Who is Irish?

Terminology is always important in any academic field. In my case, one piece of terminology which has proven quite difficult is the very term ‘Irish’. Given that I am working on identity it should not really be all that surprising that a difficult piece of terminology is itself an identity fundamental to my research.

Everyone in Ireland, should they ever ask themselves the question, would probably have their own opinion on what is to be ‘Irish’ and who would meet their own imagined criteria. There are plenty of criteria that could be suggested, from the Irish language to the GAA, to religion (or lack thereof) or something as mundane as going to the pub. These can also be quite serious, in how it impacts national politics and Northern Ireland or how migration might yet change or force us to reconsider our ideas of Irishness.

In seventeenth-century texts, however, you don not often get authors telling you outright what it is to be Irish or even who they consider the ‘Irish’ themselves to be. We could get some vague hints and try and piece it together. The Irish-language poetry of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair for example gives plenty of references to ‘hairy Saxons’ with names like ‘Gammer [‘Grandma’] Ruth and Goodman [the head of the household] Cabbage’, implied to all have been former followers of Cromwell: protestant, crude, and unfit to live in Ireland.  We might think Ó Bruadair imagines Irish people to be something else but then this view is not unique to Irish-language texts. Sources complain about the ‘mechanical men’ [those that would work with their hands] that had risen to prominence following the Cromwellian invasion, displacing those who derived their station from being born into well-connected families.

Social class and family origins tend to be the dividing lines which are suggested or pointed to most frequently in histories from the later seventeenth centuries. By the 1660s, the term Éireannach had already gained some acceptance among Irish-speakers and some of the older ‘ethnic’ divisions had started to break down under the pressures of the 1640s and ‘50s. Aidan Clarke’s 1966 The Old English in Ireland describes how the ‘Old English’, the descendants of the first Norman and medieval English settlers (among Welsh, Flemish, and others), found their political fates tied in with the ‘Old Irish’, those that we might call the traditional ‘Gaelic Irish’. Bound together by their common religion, with most being still Catholic, and by marriage and family ties in many cases it is possible to talk about a ‘New Irish’ identity being born.

John Lynch, for example, proudly considered himself and his family examples of this common bond. A Catholic (a priest and archdeacon of Tuam from 1631), he himself could be considered an Old Englishmen as the Lynches of Galway had arrived there following Henry II’s invasion (though Lynch can also be found as an Anglicisation of Ó Loingsigh, a family mentioned by Lynch as lords of Uaithne in Tipperary). According to Lynch in his biography of his cousin, Francis Kirwan – Catholic Bishop of Killala – the Lynches were descended from Hugh de Lacy, twelfth-century Earl of Meath. He praises Kirwan’s ancestry, noting that he was the son of Joanna Lynch (and so descended from de Lacy) and Matthew Kirwan, whose family first appear as Ó Ciardhubháin. According to Lynch, the Uí Chiardubháin were themselves descended from the Uí Conchobair (O’Connor) kings of Connacht and the last high-kings of Ireland, making them a prime, genealogical example of this ‘New Irish’ identity.

The Irish Catholic Confederation of the 1640s provides more examples of how this ‘New Irish’ might be understood. Many of its most prominent members were from Old English families, like the lawyer Nicholas Plunkett (whose nephew Oliver would be martyred in 1675 and beatified in 1970), while others were thoroughly Gaelic Irish such as Owen Roe O’Neill, a veteran of the Spanish wars on the European continent and nephew of the exiled Hugh O’Neill. One Confederate, another Galwegian called Patrick Darcy, shows just how complicated determining ‘Irishness’ can be. Coming from a well-to-do Galwegian family and trained at the London Inns of Court, Darcy is often labelled ‘Old English’. However, he himself had commissioned the genealogist and translator Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh to prove that he was descended from the Gaelic Irish Ó Dorchaidh family. The anonymous author of the ‘Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction’ used this ancestry when criticising Darcy’s royalist politics and Old English loyalties, suggesting that he had in essence ‘forgotten’ his ‘Irishness’.

So, when talking about the Catholic Irish in the seventeenth century it becomes difficult to disentangle ‘Old English’ and ‘Old Irish’ and ‘New Irish’ does seem to become ever-more appropriate. But, you might ask, what about the Protestant Irish?

This is perhaps a topic for another post, but I would draw your attention to the image at the top of this page. It is the title page for Sir James Ware’s 1654 De Hibernia (this is from the 1658 second edition) and depicts ‘Old Ireland’ personified, or an early version of the anthropomorphised ‘Hibernia’ as we might understand her. Standing alone, armed and proud, she is accompanied only by her hounds* amidst a pastoral scene of (literal) milk and honey. Ware could be considered the epitome of the ‘New English’ in Ireland. In contrast to the mostly Catholic Old English, these New English were those who had arrived after the Reformation and embodied the new ethos of English rule in Ireland. Ware, a protestant, was the son of Sir James Ware elder who had been posted to Ireland as secretary to one of Elizabeth I’s Lord Deputies. He took a keen interest in Irish history and employed Irish scholars (such as Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh) to provide and translate material for him. It is people like Ware who would eventually become those that we tend to call the Anglo-Irish of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are a topic for another day. What can be said is that their identification as Irish was and is complicated but should serve as proof of just how complicated it can be to be Irish.

*I am of the opinion that these dogs, often identified as greyhounds, are meant to be wolfhounds and that there was not so much of a distinction between the two breeds. This too might be a topic for another post!