A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Read online

  To Carol

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1: The Irish landscape: the last Ice Age and after

  Chapter 2: Mesolithic Ireland

  Chapter 3: Neolithic Ireland: the first farmers

  Chapter 4: Neolithic megaliths

  Chapter 5: Copper, bronze and gold: 2000–1000 BC

  Chapter 6: Before the Celts

  Chapter 7: The coming of the Celts

  Chapter 8: Preparing for the Otherworld in pre-Christian Celtic Ireland

  Chapter 9: Kings and champions

  Chapter 10: Agricola plans to conquer Ireland

  Chapter 11: Patrick the Briton

  Chapter 12: The early Irish church

  Chapter 13: A land of many kings

  Chapter 14: Poets, judges, nobles, the free and the unfree

  Chapter 15: Homesteads and crannogs

  Chapter 16: Living off the land

  Chapter 17: Saints and scholars

  Chapter 18: ‘Not the work of men but of angels’

  Chapter 19: St Columba, St Columbanus and the wandering Irish

  Chapter 20: The coming of the Vikings

  Chapter 21: The wars of the Gael and the Gall

  Chapter 22: Viking towns and cities

  Chapter 23: Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf

  Chapter 24: ‘A trembling sod’

  Chapter 25: The rape of Dervorgilla

  Chapter 26: ‘At Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won’

  Chapter 27: Waterford and Dublin: a tale of two sieges

  Chapter 28: Henry II comes to Ireland

  Chapter 29: The lordship of Ireland

  Chapter 30: Conquests and a failed treaty

  Chapter 31: John, Lord of Ireland

  Chapter 32: ‘Dreading the fury of the king’

  Chapter 33: The English colony

  Chapter 34: Feudal Ireland

  Chapter 35: ‘A great affliction befell the country’

  Chapter 36: Edward Bruce ‘caused the whole of Ireland to tremble’

  Chapter 37: ‘Famine filled the country’

  Chapter 38: The Black Death

  Chapter 39: Gallowglasses

  Chapter 40: ‘More Irish than the Irish themselves’

  Chapter 41: The Statute of Kilkenny

  Chapter 42: ‘Into the land of the savage Irish where King O’Neill reigned supreme’

  Chapter 43: A Catalan pilgrim among the unconquered Irish

  Chapter 44: Richard II’s great expedition to Ireland

  Chapter 45: The Pale

  Chapter 46: Beyond the Pale

  Chapter 47: Garret Mór FitzGerald, the Great Earl of Kildare

  Chapter 48: The decline of the House of Kildare

  Chapter 49: The rebellion of Silken Thomas

  Chapter 50: The church in turmoil

  Chapter 51: ‘Sober ways, politic drifts, and amiable persuasions’

  Chapter 52: Conn Bacach O’Neill visits London

  Chapter 53: Religious strife and plantation

  Chapter 54: Shane the Proud

  Chapter 55: The fall of Shane O’Neill

  Chapter 56: A failed plantation and a bloody feast in Belfast

  Chapter 57: An English queen, a Scottish lady and a dark daughter

  Chapter 58: ‘Warring against a she-tyrant’: holy war in Munster

  Chapter 59: The plantation of Munster

  Chapter 60: The wreck of the Armada

  Chapter 61: The last voyage of the Girona

  Chapter 62: The adventures of Captain Francisco de Cuellar

  Chapter 63: ‘The wild Irish are barbarous and most filthy in their diet’

  Chapter 64: ‘A fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief’

  Chapter 65: The capture of Red Hugh O’Donnell

  Chapter 66: The escape of Red Hugh O’Donnell

  Chapter 67: Granuaile: the pirate queen of Connacht

  Chapter 68: Granuaile and the Composition of Connacht

  Chapter 69: The Nine Years War begins

  Chapter 70: ‘Freeing the country from the rod of tyrannical evil’

  Chapter 71: ‘The scurvy fort of Blackwater’

  Chapter 72: ‘A quick end made of a slow proceeding’: the Earl of Essex’s failure

  Chapter 73: Mountjoy and Docwra

  Chapter 74: ‘We spare none of what quality or sex soever’

  Chapter 75: The Battle of Christmas Eve

  Chapter 76: The Treaty of Mellifont

  Chapter 77: ‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November’

  Chapter 78: ‘I know that they wish to kill him by poison or by any possible means’

  Chapter 79: The Flight of the Earls

  Chapter 80: ‘We would rather have chosen to die in our own country’

  Chapter 81: ‘Bring in colonies of civil people of England and Scotland’

  Chapter 82: A lucky escape, Scottish lairds and the division of Clandeboye

  Chapter 83: Planting Down and Antrim

  Chapter 84: The rebellion of Sir Cahir O’Doherty

  Chapter 85: The plantation of Ulster

  Chapter 86: ‘Make speed, get thee to Ulster’

  Chapter 87: The Londonderry plantation

  Chapter 88: The luck of the draw

  Chapter 89: ‘The heretics intend to vomit out all their poison’

  Chapter 90: Thomas Wentworth and the ‘Graces’

  Chapter 91: The Eagle Wing and the Black Oath

  Chapter 92: Presbyterian anger, Catholic resentment

  Chapter 93: October 1641: the plot that failed

  Chapter 94: The 1641 massacres

  Chapter 95: The Confederation of Kilkenny

  Chapter 96: ‘Your word is Sancta Maria!’

  Chapter 97: ‘The righteous judgment of God’

  Chapter 98: The curse of Cromwell

  Chapter 99: ‘To Hell or Connacht’

  Chapter 100: Priests and tories

  Chapter 101: Restoration Ireland

  Chapter 102: Ormond

  Chapter 103: Work, food and leisure

  Chapter 104: The Popish Plot

  Chapter 105: The trial of Oliver Plunkett

  Chapter 106: ‘Lilliburlero’

  Chapter 107: Three kings and thirteen apprentice boys

  Chapter 108: ‘No surrender!’

  Chapter 109: The Relief of Derry

  Chapter 110: Schomberg

  Chapter 111: The Battle of the Boyne

  Chapter 112: Galloping Hogan, Sarsfield and the walls of Limerick

  Chapter 113: Athlone and Aughrim: June–July 1691

  Chapter 114: Limerick: a second siege and a treaty

  Chapter 115: The Wild Geese

  Chapter 116: The Penal Laws

  Chapter 117: ‘The minority prevailing over the majority’

  Chapter 118: The Protestant Ascendancy

  Chapter 119: John Dunton eats and sleeps in Connemara

  Chapter 120: Wood’s Halfpence and the Drapier

  Chapter 121: A modest proposal

  Chapter 122: 1740: the year of the Great Frost

  Chapter 123: 1741: the ‘Year of the Slaughter’

  Chapter 124: The first performance of Handel’s Messiah

  Chapter 125: The second city of the Empi
re

  Chapter 126: Dublin: poverty, crime and duels

  Chapter 127: ‘The Irish gentry are an expensive people’

  Chapter 128: ‘A sort of despot’

  Chapter 129: Hearts of Steel, Hearts of Oak

  Chapter 130: Clearing the land

  Chapter 131: The peasantry

  Chapter 132: ‘Superfine cloth, of home manufacture’

  Chapter 133: Ulster’s domestic linen industry

  Chapter 134: Wash-mills, bleach-greens and beetling engines

  Chapter 135: ‘A vast number of people shipping off for Pennsylvania and Boston’

  Chapter 136: The voyage of the Sally

  Chapter 137: The American Revolution and Ireland

  Chapter 138: ‘Free Trade—or Else!’

  Chapter 139: The Dungannon Convention

  Chapter 140: ‘I am now to address a free people’

  Chapter 141: The failure of reform

  Chapter 142: ‘Fourteenth July 1789; Sacred to Liberty’

  Chapter 143: The United Irishmen

  Chapter 144: The Belfast Harp Festival of 1792

  Chapter 145: At war with France

  Chapter 146: Earl Fitzwilliam’s failure

  Chapter 147: Peep o’ Day Boys and Defenders

  Chapter 148: ‘I will blow your soul to the low hills of Hell’

  Chapter 149: ‘The French are in the bay’

  Chapter 150: ‘Nothing but terror will keep them in order’

  Chapter 151: ‘Croppies, lie down!’

  Chapter 152: ‘Rouse, Hibernians, from your slumbers’

  Chapter 153: The Boys of Wexford

  Chapter 154: The Battle of New Ross

  Chapter 155: The rebellion spreads north

  Chapter 156: Rebellion in County Antrim

  Chapter 157: Rebellion in County Down

  Chapter 158: Vinegar Hill

  Chapter 159: The Races of Castlebar

  Chapter 160: The Union proposed

  Chapter 161: ‘Jobbing with the most corrupt people under Heaven’

  Chapter 162: The passing of the Act of Union

  Chapter 163: Robert Emmet

  Chapter 164: ‘Now is your time for liberty!’

  Chapter 165: ‘Let no man write my epitaph’

  Chapter 166: Caravats and Shanavests

  Chapter 167: Ribbonmen, Orangemen and Rockites

  Chapter 168: Emancipation refused

  Chapter 169: The Catholic Association

  Chapter 170: The ‘invasion’ of Ulster

  Chapter 171: The Clare Election

  Chapter 172: ‘Scum condensed of lrish bog!’

  Chapter 173: A social laboratory

  Chapter 174: The Tithe War

  Chapter 175: ‘Property has its duties as well as its rights’

  Chapter 176: The Repealer repulsed

  Chapter 177: Monster meetings

  Chapter 178: A Nation Once Again?

  Chapter 179: ‘The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown’

  Chapter 180: ‘So much wretchedness’

  Chapter 181: The census of 1841

  Chapter 182: Phytophthora infestans

  Chapter 183: ‘Give us food, or we perish’

  Chapter 184: The Famine in Skibbereen

  Chapter 185: Fever

  Chapter 186: Emigration

  Chapter 187: The Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch

  Chapter 188: The Fenian Brotherhood

  Chapter 189: ‘The green flag will be flying independently’

  Chapter 190: ‘God Save Ireland!’

  Chapter 191: The growth of Belfast

  Chapter 192: Party fights

  Chapter 193: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’

  Chapter 194: ‘Keep a firm grip of your homesteads’

  Chapter 195: The Land War

  Chapter 196: The relief of Captain Boycott

  Chapter 197: Assassination in the Phoenix Park

  Chapter 198: The First Home Rule Bill

  Chapter 199: ‘Is them ’uns bate?’

  Chapter 200: The Belfast riots of 1886

  Chapter 201: Belfast: an imperial city

  Chapter 202: Committee Room 15

  Chapter 203: ‘Keep our noble kingdom whole’

  Chapter 204: The Second Home Rule Bill

  Chapter 205: ‘The country is bleeding to death’

  Chapter 206: Killing Home Rule with kindness

  Chapter 207: ‘De-anglicising the Irish people’

  Chapter 208: Two nations?

  Chapter 209: Cultural revival

  Chapter 210: Home Rule promised

  Chapter 211: The Covenant

  Chapter 212: The great Dublin lock-out

  Chapter 213: The Curragh ‘mutiny’

  Chapter 214: To the brink of civil war

  Chapter 215: ‘Faithful to Erin, we answer her call!’

  Chapter 216: The conspirators prepare

  Chapter 217: ‘We’re going to be slaughtered’

  Chapter 218: Easter Week

  Chapter 219: Executions and internment

  Chapter 220: Sacrifice at the Somme

  Chapter 221: The rise of Sinn Féin

  Chapter 222: The First Dáil

  Chapter 223: Return to violence

  Chapter 224: Terror and reprisal

  Chapter 225: ‘The dreary steeples’

  Chapter 226: Partition

  Chapter 227: ‘Stretch out the hand of forbearance’

  Chapter 228: The Treaty

  Chapter 229: The split

  Chapter 230: Troubles north and south

  Chapter 231: Civil war

  Chapter 232: Green against Green

  Chapter 233: Divided Ulster

  Chapter 234: ‘Not an inch!’

  Chapter 235: Northern Ireland: depression years

  Chapter 236: ‘An empty political formula’

  Chapter 237: The Economic War

  Chapter 238: Democracy in peril

  Chapter 239: ‘Forget the unhappy past’

  Chapter 240: ‘Crying for a happier life’

  Chapter 241: The Emergency

  Chapter 242: The blitz and after

  Chapter 243: The inter-party government

  Chapter 244: The Mother and Child crisis

  Chapter 245: ‘What we have we hold’

  Chapter 246: The vanishing Irish

  Chapter 247: The years of stagnation

  Chapter 248: Church and state and the IRA

  Chapter 249: New brooms north and south

  Chapter 250: The O’Neill–Lemass meeting, 14 January 1965

  Epilogue

  References

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About Gill & Macmillan

  PREFACE

  In 2005 I was asked by BBC Radio Ulster to write 240 five-minute programmes to cover the history of Ireland from earliest times to 1939. These episodes were broadcast every weekday for a year in 2006–7. This book is largely based on the scripts for those programmes, together with an additional ten episodes and an epilogue to bring the history up to date. The aim of each broadcast was to tell a story from Irish history which was sufficiently self-contained for those listeners who had not heard the previous broadcast. In the same way the reader should be able to open this book at random to enjoy a fully understandable snippet of Irish history. The episodes, read in sequence, provide a narrative history of Ireland. Only after the last episode of the BBC series had been broadcast did I discover that the whole idea of relating the history of the island in numerous short episodes was that of Alison Finch, who subsequently produced all the programmes.

  Trawling through the archives is a core activity for the professional historian. Historians also must consult and build on the scholarly work of their predecessors and contemporaries. In a book of this scope, spanning all of the time that humans have been in Ireland, the author is especially reliant on the published findings of speciali
sts. I hope that these writers will consider acknowledgment of their work in the references and bibliography in part an expression of my gratitude. It has been a real privilege to be reminded of the vigorous good health of historical research in Ireland. Encountering gems, sometimes by accident, which have informed some of the episodes, has been a delight. For example, had I not been a member of the Clogher Historical Society, almost certainly I would not have come across the account by Ramon de Perellós, translated by Dorothy M. Carpenter, of his pilgrimage from Catalonia to Lough Derg in 1397 which I used in episodes 42 and 43.

  I urge young historians not to cast the works of Victorian historians too hastily aside. After all, some, such as Sir John Gilbert, had the opportunity to consult records subsequently destroyed in the Four Courts in 1922. Also nineteenth-century historians liked to quote contemporary documents at length—particularly useful for this book where I want the reader to have access to voices from the past. Thomas Wright, for example, in his History of Ireland published in 1870, includes long extracts from speeches and correspondence of leading figures in Irish political life in the eighteenth century not easily accessible elsewhere. And material useful to the historian can be found beyond libraries and record offices. Here are some examples.

  ‘I got the essay done!’ And a good essay it was too. A police officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, he explained with a broad smile that he had written it in the back of a Land Rover before going in, truncheon in hand, to deal with rioters in north Belfast. It was April 1969 and I was teaching adult students about the First World War in the Jaffe Centre, a former Jewish primary school on Belfast’s Cliftonville Road—a building subsequently reduced to ashes during convulsions accompanying the Drumcree crisis in July 1996. At the end of the class another student, Kathleen Page, came up to me with a single sheet of paper: this was a letter written by Herbert Beattie in July 1916 which vividly described the horrors of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. An extract from the letter can be read in Episode 220—no doubt the seventeen-year-old’s idiosyncratic spelling enabled the letter to escape his officer’s censoring pencil.

  I spent much of my spare time in my teens in the 1950s at the end of the west pier in Dún Laoghaire. Here I fished with former employees of the gasworks, who had been presented with orange-painted bicycles on retirement. In the winter dark, while rats formed a great semicircle round us (waiting for us to throw them an undersized whiting or two), one man gave me a vivid account of the great Dublin lock-out of 1913 and how members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police batoned people all round him when listening to Jim Larkin in O’Connell Street.

  Shortly after being asked to write articles for a Sunday newspaper to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme in 1966, I was rushed to hospital to have my appendix removed. After the operation I found six veterans of the battle in my ward, and one of them also had fought in the Boer War. Naturally, I recorded as many of their memories as I could. One of them recalled little: he was a Catholic who had enlisted in what had been a temperance battalion of the Ulster Volunteer Force, and he drank the tots of rum his comrades refused before going over the top. The former water keeper of the Argideen river in west Cork, Johnny Murphy, recounted in detail for me how in his youth a neighbouring family had resisted eviction by boiling up a cauldron of porridge and hurling spoonfuls of it at the bailiffs.