Imagine, if you will, the reaction had somebody in Gript or perhaps a TD in Leinster House described Americans or English people or Palestinians or people from Zambia or Portugal as “mongrels.”
Yet it seems perfectly acceptable now to describe the Irish people in this way. And lest there be any suggestion that she was using the word in a postmodern ironic sense it is quite clear what Bríona Nic Dhiarmada meant when she used the term in an interview about the RTÉ series ‘That Small Island’ which she produced.
She told Mark Hennessy of the Irish Times: “This homogeneous Ireland idea, this little Catholic thing, was never the case. We were never homogeneous. Always hybrids, always mongrels. We didn’t set out to prove that, but that’s what came out.”
These are remarks that present Ireland as being, and having always been, a kind of genetic dream catcher – a cheerful, ahistorical melting pot of diversity.
If there is a theoretical proposition underlying that statement then it would appear to be based on scattered genetic evidence that people came here thousands of years ago. And that, therefore, anyone who feels the need to come here can and indeed is as much Irish as anyone whose ancestors have lived here for millenia.
Nic Dhiarmada merely states, apropos of our mysterious past enriching genetic benefactors, that “We don’t know where they came from, but they came by sea. That’s the only thing that we’re sure about.”
Which is more than we seem to know about many of the asylum seekers who arrive into Ireland. No one knows where those without passports are actually coming from but they cross the border from the north and register themselves – mostly on false grounds it would seem given the statistics on acceptance of claims – as entitled to International Protection.
That might appear to some to be a gratuitous observation on my part but in the context of what the creators of this movie are saying there it is relevant.
It is generally accepted that there have been people living on the island for more than 30,000 years and continuously for around 10,000 years. During that 10,000 years, while there were newer arrivals they tended, as far as can be told, to arrive in small numbers and the genetic evidence seems to show a remarkable homogeneity dating back to the Bronze Age.
That homogeneity is shared with other peoples who spoke one of the languages which are part of the Goidelic and Brittonic groups. That includes the Gaels of Scotland, the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons of north western France.
A 2015 paper considered detailed evidence which “suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 years ago.”
In other words, there has been a virtually homogenous and distinctive Irish race for over at least that period. Further, they found that there was no evidence of large scale incursions or population replacement “with most opinion favoring incursion of only small numbers of technical specialists.”
From the examination of genetic samples, the conclusion was that it “suggests a degree of continuity stretching over 4,000 years at the insular Celtic edge of Europe.”
There are references in places to genetic evidence of people of Sardinian appearance living here during the Neolithic period. That is before the later Bronze Age, which the paper referenced above regards as having established the “central attributes of the Irish genome.”
Nic Dhiarmada refers to people with “dark, sallow skin and brown eyes” who looked like Sardinians. Well, if there were people who looked like Sardinians – another European people – then there were not many of them, they arrived here 6,000 years ago and if they have left a genetic print then it has been assimilated into the genetic evidence discovered by geneticists.
So like all the other tropes about mysterious people who rocked up to this “little Catholic thing” – (Ponder that as an example of what passes for serious intellectual discourse by people with the official imprimatur of the state broadcaster and the seeming approval of Micheál Martin) – there is no evidence to back the implication that perhaps they were African.
Attempts to incorporate the later arrivals of people from Britain mostly fail as an example of diversity because they were brutal efforts not only to take the land of Ireland but were accompanied by periodic attempts of varying degrees of success to destroy us as a people.
Nor did such attempts introduce substantial numbers of settlers. The initial Conquest initiated under Henry II had little demographic impact. By 1300 it is generally believed that the settler population was no more than 3 or 4%.
The population overall fell by around one third during the second half of the 14th century due to the Bruce wars and the Black Death and the colony was almost wiped out. It only recovered during the massive Tudor military campaigns of dispossession after 1540, but even by 1622 the new settler population mostly in east Ulster was no more than 20,000.
That increased substantially over the 17th century when the native population was displaced and destroyed on a mass scale. Even following that the settler population was estimated at between 5% and 7% in 1700, and mostly concentrated in the old Pale and the new Ulster plantation areas.
Anyone who believes that this was a boon for diversity and multiculturalism need only look at how well the descendants of the Protestant settlers after 1640 have integrated. Indeed, the only way in which the native and settler populations ever came to appear to share anything in common was through the destruction of the Irish language and the transformation of both the native population into monolingual Anglophones. Hard to tell the difference between lads wearing Liverpool jerseys.
That had not been the case up until the Tudor period because most of the small numbers of settlers who came over the preceding centuries – other than those residing in towns and not even all of those were immune – were broadly assimilated. They spoke Irish, and they inter-married, mainly through necessity but also because the Fitzgeralds and other powerful families chose to marry into the Ua Neill and other Gaelic elite families rather than form alliances with their counterparts in England.
Some of the greatest exponents of Gaelic literature were settler descended poets such as Gearóid Íarla, Piaras Feiritéar, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, and Pádraigín Haicéid. And of course the great historian of Gaelic resistance, and the hammer of the genocidal ideologues of English colonialism from Cambrensis to Spenser and Stanihurst, was Seathrún Céitinn or Geoffrey Keating, a Norman settler descended priest born in Tipperary.
Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éireann, written in the 1620s and 1630s before the old order finally fell to the Cromwellian hordes, is a masterful work. Not only of recovery and restatement of what was an Irish Gaelic nation, but of what the fundamental bases of that nation were.
That is something largely overlooked in the recent debate over our “Norman heritage.” For what Céitinn did was show how the small number of the original Anglo-Norman conquistadors had become part of a common nation with the native Irish.
There were two fundamental aspects to that. Our language and our Faith. Although even a shared Catholicism was not always sufficient for the Old English of the Pale and the isolated Anglo towns to make common cause and their general Preston and the royalist garrison under Ormond in Dublin betrayed Eoghan Ruadh in 1647 when he had an opportunity following his victory the year before at Benburb to extirpate the colony.
The new revisionists can hardly deny the facts of history but they are qualified by the canard that “we” even as miserable, raped, starving, beaten “servants” of the English in the Caribbean were “privileged” because “we” were “white.” And of course, once we got over the self-pitying whinge, we too became colonisers.
This is another myth based on the actual fact that some of the descendants of English and Scottish colonisers – and even the French Huguenot La Touches – who had stolen land in Ireland expanded their remit overseas through slavery. “We” did not own slaves.
Zambian-born, and Ulster Protestant and South African descended, Professor Jane Ohlmeyer chaired a seminar on “Irishness, Blackness and the Early Modern World” which she noted had the subtitle “where do we go from here?”
It is quite evident where some want to go from here. The demographic evidence and trends all show that the Irish state has a population in which approaching 25% if not already more than that were born overseas. That is neither a natural development nor a positive one.
No more than it would be – and I would hazard a guess that the Professor herself would concur – if one quarter of the population of Zambia was to be made up of Europeans, or Asians, and that this would be on a trajectory to become a majority within 40 or 50 or 60 years. The white population of her native Zambia is around 1%, by the way.
It is apparent then when one listens to Nic Dhiarmada and Ohlmeyer what viewers and readers can expect from this latest chapter in the mission. Ohlmeyer concluded her remarks in the Irish Times with the observation that “We’re in a very different space now. I think Ireland is having a conversation in a very actually mature way that has paved the way for a very difficult conversation around empire and the legacy of empire.”
The legacy of Empire does not require a “conversation” unless it is one designed to obscure the actual “legacy of Empire” here. That, incidentally, is a tendency for a beaten down people – forced to speak another language and with history and traditions and religion suppressed – to internalise the world view of the coloniser.
A most convenient flaw when a new generation of colonial ideologists are about once and for all turning Ireland into little more than an economic base, with a state as a Human Resources manager. How better then to convince the natives of the unqualified good that mass immigration and domination by global capital and Anglo culture means, than persuading them that they are no more intrinsic or even native to this country than some lad who arrives with a tech degree and a permit or dumps his passport down the toilet of an airplane?