The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (3 page)

Brother Kelly witnessed the decline of British colonialism and taught many of the boys who would go on to become prime ministers and chief justices under the new dispensation. He returned determined to encourage in his Irish pupils an attitude of openness. Although a proud Irish nationalist himself, he was too clever and had seen too much of the world to live or teach according to slogans. He hired men who would challenge our preconceptions. Among them was a warm, and occasionally fiery, history teacher, Declan Healy, who spoke beautiful Irish and caused our heads to spin with his gift for asking troubling questions. On one occasion Healy challenged his class with the proposition that Sir Edward Carson, the Ulster loyalist leader and pet hate of Irish nationalists, was in fact an Irish patriot. As he reminded me recently: ‘I remember one kid saying, “Sir that doesn’t make any sense.” I said, “How do you mean that doesn’t make any sense?” I said, “Carson wanted the union of Ireland and Britain, he wanted what for him was the best thing for Ireland. Now can you say that he’s not a patriot because he doesn’t agree with you?” I was trying to do that kind of thing, it was a bit awkward and sometimes you’d be afraid they might use it as answers to questions in examinations and find themselves in trouble. But as I always said, we’ll have a go.’

Those words, ‘we’ll have a go’, came back to me throughout this journey into history. Trying to tell the story of thousands of years in five hours of television was a daunting task. Yet it was easily one of the most rewarding journeys I have undertaken in my career. I have always yearned for stories that challenge the way I see the world and that turn my own prejudices on their head. The
Story of Ireland
told in this book and in the television series is far more than a recitation of old battles. But I have to acknowledge the impact of war as a motive in wanting to tell the Irish story. The lesson I learned from covering the wars of Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East is that the greatest single cause of conflict is our fear of the other, of ‘them’. Fear that they will rise up and kill us; fear that they will take our jobs; fear that they will erase our identity, that we will be eradicated entirely as a people or forced to become like ‘them’.

In Portadown, County Armagh, I was once told by a loyalist demonstrator that he would like to see ‘you and all your bloody priests on top of a bonfire’. I was happy that the presence of the police prevented his aspiration becoming tangible. To this man my southern accent and name marked me as the enemy. I represented a threat to his home and his sense of himself as a Protestant subject of the Queen. He knew nothing of my history and I, at that time, could see him only as a cartoon character, the walk-on bigot in a drama from the seventeenth century.

Soon afterwards I was posted permanently to Northern Ireland and I covered the conflict day in and day out. I also read every book I could on the history of the previous four centuries, and I made it my business to talk with nationalists and unionists and, above all, to listen. The world that had seemed so simple from the other side of the border turned out to be a very complicated place indeed. I learned, slowly and at times painfully, the virtue of trying to put oneself in the other man’s shoes, and of looking beyond rhetoric to the history that made him. If the telling of history, for nationalists and unionists, for Irish and British, is a mere matter of computing wrongs in the hope of a final moral victory, then we miss the point entirely. The story must be a means to greater understanding.

Perhaps this idea is best expressed in a poem written by a good friend of mine, Michael Longley, an insightful and civilized voice throughout the years of the Troubles. In the best tradition of outward-looking Irish writers, Longley reaches across the oceans and draws from the classical tradition for a work he wrote to commemorate the IRA ceasefire of 1994. In the poem ‘Ceasefire’ Longley evokes the death of Hector at the hand of Achilles before Troy, and the visit to the victor’s tent by King Priam, father of Hector.

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears

Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king

Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and

Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands, Achilles

Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,

Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry

Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

When they had eaten together, it pleased them both

To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,

Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still

And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done

And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’

Fergal Keane, 2011

Prologue

The human history of Ireland begins very late in European terms: humans first appeared there a mere ten thousand years ago, in the wake of the last ice age. These first settlers may have come from western France or Iberia, hugging the curving European coastline before making a final jump north and west. Or they may have crossed the narrow North Channel from Britain: indeed, some of the earliest evidence of human activity in the island has been uncovered in the northeast of the Country at Mount Sandel on the banks of the river Bann in what is now County Derry. Here, archaeologists have discovered mute testimony – in the form of charcoal and ash, salmon bones and the hazelnut shells that are ubiquitous features of these early sites – of a mesolithic culture dating back to 7000 BC. Similar sites have been excavated across the island: an aerial view reveals a wealth of other artificial ripples and furrows in the landscape, all of them silent but eloquent memorials of nameless and untraceable ancestors.

These first settlers were far from static. They were beginning to trade, to travel, to explore the land and exploit its rich resources: venturing across to what is now Scotland, for example, to barter hides and their superior hard flint for seed, cattle and other novelties that would transform their home surroundings. At the same time, the dense forests that succeeded the ice ages began to be hacked away for firewood, to provide access to grazing land on the bald uplands and to carve out small fields in which the first primitive strains of rye, oats and especially barley were grown. More newcomers came, and more, as a result of these contacts between this society and the world outside, slowly but unceasingly feeding new ingredients and genes into the Irish scene: and as the mesolithic age passed into the neolithic, so levels of sophistication rose in agriculture, in pottery and sculpture and in science.

And in architecture: for these are the ancestors that began, definitively, to leave a built legacy across the island. In what is now the windswept and bleak littoral of north County Mayo, for example, lies that patchwork of tombs, dwellings and ancient stone-walled agricultural land called the Céide Fields, which were grazed by cattle and planted with cereal crops five thousand years ago when the climate was a good deal warmer than it is today. It was only by flukes of climate change that this landscape came to be covered in a thick, pickling layer of peat bog that preserved it for posterity; there is no reason, therefore, to think that what was accomplished in Mayo was not equally undertaken elsewhere. Or take the remarkable megalithic monuments that began to appear at this time too, of which the astronomically aligned passage tombs at Newgrange, Dowth and Knowth on the bend of the river Boyne in County Meath remain the most famous.

Later, metals were fashioned into shapes beautiful and practical: smiths worked bronze into tools, horns and ornaments for the country’s elite; and gold into fabulous collars, torcs, necklaces and bracelets. A model boat fashioned in pure gold – ‘that small boat out of the bronze age / Where the oars are needles and the worked gold frail / As the intact half of a hollowed-out shell’
¹
– was an element in the Broighter Hoard, stored carefully in a wooden box and unearthed by a farmer ploughing his fields on the shores of Lough Foyle in 1896. Human history, then, began to unfold and to score itself on to the land – but a modern map of the island is equally impressed with traces of a parallel mythical past: the modern cathedral city of Armagh that is named for the goddess Macha; Faughart in County Louth where the hero Cúchulainn accomplished his mighty deeds; the hexagonal stones of the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim that geologists surmise were forged by volcanic action millions of years ago, but that myth declares to be the work of supernatural hands.

History and myth have thus been much mingled, and the result is that the story of this pre-Christian land is still the subject of a good deal of conjecture. Of course, tales handed down from generation to generation can preserve a version of history that would otherwise be utterly lost – especially when dealing with oral cultures that leave few or no written records for posterity. In this case, tales of invasions of the island by the Milesians of Iberia and other mythical entities seem to glimpse an ancient past, when repeated waves of new settlers came from over the sea. Such events were not formal military expeditions as we would understand the term, but they had immediate cultural and political implications on the island itself: it was divided and divided again among various groups and tribes, in a pattern that would continue well into the Christian era. These later migrations, however, did not erase the earlier, culturally sophisticated societies already established. Persistence and consistency characterize this island’s history – and these earliest human civilizations were no less dogged in this regard than their successors would prove to be. Rather, it is much more likely that newcomers, discovering as they did a country already settled, adapted their old ways to the new land. In the process, they added both their genes and – more immediately usefully – their own layers of vital cultural experience to an increasingly complex society. And as the centuries passed, so the population of the island slowly rose: by 700
BC
, it may have risen above the one hundred thousand mark.

By the fourth century
BC
, Ireland had appeared on maps of the classical world. Although the Carthaginians had long maintained a blockade of the Strait of Gibraltar, the better to maintain control of their trading routes, at least one mariner managed to dodge the patrolling ships and sail north and west in search of the tin and other metals that formed the wealth of the western islands. The navigator and cartographer Pythias of Massilia – modern Marseilles, but originally a Greek colony – named the far-flung island Ierne, a name clearly derived from Ériu, the Irish matron goddess. Three hundred years later, as Julius Caesar swept through Gaul and landed in Britain, the name had been Latinized: the Romans unflatteringly knew the island that hovered just over the western horizon as Hibernia, land of winter. They gradually accumulated all the knowledge they needed about this Hibernia, as with all the territories that fringed their empire: ample evidence exists, in the form of Roman coins and material goods, that imperial scouts and traders crossed the water in search of butter, cattle and Irish wolfhounds; and that Roman merchants and enterprising tourists fetched up in the valley of the river Boyne to marvel at the already ancient tombs. Conversely, Hibernian contacts with Britain and further afield, in search of gold, wine and agricultural produce, were equally common and ongoing. Roman control of its province of Britain was never as deeply rooted and all-encompassing as has sometimes been supposed – Romano–British towns were invariably walled, in sharp contrast to the situation in, say, Gaul and Spain – and it is reasonable to assume that repeated Hibernian incursions in search of booty and slaves were one good reason for this state of affairs.

But this land of Ierne or Hibernia was only ever of marginal economic and strategic interest: there was never enough at stake to make a Roman invasion worthwhile. Only once, in
AD
82, do we have a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when a decisive Roman intervention might have been possible. The historian Tacitus describes an embassy in that year in the form of a Hibernian princeling, ‘expelled from his home by a rebellion’, who sailed across the water to Roman Britain. The intentions of this prince were to negotiate with Agricola, the all-conquering Roman governor of Britain (and father-in-law to Tacitus himself, which is why we know so much about him), who maintained a fleet in the Solway Firth, less than a day’s sail from the northeast coast of Hibernia. He ‘was welcomed by Agricola, who detained him, nominally as a friend, in the hope of being able to make use of him’.
²
The embassy, in other words, would have provided a convenient pretext to enter and conquer Hibernia, had the political will been present.