesale robbing of the clans. That the lands belonged to the whole clan community was of no consequence to the English. According to English law and custom it should belong to the lords (chiefs). The English Lord Lieutenant, Sir Arthur Chichester, and the Attorney General, Sir John Davies, were the instruments , for giving effect to the great Plantation. The natives were driven to the bogs and the moors where it was hoped that they would starve to death. The conditions upon which the new people got their land bound them to repress and abhor the Irish natives , admit no Irish customs, never to intermarry with the Irish, and not to permit any Irish on their lands. As a result many of the Irish starved to death. Many others sailed away and enlisted under continental armies.

[Fairlie]

The Rising of 1641

The Irish were not content to starve and die upon the moors. The Rising of 1641 was the natural outcome of this great wrong. Rory O’Moore is chiefly credited for this great resurgence of the Irish race. For years he patiently worked among the leading Irish families, Irish Generals in the Continental armies, and other Irish representatives in the European countries. Plans being matured, the Rising broke in Ulster on the night of the 21st October 1641. Practically in one night they reconquered their province, having sent the Planters scurrying into the few Ulster cities that they still could hold. It was Ulster only that had risen that night - the other quarters remained quiet due to a miscarriage of plans and through a traitor. For the purpose of inciting the English at home , the English invented stories of massacres and Irish cruelty - many of which are still believed today. The fearful cruelties perpetrated by Sir Charles Coote, leader of the English army in Leinster, and by St Leger, English commander in Munster, combined with fear for themselves and their estates, drove the Anglo-Irish Catholic lords and their fellows in Munster to join the Rebellion. When the great and historic Synod met in Kilkenny in May ’42, the Irish practically owned Ireland, English power merely clinging by its teeth to some outer corners of the country.

[Fairlie]

The War of the ‘Forties

The Confederation of Kilkenny proved to be perhaps more of a curse than a blessing to Ireland.
The establishing of the Confederation was the establishing of a Parliament in Ireland. In England Charles and his Parliamentary Government were now at bitter odds - beginning the great civil conflict there. They manacled, and thwarted the great Irish figure of the Forties - the truly admirable man and signally great military leader, Owen Roe O’Neill. With Owen Roe’s coming arose Ireland’s bright star of hope - and with his passing, that star set. Owen Roe was a nephew of Hugh O’Neill, ‘Earl of Tyrone’, who fled at the century’s beginning, and had died abroad. Owen Roe was a young man at the time of the Flight of the Earls, had fought in that last disastrous fight at Kinsale and going abroad also, had won signal distinction as a military commander in the Spanish Netherlands. He had never ceased to hope that he would yet be the means of freeing his Fatherland. And through the years in which his sword had been in the service of Spain, his heart was ever with Ireland. He came to his own North, when, close following its first bright burst the clouds of despair had come down, and begun to sit heavy on it again. On the 6th July 1642, with a hundred officers in his company, the long wished for saviour stepped off a ship and was given command of the Northern army. So potent was the name and fame of Owen Roe that even while his army was still in embryo, Lord Levin from Scotland at the head of twenty thousand men refused to meet such a formidable battler and strategist. In June 1646 he fought and won his great pitched battle, the famous victory of Benburb. Here he met and smashed the Scottish General Monroe, who then held the British command in Ulster. All remaining Scottish forces were, by his signal victory sent scurrying into the two strongholds of Derry and Carrickfergus. The province was Owen Roe’s and Ireland’s.
So would the whole country soon have been - but unfortunately the Supreme Council, flinging away the golden opportunity, not only signed a peace with Ormond, acting for King Charles, but went so far as to put under his command all of the Confederate Catholic Army. Owen Rose hurried south with his forces to overawe the traitors and try to counteract the harm they had done. But every move made by Owen Rose, and every combination, was wisely directed toward the great end. Yet the noble man held steadily to his task, and when eventually Cromwell came like an avenging angel Owen Roe was the one great commanding figure to which the awed and wasted nation instinctively turned.
But, as by God’s will it proved, their turning to him was in vain.

[Fairlie]

Cromwell

It was in August of ’40 that Cromwell landed in Dublin. The great leader of the grim Ironsides, himself, was destined to leave behind him in Ireland for all time a name synonymous with ruthless butchery. The first rare taste of the qualities of this agent of God the Just, and first Friend of the Irish was given to the people at Drogheda. Only thirty men out of a garrison of three thousand escaped the sword. After Drogheda, Cromwell in quick succession reduced the other northern strongholds, then turned and swept southward to Wexford - two thousand were butchered here. Cromwell reduced the garrisons of Arklow, Inniscorthy and Ross on the way to Wexford. After Wexford he tried to reduce Waterford, but failing in his first attempt, and not having time to waste besieging it, passed onward - and found the cities of Cork an easy prey. He rested at Youghal, getting fresh supplies and money from England. In January he took the field again, reduced Fethard, Cashel and eventually got Kilkenny by negotiation. Against his new and powerful cannon, the ancient and crumbling defences of the Irish cities were of little avail. The conqueror then - in the end of May - sailed from Youghal for England after having in eight months, subdued almost of Ireland, destroyed the effective Irish forces, and left the country prostate at the feet of the Parliament. He left in command his general, Ireton, who on his death soon after, was to be succeeded by Cromwells son, Henry. It took his successors another two years to finish up the remnant of work that he had left unfinished. Waterford, Limerick and Galway still held out. Scattered bands of fighters here and there, and an army of the North, under Heber MacMahon, kept Ulster resistance still alive. The few towns - Waterford, Limerick, Galway - and the scattered fighting forces were gradually conquered or capitulated. Till on the 12th May ’52, Articles of Kilkenny signed by the Parliamentary Commissioners on the one hand and the Earl of West Meath on the other - yet fiercely denounced by the Leinster clergy - practically terminated the longest, the most appallingly dreadful and inhumane, and the most exhausting, war, with which unfortunate Ireland was ever visited.

[Fairlie]

The Cromwellian Settlement

But Irelands sufferings, great and terrible as they had been, were yet far from ended. "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. The bodies of many wandering orphans, whose fathers had been killed or exiled, and whose mothers had died of famine, were preyed upon by wolves. 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 not see a living creature". In September 1653, was issued by parliament the order for the great transplanting. Under penalty of death, no Irish man, woman or child was to be found east of the River Shannon, after the 1st May 1654. Sir William Petty, in his Political Anatomy of Ireland, estimated that the wars had reduced the population.

[Fairlie]

The Later Penal Laws

When fire and sword had signally failed to suppress the Irish race new means to that end must be found. So the fertile mind of the conqueror invented the Penal Laws. The object of the Penal Laws was threefold ;
1) To deprive the Catholics of all civil life
2) To reduce them to a condition of most extreme and brutal ignorance
3) To dissociate them from the soil
The Penal Laws enacted or re-enacted in the new era succeeding the siege of Limerick, when under the pledged faith and honour of the English crown, the Irish Catholics were to be "protected in the free and unfettered exercise of their religion", provided amongst other things that :
The Irish Catholic was forbidden the exercise of his religion,
He was forbidden to receive education.
He was forbidden to enter a profession.
He was forbidden to hold public office.
He was forbidden to engage in trade or commerce.
He was forbidden to live in a corporate town or within five miles thereof.
He was forbidden to own a horse of greater value than five pounds.
He was forbidden to purchase land.
He was forbidden to lease land.
He was forbidden to vote.
He was forbidden to keep any arms for his protection.
He was forbidden to hold a life annuity.
He could not be guardian to a child.
He could not attend catholic worship.
He could not himself educate his child.
The law soon came to recognise an Irishman in Ireland only for the purpose of repressing him.
The Volunteer movement in the 1780’s first began to take the edge off Protestant prejudice. In the year 1793, an Act was passed relieving the Catholics of many of their disabilities - in theory at least. Another thirty-six years were to elapse before the next step was taken, under compulsion from the O’Connell agitation, and the Act known as Catholic Emancipation made law.

[Fairlie]

The Suppression of Irish Trade

In the early centuries of the Christian Era the highly civilised Celt was inclined to trade and commerce. The early Irish, were famous for their excellence in the arts and crafts - particularly for their wonderful work in metals, bronze, silver and gold. By the beginning of the 14th Century, the trade of Ireland with the Continent of Europe was important. This condition of things naturally did not suit commercial England. So at an early period she began to stifle Irish industry and trade.
The Irish woollen manufacturers began to rival Englands. So in 1571 Elizabeth imposed restriction upon the Irish woollen trade that crippled the large Irish trade with the Netherlands and other parts of the Continent.
Ireland tried its hand at manufacturing cotton. England met this move with a twenty-five per cent duty upon Irish cotton imported into England. And next forbade the inhabitants of England to wear any cotton other than of British manufacture.
Ireland attempted to develop her tobacco industry. But a law against its growth was passed in the first year of Charles the Second.
Four and five centuries ago and upward the Irish fisheries were the second in importance in Europe. Under careful English nursing they were, a century and a half ago, brought to the vanishing point. Then the independent Irish Parliament at the end of the eighteenth century saved them. Here we have set down only examples of the principal Acts and devices for the suppression of Irish manufacturers and Irish industries, but yet sufficient to show how England protected her beloved Irish subjects in the enjoyment of all they have - how Ireland prospered under English Rule in a material way - and how England in her step-motherly way, took each toddling Irish industry by the hand, led its childish footsteps to the brink of the bottomless pit, and gave it a push - thus ending its troubles forever.
And thus is explained in part why Ireland, one of the most favoured by nature and one of the most fertile countries in Europe, is yet one of the poorest. And why it is that, as recent statistics show, ninety-eight per cent of the export trade of the three kingdoms is in the hands of Britain and in Ireland’s hands only two per cent.

[Fairlie]

The Volunteers

The Volunteers needed no special perspicacity to see that the most formidable enemy even of the English colony in Ireland was the English trade interest, to which their advantages were ruthlessly sacrificed. The first invasion they set themselves to repel was that of English manufacturing goods. Shopkeepers and merchants who imported foreign goods or tried to impose them on their customers as Irish manufacture, were warned of the consequences. The Volunteers were there to see that the boycott was duly observed. When Parliament met in October 1779, Grattan moved his celebrated amendment to the Address to the Throne, demanding Free Trade for Ireland - that is the right to import and export what commodities she pleased, unrestrained by foreign legislation. The amended address was carried by a huge majority, and next day it was borne to the Castle and dispatched to England. Acts were rushed through the English Houses of Parliament in a few weeks which restored to the Irish the trade rights of which they had been robbed. At any moment England might revoke the concessions she had granted under duress. There still remained on the Statute Books of the two countries the Acts which gave her this power - Poyning’s Act , and the Sixth of George 1.
Poyning’s Act bound the Irish Parliament to legislate only as the British Parliament permitted it. The Sixth of George 1, also called the Declaratory Act declared that the King had full power and authority to make or amend laws. The following year, 1783, under pressure from the Volunteers and Flood a ‘Renunciation Bill’ was carried through the British parliament. It declared that the ‘right claim by the people of Parliament of that Kingdom in all cases whatever, and to have all actions and suits at law, or in equity, which may be instituted in the Kingdom, decided by His majesty’s courts therein finally, and without appeal from thence, shall be and is hereby declared to be established and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time here-after be questionable’.

[Fairlie]

The United Irishmen

The first general meeting of the United Irishmen was held on 18th October 1791, and the following resolutions were proposed and carried ;
1) That the weight of English influence in the Government of this country is so great as to require a cordial union among all the people of Ireland, to maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties and the extension of our commerce
2) That the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed is by a complete and radical reform of the people in Parliament
3) That no reform is just which does not include Irishmen of every religious persuasion.
During the year 1796, events had moved in Ireland with extraordinary rapidity. On the one hand the Government had let loose on the country a storm of organised terrorism, and on the other the country, as a measure of self-protection, if nothing else - had gone solidly into the ranks of the ‘United’ men. Among the sinister measures adopted by Government to break the ‘Union’ was the establishment of the Orange Society.

[Fairlie]

The Rising of 1798

The insurrection long delayed in the hope of the promised aid from France, now broke out under the worst possible conditions. for success. Left without leaders, it is astonishing that it should have been confined to only a portion of the country and that the efforts of the counties that ‘rose’ were speedily suppressed. Between 24th and 27th May there were engagements with the military at Naas, Clane, Prosperous, Kilcullen and Monasterevin in Kildare, at Dunboyne and Tara in Meath, at Baltinglass in Wicklow, at Lucan, Rathfarnham and Tallaght in Dublin. The only other important engagements in Ulster were at Saintfield and Newtownards, where the insurgents were successful, and at Ballinahinch where Monroe and his United Men were defeated by General Nugent. News of those events came in due time to Tone in France, and made him frantic with anxiety and impatience to be with his comrades in Ireland. Tone was called to Paris to consult with the Ministers of War and Marine in the organisation of a small expedition. Wolfe Tone accompanied eight frigates under Commodore Bompard and 3000 men under General Hardy to Ireland. However they were set upon by the English fleet. Tone was not recognised at first but his disguise was soon upturned. He made a gallant figure as he stood before his judges in the uniform of a French Colonel, making his last profession of faith in his principles to which he had devoted all that was his to give. "From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced, that while it lasted, this country would never be free or happy. In consequence, I determined to apply all the powers which my individual efforts could move, in order to separate the two countries. that Ireland was not able, of herself, to throw off the yoke, I knew. I therefore sought for aid wherever it was to be found.......Under the flag of the French Republic. After such sacrifices, in a cause which I have always considered as the cause of justice and freedom - it is no great effort at this day to add the sacrifice of my life".
Tone is buried at Bodenstown alongside his brother who had died for the same glorious cause a few weeks earlier.
And there, side by side, those two mangled bodies - each broken so cruelly in the conquerors murder machine - await the Resurrection - in the ‘green grave’ which Ireland cherishes as the most precious thing she owns.

[Fairlie]

Robert Emmet

Everybody knew that the war between France and England, to which the peace of Amiens had put a temporary cessation, would soon break out again; and it was common belief likewise that when the war did break out, an invasion by Bonaparte either of England or Ireland would be attempted. The United Irishmen, both on the continent and in Ireland therefore were prepared to sacrifice their just resentment against France for her failure to keep her engagements with them in ’98 and enter into a new alliance with her. The Agent of the United Irishmen in Paris, was Thomas Addis Emmet, who left Brussels for the French Capital early in 1803, to act in that capacity on definite instructions from the Provisional Government in Ireland. In the first place there was an absolute promise on the part of the French of a large expeditionary force to aid the Rising in Ireland. In the second there was an understanding with, and guarantees of co-operation from the revolutionary societies in England and Scotland. In the third, there were pledges from men of the highest social, military and political standing in Ireland to aid the movement with money, moral and other backing. If ever an effort for Irish Liberty seemed destined to succeed, it was that to which Robert Emmet found himself committed when he returned to Ireland, after his ‘Grand Tour’ on the continent, in the Autumn of 1802. His primary object was to get the country organised and armed, ready to co-operate with the French landing. Emmets own work was mainly confined to Dublin, but he was in close touch with the men of Carlow, Wicklow and Wexford. On the 16th July an explosion took place in a house in Patrick Street, which Emmet had taken as a depot for arms and explosives. This event, which made him regard the discovery of his plans as imminent, caused him to fix an early date for the Rising without waiting for the promised French help. Assurance came from all over the country that if Dublin rose the rest of Ireland would speedily follow. Saturday, the 23rd July was the day arranged for the Rising. But on the day appointed it was discovered that only a small fraction of the men expected to help had turned up. The romantic sequel of Robert Emmets story has given to the occurrences of the 23rd July an importance which the men who organised the conspiracy of which they were only an incident, did not recognise. One part of the plan, the Rising in Dublin, had miscarried, through no fault of Robert Emmets; but if the French had been true to their plighted word the rest of the country would have risen later, according to the plan, and the dream to which the gallant youth sacrificed fortune, life and love, might yet have come true. But the French failed their Irish allies once more, and Thomas Addis Emmet, though he still continued for a time his negotiations with the agents of the First Consul, had at length to convince himself that ‘Bonaparte was the worst enemy Ireland ever had’. As for his brother, Robert, when he saw the blood of Lord Kilwarden, he dispersed his followers and was determined to do nothing more until the promised French aid had arrived. To expedite its coming he sent Myles Byrne to France with an urgent message to his brother, Thomas Addis. Before Myles Bryne had arrived in Paris, Robert had been arrested at Harolds Cross, to whose dangerous neighbourhood he had been drawn by an overpowering desire to see once more his ‘bright love’ the exquisite Sarah Curran. On the 20th September the sacrifice was consummated. The brave youth was publicly beheaded on a Dublin street.

[Fairlie]

Daniel O’Connell

Throughout almost the first half of the nineteenth century Irelands history is reflected in the life of Daniel O’Connell. In Dublin he associated with the United Irishmen and shred their national sentiments. When the Emmet alarm burst on the country in 1803, he flew to arms to preserve the Constitution. He was one of the Lawyers Corps that was formed for defence of the realm against the assault of French principles. It was in 1808, that O’Connell first got marked prominence in Irish affairs. When in ’13 those Protestant champions of Catholic Emancipation, Grattan and Plunkett, had introduced in Parliament a Catholic Relief Bill which had every chance of passing, and which had the approval of the Irish Catholic aristocratic party and the English Catholics, O’Connell aroused Ireland against it because it was saddled with the objectionable veto and also gave to the British the right to supervise all documents passing between Rome and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in these islands. The passion of O’Connell, the people, and the prelates had the desired effect. The rights of the Irish church were no longer to be considered a negotiable security at Rome.