The Story of Ireland Read online

  Let the school-children fumble their sums in a half-dead language;

  Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the Georgian slums;

  Let the games be played in Gaelic.1

  But MacNeice was clear-eyed and objective enough to recognize that in Unionist-ruled Ulster there existed another land of small horizons.

  Free speech nipped in the bud,

  The minority always guilty.

  Why should I want to go back

  To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

  The blots on your page are so black

  That they cannot be covered with shamrock.

  MacNeice published his great poem ‘Autumn Journal’ in 1940 as Europe was convulsed by war. His bitter tone needs to be understood in the context of its time. MacNeice nurtured the anguish of the exiled intellectual for whom Ireland represented both a prison and an inspiration. In this respect he followed a tradition of exiled Irish writers, including Samuel Beckett and James Joyce; indeed, the latter famously wrote of Ireland as ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’.

  For MacNeice the imagination needed distance if it were to be unfettered. Yet Ireland and its preoccupations followed him. He believed that the Irish, north and south, had become trapped in a narrative of atavistic slogans: ‘A Nation Once Again’ or ‘No Surrender’. Identity was defined in ever narrowing circles of Catholic or Protestant, nationalist or loyalist, Irish or British. Take your pick according to tribe. The debate about an Irishness that might transcend such proscribed identities or even be a mixture of them, or a view of identity that might at least embrace the complexities of our history, was a long way into the future. The ground has widened now, the shrill voices of certainty are less voluble, but it is still a painstaking work in progress.

  Earlier I described Irish internationalism as something ‘reborn’. In fact the period of our isolation from the mainstream of world affairs was comparatively short, and it was almost overwhelmingly a psychological rather than a physical drawing inwards, beginning for both northern and southern states after 1922, and continuing in the south until the arrival of Lemass as taoiseach in 1959. My own speculation, based on my experience of other warravaged nations, is that the men who took over the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State after the civil war were, besides being inherently conservative, too exhausted by the physical and moral cost of the conflict to have a vision that extended beyond creating stability and balancing the books. The country was broken, the bitterness coursed through every political debate, and the people could justifiably wonder what freedom had brought them.

  Yet even in that period, Ireland was not isolated on the international stage. The Free State government was actively engaged in the politics of the British Commonwealth, and even during World War II, Irish neutrality did not mean the country was entirely unaware or untouched by the great catastrophe unfolding across the seas. After the declaration of a republic in 1949, the country pursued an assertively independent foreign policy, gaining UN membership in 1955 and upsetting her American allies by declaring support for Chinese membership of the UN. During this period, Irish towns and villages witnessed the departure of hundreds of thousands of people for Britain and America. But when these emigrants returned on holiday visits they brought accounts of other worlds and ways of living. Along with the celebrated ‘American parcel’ and its flashy ties, button-down-collar shirts and loud check trousers, came uncles and aunts who described tantalizing freedoms in the cities across the ocean.

  For all the efforts of the censors, the customs men could not search every bag or blockade the ships and planes that brought in books that were morally dubious in the eyes of the Church or the ‘Committee on Evil Literature’ established by the government in 1926. Nor could the likes of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin, a self-appointed moral conscience of the nation, stifle the minds of writers such as Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan), whose comic masterpieces included An Beal Bocht (The Poor Mouth, 1941), a merciless satire written in Irish about stereotypes of native misery and the Gaelic language ideologues whom the writer loathed. A representative sequence involves a Gaelic revivalist from Dublin addressing the country folk at a festival.

  Gaels! It delights my Gaelic heart to be here today speaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic feis in the centre of the Gaeltacht. May I state that I am a Gael. I’m Gaelic from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet…If we’re truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question of the Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. There is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelic topics. He who speaks Gaelic but fails to discuss the language question is not truly Gaelic in his heart; such conduct is of no benefit to Gaelicism because he only jeers at Gaelic and reviles the Gaels. There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly true Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language.

  In The Hard Life (1961) O’Brien reflected on, among other things, Irish piety and the lack of a proper public toilet for women in central Dublin. One of the principal figures is a sanctimonious German Jesuit by the name of Father Kurt Fahrt, who is taunted throughout by the fractious figure of Mr Collopy, who believes the matter of proper facilities for women should be placed before the pope in Rome. It is anarchic, surreal and brave, and belonged to a decidedly European post-modernist tradition.

  The pace of change accelerated throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Television had arrived in 1961, the same year I was born. Until then, dissent was articulated by a comparatively small intellectual elite whose views rarely reached beyond a limited audience. But the cultural commissars of the republic could not control the flow of debate on television and radio.

  I did not grow up in the tyrannical isolation of General Franco’s Spain, and was part of the first Irish generation that could travel widely simply for the ‘experience’ as distinct from economic necessity. I recall the pride of seeing Van Morrison – who embraces British and Irish identities – walk on to a stage in America and be greeted for what he was: one of the great figures of twentieth-century music.

  The sense of coming from an ‘international island’ was something I experienced in ways both profound and seemingly trivial: the victory of the singer Dana in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970; the importation of American blues to Cork city by our local guitar legend, Rory Gallagher; the arrival of the first non-white pupils at my school later in the mid 1970s. They had come on scholarships organized by Irish missionary brothers, who had gone to the West Indies during the heyday of British imperialism. Our headmaster, Brother Jerome Kelly, was one of the most far-sighted men I have known. He went to the West Indies as a missionary, having grown up on a poor farm in one of the most remote parts of Ireland, a place in which I doubt a black or brown face was ever seen.

  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 a
s 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, how
ever, 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.