I know for sure my mother's parents emigrated from Ireland to Boston in the 1920s because my nana told me so. And I've seen her birth certificate. My father's forebears made the same trip much earlier, perhaps as a result of the potato famine in the 1840s. Milk and potatoes make a complete diet and that's what the Irish peasants lived on. They couldn't afford windows for their sod houses but peat was there for the digging and they kept the cold off with a constant peat fire. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, it never got very cold anyway, just very rainy.
When blight destroyed the potato crop about a million people died of starvation and another million left the country mainly for England, Australia, and the US. But where did the Irish come from originally? I always thought the Irish had been the Celts. I concluded as a child that several of the players on the Boston Celtics were members of the famous Black Irish. That was not quite right. The ancient Celtic peoples were composed of many groups. One group, the Gaels, were the people who ended up in Ireland.
I began to hear later that Ireland had been settled from Spain by a people called the Milesians, but this was the stuff of legend and wishful thinking. DNA shows that the Gaels arrived in Ireland around 500 B.C. from southern Russia. They subdued the people who had been there since 6,000 BC. According to legend, these earlier people went underground becoming the Little People, aka the Leprechauns, who have been taking their revenge ever since through acts of mischief.
The Gaels had a thousand years to get comfortable before St. Patrick arrived with the good news. They barely had time to get their heads around that when the pagan Vikings arrived in 800 A.D. to rape and pillage. The Vikings founded Dublin and used it as a base to trade with Europe. No sooner did the Irish get rid of the Vikings than the Normans invaded a hundred years after they had taken over England in 1066.
The Black Death arrived in Ireland in 1348. The Normans lived in towns and died in greater numbers than the native Irish who now got back on top. Things went well for a few centuries until Henry VIII decided he wanted a new wife and turned England from Catholic to Protestant so he could divorce his first wife. Serious mischief ensued over religious differences and Henry went on to annex Ireland to England. The Irish struggled to get out from under Henry's thumb until Cromwell put a bloody kibosh on the business a hundred years later in 1651.
Ireland was ruled from England after that. All the farmland was owned by English landlords and no Catholic could hold a government job. The Great Famine came and went. England began to feel guilty for the way it had treated the Irish and made some concessions to Catholics. But it was never enough and beginning with the Easter uprising in 1916, there was violence and warfare in the country, finally ending in December 1921 with a treaty giving Ireland independence.
You would think after all this suffering and death the Irish would be happy to be done with the British. But some people were unhappy with the treaty and took up arms against the Irish with whom they had just been fighting the British. It took almost a year before the rebels "dumped arms".
A final thing I just learned: the peace treaty made Ireland a Free State but kept it a member in the British Commonwealth. The Irish were citizens of Great Britain with the king as their head until Ireland declared itself a Republic in 1949. I was around by then so feel somehow connected to Ireland's long and convoluted history. Erin go braugh!
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| Too close for comfort |
Sla’inte
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