The second Earl of Pembroke, Richard deClare, died on April 20th, in the year of our lord eleven hundred and seventy-six, some 849 years ago, apparently as a result of an infected leg. Bad way to go.
Irish history records the Earl not by his given name or noble title, but by the nickname he acquired over a hundred years after his death: “Strongbow”.
Amusingly, “Strongbow” is an anglicisation of his original moniker – in the Latin language annals of the 13th century, he is recorded as “Stranghose”, which would seem to relate to his choice of trousers but may in fact relate to his secondary title as Earl of Striguil, a little place in Wales just east of Cardiff.
In any case, we know him on this island as the first of the Norman invaders, after he came here to secure the High Kingship of Leinster for his father-in-law, Dermot MacMurrough. When the latter died, Strongbow claimed Leinster for himself, because he was married to the dead King’s daughter. To protect himself from charges of enriching and empowering himself back at home, he then made a gift of most of Leinster to Henry II of England. Henry thus became the first English King to claim dominion over at least part of this island. 850 years later, his successor Charles III remains Sovereign Lord of the Northern Six counties.
This is presumably the basis for Sinn Fein’s objection to the Irish Government’s participation in an EU-wide commemoration of the Normans, which is set to take place on the birthday of that most famous Norman of them all, William the Conqueror. William never set foot on this island, nor claimed any part of it – but his legacy of conquest surely spurred the ambition of his Norman successor Kings, who made sure to add Ireland to their possessions. To celebrate the Normans, pace Sinn Fein, is to celebrate some of our auld enemies, and their conquests of us.
But this is only half the story. The Normans of DeClare’s vintage who came here were outsiders, for sure, but they were deeply Catholic. And, as in England, they had no difficulty in intermarrying and adopting many of the old Gaelic traditions, to the extent that within a few hundred years, it was often the descendants of the original Anglo-Normans who were leading Irish resistance to the Crown.
Anyway, interpretations of history may vary, but the absurdity of the Sinn Fein position is, in my view, absolute.
First, of course, because all of this happened so long ago that the Normans and the Gaels are functionally indistinguishable in the modern era. In genealogical terms, it is very likely that the vast majority of Irish people have at least some Norman blood flowing through their veins. These people were interlopers in their time, but they are our ancestors in our time. My own wife, for example, bears the surname “Fleming”, which originates in Flanders. Many of William the Conqueror’s supporters were Flemish in origin, because of his marriage to Matilda of Flanders and his father-in-law’s support for the Norman invasion. She is likely a long-distant descendant of some minor fighting man who came to these shores with the Normans. My mothers family bear the name Reynolds, which again originates in Normandy and came to these shores with the invaders. Norman history is our history, whether we like it or not.
Second, because of the irony: Sinn Fein is still upset about population movements a thousand years ago, when the Normans arrived on these islands. It still wishes to regard them as invaders, conquerors, and usurpers – even while, at the same time, endorsing the much larger movement of people from the rest of the world into the Irish state in the modern era. If the Norman legacy is one of upset and displacement and cultural incohesion, then what will people say a thousand years from now about politicians who allowed foreign born nationals to become more than 20% of the population in just a few decades?
Third, because of the relentless and counterproductive Anglophobia: The essential root cause of Sinn Fein’s objection to the Normans is that in Sinn Fein’s eyes the Normans are proxies for the English. Even though it was, of course, the English who bore the brunt of the Norman conquest. The Anglo Saxon lords and Kings of England were displaced and deposed, and huge swathes of the civilian population were terrorised. If the Norman invasion was a trauma, then it was not an English trauma, but one shared between England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland over the course of about 200 years.
Reducing Irish history to goodies and baddies like this is a form of sectarian insanity. The Normans, for better or ill, are part of our history and our lineage. One can have a view on whether they were a good or a bad part, but to be Irish today is to live with their legacy and their inheritance. Reducing that down to “England bad” is precisely the kind of cheap sectarian nonsense that sets Sinn Fein’s dream of a united island back further generations.