Eoin Mac Neill

“ By what criterion do we recognise any ancient population to have been Celts? The answer is undoubted—every ancient people that is known to have spoken any Celtic language is said to be a Celtic people. The term Celtic is indicative of language, not of race. We give the name Celts to the Irish and the Britons because we know that the ancient language of each people is a Celtic language.
A certain amount of enthusiasm, culminating in what is called Pan-Celticism, has gathered around the recognition of this fact that the Irish, the Gaels of Scotland, the Welsh and the Bretons are Celtic peoples. ”

“ In every intense and distinctive development of a nation, there dwells the actuality or the potentiality of some great gift to the common good of mankind; and I rejoice, I am sure we all rejoice, to see, in these days of clashing and crashing empires, that the clear idea of nationality, as if by the wonderful recreative power that is in nature, is rising in the esteem of good men all over the world, above and beyond the specious and seductive appeal of what has been called "the wider patriotism." ”

“ When we speak of a particular race of men, if we speak accurately, we mean a collection of people whose personal appearance and bodily characters, inherited from their ancestors and perhaps modified by climate and occupation, distinguish them notably from the rest of mankind. It is important for us to be quite clear in our minds about this meaning of Race, for the word Race is often used in a very loose and very misleading way in popular writings and discussions. Thus we hear and read of the Latin races, the Teutonic race, the Anglo-Saxon race, the Celtic race. ”

“ Patrick, in his simple narrative, tells little but his own heart, but his Confession is one of the great documents of history, and explains to us better than all the historians how barbarism was tamed and civilisation saved. Imagine a young lad of tender years, son of a Roman citizen, torn away by fierce raiders from his parents and people, no doubt amid scenes of bloodshed and ruin, and sold into slavery among strangers ”

“ Every one who is black-haired, who is a tattler, guileful, tale-telling, noisy, contemptible; every wretched, mean, strolling, unsteady, harsh and inhospitable person; every slave, every mean thief, every churl, every one who loves not to listen to music and entertainment, the disturbers of every council and every assembly, and the promoters of discord among people—these are the descendants of the Firbolgs, of the Galians, of the Liogairne, and of the Fir Domhnann in Eirinn. But the descendants of the Fir Bolg are the most numerous of all these. ”

“ Their rule in Ireland remained secure during four centuries of Roman domination in Gaul and Britain. During four centuries of Germanic invasion and conquest, Ireland stood intact. After four centuries of Norse supremacy over neighbouring seas and lands, Ireland emerged unconquered. Two thousand years of unbroken sway may suffice to set pride above prudence in the tradition of any class. At the end of another cycle, when the Irish nobles were scattered over Europe, the nobility of their bearing and the distinction of their manners won admiration for them in every land but one. ”

“ Iron, when it came, introduced an industrial revolution relatively greater than that which has been introduced in modern times by the steam-engine. Once people knew how to work it, iron was abundant enough to be in the hands of every worker. Iron became and has ever since remained the sole master of growing wood. With the conquest of the forests came a great extension of tillage. Iron not only cleared fertile tracts but tilled them more rapidly and deeply than was possible with the wooden spade which, as the old Irish copper mines have taught us, was the digging implement of the Bronze Age. ”

“ The most casual reader of Irish history knows that within a few centuries of the Norman invasion, the authority of the kings of England had shrunk to within a day's easy ride of Dublin and the outskirts of a few other towns. Standish O'Grady has noted the constant alliance between town and crown in the Middle Ages. It was not peculiar to Ireland. The merchants and the sovereign had a common interest in resisting the encroachments of the great nobles. Even despotic kings, as a rule, governed better in the interest of the burgesses than any powerful oligarchy was likely to govern. ”

“ The first words spoken by a Gael on Irish soil, in the ancient legend, were an invocation addressed to Ireland herself by the druid Amorgen: "I entreat the land of Eire," and the land itself, under its three names, Éire, Fódla, and Banbha, when the Gaels arrived, was reigning as queen over the Men of Ireland. Thus we find the clearly formed idea of one nation, composed of diverse peoples, but made one by their affiliation to the land that bore them—the clearest and most concrete conception of nationality to be found in all antiquity. ”

“ The Irish nobility were rendered incapable of using their intelligence to profit with the times by one defect—they were perhaps the most intensely proud class of men that ever existed. This pride was bred in their bones. It came to them out of an immemorial past. The history of the Gaelic people falls into cycles of four centuries, beginning with our earliest knowledge of the Celts in the Hallstatt Period. There are four centuries of conquest, expansion and domination, before the Celts came to Ireland. By this time, pride of race was already their dominant sentiment. ”

“ Give us a kingdom for ourselves and our posterity. It shall be so, said the king. What part of Ireland will you give us? said they. The Ulstermen, said the king, have ever been hostile towards me and towards our fathers. Go and conquer their kingdom, and it shall be yours.
The Collas then went to Connacht, which was still the homeland of the new Tara dynasty, raised an army there, invaded Ulster, were victorious, and captured the Ulster capital. The conquered territory comprised the present counties of Armagh, Monaghan, Tyrone, and the greater part of Fermanagh and Derry. ”

“ I do not know whether anyone has yet attempted to draw up a complete conspectus of the Latin literature that has been preserved in MSS. copied by Irish scribes, and of Latin authors quoted in ancient Irish books. In my opinion, the formation of a sane estimate of the Latin learning of that age, in the case of Ireland as of other countries, has been hindered by what I will call the intellectual snobbery of the Renaissance—an attitude of mind in which scholars think to dignify themselves by despising everything in Latin that was not written in the time of the first twelve Caesars. ”

“ The true beginning of the Irish rally was in the minds of those kings and nobles and fighting men of Thomond and Connacht who marched to the Erne in 1258 to offer the headship of the free Irish to a king of Tir Eoghain. Both O'Brien and O'Connor were closer in the line of descent to kings of Ireland than O'Neill was. There was no country in Europe at that time whose magnates were not willing to have civil war rather than abandon plausible claims to sovereignty. ”

“ Sir John Gilbert, in his history of the Viceroys of Ireland, writes soberly and judiciously. He has one weakness. Just as Mr. Orpen revels in grants of land, which he takes to be the bedrock of civilisation, and therefore declares to have been no structural element in the Irish polity, attaching to them a sacred efficacy of which neither Henry II. nor John nor their grantees in Ireland appear to have been fully sensible ”

“ Orpen shows familiarity with a much wider range of Irish literature in English translations. When he wrote his history, in which he claims expressly for himself the title of historian, he knew certain things, but the necessities of the case compelled him to forget he knew them. He knew quite well that the ancient literature in general ascribes the judicial function to every Irish king, the head of every Irish state, great or small. He knew that a hundred and a hundred times the good king is said to be a just judge, and the unjust judge is said to be a bad king. ”

“ Now we come to the question, what were the five principal divisions of Ireland under the Pentarchy? In my experience, the less erudite who are interested in such matters usually answer, Ulster, Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Meath. Those who are better read in Irish history will answer, as a rule, leaving out Meath and will say that there were two Fifths comprised in Munster, and this is the teaching of Irish historians for some centuries back. In this case, it will be seen that the less learned folk are nearer to the truth. ”

“ Between the establishment of the Connacht dynasty in East Meath and in Tara, the ancient seat of the North Leinster kings, and the overthrow of the Ulster kingdom, there is a period of more than half a century, during which the Ulster power stood at bay. Of this state of things we have a very remarkable record, not written on paper, but graven on the face of the country. The Ulster kings endeavoured to defend themselves against further aggression by fortifying their entire frontier except where it was already protected by strong natural obstacles such as lakes, forests or broad rivers. ”

“ We start off from the Pentarchy and the Ulster cycle. The Ulster stories have for their main basis the hostile relations between Ulster and Connacht. Being Ulster stories, they do not prolong their scope beyond a time in which Ulster has generally the best of it. Ulster's mishaps merely serve to heighten the effect, which is Ulster's heroism and victory. It was when this time of glory was but a memory, when Emain was a deserted site and the remnant of the Ulaidh occupied only a tiny fraction of their former territory, that these stories took their present shape and were committed to writing. ”

“ I. THE ANCIENT IRISH A CELTIC PEOPLE
Every people has two distinct lines of descent—by blood and by tradition. When we consider the physical descent of a people, we regard them purely as animals. As in any breed of animals, so in a people, the tokens of physical descent are mainly physical attributes—such as stature, complexion, the shape of the skull and members, the formation of the features. ”

“ We can recognise that the ancient Eoghanacht dynasty of Cashel, which Mathgamain overthrew, had already lost its prestige and was no longer able to rule and protect Munster. It has always happened in the world's history, and is probably happening to-day, that institutions and established powers appear to contemporary people to be full of vigour and likely to last, whereas to people of a later time it is clear that they resembled the hollow tree awaiting the blast that was to lay it low. ”

“ The notion that the migratory conquests of antiquity resulted in the displacement of one population by another is one of the favourite illusions of popular history. In Spain no doubt the Celtic element was relatively less numerous than in Gallia Celtica, and also perhaps the Celtic civilisation became less dominant, for the Iberians were in touch more or less with another and still more highly developed civilisation, that of the Phœnicians. ”

“ Why did the Norman conquest fail to be a conquest? Giraldus Cambrensis gave to his story the title Hibernia Expugnata—"Ireland fought to a finish." Four centuries later comes another historian, telling of another conquest, and he calls his story Hibernia Pacaia—"Ireland pacified." Why was the second conquest necessary?
There are two factors that make for the completeness and permanence of conquest—namely, physical superiority and moral superiority. In the art of war and in the apparatus of centralised government, the invaders, we have seen, were superior to the Irish. ”

“ We may go farther and say that our ancient writers, when they set about exploring the geographical knowledge of the world that came to them in Latin writings, had it very definitely in their minds that the Irish were not of Celtic origin; for, of the three great populations of northern and western Europe known to the oldest classical writers—the Iberians, the Celts, and the Scythians—they excluded the Celts, and included the other two, some selecting the Iberians and others the Scythians as the ancestral people from which the Gaels were descended. ”

“ The strictly historical period in Ireland begins with St. Patrick. The authentic writings of St. Patrick are the earliest written documents of Irish history. But I do not think it would be just to say that all before that time is prehistoric. If all we had for the first four centuries of the Christian Era was a slender thread of narrative like Livy's story of ancient Rome, we might wonder how much profit, if any, could come from examining it. We are not in so poor a case. ”

“ The value of this new force was crystallised into a proverb by one of the Feudal lords, Sir Robert Savage of the Ards in East Ulster: "Better is a castle of bones than a castle of stones." The policy of conquest by incastellation crumbled away before the castles of bones built up first under the Irish princes of Ulster, afterwards in Connacht, and in time all over Ireland. By a castle of bones, Sir Robert Savage meant a well organised, well armed, and well trained permanent field force. ”

“ The Gaels occupied Ireland as a conquering and dominant people. During the early centuries of their occupation, whatever language or languages had been spoken in Ireland before them completely disappeared as languages, leaving no doubt some traces behind in the names of places, etc., and probably also influencing to some degree the Gaelic language itself. But for a long time there was nothing like a complete fusion of the old and the new population. ”