Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
On with part two of our Irish celebration (click here for part one): another excerpt from The Shape of Irish History.
‘I am a genuine typical Irishman,’ George Bernard Shaw once declared, ‘of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian, and (of course) Scottish invasions.’ The oldest pattern in Irish history is created by the continual arrival of newcomers through 'invasions'. The early migration of peoples across Europe seems to be inexorably westward, and sooner or later they must come to Ireland, which until the discovery of America was the western edge of the world. Once there, they had to stop, and help form the reservoir of population into which the next westward-moving wave would inevitably spill. The original Irish gene pool was created by the first Mesolithic and neolithic dwellers, but the subsequent process is one of continuous mixing. The Irish must be among the most heterogeneous of peoples, yet they behave politically and culturally as if the precise opposite were true.
This ceaseless mixing of the population makes nonsense of all the familiar assumptions of 'Gaelic origins' or 'the Irish race'. The distinctive nature of Irishness arises specifically from the interaction of newcomers with natives (the perennial cliche of Irish historical writing). Strictly speaking, there are no natives; or, to put it the other way round, all the Irish are natives. 'Irish', if it means anything, simply means being born in Ireland, even if, like Swift or the Duke of Wellington, you did not want to be. Many of the characteristics which are regarded as 'typically Irish', for instance, are demonstrably the legacy of the Old English, or the Anglo-Irish or the Lowland Scots just as much as they are of the Celts, whom we now call the Gaels. Interest in the Gaels, in their language which Irish people still spoke, in their literature and culture generally, revived in the eighteenth century. More specifically, both Protestants and Catholics, though divided from each other politically by the penal laws and structures based on them, tried to establish a connection with the Gaelic Irish culture, which was still extraordinarily healthy. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was in decline, and speaking Irish was regarded as a mark of social inferiority, something associated only with backward rural communities. Then, by the end of the century, a revival was under way, and Gaelic culture was being presented to the Irish population as the indigenous culture.
– Excerpted from The Shape of Irish History by A.T.Q. Stewart
Looking for more Irish-themed reading?
No comments yet.