The Berkeley Guides:
Berkeley Guide to Europe:
Ireland:
Background Information for
Ireland
Until Columbus stumbled upon the not-so-New World in 1492, Ireland was on the very edge of the European universe. To the merchants and explorers who chanced upon this storm-battered isle, Ireland was a wild, indomitable place, mysterious and brooding; a land that, viewed from afar, appeared to rise in defiance from the water. To the medieval mind, Ireland was only a short sail away from oblivion.
The history of Ireland really is the history of its many conquerors, be they the Celts, Vikings, Anglo-Normans, or British. The arrival of the Celts, a Continental tribe of warriors, in the 6th century bc, spurred Ireland's Golden Age, a time of Druidic learning and bardic poetry, a time when ferocious warriors roamed in search of honor, glory, and, of course, heads (head-hunting was a common Celtic practice). The next wave of conquerors, the Christians, appeared around the 4th century ad. While continental Europe languished in the so-called Dark Ages, Ireland became a beacon of enlightenment. Christianity and the Catholic church are still pervasive forces in Ireland. The Virgin Mary is Ireland's true queen. She appears in the unlikeliest of places--in glass-enclosed shrines, in run-down Dublin apartments, at the intersections of country roads, along stone quarries, and carved into green hillsides.
The most serious threat to the Christians was the Vikings, who began their conquest of the coast around 800. Conquered and subdued, Celtic Ireland would slowly fade into oblivion, its culture and traditions relegated to the imagination, myth, and fairy tale. It was in this context that, in 1155, English-born Pope Adrian IV boldly granted dominion over Ireland to his fellow Englishman, King Henry II. By the time the last of Ireland's Gaelic kings had their remaining land confiscated by the British in 1603, Ireland had become a servile colony where English nobles lorded over an adopted homeland.
Following English king Henry VIII's conversion to Protestantism in 1534, Ireland was divided not only along political lines but also along religious ones. Just over a century later, the religious schism became the focus of renewed animosity in the aftermath of the English Civil War, when the pro-Catholic Charles I was deposed by the vigorously Protestant Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell came to Ireland in 1649, intent on making Ireland a Protestant country. He unleashed his troops on the country, beginning a campaign of persecution against the already bitter Irish Catholics.
Worse was still to come in the wake of Cromwell's Act of Settlement (1652). It called for the forced migration of all Catholics west of the River Shannon. If they removed themselves from the Anglicized and increasingly commercialized east, the Gaels were welcome to relocate, in Cromwell's words, either "to Hell or Connaught." To this day, many in Ireland feel bitter animosity toward the British, whom they blame for more than one grim chapter in their country's history.
But Ireland has effected its own sweet form of revenge: the development of an identity that is rooted in shared suffering, the subtle twist of a phrase, rural backwardness and poverty, and--perhaps most important of all--in the realization that time and an unhurried lifestyle are the luxuries of the vanquished. In the words of Oliver Goldsmith, another of Ireland's great Anglo-Irish authors: "The natives are peculiarly remarkable for their gaiety . . . and levity; English transplanted here lose their serious melancholy and become gay and thoughtless, more fond of pleasure and less addicted to reason." From an Irish perspective, these are the highest of compliments.
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