Irish History – a Revision

Prehistoric Ireland (8000BC-400AD)

Passage Tombs in Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth

Leinster
Munster
Connacht
Ulster
Gealic Ireland
Christian Ireland
Ireland and England – relations and
problems
Norman invasion (12th c.) and the Tudor conquest of
Ireland (16th century), Penal Laws (17th century)
Oliver Cromwell in Ireland
 WHITE SLAVES ”indentured
servants”

Statistics
from 1641 to 1652

>500,000 Irish people killed

ca. 300,000 Irish people sold as

slaves

The population fell from about

1,500,000 to 600,000
The Battle of the Boyne – 1690
Union with Great Britain – Act of Union , 1801
 The Great Famine

potato bligth

starvation

emigration
evictions
Celtic Revival (Celtic Twilight,
Irish Literary Revival)
- The Gaelic League
- The Abbey Theatre)
Home Rule

Charles Stewart Parnell

Easter Rising, 1916

Countess Markievicz
Patrick Pearse

GPO

James Connolly
Easter, 1916 (W.B. Yeats)
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the
head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the
end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
[…]
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are
dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The War of Independence and Civil War

IRA

Black and Tans

I sat within a valley green,
I sat there with my true love,
My sad heart strove the two between,
The old love and the new love, -
The old for her, the new that made
Me think of Ireland dearly,
While soft the wind blew down the glade
And shook the golden barley.
Twas hard the woeful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us
Twas harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen
I'll seek next morning early
And join the brave United Men!"
While soft winds shook the barley.
While sad I kissed away her tears,
My fond arms 'round her flinging,
The foeman's shot burst on our ears,
From out the wildwood ringing, -
A bullet pierced my true love's side,
In life's young spring so early,
And on my breast in blood she died
While soft winds shook the barley!
I bore her to the wildwood screen,
And many a summer blossom
I placed with branches thick and green
Above her gore-stain'd bosom:-
I wept and kissed her pale, pale cheek,
Then rushed o'er vale and far lea,
My vengeance on the foe to wreak,
While soft winds shook the barley!
But blood for blood without remorse,
I've ta'en at Outlard Hollow
And placed my true love's clay-cold corpse
Where I full soon will follow;
And round her grave I wander drear,
Noon, night and morning early,
With breaking heart whene'er I hear
The wind that shakes the barley!
 Free State and the Republic

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland

that we dreamed of, would be the home of a
people who valued material wealth only as a basis
for right living, of a people who, satisfied with
frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things
of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be Eamon de Valera
bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and
villages would be joyous with the sounds of Celtic Tiger
industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the
contest of athletic youths and the laughter of
happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums
for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in
short, of a people living the life that God desires
that men should live.
1937 Constitution/de Valera’s Constitution

Article 44.1:
The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty
God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.
Article 44.1.2:
The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and
Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of
the citizens.
Article 41.2:
1° [...] the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the
State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be
obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties
in the home
Article 41.1.1:
"recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society,
and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights,
antecedent and superior to all positive law„

Article 41.3.1:
"[t]he State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on
which the Family is founded".
The swinging 60s
John Montague, ”The Siege of Mullingar,” 1963
At the Fleadh Cheoil in Mullingar
There were two sounds, the breaking
Of glass, and the background pulse
Of music. Young girls roamed
The streets with eager faces
Shoving for men. Bottles in
Hand, they rowed out a song:
Puritan Ireland’s dead and gone,
A myth of O’Connor and O’Faolain.

In the early morning the lovers

Lay on both sides of the canal
Listening on sony transistors
To the agony of Pope John.
Yet it didn’t seem strange, or blasphemous,
This ground bass of death and
Resurrection, as we strolled along:
Puritan Ireland’s dead and gone,
A myth of O’Connor and O’Faolain.
The culture that was produced by a nationalist ideology,
Gaelic revivalism and religious devotion, “with its contempt for
cities, had nothing with which to absorb the new urban Ireland
that began to develop from the late 1960s onwards. It had no
great over-arching myth into which the children of the
suburbs, fed on sex and drugs and rock and roll, might be
absorbed”
Fintan O’Toole
Northern Ireland – The Troubles
Bombings and hunger strikes
HUNGER STRIKES ON THE SCREEN
CULTURE VS. CONFLICT
Mummers’ plays
The peace proces – the Good Friday Agreement, 1998

2005 – IRA officially

disarms

2007 – British Army

withdraws from
Northern Ireland
Belfast today – the Parades
Murals – Shankill Rd.
Murals – the Falls
Mary Robinson – the the first woman elected President of Ireland (1990)

I want this Presidency to promote the telling of stories — stories

of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and of
social justice. As a woman, I want women who have felt
themselves outside history to be written back into history, in the
words of Eavan Boland, “finding a voice where they found a
vision.”
May God direct me so that my Presidency is one of justice, peace
and love. May I have the fortune to preside over an Ireland at a
time of exciting transformation when we enter a new Europe
where old wounds can be healed, a time when, in the words of
Seamus Heaney, “hope and history rhyme.” May it be a
Presidency where I the President can sing to you, citizens of
Ireland, the joyous refrain of the 14th-century Irish poet as
recalled by W.B.Yeats: “I am of Ireland ... come dance with me in
Ireland.”
Eamon de Valera

The Ireland that we dreamed of – full of ”comely

maidens dancing at the crossroads and the
laughter of athletic youths"

Article 41.2.1 of the Irish Constitution of 1937:

“In particular, the State recognises that by her life
within the home, woman gives to the State a support
without which the common good cannot be achieved”