The Origins of the Irish

J. P. Mallory

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500771372
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The Origins of the Irish is the first major attempt in nearly eighty years to deal with the core issues of how the Irish people came into being. Written as an engrossing detective story, this authoritative and brilliantly argued book emphasizes that the Irish did not have a single origin, but are a product of multiple influences that can only be tracked by employing the varied disciplines of archaeology, genetics, geology, linguistics and mythology. Illustrated with numerous informative line drawings and maps, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Ireland and the Irish.

CHAPTER ONE

The Origins of Ireland

After a night that could not have been entirely pillow talk, Cairenn, the mother of Niall, carried within herself a fertilized egg weighing about 0.000005 grammes. For the sake of illustration we will presume that when the infant grew up to be the famous Niall of the Nine Hostages he weighed about 70 kg (or 155 lbs). In the 4th century young Niall’s diet (excepting the odd wine shipment) would have been derived entirely from Ireland and its offshore waters. In short, the future High King of Ireland was in effect a reconstituted mass of Irish geology and hydrology that had been processed into an Irish adult (though recycled back into Irish soil about every two months).

The body of an Irishman contains up to 59 of the 92 naturally occurring elements. One of these, hydrogen, accounts for about one-tenth of the mass of a human being and for a 70-kg Niall, the other very light elements (helium, lithium, beryllium and boron) only provide about 25 mg. Some of the other elements are plentiful, such as the c. 43 kg of oxygen (which, like hydrogen, is largely tied up in water molecules) and 16 kg of carbon, while most of the rest are only slightly attested. For example, we could squeeze a lethal dose of arsenic out of about 150 Irishmen but it would take us on the order of 5,000 of them to obtain a gramme of gold. And to turn the Irish into a weapon of mass destruction, it would take about 70 million of them (or of anyone else) to provide enough uranium for a small atomic bomb. As there are an estimated 80 million people who claim Irish descent, this could be managed with people to spare.

It is obvious then that in order to construct Niall we are going to have to combine a great many elements. Some of these, the lighter ones such as hydrogen, may be a residue of the Big Bang. But the rest are heavier elements that make up Niall and the rest of the solar system, and these required a death. Some 4.6 billion years ago the Earth formed out of the dusty residue of previously exploded and obviously nameless stars. We know this because only the hot internal engine of a star can manufacture the range of heavier elements that constitute a planet and the creatures that occupy and sometimes write books about it. Most of our Earth consists of iron (35%), oxygen (30%), silicon (15%) and magnesium (19%), and these elements could only be created in a star much larger than our own sun. To create anything with an atomic weight greater than iron we need the explosion provided by a supernova.¹ Such massive stars as those that made our own existence possible are relatively short-lived and are unlikely to have produced planets on which intelligent life would have had time to evolve, so we do not have to bear the burden of some cosmic guilt that we have prospered on the backs of prematurely dead atomic ancestors. We are now about halfway through the life of our own sun and when it becomes glutted on helium and expands as a red giant to fry our planet in about 5 billion years, the Earth is more likely to go out with a sizzle than a bang. Incidentally, the life expectancy of Ireland is shorter than this, as we will see later, although Guinness’s 9,000-year lease on their St James Gate brewery is probably still a safe investment.²

It is clear then that at the most basic level any search for the origins of the Irish leads us into the physical composition of Ireland. This is not just a matter of chemistry but also geography. Any search for Irish origins must be rooted in Ireland. Trace if you will the Irish back to a homeland in Britain, France or Spain, and you are led into a logical conundrum that wherever they come from they have no claim to being Irish unless they have lived on the island. Let us imagine, for example, our Proto-Irish sailing out of the Bay of Biscay in two ships. A storm ensues and only one makes it to Cork while the second is forced ashore in Cardiff. Is there anything about the occupants of the second boat that we can now regard as Irish?

The geology of Ireland, then, not only provides a setting in which to tell our story but it also provides one answer to the question of Irish origins. The earliest Irish were direct products of the land they occupied: no Irish geology = no Irish people. And we must be careful here because the physical form of Ireland is deceiving.

Historians have abandoned what they refer to as the essentialist approach to nations, the concept that ‘nations are individually prescribed by nature’ rather than invented by their populations.³ But island nations are certainly the most convincing illusions. Bordered by c. 7,500 km of coast,⁴ there appears to be a natural border to Ireland that invites us to contemplate a timeless land of lush green fields surrounded by an obviously natural barrier, the sea. A natural scientist would know how illusory this romantic image actually is. Neither the shape, appearance, composition nor location of Ireland has been constant through time, nor will any of these be so in the future. From a geological viewpoint, Erin go bragh (‘Ireland forever’) is wishful thinking. The Ireland that we know today was a geological accident forged between two continents and then frozen, dunked beneath warm seas, lifted in part to the heights of the Himalayas, covered with lush tropical swamps, blistering deserts and vast expanses of molten rock, then again buried under ice and finally thawed out. It took a lot of changes to make the Ireland we have right now, and the processes that forged the present Ireland will ensure that it will keep changing.

From hell to basement Ireland

Out of the remains left after about 10 billion years of the creation and collapse of older stars, both our sun and the planets that circle it were assembled from a spiralling disc of cosmic debris. A superheated Earth passed through the initial period of its history, the Hadean eon (named after Hades), which ended c. 3.8 billion years ago. Throughout this period the Earth’s surface was molten, covered by a magma ocean of molten rock, exuding a miasma of noxious gases from erupting volcanoes. It endured a constant onslaught of meteors that pocked its surface to resemble the crater-marked surface of the moon. Although the main period of meteoritic onslaught concluded with the end of the Hadean, the Earth still absorbs 36,000 metric tons of meteorites every year.⁵ Incidentally, the last recorded meteor strike of the 2nd millennium was in Ireland.⁶

In the period from 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago the surface of the Earth had cooled enough to permit the formation of a rocky crust. During this period, known as the Archaean eon, about 80% of the Earth’s crustal surface was formed, dotted with small proto-continents. By 3.8 billion years ago it is also believed that the temperature had cooled enough for the water vapour expelled by volcanic activity to fall as rain. The amount of water may have also been supplemented by the giant ice tails left by passing comets and water-rich meteors. The rain first filled the numerous craters and then spilled over to expand eventually into a world ocean. By about 3.5 billion years ago there emerges the earliest evidence of life in the form of bacteria.

As land-dwellers we have a very parochial view of the ocean. Even though we know that the greatest part of the Earth is covered by water we still imagine that it is the water that surrounds the land. In fact, if it were not for the fact that we have a very active planet pushing its crust upwards, there would probably be no land in the first place. The continents that we have are merely floating by virtue of the fact that they consist of lighter material than the basalt bed of the sea. Obviously, the story of Ireland cannot begin before we have some land and, over time, the amount of land has been increasing such that there is now about twice as much as there was 2 billion years ago.⁷ Still, the area of the Pacific Ocean alone exceeds that of all the land on the planet.

It is in the next major geologic period, the Protoerozoic eon (2.5 billion to 545 million years ago), that Ireland offers some specific clues to its most distant past. The story does not begin in the north Atlantic, however, but between the equator and the South Pole, around which most of the Earth’s landmasses were then clustered. About 1.7 billion years ago the sandy shore of an earlier proto-continent was pushed back deep into the Earth’s crust to be heated to about 700° C (1292° F), not hot enough to (re)melt it but hot enough to alter it chemically into a metamorphic rock known as gneiss. Later, when the land buckled to form mountains, the gneiss was pushed upwards to be exposed today on the northernmost part of Ireland, the island of Inishtrahull off the north coast of Donegal (and running under the sea to Colonsay and Islay in Scotland); somewhat later formations of gneiss can be found in the mountainous regions of counties Mayo, Sligo and Tyrone. Such gneisses form the geologic ‘basement’ of Ireland; while this may seem quite early, northwest Scotland and the Hebrides offer evidence for gneisses formed from still earlier magma (c. 3 billion years old) that were metamorphosed c. 2.75 billion years ago, while the oldest rocks known are gneisses from Canada and Antarctica that date back more than 3.9 billion years.

Partition

By about 1 billion years ago the various landmasses of the world had collided to form a single massive continent comprising portions of the later continents that we know today, hidden within which were some of the fragments that would eventually form Ireland. By about 700 or 600 million years ago the break-up of the earlier supercontinent(s) was under way (1.1). One major section is known as Laurentia which, when it came adrift to be forced northward by the Iapetus Ocean, would comprise portions of northeast Canada, Greenland, northwest Ireland and Scotland. Another section, Avalonia, contained the southern half of Ireland (and Wales and England) and lay on the subcontinent of Gondwana (later India, Antarctica, Australia, South America and Africa). Western Gondwana, the specific area from which we can derive southeast Ireland, lay very roughly seawards of what we would later recognize as the coasts of West Africa and South America.

Geographically, these two portions of the Earth’s crust that would eventually form Ireland should not have been expected ever to meet. However, this massive jigsaw puzzle was dismantled when the supercontinent broke apart and then reassembled and then, about 560 million years ago, it began splitting apart again. The good news was that at least the section of Laurentia that held the future northwestern half of Ireland and the part of Avalonia that contained the southeast of Ireland were facing each other. The bad news was that they were drifting further and further apart (1.2).

1.1. The break-up of the Vendian supercontinent 600 million years ago set the two components of Ireland in motion.

1.2. The situation 490 million years ago after the break-up of Pannotia had repositioned the two halves of Ireland on opposite sides of a spreading Iapetus Ocean.

The driving force for all these movements is the approximately 20 plates (six major and the rest smaller, with Ireland on the major Eurasian plate) that together form the Earth’s crust. The plates themselves are generally thought to be about 100–150 km thick (the distance between Dublin and Belfast) which takes them down to a depth where they encounter the asthenosphere, the top section of the Earth’s mantle that is so hot (c. 1280° C/2336° F) that it provides a slightly slippery surface over which the various plates can slide at anywhere between 1 cm and 15 cm a year. The surface of the plates is the crust, thicker (c. 40 km) on the lighter continental landmasses and shallower (c. 7 km) on the heavier ocean floors. The continental landmasses may be driven apart by sea floors which expand when molten material wells up to create a succession of mid-oceanic ridges. Currently, the floor of the Atlantic is widening at a rate of about 10 mm per year while the Pacific is shrinking. This rate is quite slow in human terms (it has grown about 16 cm since the birth of Niall of the Nine Hostages and about a metre since Ireland was initially settled by people) but easily fast enough to account for the dispersal of continents that we encounter in geologic time.⁸

The break-up of Pannotia saw the constituent parts of Ireland still divided between Laurentia and now the small continent of Avalonia, the coastal fragment of west Gondwana (southern Ireland, Wales, England, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia). At this time there was a separate continent, Baltica, to account for much of western Europe while Siberia formed yet another continent. The space between Laurentia (northern Ireland) and Avalonia (southern Ireland) as they rifted further apart was filled by the ever-expanding Iapetus Ocean, the precursor to the Atlantic Ocean. Magma poured out through the Earth’s crust and a string of volcanoes formed to create an ever-widening ocean floor driving the northern and southern halves of Ireland still further away from each other, although they were now separated by an expanding sea rather than a continental landmass. While the current distance by air between Belfast and Cork is 343 km, about 480 million years ago the distance between the ancestral locations of these two modern towns was 4,000 km! On our present globe, this part of the story of Ireland was taking place roughly where Australia lies today.

The creation of the Iapetus Ocean found northwest Ireland situated on the south coast of Laurentia. Within the shoreline and nearby sea in the period ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Origins of Ireland
• Chapter Two: First Colonists
• Chapter Three: First Farmers
• Chapter Four: Beakers and Metal
• Chapter Five: The Rise of the Warriors
• Chapter Six: The Iron Age
• Chapter Seven: The Native Version
• Chapter Eight: Skulls, Blood and Genes
• Chapter Nine: The Evidence of Language
• Chapter Ten: The Origins of the Irish
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Sources of Illustrations
• Index
• Copyright