Ireland

IRELAND
OUR
ISLAND STORY

Vincent McDonnell
from County Mayo lives near Newmarket, County Cork. In 1989 he won the GPA First Fiction Award, after being recommended by Graham Greene. He has published four other non-fiction titles and seven novels for children. Winner of numerous prizes, and shortlisted for the RAI Awards, he has been writer in residence at many venues and gives workshops and readings throughout Ireland.

For my sister Tina, Tommie and family and for my sister Theresa,
Gerry and family

W
hen you think of Ireland, do you imagine a country of lofty mountains and rolling hills, of babbling rivers and green glens? It’s how many people think of Ireland: a country of mists and myths and legends, where fairies live in fairy forts and at night dance around a solitary thorn tree to the plaintive music of a fiddle, where leprechauns, small men dressed in green, make beautiful leather shoes with silver buckles and guard their pots of gold. Ireland is also the country of the banshee, whose cries can be heard at night when someone dies.

It is a country of poets and singers and musicians. We have storytellers too, whose stories recount the brave deeds of heroes of old like Fionn MacCumhaill and Oisín and the Fianna; and of Queen Maeve of Connacht who fought a great battle over the ownership of the Brown Bull of Cooley. The stories also tell the tragedy of the Children of Lir, who were turned into swans, and the exploits of Setanta, who slew the hound of Culainn and became known afterwards as Cú Chulainn, or Culainn’s Hound. The stories also tell of ghosts and goblins and giants, and of dark-faced men called pookas who roam the countryside on moonless nights.

But there is another Ireland, a country that has survived invaders and marauders, and which has been conquered and ruled by a foreign power. Great battles have been fought on its soil and tens of thousands of its people have died in those conflicts. Terrible famines have ravaged the country. In one such famine, known as The Great Hunger, millions died of starvation and disease, or fled the country in terror. So many Irish men and woman emigrated to every part of the globe seeking a new life for themselves and their families that today Ireland is known throughout the whole world.

We have our own language and our native games of football and hurling, the latter having been played for thousands of years. Over two millenia ago, great sporting gatherings called the Tailteann Games were held. They included athletics and wrestling, as well as storytelling and drama. It is claimed that the modern Olympic Games, which first took place in Greece more than 2,000 years ago, were based on Ireland’s Tailteann Games.

Five thousand years ago, the largest settled farming community yet discovered in the world existed at the Céide Fields at Ballycastle in County Mayo. At that time, too, the people who then lived in County Meath built Newgrange, one of the first and largest man-made structures ever built on earth. It existed even before the pyramids were built in Egypt. The people who built Newgrange had no machinery. All they had were their hands and stone tools. Yet they were an intelligent people and knew how to measure the movement of the earth and the sun precisely.

The people who lived at the Céide Fields, or who built Newgrange, did not know how to write. They have left no written evidence of their existence – only their buildings and tools, and evidence of where they once lived. But thousands of years later, when the people who then lived in Ireland did know how to read and write, they wrote some of the most beautiful handwritten books in the whole world.

From AD 400 to AD 1200, a time in Europe now referred to as the Dark Ages, is known in Ireland as the age of saints and scholars, or The Golden Age. During the first 400 years of The Golden Age, Irish monks, using homemade inks and quills, wrote the largest number of illuminated, or illustrated, manuscripts that exists anywhere in the world from that time. The most magnificent of all those illuminated manuscripts is the Book of Kells, which can be seen in Trinity College, Dublin.

At this time Irish goldsmiths and silversmiths were also creating beautiful items of gold and silver, inlaid with jewels, and decorated with enamel. In 1868, a boy digging potatoes in Ardagh, County Limerick, found one of those items, a chalice, buried beneath a thorn bush. It is now known as the Ardagh Chalice, and regarded as a true wonder of the world. It can be seen at the National Museum of Ireland. Two other equally magnificent items have also been found. They are the Derrynaflan Chalice and the Tara Brooch.

During this period, the people of Britain and Europe were living in a Dark Age. It began with the fall of the Roman Empire, which was destroyed by tribes called Visigoths and Vandals. This event led to wars in Europe, as different tribes fought for supremacy. While wars raged, there was little time for learning. Ireland, which had not been part of the Roman Empire, avoided these wars, and here learning flourished and Irish missionaries brought this learning to the peoples of Britain and Europe. It is also claimed that Saint Brendan, one of those missionaries, sailed in a leather boat to what we now call America 1,000 years before Christopher Columbus.

Yet in world terms, Ireland is a very young country, probably still a teenager. The first people arrived here only about 9,000 years ago. By then people had spread out from Africa to Europe and Britain. They had crossed the Bering Straits into North America and made their way down that continent to South America. By this time too they had arrived in Australia. So why hadn’t they come to Ireland, I hear you ask? To answer that question we must go back more than 9,000 years, back to a time which we will describe as the beginning of history in Ireland.