The End of Irish History and the Last Irishman
A Reply to Philip Pilkington’s “Is Ireland Still Ireland?”
This essay was originally published in the University of Notre Dame’s Eriugena Journal.
Introduction
Irish nationalism is inherently linked to history. It requires a historical understanding to define identities and evaluate events. It is primarily concerned with the native Irish Catholic nation’s struggle against foreign English Protestant empire on the geographic island of Ireland. In his essay Is Ireland Still Ireland?, Philip Pilkington asked “why would a country that is supposedly built around rejection of Protestant-dominated English-speaking culture come to embrace this culture after only a century of independence from it?”[1] Pilkington leveraged a retelling of Irish history to answer this question. His conclusion is that at some point the struggle of Catholicism vs. Protestantism shifted away from the religious dimension and towards the secular ideologies of nationalism and republicanism. He suggested these ideologies are ultimately derived from the French Revolution, English Civil War and earlier English Reformation and thus “Irish nationalism itself was the vehicle that drove Ireland towards cultural homogenization with the rest of the Anglosphere.”[2] According to Pilkington, the logical conclusion of Irish nationalism is Anglo homogenization because nationalism and republicanism is a creation of English culture. He contrasted Anglo culture, nationalism, and republicanism against Catholicism because those constructs were created by Protestantism and its explicit rejection of Catholicism. To Pilkington, the French Revolution was derivative of ideas formulated earlier in England. In his view, Catholicism was the singular authentic animating motivation against Protestant oppression in Ireland and the ideology of nationalism coopted and mutated this struggle. Pilkington’s Ireland is Catholic, Pilkington’s Catholicism is anti-nationalist, and Pilkington’s nationalism is anti-Catholic.
Let me establish common ground with Pilkington. I commend his desire to bash through complacent obfuscations and to unravel Irish nationalism and history for real answers. I agree with his notion that present-day Ireland is headed in the wrong direction and that there’s confusion regarding Irish nationalism and history in the popular Irish imagination. I agree with his observation of strange English Protestant currents within Irish nationalism. With that being said, I passionately disagree with him on many points. In totality, I find his arguments resulting in the erasure of the Irish as a distinct people with a right to sovereignty. Thus, I must systematically dismantle the foundation on which Pilkington’s arguments rest.
First, his narrative of history is incorrect. He haphazardly jumped around Irish to English to global history in an incomplete fashion that left out context. An in-depth and wide analysis of these histories is needed to fully unpack what is wrong and right. Second, he doesn’t accept that religion and nationalism are connected. He persistently dichotomized an either or structure to religion and nationalism when the reality is that they cohesively interrelate to one another. Third, his modern definition of the nation and nationalism is incorrect. He considered nationalism an invention of post-17th century Protestantism and enlightenment that created fictional identities with loose grounding in history and traditions. He failed to understand the nation as an intrinsic and perennial feature of humanity that undergoes evolutionary processes of birth, death, fusion, and fission. Nationalism is the essence of a nation’s expression of sovereignty that is not bound to forms of government.
Fourth, his inability to untangle the factions within the Irish nationalist movement. He is certainly not alone in this as most readers of this history, even the most stalwart Irish nationalists, fail to reckon the subtilties. The descendants of settler English Protestant imperial elites in Ireland developed their own conception of Irish nationalism. As civilized Englishmen in Ireland they thought they deserved sovereignty and separation away from England in much of the same way that English Protestants in the American colonies conceptualized their rationale for independence. Even more similar, just as their American colonial counterparts did not factor in the underclasses of native Americans or African slaves within their national territorial borders, settler English Protestant in Ireland did not originally envision to share their nationalism with the native Irish Catholics. In the inverse, the native Irish Catholics understood their nationalism as older, distinct, and not just at odds with Englishmen living in England but all those of English Protestant stock that settled in Ireland.
It is only at the turn of the 18th century that these two movements awkwardly married one another. There was a perceived mutual advantage to each — the English Protestant nationalists got more numbers and the Irish Catholic nationalists got more elite support. The current flag of the Republic of Ireland is the tricolor that was meant to symbolize this awkward marriage. Green for Irish Catholics, white for peace, and Orange for English Protestants.
Finally, it is my contention that Ireland’s Anglo homogenization and modern failures is more so caused by the ideology of tricolorism. Tricolorism is the belief in a sterilized and ahistorical Irish identity shared among different groups so long as they currently reside in Ireland. While well intentioned, it necessitates the decentering of the native Irish Catholic identity. In order to fit the minority of English Protestants into this paradigm, the majority of Irish Catholics must erase their own distinctiveness and grievances. They had to also obfuscate the socio-economic structural realities derived from the differences among settler and native. Indeed, in opposition to Pilkington’s assessment that Irish nationalism was tried too much, I argue it was not tried enough. However, in some fashion I find common ground with Pilkington in criticizing Irish nationalism. We both agree Irish nationalism caused Anglo homogenization but for different reasons.
Before going further into the point by point discourse, I’d like to acknowledge the influences and sources informing my essay. The title of The End of Irish History and the Last Irishman is an allusion to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama wrote how the progress of history converges all societies toward a uniform global liberal paradigm which he denotes as the end of history. His last man is a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s avatar of nihilistic materialism that modernity produces which Fukuyama’s spins in a more benign manner. By the end of Irish history, I mean that the invention of tricolorism in the turn of the 18th century represents a similar progressively styled perspective of convergence into an ahistorical container and liberal society. The last Irishman has no history and no future. He is not the descendent of native Irish Catholic peasants or settler English Protestant elites but just an Irishman. He is not a reviver of his oppressed culture or advancer of it into a glorious future but just an Irishman. What is an Irishman? Well, a man in Ireland. You can feel the uneasy disturbing questions being begged oozed through this arbitrarily limited perspective. Fukuyama warned that thymos — the need for recognition — could dismantle the end of history and the last man. I hope that this essay catalyzes thymos of the Irish to reawaken Irish history and reject the last Irishman.
My perspective on nationalism will disagree with modernist historians. My perspective is very congruent with what is very well explained by the Cambridge University Press published historian Azar Gat in his book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. In it he argued that nations were around before pre-modern times, they can evolve, and they connect to an aggregate of shared kin-culture traits. For this essay, I will define the nation as an aggregate of shared kin-culture traits and a nation-state as political governmental institution correlated to an aggregate of shared kin-culture traits which may apply any form of government such as monarchy, theocracy, democracy, etc. It is important to note that just because a nation is ruled by a monarchy, it does not disqualify it as a nation-state if the basis for monarchial rule is on the connection to the aggregate of shared kin-culture traits. A nation can exist without its own nation-state but a nation-state cannot exist without its own nation. However, the usual end goal of a nationalism is a nation-state. Put simply, a nation is a people and a nation-state is an institution. This essay will also corroborate Gat’s assertion that “rather than a fundamental contradiction existing between the national and religious sources of identity, the two more often than not complemented and reinforced each other.”[3]
These perspectives are contrasted against the modernist school of thought on nations and nationalism. Benedict Anderson was a prominent scholar of this view and argued that nations and nationalism emerged in the 18th century as imagined communities through mass-produced written propaganda. He and his fellow travelers considered nations and nationalism as contrived social constructs that have little resonance with an accurate past or material reality. This view often described pre-modern people as having no conception of the nation and ordered their societies along non-national criteria like dynasties or religion. This narrative suggested that nationalism is falsehood and only relevant for its post-18th century role as a propaganda device to control large populations. Many of these scholars, like Anderson, were Marxists who derived their theories from the older Marxist criticisms of nationalism as a falsehood that stood in the way of class solidarity. Other modernists, as Gat pointed out, were well-traveled cosmopolitan beneficiaries of imperial empires which distorted their perception of nationalism. Pilkington didn’t articulate his explicit stance but can be interpreted as standing in the modernist view while I offer the pre-modernist.
In addition, various other scholars focused on different periods and aspects of Irish and global history have influenced this essay. Besides just history, disciplines such as ancient genetics, archeology, sociology, economics, and literature were leveraged. Modern journal articles and books as well as ample primary sources spanning the periods covered were also used. Special appreciation is given to the Twitter discussions generated from Pilkington’s publication and some of those discussions informed this essay.
The Origin of the Irish Nation
What exactly are the Irish? Such a simple question is yet such a significant one as it provides the foundation for Irish nationalism. In order to answer that we must start at the very beginning: the Irish Big Bang.
For much of human prehistory, Europe was covered in ice. As the glaciers receded, small migrations of humans settled it. The earliest known humans in Europe were those that arrived about 40,000 years ago. The few descendants that persisted in Europe were known as a culture of Western Hunter Gatherers. Notably between 8,000 BC and 5,000 BC, Neolithic Farmers from Anatolia settled in larger numbers across most of Europe. These were the people responsible for building megalithic sites like Stonehenge and, generally, a more substantial archaeological footprint. Europe was then struck by its final large migration wave: the Yamnaya Pastoralists from the Eurasian Steppe. Between 3,000 BC and 2,000 BC, these newer migrants either intermarried or replaced the earlier groups. To show their level of impact, almost all modern European languages descend from the original language spoken by the Yamnaya Pastoralists. The cultural and genetic origin of the modern European starts during this period and consists of a dominant Yamnaya component, a secondary Neolithic Anatolian Farmer component, and a trace amount of Western Hunter Gatherer.[4] As time went on, settlement and the end of migration allowed distinct cultures to evolve into the antecedents of our present-day conception of distinct European nations.
The Irish were no different in this general story. Between 3,000 BC and 2,000 BC, the Irish Big Bang occurred when Yamnaya Pastoralists from the Eurasian Steppe settled and dominated Ireland.[5] They intermarried with the existing Neolithic Anatolian Farmer culture and remnants of Western Hunter Gatherers. As the centuries went on the distinctiveness of this new admixed composite group on the island of Ireland would intensify just as other European groups did similarly. The history of European languages provides evidence of how the singular Indo-European culture evolved into about 5 large distinct cultural blocs which then further evolved into a myriad of distinct European nations.[6] For instance, the Celtic branch of the European languages split off around 2,000 BC and the specific Gaelic Irish derivative split off in 1,000 BC after the Irish absorbed continental Celtic cultural elements.
Returning to our prior question of — what exactly are the Irish? — we can now answer that the Irish are a nation, an aggregate of shared kin-culture traits, starting in about 2,500 BC on the island of Ireland. The Irish nation maintained cohesiveness and was refined over thousands of years. The Irish nation-state was more decentralized and less developed but evidence suggests that the Irish understood themselves as part of a unified political order because of the all Ireland high kingship or Ard Rí that was alleged to begin in about 2,000 BC[7] as well as common legal practices such as the Brehon Law. The Irish nation’s most notable cultural evolutions included the remarkably peaceful integrations of the Catholic religion and the Latin alphabet around 400 AD. The Irish are thus the people who share a common ancestry to the 2,500 BC Irish Big Bang, historically have spoken and written the Celtic-Gaelic language, historically have believed in Catholicism, and a multitude of other cultural elements such as customs, folklore, sports, food, and more.
Ireland’s Historical Others
The other groups that interacted with the Irish on the island of Ireland in significant ways were the Norse Vikings (8th-11th centuries AD), Norman Catholics (12th century AD), and English Protestants (16th-17th centuries AD). These groups often complicate the definition of Irish but that problem is easily rectified. These other groups at any given period represented 1-15% of the total population of Ireland, with this percentage most likely being an average of 5% up until major settlement of northern Ireland by Protestants post-16th century.[8]
The Norse Vikings somewhat settled the coastal fringes of the island and were definitionally sea-nomads. They often terrorized the interior Irish which stimulated resentment against the foreign invaders. The most notable anti-Norse Irishman of the time was Brian Boru. From a noble Irish family of southern Ireland, he saw first-hand the terror. His family was killed by Norse raids and this would fuel his ambitions for all his life. He went on to become the High King (Ard Rí) of Ireland and united the often factional Ireland. Ireland was perhaps never as centralized into a nation-state then at this time. The Battle of Clontarf in 1014 AD marked the turning point for a unified Irish national military campaign that decimated Norse Viking culture in Ireland. The minority of Norse Vikings either left Ireland or assimilated into the Irish nation.
About 100 years later, the Norman Catholics, who were a group of Norse Vikings who settled in France and conquered England in 1066 AD, invaded Ireland to assert their dominance. The effectiveness of this dominance was questionable. While the Norman Catholics certainly had military supremacy, their power couldn’t reach much farther than the middle-eastern portion of Ireland known as the Pale. This is where the expression “going beyond the Pale” comes from.[9] Beyond the Pale was the intact Irish nation. The Norman Catholic minority eventually gravitated towards assimilation into the majority Irish nation. It was thought that the Norman Catholics were “becoming more Irish than the Irish”[10] and their anxious betters back in England instituted segregation laws to stop it. The Statutes of Kilkenny were enacted in 1367 AD and prohibited marriage and reproduction between natives and settlers, the use of the Irish language, certain trade between natives and settlers, and more.[11] In the 14th century, the Black Plague raged across Europe. In Ireland, Norman Catholics lived in settlements that were more urban and trade-oriented contrasted to the Irish Catholics who were more rural and isolated. This led to a disproportionate amount of Norman Catholics being severely affected by the plague compared to the Irish. After this destructive period, the population, power, and wealth of Norman Catholics decreased.[12]
The separateness of Norman Catholics and Irish Catholics faded. By the 16th century, the distinction was almost completely gone. In 1515 AD, one primary source described the Norman Catholics in Ireland as “for the most part be of Irish birth, of Irish habit, and of Irish language.”[13] It was in that century when Protestant Anglicanism was created in England and sought to discriminate against all those who were not in the imperial realm. Many Norman Catholics didn’t convert and for that their class, wealth, and status was diminished. It is at this time when the Norman Catholics were fully assimilated into the Irish nation. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, Ireland was settled by a new group of English Protestants. They were disproportionately large landowners and asserted an increased level of control of the island. Unlike the two prior groups, the English Protestants remained separate and didn’t assimilate readily into the majority Irish nation because of segregation laws, socio-economic class structures, and religious incompatibility. The English Protestants increased direct and indirect destruction of the Irish nation such as mass slaughters, land seizures, language suppression, disfranchisement, and famine.
We can see that the identification of the Irish nation is not that mysterious at all. It has largely been the consistent majority shared kin-culture group of the island that started in 2,500 BC. It interacted with other cultures but when it did it either pushed back the invaders or assimilated the invading minority into its majority, not the other way around. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the Irish nation was oppressed and battered but remained intact.
Pilkington’s History Part 1: The Roots of the Irish
Now that we have properly reviewed the origins of the Irish and their history, we can turn to Pilkington’s account of history. Pilkington identified an origin point in the 5th century with the arrival of Roman Catholicism to Ireland. To Pilkington, the container of Irish is only meaningful as a signifier for Roman Catholicism. Pilkington acknowledged an Irish culture before the 5th century but discounted it because it was not “civilization proper” as it did not have writing.
Pilkington changed the goal post on a discourse about nationalism to that of civilization. A nation and nation-state are obviously not the same thing as a civilization which usually refers to the most advanced stage of culture which can encompass multiple nations. Writing is also an arbitrary criteria in recognition of a distinct nation, even if we can agree with Pilkington that writing as a technology advances a culture. Civil sewage infrastructure also does, so should we make this the threshold of civilization instead? With that being said, Pilkington seems to neglect that the Irish had a writing system called Ogham which, while not produced in as high quantities as Latin or Greek, was comparable to its non-Latin and non-Greek European counter-parts like Germanic Elder Futhark. German was also augmented with the Latin alphabet and increased its writing technology around the same time period. This technological innovation did not create Germanness or destroy Germanness but evolved it. There was no confusion from either the German or Roman side of who was who going back centuries before that and there was no loss of German distinction after writing was integrated. In fact, the German chieftain of the Cherusci tribe Arminius united German tribes against the Roman imperium in the 1st century AD before they had German writing in the Latin alphabet on the basis of their shared kin-cultural affinities in contrast to the foreign oppression of the Romans.
Pre-5th century Irish culture was also not destroyed as Pilkington led readers to believe. St. Patrick was the Catholic priest that is most responsible for the conversion of the Irish. His efforts were uniquely marked by his synchronizing rather than destructive influence. He was known for the use of existing Irish symbols and culture as proxies for the Catholic faith. For example, his most famous use of the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity was a cooption of an Irish pagan belief as the shamrock was already a sacred symbol used to represent rebirth in the spring as well as its three leaves representing the Irish pagan concept of the “sacred three.”[14] St. Patrick respected many other secular cultural elements of the Irish. The Irish legal system of Brehon Law was sophisticated and St. Patrick transferred this oral tradition to writing for the first time in the book Senchus Mór (Great Ancient Tradition). St. Patrick in a very literal way synthesized the older Irish tradition with Catholicism in this new production. He did this with collaboration from three Irish kings, three Irish scholars (poets), and two other Catholic clerics.[15] There is some discrepancy about the exact date of the finalized version but either way the conclusion is the same: Catholicism did not destroy pre-existing Irish culture, it synthesized it and evolved it. For present-day readers, if you have ever been on a tourist excursion around the Irish country-side you have most likely stopped at an Irish holy well usually dedicated to a Catholic saint. These wells were once sacred sites of pre-Christian Irish pagans and are very much an unbroken syncretic cohesion of Catholicism and Irish culture that thousands of people interact with each year.[16]
There is no controversy around the legitimacy of the written works of the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), Lebor na hUidre (The Book of the Dun Cow), or Lebor Laignech (The Book of Leinster) which all detail Celtic myths and history written by Catholic monks in Ireland before the modern era. In particular, the Táin Bó Cúailnge was first recorded in the 7th century and updated periodically in newer manuscripts such as the 11th century one from the Clonmacnoise monastery. The Lebor na hUidre was also notable for it was written entirely in the Irish language rather than Latin. If we take Pilkington seriously, why would Catholic monks record Celtic myths and history before the modern era if Catholicism and Celtic culture are opposed? Furthermore, were these Catholic monks inventing these works from thin air or were they copying them from other sources? Catholicism and Celtic culture of pre-modern Ireland were not in conflict with one another. Catholic monks fostered Celtic culture as shown by their manuscripts. This Celtic culture existed during their time and before. Since Ireland was predominately an oral culture before the arrival of Catholicism much of its culture was not written down but preserved through its oral tradition. Ireland of this era was also notable for the intensity it placed on oral education of its druids, poets, bards, and brehons. The Catholic monks sourced their literature on Celtic culture from the abundant oral tradition around them.
For the purposes of identifying what the Irish are and what motivations fueled the Irish nationalist sentiments stretching over centuries, we must understand that other aspects besides Catholicism are significant inputs. This is not to marginalize or erase the importance of Catholicism but only to reveal that there is no necessity to pick one exclusive input of identity. As Gat points out, nations are an aggregate of shared kin-culture traits and this aggregate evolves together. Rather than a Roman Catholicism created hard binary between what came before it and after, a more correct understanding of this history is that it synthesized itself into the Irish nation whose other elements continued to evolve alongside it. Its compatibility with overall Irish culture is even more apparent when we consider the unique transition of the Irish’s voluntarily conversion to the new faith rather than being conquered into it.
Overall, it’s not clear why Pilkington brought up civilization or writing as the analysis holds no impact on the core questions of, one, what are the Irish? And, two, what motivations fueled centuries of Irish national struggles? While Pilkington overstates the primitiveness of pre-Christian Irish culture, the linear spectrum between primitive and advanced doesn’t factor much into a discussion around the above core questions. We usually don’t say a culture doesn’t exist because it is more primitive on this or that metric. Additionally, the integration of a foreign religion doesn’t destroy national identity or exclude it thereon from being relevant. I have a hunch Pilkington would be hard pressed to say the Japanese national identity ended with its importation of Indian Buddhism in the 6th century and every Japanese cultural product was thus the source of India rather than Japan. He already demonstrated that he accepted Catholicism as uniquely Roman yet the religion comes from Israel. For Pilkington to be consistent he would have to refute any Roman ownership and instead attribute it to Israel full-stop. Pilkington should have filled his essay with references to Israeli Catholicism to be consistent. We know this is silly and Pilkington knows it is, which is why the contradiction didn’t phase him.
The main purpose of this essay’s current section is to reveal that Catholicism was part of Irish national identity rather than it having a monopoly on Irish identity. Pilkington started off with the hard binary because it sets up the rest of his essay to argue that only Catholicism mattered. I argue that it was not the only criteria that mattered for both the Irish and their foreign enemies.
Pilkington’s History Part 2: The Normans in England
Pilkington turned next to Ireland’s first wave of enemies from England: the Normans. His first claim was that because the Normans invaded England a century before Ireland and that wasn’t considered imperialist than by transitive property it was not so in Ireland. His second claim is that because both the Irish and Normans were Catholic then there was no Irish hostility to the invasion. He further argued that because the Irish were more primitive, especially in their faith, the Normans were justified in invading.
Tackling the first claim, the Norman invasion of England in 1066 AD by William the Conqueror was imperialist. With a title like that it seems odd to argue otherwise. The Normans were Norse Vikings who converted to Catholicism and settled in France in the 10th century. They setup the Duchy of Normandy on the western French coastline which would later grow into the Angevin Empire. The Normans situated themselves as a ruling caste in England. They maintained a separate elite culture and displaced many prior Anglo-Saxon elites. For example, they continued to speak the Latin derived French while the lower Anglo-Saxon classes spoke the Germanic derived English. Economic Historian Luke Oades tallied the distribution of land before and after the Norman conquest of England. He found, “very small and small landholders owned 4% and 18% of land (by value) before the conquest, afterwards they represented only 0.2% and 2% respectively. In contrast, the proportion of land held by large landholders increased from 43% to 64% over the same period, and the monarch’s holdings increased from 12% to 23%. King William radically altered the distribution of land in England.”[17] The conclusion is that William drastically marginalized Anglo-Saxon land holders and transferred their lands to himself and his small pool of loyal Norman allies.
The two key lodestones for understanding Anglo-Saxon sentiment towards the Normans were the Manga Carta and the Norman Yoke trope. The Manga Carta was agreed to in 1215 and is seen as one of the most important legal documents in world history today. It set limits on the powers of the king and gave more rights to his subjects. The background context concerned the perception that the Norman conquest imported non-democratic customs into England which until then, under Anglo-Saxon rule, was more democratic and similar to the Manga Carta in legal spirit. The Manga Carta drew on historical Anglo-Saxon legal tradition and was contrasted with unjust rule by the Normans. Legal scholar Christopher Collins noted:
“In Anglo-Saxon times, a king would not normally be recognized, crowned, or obeyed without the consent of ‘the great council of the realm, the witena gemot.’ This tradition ‘kept alive the principle that the king must govern under advice.’ The Normans were of Germanic stock too, but they spoke a dialect of French and had adopted many of the French customs and governing practices. So while the descendants of Hrolf and his band of Northmen were not entirely French, the Norman dukes still managed to avoid much of the Germanic tradition of rule by consent. To their English subjects, it must have seemed a gross injustice to dispose of the practice. But the English absolute monarch was a fiction in 1215, as it had been for centuries, though [King] John clearly thought otherwise when he mused ‘Why do not the barons, with these unjust exactions, ask my kingdom?’”[18]
The Manga Carta was one of the first big push-backs against Norman imperial rule by the Anglo-Saxons. The concept of the Norman Yoke became very popular that described the oppression of Anglo-Saxons under Norman rule. The use of this phrase demonstrated that Norman rule was seen as a foreign imperial aggression against the native Anglo-Saxon population. The first depiction of it was from 12th century monk Orderic Vitalis who wrote, “and so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed.”[19] Efforts to re-anglicize England were fueled by this anti-Norman attitude. The early 19th century Scottish writer Walter Scott summarized the relationship as:
“Norman saw on English oak.
On English neck a Norman yoke;
Norman spoon to English dish,
And England ruled as Normans wish;
Blithe world in England never will be more,
Till England's rid of all the four.”[20]
Another literary example of the Norman vs. Anglo-Saxon dichotomy was the tale of Robin Hood which was also based on true events which emerged between the 12th and 13th centuries. One view of the story is that Robin Hood was an Anglo-Saxon defending lower class Anglo-Saxons from the tyrannical rule of Norman King John.[21]
The most potent expressions of the Norman Yoke occurred in the 17th century English political upheavals and 18th century American Revolution. As a product of educational reforms that expanded literacy in England, many had a much keener understanding of history and political organization in the 17th century. For instance, in 1641 and 1642, republished 13th and 14th century works of the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum and The Mirror of Justices described pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon legal and governing systems.[22] They were seen as far more decentralized and democratic. Boring scholarly analysis gave way to more polemical rhetoric as the lower classes learned more and grew their desires for reform. The English Civil War between 1642 and 1651 pitted royalists and upper classes against the lower classes and revolutionaries. Anti-royalist sentiment took on explicit anti-Norman and pro-Anglo-Saxon rhetoric. One of the most explicit examples was the 1642 St. Edwards Ghost or Anti-Normanisme by John Hare. In no uncertain terms, Hare divided the lower class Germanic-derived English from the upper class French-derived Normans. “Wee should have our Spirits so broken and un-Teutonized by one unfortunate Battaile, as for above 500 yeares together and even for eternity, not only to remaine, but contentedly to rest under the disgracefull title of a Conquered Nation, and in captivity and vassalage to a forraigne power?.. wee thinke we have not yet received shame enough by this Normane Conquest.”[23]
Other revolutionary pamphlets detailed this view with lines such as “we protest against the whole Norman Power, as being too intolerable a burden any longer to bear” and “the successor of the Norman Conqueror, under whose oppressing power England was enslaved.” [24] Revolutionary Gerrard Winstanley wrote, “the National Covenant with joint consent, to endeavour the freedom, peace, and safety of the people of England…Will. the Conqueror’s successor, which was Charles, was cast out; thereby we have recovered ourselves from under that Norman yoke… and so take possession of your own Land, which the Norman power took from you and hath kept from you about 600 years.”[25] While there was a spectrum of moderate to extremism on the intensity of the anti-Normanism, many revolutionaries saw the English Civil War as struggle to reestablish Anglo-Saxon traditions that were lost because of the Norman conquest.
This view was so strong that it extended a century later to feature in the American Revolution. The American revolutionary and eventual President Thomas Jefferson wrote extensively on justifying his revolution under the same pro-Anglo-Saxon and anti-Norman terms. Historian H. Trevor Colbourn detailed Jefferson’s extensive library and knowledge of English history from the anti-Norman perspective. Colbourn wrote:
“He went back to ‘our Saxon ancestors’ who ‘left their native wilds and woods in the North of Europe, [and] had possessed themselves of the island of Britain…’ To the new habitat, the transplanted Saxons had carried their free customs and political democracy, and, Jefferson noted, there was never any question of their being subject to any form of allegiance or control by the mother country from which they emigrated…Jefferson declared pointedly that ‘no circumstance has occurred to distinguish materially the British from the Saxon emigration.’ If the Saxons could migrate freely from Germany to England, then their descendants could move with equal liberty to North America…The responsibility for the unhappy change in England, Jefferson placed squarely upon ‘William the Norman.’”[26]
Jefferson like other American revolutionaries viewed the experimental American democracy as a return to Anglo-Saxon tradition and rejection of anti-democratic Norman imperialism that still lingered in England. Jefferson believed that the English Civil War was positive but history wiped away much of progress in the years after as England returned to a monarchial form of government which dispensed with the more radical republicanism that occurred with the English Commonwealth period of the 1640s-1660s. The American revolution was a chance to finish what was started during the English Civil War. Jefferson’s perspective was so strong that he suggested the official seal of the newly created United States of America include: “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”[27] Although the Normans assimilated somewhat into English nationhood, there was a persistent tension that prevailed past the immediate conquest. The expansion of literacy and weakening of the Norman’s strength led to the increased awareness of neglected Anglo-Saxon culture. By the 17th century, these tensions fed into the English Civil War and anti-royalist attitudes. After the earlier English Civil War revolutionaries compromised with their perceived Norman betters, the later American colonists leveraged the same anti-Norman tension to argue for independence and the completion of the mission to restore Anglo-Saxon culture and do away with Norman influence.
There is some historical disagreement as to the validity and the objectivity of the Norman Yoke and its extrapolated Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman dichotomy. Critical historians argue that the myth was created as a political device of modern English revolutionaries to insult the upper classes. However, such critical opinions from the time of the modern revolutionaries or the 20th century are biased because of the conflict of interest to protect the status quo. For all the progress in scholarship of the 20th century, historical accounts that have filtered down until today were still colored with England’s desire to preserve its collapsing global empire of colonies. Simply, mainstream English scholarship couldn’t admit that imperialism extended into the distant past of its own people as it would fuel arguments for 20th century anti-imperialism. With that being said, a strong argument on the critics’ side is that the Anglo-Saxons and Normans found earlier relative peace than the later modern revolutionaries give them credit. The fusion of Normans and Anglo-Saxons was more a circumstance of Norman weakness than mutual agreement.
The Normans in England faced pressure in France and vied with continental powers to retain their French lands. This most prominent period was Hundreds Years War from 1337 to 1453. These wars created a need to culturally unify with Anglo-Saxon lower classes to aid and fight in their wars. Over this period, the Normans would assimilate closer into Anglo-Saxon culture. Most notably the Pleading in English Act of 1362 for the first time dislocated French as an official language. It mandated English be used in courts rather than French. This marked the turn to reduce the distinction between Normans and Anglo-Saxons. Along with a fair bit of intermarriage, the Normans anglicized themselves. By the 15th century King Henry V’s dominant language was English. The Hundreds Years War was a defeat for the Normans. After they lost their lands in France, it was more imperative than ever to create a shared identity with those they ruled over in England. After this period, it makes more sense to label Normans in England and Anglo-Saxons as English together.
While this assimilation process took place, not all tensions faded. The socio-economic class structures still existed to some degree and animated those who considered themselves primarily Anglo-Saxon ancestry against those they saw as primarily Norman ancestry above them in class as evidenced by the Norman Yoke persisting for so long. From the French wars to the modern era, English nationalism has itself told an awkward national mythos in order to soften the rough edges of imperial realities of Anglo-Saxon suppression by the Normans for the expansion of global imperial ambitions.
Pilkington’s History Part 3: The Normans in Ireland
Pilkington’s second claim referred to the absence of Irish opposition as well as the evidence of justification to civilize backwards Ireland. Contrary to Pilkington’s revision, the 12th century Norman invasion of Ireland was, indeed, an invasion i.e., a foreign people illegitimately entered a native people’s land to dominate them through violence and subjugation. The fact that both peoples were Catholic only further illuminated the fact that religion was not the main dividing issue. There is an unsettled historical debate on the official opinion of the Catholic Church on the invasion which Pilkington incorrectly painted as decisively settled in favor of the view that the Catholic Church affirmed and sanctioned the invasion. The reasons suggested were that the Irish were not sufficiently Catholic and civilized. This is quite laughable as it was the Irish who after adopting Catholicism for themselves, through monks, converted the Anglo-Saxons of England to Catholicism from paganism. The Irish monks also taught the Anglo-Saxons how to translate their language into a written one.[28] Finally, the Normans only converted to Catholicism from paganism in the 10th century as a condition of political settlement in France. The Irish had a vastly deeper and sophisticated relationship with Catholicism than the Normans or Anglo-Saxons.
Even if we assume the official opinion of the Catholic Church sanctioned the invasion, the Church is not infallible in temporal matters. It must be said that Pope Adrian IV who allegedly directly sanctioned the Norman invasion was the first and only English-born Pope. According to historian I.S. Robbinson, “Adrian IV’s attachment to his homeland was demonstrated above all by his devotion to the cult of St. Alban. He also promoted the insular and continental ambitions of Henry II in various ways…reversing the policies of his immediate predecessors.”[29] While the evidence for the Church’s position before the invasion is in dispute, if we were to assume the sanction then it would be a glaring omission to not reveal the only Englishman to ever have been a Pope occurred at this exact time and was observed to have a very close relationship with the King of England. In instance one, the evidence for the suggested Papal sanction is either non-existent or plagued by unreliable sources especially sources that reproduced alleged copies decades to centuries after the fact. In instance two, the English Pope had compromised motives and shouldn’t be held as a temporal authority the Irish were obliged to obey, only morally. Catholics understand Papal “infallibility, [as applicable] only to solemn, official teachings on faith and morals.”[30] To be frank when it comes to deciding who owns what land and who pays taxes to who, the Pope is out of his jurisdiction which Catholicism explicitly teaches as so.
Returning to Irish opposition to the invasion, Pilkington doesn’t seem to have an answer for obvious questions related to the events of this time. Why did the primary contemporary sources like the Annals of Tigernach and Annals of Inisfallen record many battles between the native Irish and the foreigners? Why did these texts use the nomenclature of foreigner? If the invasion was somehow not a violent war between two nations, why was the 1175 Treaty of Windsor between High King of Ireland Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair and King Henry II of England needed? Pilkington considered these irrelevant details to the non-imperialist nature of uncontested Norman rule in Ireland. However, after the initial violence of their arrival, was there continued struggle? The answer is yes. Although the Treaty was signed, Normans illegitimately invaded more Irish lands which forced the Irish to retaliate. King Henry II backed his Norman countrymen in the spiraling outbreak of further violence and stripped whatever assurances he had previously given to the Irish. Further violence and land expropriation beset the Irish.
The 13th century was largely a period of stalemate. The Normans securely controlled the area known as the Pale encompassing the middle eastern provinces of Ireland, notably Dublin, and a handful of insecure outposts beyond the Pale. The Irish still maintained control on most of Ireland and continued to live as their own national culture. Eventually, certain Norman and Irish relations softened which enabled the start of absorption of Normans into the Irish nation. This process did not mean the Irish were pleased with Norman rule or the rule from a king in England. Skirmishes continued like the Sieges of Galway by Richard de Burgh between 1230 and 1235. By the early 14th century, a larger military campaign would attempt to reassert Irish control of the island. In 1315, King Robert the Bruce of Scotland sent troops to aid the Irish. Irish King of Tyrone Domhnall Ó Néill and a joint coalition of other Irish leaders invited Robert as he was already fighting England and they felt troubled by recent increased incursions of the Normans. They worked out a deal where Robert would remain King of Scotland and his brother, Edward, would lead the campaign and become King of Ireland.
The Bruce Campaign was a three year struggle of battles and castle sieges that almost dislodged Norman-English rule from Ireland until it was ultimately defeated. The scale of fighting is correlated to the scale of oppositional sentiment in Ireland to foreign rule. But wasn’t Robert also British? Was he not also a foreigner? Doesn’t this contradict arguments of Irish nationalism in the 14th century? The answer is no, in fact, as it will be shown the alliance with the Bruces and Scotland validated the nationalist rationale even more so.
Firstly, the name Scotland comes from the Latin Scotti which is the name Latin writers used to describe the Irish. Over time, Scotti became uniquely tied to the Irish that settled in northern Britain exclusively. The origins of Scotland as the land of the Scotti or land of the Irish has a deep contextual significance. The Irish migrated across the north of Ireland to the islands, coastline, and highlands of western Scotland in the 5th century. Eastern Scotland had pre-existing Celtic peoples like the Picts who were gradually assimilated into the Irish culture of those who migrated. This was largely due to their shared struggle to push back Norse Viking, Anglo Saxon, and Norman incursions.
Robert and Edward were part Norman but had significant Irish heritage, spoke Irish, and maintained Irish customs. One such custom was as young boys to be fostered in Ireland with Irish clans such as the influential O’Neill. Aside from a sojourn in Ireland, their childhood was spent in their mother’s native Carrick which was one of the most culturally Irish areas of Scotland. Robert also had ancestry directly connecting him to the Irish High King Brian Boru. In 1315, Robert wrote a letter to the Irish which stated:
“Whereas we and you and our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent you our beloved kinsman, the bearers of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you, so that with God's will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty.”[31]
For all intents and purposes, Robert and Edward thought of themselves as profoundly Irish.
The Irish in Ireland thought likewise. Domhanall Ó Néill along with his Irish allies wrote a detailed letter to Pope John XXII in 1317. In it, he explained the invitation of Robert and Edward was stimulated by this shared national affinity. The Irish in Ireland justified the Bruce’s rule through the argument that they “sprung from our noblest ancestors… For know, our revered Father, that besides the kings of lesser Scotia [Scotland] who all drew the source of their blood from our greater Scotia [Ireland], retaining to some extent our language and habits, a hundred and ninety seven kings of our blood have reigned over the whole island of Ireland. Here ends the process set on foot by the Irish against the king of England.”[32]
In very clear terms, the Irish communicated that they saw Robert and Edward as part of their nation and that they would assist them in a nationalist revolution against the imperialist Norman-English. The Irish understood themselves as an Irish nation which settled Ireland “3,500 years” ago. It is remarkable that in the early Middle Ages, the Irish pinpointed the same arrival period that modern archaeological and genetic studies has only recently proven as shown in the prior section. He further distinguished between the Irish and Norman-ruled English nations, fully understanding the concept of nations and nationalism which modernist historians claim only started four centuries later. The letter stated:
“Let no one wonder then that we are striving to save our lives and defending as we can the rights of our law and liberty against cruel tyrants and usurpers, especially since the said King, who calls himself lord of Ireland, and also the said kings his predecessors have wholly failed in this respect to do and exhibit orderly government to us and several of us. Wherefore, if for this reason we are forced to attack that King and our said enemies that dwell in Ireland, we do nothing unlawful but rather our action is meritorious and we neither can nor should be held guilty of perjury or disloyalty on this account, since neither we nor our fathers have ever done homage or taken any other oath of fealty to him or his fathers. And therefore, without any conscientious misgivings, so long as life endures we will fight against them in defence of our right and will never cease to attack and assail them until through want of power they shall desist from unjustly injuring us and the justest of Judges shall take evident and condign vengeance upon them for their tyrannous oppression and other most wicked deeds; and this with a firm faith we believe will soon come to pass.”
Is this a tract from the American Revolution of 1776? Wait, no this is the Irish talking about English tyranny in 1317. In totally unambiguous terms, the Irish understood the Norman invasion of Ireland as an imperialist action of a separate nation against their identifiable native nation.
Ó Néill’s letter alone refutes Pilkington’s whole argument. It was written well before when modernists pin the origin of nationalism. Thus, it is not linked to modern republicanism. The Irish understood themselves as a national entity defined by shared kin-culture traits whether in Ireland or Scotland. The Irish understood the Normans as imperialist foreigners and since both were Catholic, non-Catholicism played no role. The letter itself was addressed to the Pope and explained how the Irish were better Catholics than the Normans and listed evidence which negated the Norman portrayal of the Irish as not sufficiently Catholic and barbaric. If we consider this letter as valid testimony, the Normans were the immoral barbarians completely out of line with Catholic teaching.
In other correspondences, the Irish leaders and the Bruces even went so far as to envision a pan-Celtic alliance, which included Wales and other Celtic territories of Britain, to push back against the Norman-ruled imperium. The Bruces wrote letters to the Welsh leaders along similar common national arguments as their Irish letters. Welsh lead Gruffydd Llwyd replied back in agreement with the idea of a shared Celtic community and hatred of the Normans and English.[33] Llwyd consented that he and other Welsh nobles would join the Bruces if they came to Wales. The Bruces didn’t have the capability to expand to Wales and Llwyd was later arrested in 1316 but nonetheless communal affinity was demonstrated. To Pilkington, these ideas shouldn’t be possible at this time yet here we see it. Not only did the Irish understand themselves as Irish whether from Ulster or Munster but they also saw a larger shared kin-culture community that enveloped Scotland, Wales, and others. This Celtic dominion or Celtdom illustrated a strong sense of Irish national identity that was incredibly tangible even if it did not fully actualize itself.
The Normans won the war against the Bruces in Ireland which was a result of a terrible famine that coincided with the war. The Normans, although victors, slowly became more estranged from their counter-parts in England and closer to the native Irish. One of the most significant events of the 14th century was the European Black Plague of 1347 to 1351. As noted above, this plague disproportionately affected the urban and trading Normans compared to the rural and isolated Irish. Based on scientific studies, historical research, and primary sources the conclusion that the Plague affected the Normans more than the Irish in Ireland is sound.[34] Historian Maria Kelly noted:
“Geoffrey Le Baker, a contemporary English chronicler, wrote that the plague in Ireland ‘killed the English inhabitants there in great numbers, but the native Irish, living in the mountains and uplands, were scarcely touched.’… In summer 1349, Archbishop Fitzralph asserted the plague had not yet reached the ‘Irish nation’. The Great Council in July 1360 complained of a plague that was ‘so great and so hideous among the English lieges, and not among the Irish’… Archbishop Fitzralph stated it had destroyed more than two-thirds of the English nation in Ireland and individual religious houses claimed death rates of over 50 per cent, figures that tally with historians’ estimates of overall mortality in Europe. The plague’s effect on demographic decline in Ireland in the later middle ages was a cumulative one. Thanks to famine and warfare, the population of the [Norman] colony in Ireland had already been declining for some decades before the Black Death. The plague sealed the downward trend.”[35]
Historian Terry B. Barry found correlated evidence that “there was a hiatus in the building of major [Norman] stone castles from about the end of the first quarter of the fourteenth century to the following century.”[36] This indicated that the Plague severely curtailed the expansion of Norman rule in Ireland. In addition, the center of Norman power in England was constrained by their other objectives so support from them for the Normans in Ireland was minimal. The Norman’s population, power, and wealth diminished. This exasperated intermingling with the native Irish out of desperation. This is the real turning point for Norman assimilation into the Irish nation. This increased trend is why the Statutes of Kilkenny were enacted in 1366. It was because Normans in England post-hoc scrambled to stop what already occurred to preserve their hold of Ireland. Finally, the Normans in England were preoccupied with fighting the Hundred Years’ War in France from 1337 to 1453. This meant that attention and resources were devoted to the preservation of their dearly held French lands. The internal Wars of the Roses from 1460 to 1485 also stifled Irish focus. This left the Normans in Ireland more neglected, led to further weakness, and push for assimilation into the Irish nation.
The 14th-15th century represented an Irish Renaissance. With the Normans becoming more Irish than the Irish, the culture was freer to flourish. Additionally, Irish expanded into Norman lands and Irish law replaced that of the Normans. As noted previously, by 1515 the Normans in Ireland were seen by those in England as “for the most part be of Irish birth, of Irish habit, and of Irish language.”[37] Norman rule in Ireland became largely nominal. The imperial strength disintegrated during this period but by the middle of the 16th century a new phase of foreign imperialism took over Ireland that also solidified the Normans in Ireland as fully Irish.
Pilkington’s History Part 4: The Protestant Upheaval
Pilkington marked the 16th century as the real beginning of Irish antagonism towards England since it coincided with the creation of English Protestantism with its specific variant of Anglicanism. Since Normans joined forces with the Irish under a common Catholic cause against the English, Pilkington argued that there must have been no problem with the Norman invasion and rule of Ireland. However, as the previous sections greatly detailed, Pilkington failed to consider intense conflicts between Irish and Normans and why the Normans had to assimilate into the Irish nation. The Normans became Irish because of Irish military victories, ecological devastation like famines and the Black Plague, and neglect from England distracted in other matters. The more correct way to view this history is that the Normans stayed Catholic because they were Irish rather than the Normans were Irish because they stayed Catholic.
Pilkington used the example of the rebellion of Thomas FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Kildare. Pilkington portrayed this as a fight over Henry VIII’s subversion of Catholicism but it was much less theological than that. The young Thomas heard a rumor that his father, who traveled to London, was executed by Henry VIII. This stimulated him to rebel out of revenge for his father, who he didn’t know was not executed. Thomas was also responsible for murdering a Catholic archbishop during his rebellion which caused the Catholic Church to excommunicate him. The full context of this story revealed that this has nothing to do with religion. While Thomas didn’t receive significant support from Irish Catholics, to the degree that he did and this story is read in a nationalist perspective, it is because, as described above, the Normans assimilated into the Irish nation by this point.
The biggest omission on Pilkington’s part was that he didn’t discuss the national nature of Anglicanism. Anglicanism emerged out of a dispute between the English King Henry VIII and the Roman Catholic Church’s Pope. In retaliation, Henry VIII started his own sect of Christianity which made him the hierarchical equivalent to the Pope. Henry VIII was not a theologian following divine inspiration, he was a cynical tyrant that corrupted religion to suit his material pursuits. To be a religious follower of Anglicanism was the same thing as being a loyal secular subject of the King of England. The clue is in the name: Anglo i.e. Anglicism. In a certain way, we can say Henry VIII made religion a matter of nationalism. Whereas Catholicism was the uniform backdrop of many European nations previously, the divide between Catholicism and Protestantism often demarcated itself at the fault lines of nations.
Religion, as stated previously, is a part of a national identity but Henry VIII highlighted it as a significant matter for distinction. Thus, the Irish who rejected the Catholic Normans and English would of course reject Anglicanism because it was synonymous with the English nation. The Irish reactionarily entrenched themselves in Catholicism as a signifier. Catholic also provided a useful nomenclature to describe the Irish post-assimilation of Normans into the Irish nation. To argue that Anglicanism had nothing to do with nationalism is disingenuous to say the least. It’s equally disingenuous to suggest that religion was not a heavily used contextual model in post-16th conflict in Ireland, however, that still doesn’t exclude the nationalist interrelatedness of the religious dimension.
Pilkington claimed “the Penal Laws…stated goal was anti-Catholic, not anti-Irish or anti-Celtic.” Pilkington failed to comprehend the nature of the Penal Laws in three ways. One, the Penal Laws mirrored earlier discrimination like the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1367. Two, Catholicism was equivalent with the Irish nation at this time. Three, prohibition of the Irish language was part of the Penal Laws. The third is the most glaring point. In 1537, King Henry VIII issued the Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language which prohibited the Irish language and especially in education and religious preaching. In 1737, the Administration of Justice Act mandated only English could be spoken in courts. If the Celtic Irish language was under attack then the Penal Laws and their precursors were necessarily anti-Celtic. Furthermore, the general prohibition against Irish law, customs, and culture were also signs of anti-Celtic not just anti-Catholic sentiments.[38]
Other aspects of the Penal Laws that prohibited land ownership, political representation, and more which were targeted at Catholics did not not disrupt the interrelatedness of Catholicism with the Irish nation. While there may have been a few Irish who became Anglicans and a few English who stayed Catholic, the overwhelming fact of these two religions, within the British Isles, is that they correlated highly with nationality. Pilkington’s highlighted references to Catholic as the specification in the Penal Laws don’t point away from Irish nationalism but point towards it. Next, Pilkington used the example of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the revolutionary republican English Commonwealth. Cromwell’s extreme Puritanism, Pilkington suggested, made him only care about Catholicism and not nationality. While Cromwell may have personally contextualized his animosity in religious terms, again, it doesn’t erase the fact that those religious terms correlated to nationalities. With that being noted, Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland was ultimately a political action. He and his ruling cohort saw Ireland as an English possession that rebelled against England’s right to rule over them in establishing an independent Irish Catholic Confederation in 1642. The political desire combined with the economic demand to return Irish land and resources to English control especially for the repayment of the massive debts taken out under the Adventurers Act.
Thus, Cromwell’s Irish antagonism can be contextualized within particular political dynamics between two nations expressed through the labels of religion. Additionally, the claim that Cromwell was primarily motivated by a Puritanical sense of general religious warfare against anyone not sufficiently Protestant Christian is diminished in the face of Cromwell’s efforts to readmit the Jews back into England during the same period.[39] Jews were previously banned by royal decree. Cromwell met with Jews and argued their case before his fellow English council leaders. Ultimately, through his own informal decree he permitted the Jews to be readmitted to England and receive toleration. Obviously, it is not logically consistent for Cromwell to oppress one non-Protestant religion and support another non-Protestant religion. Again, we see that Cromwell considered the national political dimension more so than that of the religious even if religious terms were heavily leveraged.
Pilkington’s History Part 5: The English Civil Wars
The subsequent events after Cromwell’s rule are another important chapter in the Irish history. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, his republican domain went into anarchy. In 1661, political leaders decided the best solution was to reinstall a modified monarchy with none other than Charles II, the son of Charles I who they had executed in 1649. In 1685, Charles II died with no heir which led to his younger brother James II becoming king with initial support of the political leaders. One glaring quirk stood out, James II was Catholic. At first, James II was seen to play along with the Protestant agenda but later on was perceived as a threat to Protestant rule. This led to Protestants requesting the help of James II’s Protestant daughter Mary. She was married to the Protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange. William was offered the crown by the English Protestant political leaders if he could unseat James II. This created a war that stretched across the British Isles that pitted Catholic James II against Protestant William of Orange. The Irish Catholics sided with James II against William of Orange and his faction of English settlers in Ireland and Protestant English in England. William of Orange won in what is called, by the English, the Glorious Revolution, but James II fled. His exile meant he and his hereditary line fueled conspiratorial rebellious thought for years which became known as Jacobitism.
Pilkington asked, “why on earth would the Irish side with the English King?”[40] He then confidently argued that the answer to this question clearly illustrated the Irish were more concerned about religion than nationalism and preferred an English King over self-rule. On the surface, the combination of facts is awkward, however, with further historical expansion to encompass both the Irish particulars and the European big picture, we can better understand the situation albeit with increased awkwardness.
The Irish had a complex association with James II. The crucial nuance that Pilkington left out was that the Irish Catholics made a realist bargain with James II. In return for their support, he would enact toleration of Catholicism, end the Penal Laws, reverse the land confiscations, and enable political autonomy of the Irish Parliament. This process occurred tepidly at first with James II granting few leniencies to Irish Catholics. However, as James II lost more and more support in Britain he was pressured into granting more and more freedoms to the Irish Catholics. James II passively preferred to help his coreligionists but in matters of the political game he often pushed back to not alienate what few English Protestants he had left on his side. This especially was the case around reversals of land settlements. Even if James II was pressured more than he would have liked to have been, by 1689, he had enabled a massive change in Irish Catholic freedom and representation across society. With the introduction of Irish Catholics into leadership in the courts, “the Gaelic poet David Ó Bruadair rejoiced that the Irish Catholics on the bench could now give justice to the natives, and ‘listen to the plea of the man who can’t speak / The lip-dry and simpering English tongue’.”[41] As an aside, Pilkington’s assertion that Celtic culture didn’t matter to the Irish Catholics is once again disproven since Ó Bruadair praised the use of Irish language and insulted the English language.
These general positive results fueled myth-making around James II by Irish Catholics, even if the reality was more cynical. Irish poets aggrandized James II and commoners cheered his reign. Historian Éamonn Ó Ciardha described Irish literature of the time as also having a “pan-Gaelic dimension to Irish Jacobitism”[42] in relation to the highlighting of James II’s Stuart hereditary line from Scotland. This connection reminds us of the prior section of Robert and Edward the Bruce’s campaign in Ireland. This historical element overlaid on James II further ingratiated his myth into Irish Catholic support. A Scot and a Catholic reassured Irish Catholics that this king wouldn’t betray their hopes. Irish Catholic hopes rested on James II functioning as a tool to reestablish national self-rule in Ireland and do away with English oppression.
Historian Tim Harris wrote, “there was a tendency among those engaged in the struggle against English hegemony to perceive the conflict in national terms — as a struggle to throw off English colonial domination and achieve autonomy and self-determination for the Irish nation.”[43] Both Irish Catholics and their counterparts among the English Protestants thought this. Protestant “Sir Paul Rycaut, put it in July 1686: ‘the Irish talk of nothing now but recovering their land and bringing the English under their subjection’”[44] Another Protestant pamphleteer opined that he thought Irish Catholics wanted “Ireland to be ‘an independent Kingdom, and in the hands of its own Natives: he longs till the day, when the English Yoak of Bondage shall be thrown off.”[45] National distinction and political sovereignty were the foundations of support for James II and both the Irish Catholics and English Protestants frequently acknowledged it. The Catholicism of James II was seen a confidence booster by Irish Catholics which convinced them that he would follow through on the political issues. In 1689, after being left with only Irish Catholics in his corner he begrudgingly conceded The Declaratory Act:
“With some reluctance James agreed to an act declaring that English parliament had no right to pass laws for Ireland. The act declared the Ireland had always been a kingdom distinct from that of England; its people had never sent representatives to a parliament held in England, but had their laws made in their own parliament: ‘yet of late times (especially in times of distraction) some have pretended that acts of parliament passed in England, mentioning Ireland, were binding in Ireland’. Such a claim was declared to be against justice and natural equity, oppressive to the people and destructive of the constitution…The declaratory act of 1689 was a forerunner of the long argument conducted by Molyneux, Swift and Grattan for the right of Ireland to be independent of English laws and courts…The act was singled out for particular praise by Thomas Davis: ‘the idea of 1782 is to be found full grown in 1689.”[46]
The culmination of Irish Catholic support for James II occurred with this act. The act represented clear and unambiguous evidence that the goal of Irish Catholics was national and political. They were content to support a symbolic king so long as it meant he couldn’t rule them in any meaningful way. One way of looking at it is that the Irish Catholics took advantage of James II’s marginalization and weakness to further their own material agenda while often employing mythologized propaganda using Catholic and Gaelic allusions. With no better option on the table, James II capitulated to the Irish Catholics. “In his speech at the opening of ‘The Patriot Parliament’, James fed such fervor by appealing to Irish steadfastness in the face of the looming invasion, stressing that Irish ‘liberty’ was inextricably linked to his ‘rights’.”[47] Historian J.G. Simms noted how this dynamic was also more relevant to later Irish nationalists, which also decenters Pilkington’s alleged French revolutionary myopia.
Beyond Ireland and Britain, the wider European context further complicateed Pilkington’s argument. The Dutch Prince William of Orange was a Protestant who fought on behalf of the English Protestants but one fact stood out: he was supported by the Roman Catholic Pope. Returning to Pilkington’s question, “why on earth would the Irish side with the English King?”[48], can be followed up with the use of historian Steve Pincus’ even more contradictory question. “Why was Pope Innocent XI interested in seeing the first openly Roman Catholic King of Great Britain and Ireland [James II] overthrown in favor of a Dutch Protestant [William of Orange]?”[49] This is because the conflict between James II and William of Orange was part of the larger European Nine Years’ War. From 1688 to 1697, France led by King Louis XIV fought the Grand Alliance of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany), the Dutch Republic, England, Spain, and Savoy.
While it was partly a territorial dispute, there was a large controversy centered around the relationship between King Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XI. “At the heart of the tension between Louis XIV and Innocent XI was a conflict over sovereign authority.”[50] The Pope disagreed with Louis XIV’s taxing of Church revenues in France, appointment of clergy, and forced conversions of French Protestants to Catholicism. Matters like these and others shaped the debate around Gallicanism which was the French ideology, with origins in the 13th century, that sought to maximize the authority of a king as well as subordinate the church.[51] Implicitly, this was perceived to be limiting the authority of the Pope. An analysis of the deeply complex theological and administrative underpinnings within this debate is unnecessary, however, this debate bled into the political realm and war because it was the motivation for the Pope’s decisions of who to support or not support.
James II was half French due to his mother Henrietta Maria of France who was also a Catholic. During the anti-royalist Cromwellian era, he was exiled to France where he also fought in the French army. His exile exposed him to Catholicism, Gallicanism, and Louis XIV. This led to his conversion to Catholicism in 1668, his affiliation with Louis XIV along with his allied faction of Gallican Catholics. As Pincus pointed out, James II was saturated in French Catholic circumstances that put him indirectly at odds with the Pope of his own faith. The dissonance was expressed through James II’s ambassador to Rome whose “own views of European politics could not have been closer to those of the French King and further from the Pope’s. In Rome he told Cardinal Cybo that Innocent’s differences with Louis XIV were ‘frivolous’ and that the Catholic world should unite in a war against the United Provinces which were nothing but a ‘a haven for rebels, pirates, and heretics.’”[52] James II couldn’t fully comprehend why the Catholic Pope wouldn’t side with him and Louis XIV in establishing a larger and stricter Catholic realm across Europe. James II’s imported Gallicanism was also perceived to have manifested in England and so through both affiliation and actions the Pope disfavored James II. “The Pope treated the ambassador from the first openly Catholic monarch of Great Britain and the first of either England or Scotland for over a century with the utmost contempt.”[53]
The Pope viewed his support for Protestant rulers as the better choice among few in his conflict with what he saw as the worse Louis XIV whether through his direct rule or the spread of his Gallican ideology. There was evidence to suggest Catholics would be treated fairly under Protestant rule too. William of Orange “made it known before his arrival that ‘he never was nor is for oppressing any, no not the Papists in their consciences.’”[54] Ironically, William did not exactly see himself as leading an anti-Catholic crusade. For this, “Pope Innocent XI himself appears to have been convinced that ‘the bloodshed and persecution of Catholics in England should cease, and that their religion should prosper under [William’s] protection and government more than it would have done under that of King James.’”[55] Pincus continued, “the Pope was known to have funneled large sums to the confederate princes fighting France in 1689, ‘but has refused to send anything to King James’”[56] It is speculated that the Pope financially supported William of Orange too but only within the bounds of William’s conflict with Louis XIV on the continent and allegedly nothing to do with the British Isles.
This section has laid out that Irish Catholics supported James II because he would have given them nationalist self-rule. The Catholic James II was not supported by the Pope because of his ideological similarity and political alliance with the French Catholic King Louis XIV. The Pope supported Protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange because he was against Louis XIV and was relatively tolerant of Catholics. Pilkington’s Catholic-centrist claims also fall flat in the context of many Catholics in Europe, Britain, and Ireland that supported the Pope’s opposition to Gallicanism and disliked James II’s overreaches. Ironically, the only reason the Irish Catholics supported a Gallican king, whose ideology maximized the king’s power, was because of their expectation that that king would give up all power over them. With this political rationale, the Irish Catholics decided to ally themselves with the Gallican faction of James II and Louis XIV that was directly opposed by the Pope. Why would Irish Catholics ignore the opinion of the Pope if these events were solely about Catholic theology? There was no response by Pilkington since he left much of this historical context out of his essay, but my essay can easily answer. The Irish Catholics were more concerned with their political rights as a distinct nation. Jacobitism, a movement to restore James II and his descendants to the English crown, continued for decades after these events only because of its relationship to the original political machinations between James II and the Irish Catholics, especially the Declaratory Act instituting self-government in Ireland.
Pilkington’s History Part 6: French Republicanism
Next, Pilkington jumped to the turn of the 19th century. He claimed the French Revolution was the primary influence on Irish republicanism. He alleged that the nihilistic and atheistic ideas of the French Revolution, known as Jacobinism (unrelated to Jacobitism), planted seeds in the Irish republican movement even if they weren’t fully blossomed yet. Irish republican leadership, he claimed, endorsed Jacobinism more so than the ignorant rank and file of the movement and sought to secretly embed Jacobinism in Irish republicanism. According to Pilkington, Irish Catholics’ desire for military support from the French revolutionaries during this time left them vulnerable to infection of French revolutionary ideas.
While there is no denial that the French Revolution unleased a period of chaos and destruction mostly directed towards power centers like the aristocracy and Catholic Church, it would be wrong to categorize all of French Republicanism this way. The French also had nationalist grievances. The rise of Napoleon also brought peace back to France and notably the Catholic Church in France. Irish republicanism at the turn of the 18th century had a long native tradition that did not require French influences to direct it. However, where knowledge transfer occurred it’s important to show that French influence was not all nihilistic and atheistic.
The French Revolution is usually defined by class tensions and Enlightenment ideas of democracy and atheism. For Pilkington, French nationalism came out of these ideological motivations. I counter that because French nationalism existed prior and distinctly from late 19th century class tensions and Enlightenment ideas. It is worth asking: was the French Revolution nationalist in the sense that it pitted an oppressed native people against oppressive alien rule? Yes. By this time, French people began to see their rulers as a different nationality to themselves with correspondent differing interests.
French King Louis XVI was about 20% French and 80% German/Austrian. His wife Marie Antoinette was 100% Austrian. The nature of cosmopolitan European monarchies during this time exasperated disconnection between the rulers and the ruled. Rather than trivia, these facts expressed themselves in actions taken by the revolutionaries and the royals. The Trial of Louis XVI in 1792 revealed the nationalist attitudes of the revolutionaries. Earlier in that year, France went into conflict with Austria and Prussia which was the start of the War of the First Coalition which later enveloped much of Europe. The French eventually suspected the allowances given to the king and queen over the four years since the initial French revolt were abused. It was alleged that the royals were sabotaging the French war effort to help their Germanic co-ethnics. Charge 9 accused Louis XVI of tacitly supporting the invasion of France by Leopold II of Austria (his wife’s brother) and Frederick William II of Prussia to restore him as absolute monarch. Charge 19 accused him of negotiating a peace between Turkey and Austria so that Turkey could aid Austria against France. Charge 20 accused him of withholding strategic intelligence on Austrian army movements. Charge 28 accused him of violating the new constitution by retaining foreign mercenaries. Charge 31 accused him of allowing the French nation to be disgraced with ill-treatment by Germany, Italy, and Spain. Charge 33 accused him of causing “the blood of Frenchmen to flow.”[57]
These charges demonstrated that there were very pressing political concerns of war happening around the revolutionaries. These political concerns forced a more open confrontation with the nature of royal alienness to the French nation. The royals were alleged to have committed treason during an active war on the basis of their shared ancestry with Austrians and Prussians against the French. Nationalism among the French can clearly be identified after the revolutionary period but rather than it being an outgrowth of artificial propaganda of the conspirators’ new state bureaucracy, it was an independent motivating factor that the French were aware of before and during the revolution. Thus, nationalism can be separated from the other chaotic ideas.
The chaos of the revolutionary period was ended by the rule of French military commander Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon contrasted the alleged treasonous royals through his patriotic war record. He was a symbol of French nationalism. He was an ideological supporter of the French Revolution. His reign, while dictatorial in some measure, sought to balance the revolutionary ideas with the traditional order of France. The Concordat of 1801 was an agreement between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII that reestablished respect for Catholicism in France after persecution of the Catholic Church by revolutionary atheist radicals.[58] In 1804, the Pope officiated Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor of France in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. At Napoleon's enthronement the Pope said, "may God confirm you on this throne and may Christ give you to rule with him in his eternal kingdom."[59]
Rather than cherry picking unfortunate dates, the full scope of the French Revolution and its aftermath led to the support of Catholicism.[60] It seems odd to myopically focus on a few short years of anarchy which produced anti-Catholic sentiments in France that were ended by Napoleon when the English were tyrannically persecuting not only the Irish Catholic laity but the Catholic Church itself for centuries. Finally, French republicanism can be seen as having a variety of currents flowing around it. Nationalism was one such current. Nationalism became so intensely associated with the French Revolution that it is still the foundation of historical studies into modern nationalisms around the globe. Nationalism proved the test of time lasting for centuries in France while anti-Catholicism ended in 1801.
Pilkington’s History Part 7: Irish Republicanism and Tricolourism
According to Pilkington, the real inflection point of Irish history concerned the United Irishmen movement in the 1790s. He argued the leaders of the United Irishmen were both Protestants and orthodox Jacobins who were heavily influenced by the negative tenets of the French Revolution. He noted the leaders misled the majority rank and file. Those rank and file were Catholic who saw the French connection as simply a Catholic country which happened to be fighting their enemy Protestant England. There was also the Jacobite (James II) legacy of the French being seen as an ally to the Irish. The United Irishmen movement was the cornerstone of future rebellious fervor which culminated in the 1916 Easter Rising and War of Independence. Pilkington claimed that over these years the French Jacobin plotters of Irish republicanism wanted to erase Catholicism from Ireland. There was an increased incentive to do so because notable Irish republicans were from English Protestant backgrounds and thus already opposed to Catholicism. To do so, Pilkington explained, they emphasized a secular Celtic identity linked to the pre-Catholic past of Ireland, to supplant the Catholic identity.
Pilkington is mostly wrong but touched a few salient aspects. This section will demonstrate that Irish Catholics cared about their Celtic (interchangeable with Gaelic) identity as part of their wider sense of nationalism, the Celtic identity was based on historical truth, and that Celtic identity didn’t oppose Catholicism. It will also expand on the few points Pilkington correctly hinted at within the dynamic between Irish Protestant nationalism and Irish Catholic nationalism. Much of my concluding arguments will center around this dynamic. I will shed light on what is an inconvenient truth of modern Irish nationalism and how that has contributed to its internal problems.
Let’s begin with the United Irishmen which will set the table for the subsequent discussion. There are three main groups in Ireland at this time: the Catholics, Protestant Anglicans, and Protestant Presbyterians. While on the surface the Protestants shared privileges there were differences. The Anglicans were mostly the elite land-owning class in what is today the southern Republic of Ireland while the Presbyterians made up much of the plantation settler community in what is today Northern Ireland. The Anglicans originated from more central England while the Presbyterians were English who were from the lowlands of Scotland. Due to their inferior class status and more marginal Protestantism, Presbyterians felt oppressed and led to the creation of the United Irishmen in 1791 in Belfast. They combined with disaffected Anglicans and it was these two groups who formed the revolutionary elite leadership.
Catholic inclusion was not a foregone conclusion however the United Irishmen eventually resolved debates and considered Catholics advantageous to include. This was because there was a history of exclusionary Protestant nationalism in Ireland in the 18th century. Essentially, the Protestant settlers’ descendants after being born and raised in Ireland, perhaps the 3rd or 4th generation to do so, considered themselves worthy of self-rule. They meant self-rule as in them as the dominant English Protestant minority in Ireland would rule Ireland vs. being ruled from London. 18th century writer Jonathan Swift, best known for his Gulliver’s Travels, also advocated for English Protestant nationalism. “For Swift was an anomalous patriot, a figure of contradictions…he considered himself not Irish but an ‘Englishman born in Ireland’. The attitude so implied was in many ways typical of those of planter stock—it included a general indifference or hostility to the culture and language of the Gaelic Catholic majority…Hence, though generally considered an ancestor of Irish nationalism for his resistance to British encroachments upon Irish rights, his Ireland was a Protestant kingdom and mainly an Anglican polity.”[61]
These types of “Irish nationalists” disparaged Irish Catholics with imperial insults of barbarism but much of their fears were around that if Irish Catholics gain political representation they might legislate reversals of stolen land that those English Protestants inherited. While this tension existed, United Irishmen like Theobald Wolfe Tone reviewed the failure of attempts at achieving self-rule as owing to not finding common cause with the Irish Catholics. For the radical English Protestant nationalists were necessarily a minority among English Protestants because of their radicalness. Most English Protestant settlers in Ireland understood their status, wealth, and power rested on imperial support from England against the large Irish Catholic sub-class. Therefore, the English Protestant radicals who wanted nationalism would eventually need to turn to the Irish Catholics. While much of the 18th century English Protestant nationalism rejected Irish Catholic inclusion, the reformers like Tone won out by the turn of the century.
It was in this moment of the 1790s that the United Irishmen’s Protestant elite leadership created the ideology of tricolourism. They sought to create an Irish nationalism where the three groups of Catholics, Anglicans, and Presbyterians could all unite in self-rule and religious toleration. This also implicitly meant a forgiveness of ancestral grievances which still manifested in aspects like land ownership. The last Irishman was artificially created. He was neither Catholic, Anglican, nor Presbyterian but Irish. He was neither Gaelic nor English but Irish. “Tone recognized that [his] Irish nation…did not exist” and as he explicitly stated, he wanted “to abolish the memory of all past dissensions.”[62] This abstraction was certainly pleasant to the ears of literate English Protestants but in reality it was much less tenable. Historian W. Benjamin Kennedy wrote, “in theory, the [United Irishmen] was a fraternal union of Irishmen irrespective of religion; in fact, it was a union of expediency in which each sect exploited the other in its quest for particular political ends…unity was partial and erratic…The alliance…was plagued by disharmony from the start. Their mutual religious hatreds were stronger than their attachment to revolutionary fraternalism…The United Irishmen never overcame these antagonisms, a major reason for its ultimate failure.”[63]
As Kennedy pointed out, most of the United Irishmen’s support among Irish Catholics came from Irish Catholic peasants. The few Irish Catholic gentry opposed it as they were loyalists and the Catholic middle class were sympathetic but were moderates who wanted reform over revolution. The peasants who felt the most pressure from English imperialism were primed for revolutionary zeal. However, they only cared about revolution as it related to their material benefit and continuation of their native understanding of Irish struggle against English imperialism. They saw the French Revolution and had a basic appreciation of what was seen as a French under-class overthrowing an oppressor. In addition, the potential material military support the larger and stronger French could provide the Irish against the English was appreciated by the Irish Catholics as a realist calculation. Irish Catholic peasants were not obsessively reading about weird Jacobin theories on atheism, they just wanted to overthrow the English and the United Irishmen provided them that outlet.
“United Irish leaders were aware that Catholics did not share their enthusiasm for revolutionary France. Dr. William Drennan, president of the United Irish in Dublin, recognized this: ‘The true cause, which really disunited the Presbyterians and the Catholics, is that the former love the French openly and the Catholics almost to a man hate them secretly. And why? Because they have overturned the Catholic religion in that country and threaten to do so throughout the world.’”[64] The Catholics were not unaware of the chaos of France and had no thoughts of emulating it in Ireland. Pilkington’s leap in connecting the Irish republicans to the French Jacobins in this context would be analogous to suggesting the American revolutionaries believed in monarchism because of their alliance with the French monarchy. While Pilkington acknowledged the ignorance of the rank and file, he still overestimated the absorption of French Jacobinism, notably anti-Catholicism, and underestimated independent centuries old native Irish nationalism. As Kennedy wrote, “the conclusion that some historians have drawn that Ireland was a ready receptacle for French revolutionary ideas in the 1790s must be corrected by a review of the opinions and reactions of Irish Catholics…Rather, Catholic peasants were developing an embryonic Irish nationalism, rooted in years of oppression and aroused by the hope that revolutionary France would liberate them from it.”[65]
The 19th century contained a trend of the rise of the Irish Catholics. Just as the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland led to the dominance of English Protestants and their eventual English Protestant nationalism, after the 1790s Irish Catholics slowly embarked on their own ascendancy. The implicit logical conclusion was the decentering of English Protestants. “Irish republican separatists became captive to their own Catholic converts. One recent scholar has written ‘In the course of creating a powerful revolutionary organization, the United Irish had, unwittingly, allied themselves with a peasantry moving towards social revolution.’”[66] Similar to how the Irish Catholics won capitulation out of a cornered James II which effectively made him irrelevant, the recruitment of Irish Catholics was done by a cornered English Protestant nationalist movement who had to make concessions to the point of making their own ascendancy irrelevant.
As history continued into the 19th century, Irish nationalism was an incubator. Since the Irish Catholics were oppressed and thus poor and illiterate, a Protestant intelligentsia and leadership cadre was still necessary. They were part of the oppressor class and therefore rich and literate. By the turn of the 20th century, this dynamic flipped. Irish Catholics formed their own middle class. They achieved higher levels of income, land ownership, education, and support from their exiled diaspora communities especially in America. Figure 3 shows the religious and ethnic composition of the leaders of the 1798 United Irishmen and the 1916 Irish Revolution. There is a clear change moving from Protestants of English ethnic origin to Catholics of Irish ethnic origin. Protestants made up 83% in 1798 and 0% in 1916. Catholics made up 17% in 1798 and 100% in 1916. Those of English origin made up 78% in 1798 and 20% in 1916. Those of Irish origin made up 22% in 1798 and 77% in 1916. Protestants decreased by 100%, Catholics increased by 475%, English decreased by 74%, and Irish increased by 254%. Rather than Pilkington’s accusation that Irish nationalism was a plot by Jacobin influenced English Protestant hatred of Catholicism, after about a century of maturation, Irish nationalism produced a leadership cadre of all Catholics.[67]
It is quite easily seen that native Irish nationalism was an immense well for 19th-20th century Irish Catholics to draw from. Foreign influences like the French Revolution were no doubt absorbed but pale in comparison to the parochial outlook of Irish Catholics during this time. Whatever weird theories of English Protestant nationalists there were, they were not shared by Irish Catholic nationalists. The rise of the Irish Catholic middle class displaced the English Protestant nationalist intelligentsia and leadership of Irish nationalism which meant the dismissal of weird theories. However, tricolorism remained.
The century of English Protestant and Irish Catholic nationalist collaboration cemented tricolorism as a necessary tenet of Irish nationalism. Rather than only tolerating religions, tricolorism erased national identities. Allusions to the past were drawn but it stopped short of addressing the effects of that past that were still biasing different groups on the island. The energy was directed at separating from England but not on honestly reconciling the groups on the island. Tricolorism meant the erasure of actual identity for an artificial one you shared with historical enemies with unresolved issues. There was no reconciliation and thus this created the real seeds of Anglo homogenization. After independence was achieved for the south of the country in 1922, Irish nationalism had a nation-state to further nation building. While there were great strides to promote Irish nationalism, there was pandering to English Protestants to stay within the rules of tricolorist code of conduct. This drive to maintain tricolorism also paradoxically revealed persistent distinctions among these groups.
In 1925, there was a debate on divorce in the southern Irish Free State that featured intense discourse from the writer and then Senator W.B. Yeats. The Irish Catholic majority wanted to outlaw divorce however Yeats argued this alienated English Protestants. Yeats spastically connected the liberalization of divorce to not just Protestant religion but English Protestant ethnicity. Yeats argued in the Irish Senate:
“I wish to close more seriously; this is a matter of very great seriousness. I think it is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be grossly oppressive. I am proud to consider myself a typical man of that minority. We against whom you have done this thing, are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence. Yet I do not altogether regret what has happened. I shall be able to find out, if not I, my children will be able to find out whether we have lost our stamina or not. You have defined our position and have given us a popular following. If we have not lost our stamina then your victory will be brief, and your defeat final, and when it comes this nation may be transformed.”[68]
The ecumenical nature of tricolorism meant to Yeats that the majority of the nation, who were Irish Catholic, couldn’t enact laws that they were entitled to as the majority in a democracy. Yeats echoed the 18th century exclusionary English Protestant nationalism that desired for a sovereign Ireland of castes where the minority English Protestants dominated. While of course watered down, Yeats was getting at the same fundamental feeling. Who were these uppity Irish Catholics to tell civilized English Protestants what to do? Yeats explicitly dichotomized the majority Irish Catholics and minority English Protestants. He identified himself not as an abstract universal Irishman but a different English Protestant. He elaborated to the point of English Protestant supremacist rhetoric and insinuation at the backwardness of the Irish Catholics. Yeats didn’t allude to the French Revolution but instead relied on English Protestant nationalist history, especially its ethnic character.
The Irish Catholics got their way with the divorce bill but the trend of appeasement to English Protestant identity festered in southern Ireland. The immediate calamity of the Irish Civil War after the creation of the Irish Free State meant that there was a severe strain on the new government. This created a pressing need to maintain existing institutions for stability. English Protestants in positions of power of these institutions who rejected the Irish Revolution felt forced into the Irish Free State. They sought to continue the status quo the best they could and the Irish Civil War gave them immense leverage to continue doing so. When, in 1922, staunch revolutionary leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins both died and left the top two positions of power vacant in the Irish Free State, a subtle counter-revolution of English Protestant institutional power took greater hold.
The most critical aspect of this status quo was in finance and economics. There was no radical change to the operations of Ireland’s private banks or its government’s economic policies. These policies focused the continuation of Ireland as a non-manufacturing cattle ranching exporter, the utilization of Irish savings for lending in England not Ireland, the linkage of Irish currency and monetary policy to that of England’s, and the prohibition of protectionist policies like tariffs. This changed with de Valera’s command of government in the 1930s but as historian Mary E. Daly explained, any nationalist economic radicalness was neutered by 1938. One of the greatest negative legacies of tricolorism is the continued uncurious propagation of free trade economics which was invented by English imperialists for the benefit of English imperialists. The original Sinn Féin revolutionary economic vision that corresponded to the protectionist and nationalist school of thought, best articulated by revolutionary Arthur Griffith, was jettisoned in order to maintain the status quo of English Protestant institutional domination under the guise of tricolor ecumenicalism.[69]
In 1953, Irish revolutionary Joseph Connolly (no relation to James Connolly) wrote on his assessment of an independent Ireland compared to the vision of the 1910s. “My sole purpose…a restoration of the old spirit of Sinn Fein and Irish Ireland…I could not help reflecting on how far we had deviated from all the plans, hopes and aspirations that had fired our minds some thirty or forty years ago.”[70] Connolly talked about the economic deviations but also of cultural problems too. He didn’t understand exactly why the revolutionary spirit was quieted during these years but observed clear failures to follow through. “I am…very conscious of the effect…that leadership—Governmental and political leadership—has on our people and that that leadership has frequently been in the wrong direction and has tended to wipe out whatever hopes we had of developing a Christian culture among our people.”[71] Even with obvious concessions made to Irish Catholic culture at the start of the Irish Free State and later Irish Republic with its Catholic inspired constitution, Connolly still considered southern Ireland drifting from Christian culture and the original vision of Sinn Féin.
Ironically, the rise of another strain of Irish Catholic nationalism in the 20th century increased the tricolorist sanitization of Irish nationalism. A splinter group of the original Sinn Féin party and Irish Republican Army (IRA) of the revolution increased its activity in the north of Ireland. Southern Ireland was placed in an awkward spot of having to collaborate with London to put down the paramilitary activity. These forces created the need to distance the southern state from more radical notions of nationalism because the new Sinn Féin and IRA made them look like hypocrites. According to Trinity College Dublin Professor Brian Hanley:
“[TD] Conor Cruise O’Brien stressed that the prevailing ideology of the Irish republic, which justified armed force, legitmised the I.R.A.’s armed struggle. He believed that the Provisionals ‘hold the warrant from Pearse and the democratic nationalists can say as long as they like that they don’t, but they do, and their strength deep down is that everybody knows that they do … they are acting on a faith and credo that the rest of us claim to be living by, but don’t really live by. The Provos make people feel dishonest and a little shaky.”[72]
O’Brien’s opinion represented the institutional southern Irish trend to purge radical Irish Catholic nationalism from society in the hope that a much more sanitized tricolor Irish identity could take its place completely. “The government canceled commemorations of the Easter Rising in the 1970s, whose prior 1960s commemorations were seen as ultra-patriotic endorsements of political violence… Its apex may have been when former Fine Gael Taoiseach John Bruton said ‘the rebellion was not justified’ and believed that ‘neither the Easter Rising or War of Independence were necessary.’ To use an analogy, this would be like an American President criticizing George Washington and canceling Fourth of July celebrations.”[73]
O’Brien, in particular, was so disgusted with radical Irish Catholic nationalism and appreciative of English Protestant superiority that in the 1980s-1990s he openly supported unionism and unionists like Ian Paisley in the north. In 1996, he joined the United Kingdom Unionist Party. While O’Brien may have been a polemical standout figure, the fact that he held sway in southern Irish politics and society revealed the shifting of the guard. As I previously stated, I agree with Pilkington’s assessment that present-day Ireland homogenized to Anglo culture and that it is problematic. However, unlike Pilkington, I consider a major contributing factor to be tricolorism and how the peculiarities of the 20th century led this ideology to Anglicize Ireland further. For whatever Catholic and Gaelic influenced policies that were done, and some tremendously significant like the Republic’s constitution and Irish language education, they were not enough to override tricolorism’s marginalizing nature. Simply, Gaelicization is more than just Irish language street signs. Tricolorism led to taking cues from the wider Anglo zeitgeist and falling into more and more conformity with it. This Anglophilia combined with Anglo-centric economics to accelerate the Anglo homogenization in the 1990s with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger and high GDP growth. The unique tax haven economic model Ireland has built to attract multinational corporations from the Anglo world, mostly America, created a feedback loop that further imported Anglo culture along with money.
Pilkington’s History Part 8: Celtic Revival
Finally, with this context properly explained, Pilkington’s examples of Celtic revival’s problematic nature can be examined and expanded upon. He criticized the romantic retelling of Celtic myths by James MacPherson in the 1760s which partly spawned the Celtic revival. He listed William Smith O’Brien, John Edward Pigot, Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, and W.B. Yeats who were all English Protestants who expressed varying degrees of anti-Catholic sentiments and were part of the literary activity supporting Celtic studies across the 19th and 20th centuries.
Pilkington left out other Irish Catholic Celtic scholars who found no opposition between the two identities. Pilkington discounted the non-literary Celtic subaltern of the general population of Irish Catholics. Within the nationalist movement of course English Protestants would be disproportionately represented because they were disproportionately literate and rich until the Gaelic ascendency at the turn of the 20th century. Pilkington omitted rivalry between factions within the Celtic revival that saw the likes of writers he listed as imposters of an authentic Celtic revival.
Pilkington leveraged his tortured portrayal of Irish history to claim that the Celtic revival of the 19th century had to have been contrived because the Celtic past it recalled never existed. He combined this with a few cherry-picked Celtic writers and his unsubstantiated logic to say there was no ancient Celtic past and 19th-20th century Irish Catholics were unconcerned with their Celtic identity. Rather than relying on ancient primary sources, the 19th -20th century Celtic scholars, or modern historians, Pilkington considered the matter settled by quoting a few biased critics like Thomas Carlyle or Samuel Johnson who were self-identified with English imperialism. He offered no reasons why these men are more trustworthy auditors. Pilkington expected readers to swallow loose narratives sourced from English imperialists without batting an eye. It’s unfortunate that he has absorbed and spat out biased historical narratives used for past cynical imperial schemes.
The MacPherson controversy is not enough evidence to vanquish Celtic authenticity. MacPherson reimagined Celtic myths in his writing but also misled on the degree of direct sourcing. Thomas M. Curley surveyed the controversy from his modern perspective in 2009 and is one of the most scathing critics of MacPherson’s authenticity.[74] Curley still recognized MacPherson as a part of a wider emerging romantic movement that sought to revive ancient culture. The speculation of bibliographic legitimacy of one author used to lambast an entire movement is a vast generalization. The lack of proper sources for an 18th century work is not a sufficient argument to suggest that other Celtic revivalists had improper sources or that the Celtic past they alluded to did not exist. As noted earlier in this essay, the written works of the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), Lebor na hUidre (The Book of the Dun Cow), or Lebor Laignech (The Book of Leinster), which all detail Celtic myths and history written by Catholic monks in Ireland before the modern era, are sufficient pieces of evidence that demonstrate the reality of a Celtic culture and the vacuousness of the opinion that such a Celtic culture never existed.
Furthermore, the oral tradition persisted alongside the written tradition. The Irish Catholic peasantry, as all peasantry, were definitionally mostly illiterate up until the 19th century. Like the written tradition, the oral tradition generation after generation preserved these cultural artifacts too. Yeats’ famous The Celtic Twilight was a collection of Celtic myths. Yeats claimed, “many of the tales in this book were told me by one Paddy Flynn, a little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare…of County Sligo…I have copied this account of Paddy Flynn, with a few verbal alterations, from a note-book which I almost filled with his tales and sayings.”[75] This elusive source at least pointed to the oral tradition within the Irish Catholic peasanty. The Irish Catholics was not ignorant of their Celtic tradition since many of them were primarily Celtic speakers.
A great example of this was the Catholic reform movement in the early 19th century led by Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell was a reformer and not a radical. He focused on Catholicism as the rallying point of his movement. He held populist open-air meetings that were very well attended. Irish revolutionary leader Éamonn Ceannt wrote, “O’Connell convened monster meetings of the people. One of these at Limerick in 1843 is said to have been attended by 110,000 people. 150,000 is the estimate given of those at Kells and Mullingar the same year, while the climax was reached at Tara on August 15th, 1843, when 700,000 assembled from all parts of Ireland to hear O’Connell speak. At these meetings the English language was the official tongue. The people conversed amongst themselves in Irish. The great Tribune thundered to them in the language they little understood.”[76] Celtic culture was not something these people had to invent as it was intrinsic to their very being and in no way contradicted their Catholic identity. The Celtic language fell into fragility only after the cataclysmic Irish Famine of the 1840s and inclusion of Irish Catholics in the English designed school system. Irish Catholics didn’t lose their language in 6th century, as Pilkington suggested they did, but in the 19th century. This was a relatively recent development in the context of early 20th century Gaelic revivalists and far from the allegation that they wholesale fabricated a non-existent ancient past.
As more and more Irish Catholics achieved middle class status and the literacy with it, there were more and more Irish Catholic writers. These writers represented a rivalry between English Protestant nationalist writers. While there was much overlap between them, there was also ample tension. An example of an extreme Catholic and Celtic Irish nationalist was D.P. Moran who primarily wrote in the early 20th century. He wrote, “a certain number of Irish literary men have “made a market” – just as stock-jobbers do in another commodity – in a certain vague thing, which is indistinctly known as “the Celtic note” in English literature…This, it appears to me, is one of the most glaring frauds that the credulous Irish people ever swallowed.”[77] Moran criticized literature written in English and not the Irish language in Ireland. He also suggested that many authors of the faux Irish literature written in English were unreliable arbiters of true Irish culture. Moran viewed true Irish culture as Catholic and Celtic and that those two attributes in no way opposed one another. Moran wrote this Catholic and Celtic culture was “one of the oldest in Europe”[78] and the promotion of it would lead to national actualization of the Irish. The Celtic Catholic Irish were unique to the English Protestant Irish in Moran’s view. Moran was very critical of the awkward marriage of these two groups in a joint nationalist movement. Moran saw the English Protestants of Ireland as not just different due to happenstance but through their historical imperial role. Moran wrote:
“[English Protestants in Ireland], in fact, cared nothing about the Gaels, who, to their minds, were undesirable aborigines, speaking gibberish: a low multitude, whose existence they would like to forget, if they could. When they talked in stilted eloquence…and not inspired in the least degree by anything Irish, about the ancient constitution of Ireland, they did not refer, as 99 out of every 100 unsophisticated Irish readers, including, probably, many Nationalist Members of Parliament, think, to anything connected with Emain or Tara, but to that glorious constitution for the upholding of which Munster was laid waste by Carew, and Mullaghmast was made famous in our history.”[79]
Moran used the national term of Gael rather than exclusively Catholic. He noted the Irish language and the ancient Celtic pre-Catholic political sites of Emain and Tara. He also marked the unique English Protestant settler history with his spotlight of the Tudor conquest of the 1600s as the real legal justification English Protestants in Ireland used for their nationalism. Moran prefigured my concept of tricolorism and feared his nation of Gaelic Catholics was unaware of the slippery slope of a joint nationalism with English Protestants. The pandering to English Protestants to include them in an Irish nationalism would ironically require the promotion of the already dominant English Protestant culture at the expense of the fragile Gaelic Catholic subaltern, according to Moran. Without the self-righteous acceptance of the prioritization of Gaelic Catholic culture, Moran warned there could be no strengthening of the Irish nation for it would be forever trapped in the inferiority complex of its imperial past and locked into the subordinate lackey role to its English Protestant masters. Moran’s cutting tone was not without nuance for he wrote, “we are proud of [English Protestants] Grattan, Flood, Tone, Emmett, and all the rest who dreamt and worked for an independent country…but it is necessary that they should be put in their place, and that place is not on the top…The foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element that absorbs.”[80] Here Moran’s proper formulation of Irish nationalism is centered on the native long-standing majority culture of the Gaelic Catholics. Other groups are expected to assimilate into that culture and not fragment or supersede it with their own. As charged as Moran’s rhetoric is, he still respected men he viewed not of his nation for their noble contributions to the national cause but qualified them in their degrees of assimilation.
Pilkington was not wrong to claim that some Irish nationalists of an English Protestant background created distorted cultural works, but he is wrong to suggest that was the representation of all Irish nationalists. Moran was one such omission by Pilkington that fiercely opposed those distorted works and yet didn’t diminish what he saw as authentic Celtic culture because some English Protestants in Ireland created a faux Celticism. Moran was not alone in his rejection of the distorters. For example, “Yeats and the ‘Irish National Theatre’ following the opening of J.M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen in 1903…spawned controversy among Catholic nationalists, who regarded it as immoral…[Arthur] Griffith savaged the play in The United Irishmen…Controversy reached its apotheosis following the opening of The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. The Freeman’s Journal admonished the play as slander against the Irish peasantry…This time Catholics rioted in opposition.”[81] Here we have a very strange case. Yeats and his cadre who today are popularly conceived as an authentic exponent of Irish nationalist culture, which Pilkington agreed with, stimulated intense backlash from Irish nationalists. Irish Catholics rioted at the theater, Sinn Féiners penned negative reviews, and Irish language advocates, like Moran, challenged their literary stature. Irish revolutionary leader Patrick Pearse commented on this matter:
“The ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre is, in my opinion, more dangerous, because less glaringly anti-national than Trinity College…Mr Yeats’ precious ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre may, if it develops, give the Gaelic League more trouble…Let us strangle it at its birth. Against Mr. Yeats personally we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre it is time for him to be crushed.”[82]
Arguably the most important leader of the Irish Revolution criticized this variant of Irish nationalism. He insisted on the use of quotations to describe the faux Irishness of Yeats and his cadre. He noted the subtle problem of surface level Irish nationalism that was hollow beneath. He distanced Yeats from the nationalist movement by calling him English. Finally, he was so passionate he used violent imagery to illustrate his negative opinion. Pearse was another intensely Celtic and Catholic Irish nationalist. His writings were filled with frequent themes, motifs, and allusions to both Catholicism and Celtic culture. His poem I am Ireland featured the pre-Christian Irish mythological hero Cu Chulainn. His play The Singer included lines about Christ’s sacrifice as an inspiration for national martyrdom. The decision around the date of the Easter Rising revolt was very much influenced by Pearse’s zealous Catholicism and how he connected the Irish nationalist cause to Catholicism.[83]
William Rooney is another key Catholic Celtic revivalist at the turn of the 20th century. He co-founded the Celtic Literary Society and the first Cumann na nGaedheal. He was an advocate and writer of the Irish language and Irish literature. In his The Development of the National Idea, he wrote that there should be “Irish in everything, in language, laws and policy, in prestige and importance…the perpetuation of all our characteristics, language, music, traditions, and convictions, and the prosecution of our right to rank with the rest of the nations.”[84] He saw Irish nationalism as about not just Celtic revival for a few poems but a wide and deep cultural revolution of the Anglicized Ireland. Rooney saw the origin of the independence struggle not in French Revolution or Protestantism but in the original Norman invasion.
His understanding of the conflict conveyed his recognition of an ancient Celtic past and grievance against fellow Catholic Normans while not diminishing his own Catholicism. Rooney wrote, “let these – the words of Domhnall O’Neill to Pope John – burn into our souls. Six hundred years have elapsed since they were written. Let us show that the spirit which inspired them is still a living.”[85] Rooney referenced the 14th century Bruce campaign that was detailed previously in this essay. He understood the nationalist context of Ó’Néill’s letter and its expression of freedom in the face of imperialism. The choice of this example also showed Rooney’s attention to Catholicism. Ó’Néill argued that the Irish nation was upholding Catholicism better than the Normans and English in a direct appeal to the Pope. Historian Matthew Kelly also noted Rooney’s awareness of the tricolor slippery slope:
“the problem that Rooney thought…was that getting ahead demanded that Irish Catholics abandon or compromise their nationalist—that is, separatist—convictions. Catholic emancipation was not so much a carapace for the anti-Catholic reality of the state as part of the process by which Catholics—and middle-class Catholics in particular—were tempted into abandoning their separatist convictions…Consequently, an authentic Irish nationalism was necessarily coterminous with a specifically Catholic liberation…Rooney’s association of Irish, Catholic and Celt was significant.”[86]
Once again, an Irish nationalist and Celtic revivalist writer is proven to reinforce their nationalism with Catholicism rather than the two identities being opposed to one another.
While some Irish Catholic Celtic revivalists were given a focus in the preceding passages, it’s important to list other Irish Catholic contributors. Eoin MacNeill co-founded the Gaelic League with Douglas Hyde and wrote works on both Celtic studies and Catholicism such as his 1934 Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland. Pádraic Ó Conaire extensively wrote original fiction in the Irish language. Maurice Davin was an elite athlete who founded the still running Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) which sought to revive native Celtic sports like hurling or Gaelic football. Not only did the Catholic laity champion the Celtic cause, but also actual Catholic clergy. Father Peter O’Leary was a Catholic priest who translated many works into Irish language, retold older Celtic stories like the pre-Christian Celtic Táin Bó Cúailnge, and created his own unique Irish literature. Father Eugene O'Growney was a Catholic priest who led key efforts to revive and expand the Irish language and wrote that literature written in the Irish language was "the most Catholic literature in the world."[87]
While not so much a man of words as a man of action, revolutionary and Gaelic Catholic Michael Collins reached the apex of Irish nationalism. He was functionally the most significant leader of the war, President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Chairman of the Irish Free State, and Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State National Army. He was heavily inspired by the Irish nationalist literature of his day and of those from the 19th century. Historians Anne Dolan and William Murphy explained how Collins thought about his nationalism:
“[Collins said] in August 1922: ‘The negative work of expelling the English power is done. The positive work of building a Gaelic Ireland in the vacuum left has now to be undertaken’…This was the proof of success, he insisted, ‘not the name for, nor the form of, the government we have chosen. If we had still a descendant of our Irish Kings left, we would be as free, under a limited monarchy, with the British gone, as under a Republic.’ Elsewhere he made the same point in a different way: ‘The British form of government was monarchical. In order to express clearly our desire to depart from all British forms of government, we declared a Republic. We repudiated the British form government, not because it was monarchical, but because it was British. We would have repudiated the claim of a British Republic to rule over us as definitely as we repudiated the claim of the British monarchy.’ As he told a crowd in Dublin on 5 March 1922, ‘We must be Irish first and last, and must be Republicans or Document Two-ites, or Free Staters, only within the limits which leave Ireland strong, united and free.’ It is unsurprising that if in Collins’s view the evacuation of the British, which he equated to the freedom of Irish nationality to flourish, was more important than the achievement of a republic…The ‘essence of our struggle was to secure freedom to order our own life,’ Collins declared, ‘without attaching undue importance to the formulas under which that freedom would be expressed.’ And again: ‘Fidelity to the real Ireland lies in united to build up a real Ireland in conformity to our ideal, and not in disruption and destruction as a sacrifice to the false gods of foreign-made political formulas.’ For anyone reading closely the implication was unmistakable: those truly faithful to Ireland had always been concerned with ‘nationality’ while those obsessed with the ‘republic’ or ‘external association’ were guilty.”[88]
For all Pilkington’s accusations that Irish nationalists were orthodox Jacobin republicans is it not strange that such a central figure who stood at the finish line of the Irish nationalist cause explicitly declared he didn’t care about orthodoxy? Collins cared about practical freedom for Gaelic Ireland — a separate nation from the English. Collins mirrored the long-standing disposition of the Irish nationalist struggle to prioritize pragmatic strategy over strict orthodoxy such as in the case of the Irish Catholic support of James II’s monarchy. Collins showed that after a century of alleged French Jacobin brainwashing by English Protestants, according to Pilkington, Gaelic Catholics still didn’t care and stuck to their authentic and existing realist paradigm of much older Celtic and Catholic nationalism.[89]
Conclusion
This essay demonstrated that there is nothing oppositional about Irish nationalists having a syncretic Celtic and Catholic identity. This essay partially concurred with Pilkington’s general claims that Ireland has undergone Anglo homogenization, this trend is negative, Irish nationalism and historiography is confused, and there were weird English Protestants within the Irish nationalist movement. This essay passionately disagreed with Pilkington’s conclusions that Irish nationalism itself was solely a conspiracy by modern anti-Catholic English Protestants in Ireland to rid Ireland of Catholicism through a false Celtic culture. Pilkington additionally argued that Irish Catholics never saw themselves as Celtic until the 19th century conspiracy and only formulated their identity as exclusively Catholic prior to that. It also must be noted that Pilkington’s connection between the English Civil War, French Jacobinism, and Protestantism was never explained by him and was just assumed as in union with a general modernity of Europe. These unexplained connections could suggest France is Anglo because it inherited ideas from the English Civil War, that Ireland is French because of French Jacobinism, or that Ireland and France are Germanic because of the Germanic center of Protestantism.
Instead, this essay argued that Irish nationalism has ancient roots and legitimacy. Irish nationalism grounds itself in the origins of the migrations of 2,500 BC and the crystallization of unique Gaelic people. This unique Gaelic nation evolved with its acceptance of Catholicism and the Latin alphabet in the 6th century. It is from this ancient understanding that all Irish nationalist grievances against foreign imperialism sprang from — such as the Viking, Norman, and English invasions of Ireland. These actions were always perceived of as imperialist by the native Irish. Additionally, the prior Norman conquest of England was considered imperialist by the native Anglo-Saxons.
The Normans shared Catholicism didn’t persuade the native Irish of Norman legitimacy and didn’t dissuade them from rhetorically and violently opposing them. Furthermore, the Irish leveraged their stricter adherence to Catholicism and the Norman’s looser adherence as a justification against Norman rule of Ireland. The Norman problem went away only because the Normans were marginalized by English neglect, famines, plagues, and native Irish revolts. This marginalization led the Normans to assimilate into the native Irish nation and a temporary return of effective Gaelic cultural dominance of the island.
After the cynical creation of Protestant Anglicanism, Catholics were severely oppressed. Since most Normans in Ireland and Gaels remained Catholic any lingering distinction between Normans in Ireland and Gaels were erased. The subsequent English Protestant settlers were the most ruthless and devastating of any of the prior invaders. They stole all the land and restricted basic rights of Irish Catholics. They both created the conditions for poverty and mass death as well as directly perpetuating immoral violence. While religious terminology was used heavily during this period it was always interrelated to the fundamental national difference between the Irish and English. The conflict while overlaid with religious terms was primarily about the material and political issues affecting both parties. The Irish cared about their basic human rights, land ownership, and self-government while the English cared about resource extraction and military defense.
The awkward fact of Irish support of an English king in the 17th century, instead of being an argument against historical Irish nationalism, is a nuanced window into Irish nationalism’s realism and the awkwardness of continental European politics. For it was also the Catholic Pope who opposed the two Catholic monarchs in favor of a majority of Protestant ones in the Nine Years War of which the Irish conflict was a subset of. The Irish Catholics fought on the side of the Catholic monarchs against the Pope supported Protestant coalition. It is hard to argue that Catholicism was the exclusive and intrinsic motivation of the Irish during these events. Instead, the Irish took advantage of the situation by cornering James II into abolishing English governance and oppression in Ireland for their symbolic and token support of him as a king in name only.
The English Protestant Ascendency in Ireland was dependent on imperial core support to suppress the vast majority population of Ireland. However, after generations of living in Ireland, a minority of this minority of English Protestants thought of themselves as separate from England. They also thought of themselves as separate from the native Irish and formulated a nationalism exclusive to themselves. After the failure of this minority of a minority to secure their independence from England and caste supremacy of Ireland, they realized the only path forward was to team up with the native Irish Catholics. At the turn of the 19th century, English Protestant nationalism in Ireland awkwardly married the much older Irish Catholic nationalism. This Frankenstein nationalism was realist and transactional. The English Protestant nationalists needed more manpower and the Irish Catholic nationalists needed more elite patronage.
English Protestants disproportionately led the Irish nationalist intelligentsia in the early years because they were disproportionately richer and more literate than the oppressed Irish Catholics who were largely peasants. By the turn of the 20th century, Irish Catholics increased their land ownership, income, and education which created a rivalry within the Irish nationalist intelligentsia. Irish Catholics appreciated English Protestant efforts to further Irish nationalism but began to see problems. Most acutely, Irish Catholics opposed the Irish literature in English language movement led by English Protestant W.B. Yeats. They saw its products as not just problematic for its non-use of the native Irish language but because of its more subtle misunderstandings of authentic Irish culture. So much so that Catholics rioted at a play in Yeats’ theater because of the accusation of it using negative English imperialist stereotypes against the Irish Catholics. This example was symptomatic of the general dissonance between English Protestants and Irish Catholics inside the Irish nationalist movement.
The Irish Catholic nationalists didn’t only concern themselves with religion during this period but also the native Celtic or Gaelic culture of Ireland. As the Irish Catholic middle class ascended, more and more Irish Catholic writers contributed to the expansion of this cultural revival. They focused on the Celtic language, Celtic sports, Celtic arts, ancient Celtic history, and ancient Celtic mythology. These writers never saw these pursuits as in contradiction to their dearly held Catholicism and even Catholic priests stood as stalwarts of this revival. Rather than inventing falsehoods, these revivalists relied on legitimate sources for their Celtic studies which were often first written down for posterity by Catholic monks who in their pre-modern era saw no problem with recoding Celtic culture. Additionally, the oral tradition and spoken language of Irish Catholics was predominantly Celtic up until the end of the 19th century. Celtic culture continued among the common Irish Catholics through their non-written parochial oral tradition. The Irish Famine of the 1840s and inclusion into the English school system caused a relatively recent fragility to this common Celtic culture of the Irish Catholics. Thus, the Irish Catholic revivalists had a very familiar understanding of their Celtic heritage that was sourced from the common oral tradition and the Catholic sanctioned written tradition.
The union of English Protestant nationalism and Irish Catholic nationalism was the poison pill that would eventuate in the future Anglo homogenization. English Protestants were not the same as Irish Catholics. English Protestants were the biggest beneficiaries of English imperialism in Ireland and directly responsible for some its worst sins. This is not an argument suggesting the sins of the father affect the son, but instead pointing out that English Protestants generation after generation never relinquished their inherited imperial status and its related illegitimate benefits. The English Protestants suppressed Irish Catholic culture and replaced it with its own English Protestant culture. English Protestants tightly held onto their monopoly of stolen Irish Catholic lands. The historical legacy of these tangible economic and cultural conquests meant that passive toleration would lead to Anglo homogenization. Irish Catholic culture was weak and dying and English Protestant culture was strong and vital. Of course, if there was not an assertive and explicit centering of Irish Catholic culture and decentering of English Protestant culture, the Irish Catholic culture would wither and die.
This essay has critically examined English Protestant nationalists but doesn’t wish to neglect their positive contributions. Many English Protestant nationalists were deeply empathetic to the cause of the oppressed Irish Catholics on humanitarian grounds. Some so much so that they fought and died for the cause in the hope of equality and prosperity. Their political writings provided valid arguments and evidence. Their Celtic revivalists helped dig into the past, expand forgotten Celtic culture, and promote the Irish language. Irish Catholic nationalists owe a great debt to these men and women. It would be immensely foolish and disrespectful to not hold them in high regard for those achievements.
However, with all that being said, these merits don’t resolve the tricolor problem. Some English Protestants were totally radical black sheeps and some were well-meaning but blissful due to their inherent separate identity. That separate identity created different values, historical narratives, customs, and worldviews. It placed importance and unimportance in different ways. While the English Protestants hoped to find an elusive sameness with the Irish Catholics much of this can diagnosed as an exclusive problem of theirs alone. The Irish studies scholar and celebrated poet, Ulick Fitzhugh, sharply wrote:
“It was symptomatic of a refusal to properly cope with the waning status of the Anglo-Irish, which was at this point assailed by a self-confident and bellicose Irish Catholic middle class. That a disproportionate number of Protestants were stalwarts of the ‘Irish Literary Revival’ is no accident…one’s interest in Irish mythology does not prevent one from holding fidelity to politics which are antithetical to Irish interests. Without engaging in baseless conjecture, it is plausible to contend that the Anglo-Irish desire to immerse themselves in the folk-tales of their tenants derived from status-anxiety and a sub-conscious collective fear that an Spailpín Fánach would one day actualise his retribution – as opposed to genuine fondness for the Irish people.”[90]
Just because English Protestants had an identity crisis and national dysphoria due to their active inheritance of imperial largess does not mean Irish Catholic nationalists shared in their disorders. Pilkington’s greatest failure was not understanding these separate trends of English Protestant nationalism and Irish Catholic nationalism. Rather than Irish Catholics getting insidiously influenced by anti-Catholicism, French Jacobinism, and negative Enlightenment ideas, their post-1790s nationalism was based on transactional realism, religious toleration, and simply that the Irish are fundamentally nice people trying to do the right thing. The Irish Catholics’ good intentions over the years led to the tortured tendency by them to artificially stich together English Protestants and Irish Catholics which necessarily required the erasure of grievances and obfuscations of obvious differences. The noble lies eventually transformed into unconscious false truths internalized by the Irish Catholics.
This internalization of tricolorism meant that Irish Catholics never reckoned with full-scale decolonization both materially and culturally. "Independent Ireland never really decolonised itself. If you want to see what decolonisation looks like, consider what happened in Hong Kong in 1997...the British never really got into the minds of the Chinese people. One hundred years on, the lion and the unicorn is still atop the Custom House."[91] The comparison to Hong Kong is valid. Irish independence didn’t replicate the same level of decolonization because of its internalized tricolorism and unique cascade of events. They couldn’t disown English Protestant artifacts because they were now supposed to be tolerated within tricolorism. Whatever push for Irish Catholic restoration was quieted by the immediate fall out of the Irish Civil War.
This caused by many Irish Catholics to stay outside of the new government and for many Irish Catholic revolutionaries in government to rely on the stabilizing ability of the English Protestant institutional status quo. This institutional deference locked in much of the English Protestant culture into these institutions which should have been jettisoned at this crucial period of new nation building backed by the mandate of the recent revolution. Later the northern Sinn Féin and IRA activity created a unique dilemma. In the 1960s-1980s, Sinn Féin’s and the IRA’s argument was very consistent with Irish Catholic nationalism. This meant that the only way for the southern Irish state to be logically consistent with Irish Catholic nationalism would be to support Sinn Féin and the IRA which they were opposed to which meant they could only retreat into downplaying Irish Catholic nationalism. They implicitly found comfort in the artificial tricolorism which sanctioned Irish Catholic erasure in the name of tolerance. Such tolerance meant tolerating English imperial propaganda that diminished Celtic and Catholic identity which coincidently aided the southern Irish state’s conflict against Sinn Féin and the IRA. To go full tricolor meant not stopping at English Protestant nationalists but also the imperial non-revolutionary majority of English Protestants.
The neoliberalization of the Irish economy in the 1990s put the tricolor trend on steroids. Ireland linked its economy to suckling at the teet of American multinational corporations which led to conscious and unconscious importation of Anglo culture through its American strain. In order to keep the gravy train going, often unequally benefiting Irish elites, cultural emulation of Anglo culture was necessary to entice and keep American companies. These Irish elites were fine with it as it was already part of their institutional rationale. It is my view that one of the most disastrous results of tricolorism is the failure to eradicate English imperial economic ideology of which neoliberalism is its latest form. Tricolorism meant that Irish Catholics swallowed English imperialist economic ideology as objective economic science. It was impossible to maintain English Protestants within tricolorism and criticize their economics, so criticism of their economics was abandoned. It was because of that that Ireland’s post-1922 economy mirrored its pre-1922 economy. It’s update to tax haven in the 1990s may have changed arrangements but kept the fundamental relationship of elite inequality and absenteeism.
While much responsibility for Anglo homogenization is placed on the internal dynamics of Ireland, through tricolorism, that doesn’t mean there weren’t wider global forces shaping Ireland and other countries. This is something Pilkington also omitted in his essay. The 20th century was centered on the rise of American hegemony across the globe. America was founded by Anglo colonists. Its culture and institutions are fundamentally Anglo-centric. Its culture through war, commerce and media spread across many countries. It would be unfair to single out Ireland as unique in its Anglo problem. While tricolorism is a contributing factor, it is not the only factor. Thus, not everything wrong with Ireland can be blamed only on the internal dynamics of Ireland.
Another problem that arises from tricolorism is the failure to resolve Northern Ireland. Tricolor Irish nationalism sees Northern Ireland’s English Protestant unionists as temporarily confused Irish nationalists. The unionists time and time again have replied that they don’t consider themselves Irish, they don’t want to be in a shared government with the Irish, and believe they are English. Tricolor Irish nationalists refuse to take unionists at their word and this creates an unresolvable conflict. The end of tricolorism would enable a proper conversation of outcomes for the Northern Ireland question. First, Irish nationalists could concede the current territory or a smaller version to unionists as a way of cleaning the slate to a what is now a very distant historical problem. Second, Irish nationalists could offer toleration but always prioritize Irish Catholic culture since it is the majority culture. This would emphasize gradual assimilation to Irish Catholic culture. An alternative policy could parallel it with a financial incentive to relocate to another Anglo country.
The resolution of the Northern Ireland question would mean the restart of history, however, Ireland with its tricolor ideology and vassal status in the American world order stays stuck at the end of Irish history. The resolution would require the recognition of the national differences on the island, however, Ireland only comprehends the singular last Irishman. Beyond the north, the end of Irish history and the last Irishman all beg questions of Ireland’s future. Some have pointed out the problem with recent “Ireland is for all” sloganeering as it implicitly means that Irish Catholics are decentered.[92] This is another outgrowth of tricolorism. Nationalism is fundamentally particularistic. There is no universal “all” of nationalism, there is only “us” and “them”.
The same drive that fueled the erasure of Irish Catholic culture in toleration of English Protestant culture has now evolved to include all foreign cultures at the expense of the native culture of Ireland. This is seen in examples like the new desire to dislodge the Irish language requirements in the Irish school system because it acts as an impediment to tricolor toleration.[93] The tricolor theory is proven in this example. In order to tolerate others outside of the Irish Catholic culture, the Irish Catholic culture is explicitly erased. This is not to crudely malign the non-Irish but advocate for toleration and assimilation over erasure. Just as the friendly elements of the Vikings and Normans assimilated into the Irish nation so should the English Protestants and others. There is no problem with Vikings or Normans today because they are assimilated into the Irish nation. After centuries of colonization and oppression, why must a native culture be erased? Would we ask this of any other formerly colonized nation? Other cultures in Ireland should be accorded their basic rights and toleration but not seek to suppress the native culture of the country. As Moran wrote, “the foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element that absorbs.”[94] With that being said in the present-day, English Protestants aren’t as pervasively in power as the past and much attention should be placed on remedying Irish Catholics with internalized tricolorism who have spread through the institutions.
Pilkington should be commended for the high esteem he holds for Catholicism but that high esteem shouldn’t cloud the truth. This essay has proven the pre-modern Catholics had no problem with evolving Celtic culture. Also, shared Catholicism between two different nations didn’t purify acts of imperialism or stop non-religious animosities. After the splintering of different Protestant sects, religion was used as a primary identifier, but it often divided itself along national boundaries. Irish Catholic nationalists, for centuries, never saw their Catholicism or Celtic identity as being opposed. They never considered their pursuit of cultural restoration and political sovereignty as in any way out of step with their faith. It is strange for Pilkington to have made such bold pronouncements of what is and what is not allowed by Catholicism to argue against Irish nationalism. Perhaps there is no better authority to have spoken on these matters than the Pope of the Catholic Church. In his 2005 book, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium, Pope John Paul II wrote:
“Yet it still seems that nation and native land, like the family, are permanent realities. In this regard, Catholic social doctrine speaks of ‘natural’ societies, indicating that both the family and the nation have a particular bond with human nature, which has a social dimension. Every society’s formation takes place in and through the family: of this there can be no doubt. Yet something similar could also be said about the nation…The term “nation” designates a community based in a given territory and distinguished from other nations by its culture. Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention. Therefore, in human history they cannot be replaced by anything else. For example, the nation cannot be replaced by the State, even though the nation tends naturally to establish itself as a State… Still less is it possible to identify the nation with so-called democratic society, since here it is a case of two distinct, albeit interconnected orders. Democratic society is closer to the State than is the nation. Yet the nation is the ground on which the State is born.”[95]
The Pope defined nations along very similar lines as this essay. Nationalism that devolved into disrespecting the rights of other nations was disapproved of by the Pope. Nationalism that “is a love for one’s native land that accords rights to all other nations equal to those claimed for one’s own”[96] was approved of by the Pope. Nothing the Pope wrote contradicted the goals of Irish nationalists. Irish nationalists never sought to inflict any form of imperialist oppression on another nation and only sought the restoration of their own. In fact, there was quite a deal of respect and friendship between Irish nationalists and nationalists of other colonized nations. These friendships were based on the essence of what the Pope described as the positive version nationalism. The Pope also had much more nuanced thoughts on the French Revolution than Pilkington. The Pope wrote:
“As for the idea of fraternity, which is thoroughly rooted in the Gospel, the period of the French Revolution established it more firmly in the history of Europe and the history of the world. Fraternity is a bond uniting not only men but also nations. The history of the world should be governed by the principle of fraternity among peoples, and not simply by political power games or the imposition of the will of the most powerful, with insufficient regard for the rights of men and nations.”[97]
Interestingly, here is another example of difference between what Pilkington claimed as the correct Catholic opinion on a topic and what the Pope of the Catholic Church actually thought about the topic. The Pope didn’t ignore the negatives of the French Revolution but showed there were positives too. He also highlighted the “rights of men and nations” indicating an affinity for national self-determination which corresponds to the earlier quote by him. Far from republicanism or democracy being inherently oppositional to Catholicism as Pilkington portrayed, the Pope wrote “Catholic social ethics favor the democratic solution in principle.”[98] The Pope also stipulated that, while the democratic solution was favored, other forms of government could serve the common good. Michael Collins description of realist approaches to government from the previous section correspond to the Pope’s thinking here too.
In conclusion, Catholicism and Irish nationalism rather than being opposed to one another reinforced each other. Irish Catholic nationalism is very old and authentic but was infected by a harmful ideology of tricolorism. Tricolorism attempted in theory to unite different nationalities together in Ireland but in reality caused the erasure the of the native oppressed Irish Catholic culture and expanded the foreign oppressor English Protestant culture. This has led to the end of Irish history and the last Irishman which has stagnated and corroded Ireland. Fukuyama wrote that thymos was the need for recognition by man which would catalyze him to restart history from its stagnancy and abolish the artificial and undifferentiated last man. Irish nationalists, after reading this essay, should be filled with thymos to restart Irish history and abolish the last Irishman by finally abandoning tricolorism and asserting the national rights of the Irish Catholic culture. I have very passionately disagreed with Pilkington only because I saw much of his essay as a dangerous narrative that erased Irish Catholic identity, its historical legacy, and its sovereign right to self-government as well as the often insulting tenor of his arguments. I did agree with his notion of Anglo homogenization and it being partly caused by a confused nationalism, however, I correctly revealed a different problem — tricolorism — that confused Irish nationalism. I offered the different solution of more nationalism while Pilkington recommended less nationalism. I will end my essay with the final sentence from Pilkington’s essay. “But until the country comes to a reckoning with its actual history, it will never find firm ground on which to stand.”[99] I couldn’t agree more.
[1] Pilkington, Philip. “Is Ireland Still Ireland?” Erivgena Review, 4 Jan. 2023, https://eriugenareview.com/home/f/is-ireland-still-ireland.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Gat, Azar, “Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism”, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 223
[4] Haak, Wolfgang, et al. “Massive Migration from the Steppe Was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe.” Nature, vol. 522, no. 7555, 2015, pp. 207–211., https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14317; Gibbons, Ann. “There's No Such Thing as a 'Pure' European—or Anyone Else.” Science, 15 May 2017
[5] Cassidy, Lara M., et al. “Neolithic and Bronze Age Migration to Ireland and Establishment of the Insular Atlantic Genome.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 113, no. 2, 2015, pp. 368–373., https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518445113; Khan, Razib. “Red Hair Is about as Recessive as St. Patrick Was Irish.” Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning, 17 Mar. 2022, https://razib.substack.com/p/red-hair-is-about-as-recessive-as
[6] Figure 1 showcases the 5 large language cultural blocs and their sub-national language cultures. This is meant to be a general overview. Other blocs and sub-national language cultures are part of the Indo-European Language family but were excluded for sake of conciseness.
[7] Macalister, Robert John Stewart. “Lebor gabála Érenn : The Book of the Taking of Ireland”, Educational Company of Ireland, LTD., 1956
[8] Hannah, Emma, and Rowan McLaughlin. “Long-Term Archaeological Perspectives on New Genomic and Environmental Evidence from Early Medieval Ireland.” Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 106, 2019, pp. 23–28., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.04.001; “Track the Shift in Land Ownership from Catholics to Protestants in Ireland during King William III's Reign.” Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/video/135906/map-shift-land-ownership-Ireland-Catholic-hands-1703
[9] Jennings, Ken. “What 'Beyond the Pale' Actually Means.” Condé Nast Traveler, 10 Oct. 2016
[10] Hickey, Raymond, and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. Irish Identities Sociolinguistic Perspectives. De Gruyter Mouton, 2020
[11] Newton, Michael. “Statutes of Kilkenny.” Exploring Celtic Civilizations, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://exploringcelticciv.web.unc.edu/statutes-of-kilkenny/
[12] Olea, Ricardo & Christakos, George, “Duration of Urban Mortality for the 14th-Century Black Death Epidemic”, Human Biology Journal Vol. 77, No. 3 (June 2005), Wayne State University Press; Ruhaak, Raymond, “Towards an Alternative Black Death Narrative for Ireland: Ecologcal and Socio-Economic Divides on the Medieval European Frontier”, Journal of the North Atlantic Vol. 2019, No. 39 (December 2019), Eagle Hill Institute; Kelly, Maria, “‘Unheard-of Mortality’….The Black Death in Ireland”, History Ireland, 2001, https://www.historyireland.com/unheard-of-mortality-the-black-death-in-ireland/; Campbell, Kenneth L., “Ireland’s History: Prehistory to the Present”, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013; Barry, Terry B., “The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland”, Taylor & Francis, 2002
[13] Henry VIII. “‘State of Ireland & plan for its reformation’ in State Papers Ireland”, 1515, pp. ii, 8
[14] Green, Miranda. The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames & Hudson, 2015, pp. 30-31; Curtis, Sophie, and Victoria Jones. “This Is What the Spring Equinox Is and the Unusual Traditions That Mark It.” Wales Online, 20 Mar. 2017
[15] Hyde, Douglas. "The Brehon Laws." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 1 Apr. 2023 http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02753a.htm; Gorman, M. J. “The Ancient Brehon Laws of Ireland.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register, vol. 61, no. 4, Jan. 1913, p. 217., https://doi.org/10.2307/3313365; “Irish Manuscripts: The Senchus Mór.” The Brehon Academy, 5 June 2014, https://brehonacademy.org/irish-manuscripts-the-senchus-mor/
[16] Davis, Joy, “St. Patrick’s Well”, Discovering Ireland, 2007, https://www.discoveringireland.com/st-patricks-well/
[17] Oades, Luke, “From Norman Conquest to Norman Yoke”, London School of Economics Economic History Blog, 4 Jan. 2022, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/2022/01/04/from-norman-conquest-to-norman-yoke/
[18] Collins, Christopher, “Alfred’s Doombook: The Anglo-Saxon Foundations of Magna Carta”, University of Alabama School of Law Blog, 2 Dec. 2019, https://www.law.ua.edu/specialcollections/2019/12/02/alfreds-doombook-the-anglo-saxon-foundations-of-magna-carta/
[19] Ibeji, Mike, “The Conquest and its Aftermath”, BBC History Blog, 17 Feb. 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/normans/after_01.shtml
[20] Booker, Collin, “English Literature: Eighteenth Century and the Romantic Age”, Edtech, 2019, p. 240
[21] Thomas, Jessica Elizabeth & Basdeo, “Walter Scott’s Influence Upon 19th-Century Medieval Scholarship”, Stephen Reynolds’s News and Miscellany, 26 Nov. 2015, https://reynolds-news.com/2015/11/26/walter-scotts-influence-upon-19th-century-medieval-scholarship/
[22] Greenacre, Liam, “‘The Norman Yoke’: Uses of the Past During the English Civil War”, The York Historian: The University of York Student History Magazine, 29. Sept. 2017, https://theyorkhistorian.com/2017/09/29/the-norman-yoke-uses-of-the-past-during-the-english-civil-war/
[23] Hare, John, “St. Edwards Ghost or Anti-Normanisme”, Tracts on Liberty by the Levellers and their Critics Addendum Vol. 9 (1647-49), Liberty Fund, https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/hart-tracts-on-liberty-by-the-levellers-and-their-critics-addendum-vol-9-1647-49-forthcoming
[24] Berens, Lewis H., “The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth”, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co. LTD., 1906, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17480/17480-h/17480-h.htm
[25] Berens
[26] Colbourn, Trevor H., “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan. 1958), pp. 66-67
[27] “II. Jefferson’s Proposal, 20 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0206-0002. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, p. 495.]
[28] Hudson, Alison. “Religion in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.” The British Library , Religion in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
[29] Robinson, I. S. (2004). "The Papacy, 1122–1198". In Luscombe, D.; Riley-Smith, J. (eds.). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. 4: 1024–1198, II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 355
[30] “Papal Infallibility.” Catholic Answers, 2004, https://www.catholic.com/tract/papal-infallibility
[31] Barrow, G.W.S. “Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland”, Edinburgh University Press, 1965
[32] Ó Néill, Domhnall, “Remonstrance of the Irish Chiefs to Pope John XXII”, 1317, https://cartlann.org/authors/domhnall-o-neill/remonstrance-of-the-irish-chiefs-to-pope-john-xxii/
[33] McNamee, Colm, “The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland, 1306-1328”, Michigan University Press, 1997.
[34] Olea, Ricardo & Christakos, George, “Duration of Urban Mortality for the 14th-Century Black Death Epidemic”, Human Biology Journal Vol. 77, No. 3 (June 2005), Wayne State University Press; Ruhaak, Raymond, “Towards an Alternative Black Death Narrative for Ireland: Ecoloigcal and Socio-Economic Divides on the Medieval European Frontier”, Journal of the North Atlantic Vol. 2019, No. 39 (December 2019), Eagle Hill Institute; Kelly, Maria, “‘Unheard-of Mortality’….The Black Death in Ireland”, History Ireland, 2001, https://www.historyireland.com/unheard-of-mortality-the-black-death-in-ireland/; Campbell, Kenneth L., “Ireland’s History: Prehistory to the Present”, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013; Barry, Terry B., “The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland”, Taylor & Francis, 2002
[35] Kelly, Maria, “‘Unheard-of Mortality’….The Black Death in Ireland”, History Ireland, 2001, https://www.historyireland.com/unheard-of-mortality-the-black-death-in-ireland/
[36] Barry, Terry B., “The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland”, Taylor & Francis, 2002, p. 68
[37] Henry VIII. “‘State of Ireland & plan for its reformation’ in State Papers Ireland”, 1515, pp. ii, 8
[38] Bianchi, Rowan, “Language and Liturgy: The Relationship between Religion and the Irish”, Annotations & Abstracts: The Boston College Historical Commons, 23 Feb. 2022, https://sites.bc.edu/historicalcommons/2022/02/23/language-and-liturgy-the-relationship-between-religion-and-the-irish/; Howell, Samantha, “From Oppression to Nationalism: The Irish Penal Laws of 1695”, Hohonu: A Journal For Academic Writing, Vol. 14 (2016), https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/FromOppressiontoNationalism-TheIrishPenalLawsof1695SamanthaHowell.pdf; Cahill, Sean, “Barra Ó Donnabháin Symposium: The Politics of the Irish Language Under the English and British Governments”, 2007, https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/irelandHouse/documents/0111-0126_PoliticsOfTheIrishLanguage.pdf
[39] Fraser, Antonia. “Cromwell, Charles II and the Jews.” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, vol. 14, no. 2, 1980, pp. 19–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41442698. Accessed 29 Apr. 2023
[40] Pilkington
[41] Harris, Tim, “Revolution : the great crisis of the British monarchy, 1685-1720”, London: Penguin, 2007, p. 128
[42] Ó Ciardha, Éamonn , “Ireland and the Jacobite cause, 1685-1766 : a fatal attachment”, Four Courts Press, 2004, p. 48
[43] Harris, p. 141
[44] Harris, p. 120
[45] Harris, p. 143
[46] Simms, J.G., “Jacobite Ireland, 1685-91”, London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1969, pp. 80-81
[47] Ó Ciardha, p. 63
[48] Pilkington
[49] Pincus, Steve, “The European Catholic Context of the Revolution of 1688-89: Gallicanism, Innocent XI, and Catholic Opposition” in “Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714”, Brill, p. 79
[50] Pincus, p. 84
[51] Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Gallicanism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 3 Jan. 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gallicanism.
[52] Pincus, p. 91
[53] Pincus, p. 103
[54] Pincus, p. 109
[55] Pincus, p. 110
[56] Pincus, p. 113
[57] Stewart, John Hall, “A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution”, New York: Macmillan, 1951, pp. 386-391; Trapp, Joseph, “Proceedings of the French National Convention on the Trial of Louis XVI”, 1793.
[58] Betros, Gemma, “The French Revolution and the Catholic Church”, History Today, Dec. 2010, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/french-revolution-and-catholic-church
[59] Sloane, William Milligan, “The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte Volume 2”, Century Company, 1910, p. 344
[60] Napoleon had personal difficulties with the Pope after 1804 but this didn’t affect the general restoration of Catholicism in France. Napoleon’s personal relationship with Catholicism was a subject of critique but with that being the case he did away with the chaos of atheistic Jacobinism and in his final years personally returned to the Catholic Church.
[61] Mahoney, Robert, “Jonathan Swift as the ‘Patriot Dead’”, History Ireland, Winter 1995, https://www.historyireland.com/jonathan-swift-as-the-patriot-dean/
[62] Coakley, John, “Patrick Pearse and the ‘Noble Lie’ of Irish Nationalism”, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 72, no. 286, 1983, p. 120
[63] Kennedy, W. Benjamin, “Catholics in Ireland and the French Revolution.” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, vol. 85, no. 3/4, 1974, p. 222
[64] Kennedy, p. 222
[65] Kennedy, p. 227
[66] Kennedy, p. 226
[67] O'Bolger, Thomas. Leaders of the United Irishmen, 1798 and 1803, New York: Allied Printing, 1908, https://digital.nli.ie/Record/vtls000769750; "The Executed Leaders of the 1916 Rising", Department of the Taoiseach, 19 Nov. 2018, https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/583995-the-executed-leaders-of-the-1916-rising/
[68] “Seanad Éireann debate – Thursday, 11 Jun 1925, Vol. 5 No. 7”, Houses of the Oireachtas, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1925-06-11/12/
[69] Ryan, Peter, “Irish Anti-Imperialist and Nationalist Economics”, University College Dublin, Masters Dissertation, 6 Aug. 2021, https://www.ryanresearch.co/post/irish-anti-imperialist-and-nationalist-economics
[70] Connolly, Joseph, “How Does She Stand: An Appeal to Young Ireland”, Dublin: Michael F. Moynihan Publishing Company, 1953, p. 53
[71] Connolly, p. 54
[72] Ryan, Peter, “The Duality of Sinn Féin”, Ryan Research, 30 Jan. 2023, https://ryanresearch.substack.com/p/the-duality-of-sinn-fein
[73] Ryan, “The Duality of Sinn Féin”
[74] Curley, Thomas M., “Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland”, Cambridge University Press, 2009
[75] Yeats, W.B., “The Celtic Twilight”, Project Gutenberg, 2003, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10459/pg10459.html
[76] Ceannt, Éamonn, “The Political Value of the Irish Language”, Sinn Féin, 15 Feb. 1913, https://cartlann.org/authors/eamonn-ceannt/the-political-value-of-the-irish-language/
[77] Moran, D.P., “The Philosophy of Ireland”, An Cartlann, 2022, https://cartlann.org/authors/d-p-moran/the-philosophy-of-irish-ireland/
[78] Moran
[79] Moran
[80] Moran
[81] Fitzhugh, Ulick, “The Greasy Till: DP Moran, Yeats and Ireland’s Emergent Catholic Bourgeoisie”, The Burkean, 1 Jul. 2022, https://www.theburkean.ie/articles/2022/07/01/the-greasy-till-dp-moran-yeats-and-irelands-emergent-catholic-bourgeoisie
[82] Pearse, Pádraig, Letter to the editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, 13 May 1899, An Cartlann, https://cartlann.org/authors/padraig-pearse/the-irish-literary-theatre/
[83] Marsden, John. “Religion and the Nationalist Cause in the Thought of Patrick Pearse.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 84, no. 333, 1995, pp. 28–37; Pearse, Padraic, “Collected Works of Padriac H. Pearse: Volume 1”, Phoenix Publishing Company, Limited, 1917
[84] Rooney, William, “The Development of the National Idea”, The United Irishman, 13 Jan. 1900, https://cartlann.org/authors/william-rooney/the-development-of-the-national-idea/
[85] Rooney
[86] Kelly, Matthew, ““. . . and William Rooney spoke in Irish.””, History Ireland, Jan/Feb 2007, https://www.historyireland.com/and-william-rooney-spoke-in-irish/
[87] “Fr. Eugene O’Growney”, An Cartlann, https://cartlann.org/authors/fr-eugene-ogrowney/
[88] Dolan, Anne & Murphy, William, “Michael Collins: The Man and the Revolution”, The Collins Press, 2018, pp. 265-267
[89] Preempting the counter of the anti-Treaty side’s adherence to republicanism as a sign of French Jacobin orthodoxy, the anti-Treaty side’s main problem was the oath to the English king i.e. an foreigner rather than tenets of political orthodoxy let alone French Jacobinism.
[90] Fitzhugh
[91] Mac Lughmhadh, B.F., “‘Irish Ireland’ – D.P. Moran and The Leader”, The Burkean, 20 Aug. 2020, https://www.theburkean.ie/articles/2020/08/20/irish-ireland-d-p-moran-and-the-leader
[92] Andy, Thade, “IF ‘IRELAND IS FOR ALL’ IT DOES NOT BELONG TO THE IRISH”, Gript, 17 Dec. 2023, https://gript.ie/if-ireland-is-for-all-it-does-not-belong-to-the-irish/
[93] McGuirk, John, “AODHÁN: WE NEED “MORE DIVERSE” TEACHERS WHO DON’T SPEAK IRISH”, Gript, 13 Dec. 2022, https://gript.ie/aodhan-we-need-more-diverse-teachers-who-dont-speak-irish/
[94] Moran
[95] Pope John Paul II, “Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium”, Thorndike Press:Chivers, 2005, pp. 99-102
[96] Pope John Paul II, p. 100; The Pope considered “patriotism” a better term for positive nationalism.
[97] Pope John Paul II, pp. 156-157
[98] Pope John Paul II, p. 184
[99] Pilkington
Bibliography:
“II. Jefferson’s Proposal, 20 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0206-0002. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, p. 495.]
Anderson, Benedict. “Imagined Communities”. Verso Books, 2016.
Andy, Thade, “IF ‘IRELAND IS FOR ALL’ IT DOES NOT BELONG TO THE IRISH”, Gript, 17 Dec. 2023, https://gript.ie/if-ireland-is-for-all-it-does-not-belong-to-the-irish/.
“Annals of Inisfallen”, CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College Cork, https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T100004/index.html
“Annals of Tigernach”, CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College Cork, https://celt.ucc.ie/published/G100002/index.html
Barrow, G.W.S. “Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland”, Edinburgh University Press, 1965
Barry, Terry B., “The Archaeology of Medieval Ireland”, Taylor & Francis, 2002
Berens, Lewis H., “The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth”, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co. LTD., 1906, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17480/17480-h/17480-h.htm.
Betros, Gemma, “The French Revolution and the Catholic Church”, History Today, Dec. 2010, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/french-revolution-and-catholic-church
Bianchi, Rowan, “Language and Liturgy: The Relationship between Religion and the Irish”, Annotations & Abstracts: The Boston College Historical Commons, 23 Feb. 2022, https://sites.bc.edu/historicalcommons/2022/02/23/language-and-liturgy-the-relationship-between-religion-and-the-irish/.
Blanchard, Shaun, “A Quasi-Defense of Gallicanism”, Church Life Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame Univereseity,19 Oct. 2018, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-quasi-defense-of-gallicanism/.
Cahill, Sean, “Barra Ó Donnabháin Symposium: The Politics of the Irish Language Under the English and British Governments”, 2007, https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/irelandHouse/documents/0111-0126_PoliticsOfTheIrishLanguage.pdf.
Callan, Maeve, “Making Monsters Out of One Another in the Early Fourteenth-Century British Isles”, Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies, Vol. 12 (2019).
Campbell, Kenneth L., “Ireland’s History: Prehistory to the Present”, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013
Cassidy, Lara M., et al. “Neolithic and Bronze Age Migration to Ireland and Establishment of the Insular Atlantic Genome.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 113, no. 2, 2015, pp. 368–373., https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518445113.
Ceannt, Éamonn, “The Political Value of the Irish Language”, Sinn Féin, 15 Feb. 1913, https://cartlann.org/authors/eamonn-ceannt/the-political-value-of-the-irish-language/.
Coakley, John, “Patrick Pearse and the ‘Noble Lie’ of Irish Nationalism”, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 72, no. 286, 1983, pp. 119–36.
Collins, Christopher, “Alfred’s Doombook: The Anglo-Saxon Foundations of Magna Carta”, University of Alabama School of Law Blog, 2 Dec. 2019, https://www.law.ua.edu/specialcollections/2019/12/02/alfreds-doombook-the-anglo-saxon-foundations-of-magna-carta/.
Colbourn, Trevor H., “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan. 1958)
Connolly, Joseph, “How Does She Stand: An Appeal to Young Ireland”, Dublin: Michael F. Moynihan Publishing Company, 1953.
Crotty, Raymond, “When Histories Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism”, AltaMira Press, 2001.
Curley, Thomas M., “Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland”, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Curtis, Sophie, and Victoria Jones. “This Is What the Spring Equinox Is and the Unusual Traditions That Mark It.” Wales Online, 20 Mar. 2017.
Davis, Joy, “St. Patrick’s Well”, Discovering Ireland, 2007. https://www.discoveringireland.com/st-patricks-well/
Dolan, Anne & Murphy, William, “Michael Collins: The Man and the Revolution”, The Collins Press, 2018.
Duffy, Seán, “Medieval Scotland & Ireland: overcoming the amnesia”, History Ireland, 1999 , https://www.historyireland.com/medieval-scotland-ireland-overcoming-the-amnesia/
Fitzhugh, Ulick, “The Greasy Till: DP Moran, Yeats and Ireland’s Emergent Catholic Bourgeoisie”, The Burkean, 1 Jul. 2022, https://www.theburkean.ie/articles/2022/07/01/the-greasy-till-dp-moran-yeats-and-irelands-emergent-catholic-bourgeoisie.
Fraser, Antonia. “Cromwell, Charles II and the Jews.” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, vol. 14, no. 2, 1980, pp. 19–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41442698. Accessed 29 Apr. 2023.
“Fr. Eugene O’Growney”, An Cartlann, https://cartlann.org/authors/fr-eugene-ogrowney/.
Fukuyama, “Francis, The End of History and the Last Man”, Free Press, 2006
Gat, Azar, “Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism”, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Gibbons, Ann. “There's No Such Thing as a 'Pure' European—or Anyone Else.” Science, 15 May 2017.
Gorman, M. J. “The Ancient Brehon Laws of Ireland.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register, vol. 61, no. 4, Jan. 1913, p. 217., https://doi.org/10.2307/3313365.
Green, Miranda. The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames & Hudson, 2015.
Greenacre, Liam, “‘The Norman Yoke’: Uses of the Past During the English Civil War”, The York Historian: The University of York Student History Magazine, 29. Sept. 2017, https://theyorkhistorian.com/2017/09/29/the-norman-yoke-uses-of-the-past-during-the-english-civil-war/.
Haak, Wolfgang, et al. “Massive Migration from the Steppe Was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe.” Nature, vol. 522, no. 7555, 2015, pp. 207–211., https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14317.
Hannah, Emma, and Rowan McLaughlin. “Long-Term Archaeological Perspectives on New Genomic and Environmental Evidence from Early Medieval Ireland.” Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 106, 2019, pp. 23–28., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.04.001.
Hare, John, “St. Edwards Ghost or Anti-Normanisme”, Tracts on Liberty by the Levellers and their Critics Addendum Vol. 9 (1647-49), Liberty Fund, https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/hart-tracts-on-liberty-by-the-levellers-and-their-critics-addendum-vol-9-1647-49-forthcoming.
Harris, Tim, “Revolution : the great crisis of the British monarchy, 1685-1720”, London: Penguin, 2007.
Henry VIII. “‘State of Ireland & plan for its reformation’ in State Papers Ireland”, 1515
Hickey, Raymond, and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. Irish Identities Sociolinguistic Perspectives. De Gruyter Mouton, 2020.
Howell, Samantha, “From Oppression to Nationalism: The Irish Penal Laws of 1695”, Hohonu: A Journal For Academic Writing, Vol. 14 (2016), https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/FromOppressiontoNationalism-TheIrishPenalLawsof1695SamanthaHowell.pdf.
Hudson, Alison. “Religion in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.” The British Library , Religion in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.
Hyde, Douglas. "The Brehon Laws." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 1 Apr. 2023 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02753a.htm>.
Ibeji, Mike, “The Conquest and its Aftermath”, BBC History Blog, 17 Feb. 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/normans/after_01.shtml
“Irish Manuscripts: The Senchus Mór.” The Brehon Academy, 5 June 2014, https://brehonacademy.org/irish-manuscripts-the-senchus-mor/.
Jennings, Ken. “What 'Beyond the Pale' Actually Means.” Condé Nast Traveler, 10 Oct. 2016.
Kelly, Maria, “‘Unheard-of Mortality’….The Black Death in Ireland”, History Ireland, 2001, https://www.historyireland.com/unheard-of-mortality-the-black-death-in-ireland/
Kelly, Matthew, ““. . . and William Rooney spoke in Irish.””, History Ireland, Jan/Feb 2007, https://www.historyireland.com/and-william-rooney-spoke-in-irish/.
Kennedy, W. Benjamin. “Catholics in Ireland and the French Revolution.” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, vol. 85, no. 3/4, 1974, pp. 221–29.
Khan, Razib. “Red Hair Is about as Recessive as St. Patrick Was Irish.” Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning, 17 Mar. 2022, https://razib.substack.com/p/red-hair-is-about-as-recessive-as.
Kinealy, Christine, “A New History of Ireland”, Sutton, 2008.
Macalister, Robert John Stewart. “Lebor gabála Érenn : The Book of the Taking of Ireland”, Educational Company of Ireland, LTD., 1956
Mac Lughmhadh, B.F., “‘Irish Ireland’ – D.P. Moran and The Leader”, The Burkean, 20 Aug. 2020, https://www.theburkean.ie/articles/2020/08/20/irish-ireland-d-p-moran-and-the-leader.
Mahoney, Robert, “Jonathan Swift as the ‘Patriot Dead’”, History Ireland, Winter 1995, https://www.historyireland.com/jonathan-swift-as-the-patriot-dean/
Marsden, John. “Religion and the Nationalist Cause in the Thought of Patrick Pearse.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 84, no. 333, 1995, pp. 28–37.
Matthews, P.J., “A Battle of Two Civilizations?: D. P. Moran and William Rooney”, The Irish Review (1986-), no. 29, 2002, pp. 22–37.
McGuirk, John, “AODHÁN: WE NEED “MORE DIVERSE” TEACHERS WHO DON’T SPEAK IRISH”, Gript, 13 Dec. 2022, https://gript.ie/aodhan-we-need-more-diverse-teachers-who-dont-speak-irish/.
Moran, D.P., “The Philosophy of Ireland”, An Cartlann, 2022, https://cartlann.org/authors/d-p-moran/the-philosophy-of-irish-ireland/.
Newton, Michael. “Statutes of Kilkenny.” Exploring Celtic Civilizations, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://exploringcelticciv.web.unc.edu/statutes-of-kilkenny/.
Oades, Luke, “From Norman Conquest to Norman Yoke”, London School of Economics Economic History Blog, 4 Jan. 2022, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/2022/01/04/from-norman-conquest-to-norman-yoke/.
O'Bolger, Thomas. Leaders of the United Irishmen, 1798 and 1803, New York: Allied Printing, 1908, https://digital.nli.ie/Record/vtls000769750.
Ó Ciardha, Éamonn , “Ireland and the Jacobite cause, 1685-1766 : a fatal attachment”, Four Courts Press, 2004.
Olea, Ricardo & Christakos, George, “Duration of Urban Mortality for the 14th-Century Black Death Epidemic”, Human Biology Journal Vol. 77, No. 3 (June 2005), Wayne State University Press
Ó Néill, Domhnall, “Remonstrance of the Irish Chiefs to Pope John XXII”, 1317, https://cartlann.org/authors/domhnall-o-neill/remonstrance-of-the-irish-chiefs-to-pope-john-xxii/
“Papal Infallibility.” Catholic Answers, 2004, https://www.catholic.com/tract/papal-infallibility.
Pearse, Padraic, “Collected Works of Padriac H. Pearse: Volume 1”, Phoenix Publishing Company, Limited, 1917.
Pearse, Pádraig, Letter to the editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, 13 May 1899, An Cartlann, https://cartlann.org/authors/padraig-pearse/the-irish-literary-theatre/.
Pilkington, Philip, “Is Ireland Still Ireland?”, Erivgena Review, 4 Jan. 2023, https://eriugenareview.com/posts/f/is-ireland-still-ireland
Pincus, Steve, “The European Catholic Context of the Revolution of 1688-89: Gallicanism, Innocent XI, and Catholic Opposition” in “Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714”, Brill.
Robinson, I. S. (2004). "The Papacy, 1122–1198". In Luscombe, D.; Riley-Smith, J. (eds.). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. 4: 1024–1198, II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 317–383.
Rooney, William, “The Development of the National Idea”, The United Irishman, 13 Jan. 1900, https://cartlann.org/authors/william-rooney/the-development-of-the-national-idea/.
Ruhaak, Raymond, “Towards an Alternative Black Death Narrative for Ireland: Ecoloigcal and Socio-Economic Divides on the Medieval European Frontier”, Journal of the North Atlantic Vol. 2019, No. 39 (December 2019), Eagle Hill Institute
Ryan, Peter, “Irish Anti-Imperialist and Nationalist Economics”, University College Dublin, Masters Dissertation, 6 Aug. 2021, https://www.ryanresearch.co/post/irish-anti-imperialist-and-nationalist-economics
Ryan, Peter, “The Duality of Sinn Féin”, Ryan Research, 30 Jan. 2023, https://ryanresearch.substack.com/p/the-duality-of-sinn-fein.
“Seanad Éireann debate – Thursday, 11 Jun 1925, Vol. 5 No. 7”, Houses of the Oireachtas, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1925-06-11/12/
Simms, J.G., “Jacobite Ireland, 1685-91”, London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1969.
Simms, J. G., “Remembering 1690”, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 63, no. 251, 1974, pp. 231–42.
Sloane, William Milligan, “The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte Volume 2”, Century Company, 1910.
Smyth, Jim, “Wolfe Tone's Library: The United Irishmen and ‘Enlightenment’”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, Ireland and Enlightenment (SPRING 2012), pp. 423-435
Stewart, John Hall, “A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution”, New York: Macmillan, 1951.
Sweeney, Maurice (Director), “War of The Three Kings: Scotland's Invasion of Ireland” (Documentary), BBC, 2015
"The Executed Leaders of the 1916 Rising", Department of the Taoiseach, 19 Nov. 2018, https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/583995-the-executed-leaders-of-the-1916-rising/.
Thomas, Jessica Elizabeth & Basdeo, “Walter Scott’s Influence Upon 19th-Century Medieval Scholarship”, Stephen Reynolds’s News and Miscellany, 26 Nov. 2015, https://reynolds-news.com/2015/11/26/walter-scotts-influence-upon-19th-century-medieval-scholarship/.
“Track the Shift in Land Ownership from Catholics to Protestants in Ireland during King William III's Reign.” Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/video/135906/map-shift-land-ownership-Ireland-Catholic-hands-1703.
Trapp, Joseph, “Proceedings of the French National Convention on the Trial of Louis XVI”, 1793.
Watt, J.A., “Negotiations between Edward II and John XXII concerning Ireland”, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 10 No. 37 (Mar. 1956).
Yeats, W.B., “The Celtic Twilight”, Project Gutenberg, 2003, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10459/pg10459.html
