Ireland Journey | Travel to the Emerald Isle and visit Ireland without leaving home

The Aisling

Vision Poetry

The “aisling” is an interesting genre of Irish poetry drawing from three different streams of tradition: the pre-Christian belief in a “goddess of sovereignty,” a French tradition in which the poet claims to have had a vision of a supernatural woman, and the tradition of embedding political commentary in popular song and verse.

The pagan Gaels of ancient Ireland believed in a myth of sacral kingship in which the king ensures the prosperity of the tribe by marrying the goddess of the tribal territory in a symbolic ritual. This goddess was known by many different names, but scholars often refer to her as the “sovereignty” goddess. There was a different manifestation of the sovereignty goddess for each distinct tribal territory, but thee was also one for the entire island of Ireland.

In the aisling, the poet describes a vision in which a “heavenly woman” appears to him and laments for the loss of her true king. Of course, the poet cannot call her a goddess after the Christian conversion of Ireland, so he uses the euphemism “heavenly woman” instead. This woman is the sovereignty goddess, and by saying that she has lost her king she is in effect denying the legitimacy of the reigning (British) monarch and his claim to authority over Ireland. In the aisling poem, the most ancient pagan symbolism is used to bolster Irish resistance to British rule, more than a thousand years after the formal end of pagan religion in Ireland.

Boycotts and Rent Strikes

Irish Resistance Tactics

The “boycott” was one of the most effective tactics used by the Irish Land League in its struggles for land reform in the nineteenth century. In its original form, the boycott was an expression of community solidarity, not individual opinion. Many people today engage in boycotts in an effort to be “ethical consumers.” For instance, they may choose not to purchase any chocolate other than fair trade chocolate in an effort to avoid contributing to the child slavery problem in the cocoa farming regions.

Individual choices of this sort rarely have dramatic results, but the Irish boycott sometimes did. That's because it was never just an individual choice, nor could an individual choose to ignore or defy a community boycott. If a local chapter of the Land League made the decision to stage a boycott, the ostracism of the targeted individual was all-encompassing. For instance, if a landlord was evicting people or charging excessive rents, he might suddenly find that no one in the area would sell him bread or butter at any price, no one would do any chores for him, no one would even acknowledge his existence.

Those who attempted to defy the boycott would be ostracized themselves, and in some cases threatened or beaten or even shot. Once the community had made the decision to enforce the boycott, no person could stand aside. It was the Land League that often made the choice to use this tactic, but if the community as a whole refused to enforce it, it would have no power. Solidarity of the community as a whole was the basis of the boycott.

The Irish Pub

Originally, Not So Irish

Pub culture is such a defining feature of Irish life that the “Irish pub” has now gone global, with three or four (of varying degrees of authenticity) in any major city. It might surprise you, then, to learn that the pub was originally introduced to Ireland specifically to destroy traditional Irish culture, and that its presence in the country was bitterly resented for a long time.

Why is this? Because the historical Irish equivalent of the pub was the “hostelry,” an inn or public house located at a crossroads for the convenience of travelers. The upkeep of a hostelry was paid for by the local petty king or chieftain out of the cattle tribute paid to him by his underlings. In effect, ancient Irish “pubs” were a socialist institution paid for by taxes! As a result, it cost nothing at all to either sleep, eat or drink at a hostel.

In addition, chiefs and kings were expected to keep open house, providing free food and drink to anyone and everyone who wished to visit them. A king who didn't keep open house would never be able to expect his followers to obey him, as traditional Gaelic culture rated hospitality as one of the highest possible values, and misers were despised. Taking the chief's food and drink put an obligation on the visitor to assist him when needed, so the ability of the chief to raise an army when he wanted to was largely dependent on his perceived generosity. Chiefs also depended on the ability of merchants and other travelers to move relatively easily through the Irish countryside, because there is no trade at all if travel is impossible. Kings maintained hostels both to demonstrate their generosity to their followers and to facilitate trade.

The English invaders wanted to break the power of the Irish chiefs and regional kings, and they tried many different strategies to achieve this goal. One was to introduce what we would now think of as a cash economy or the beginnings of capitalism. When you go out to a pub, you don't get free food and drink or a free place to sleep- but you don't owe anybody your loyalty for it either! You just pay the landlord in exchange for his services. By introducing the institution of the pub to Ireland, the English were able to weaken the power of the local Irish rulers, thus facilitating their own conquest.

Medieval Irish poems on the topic show how shocking this was to the Gaelic temperament. The fact that English people charged you money for food and drink, instead of just giving it to you for free, was considered proof positive of how awful they really were!

The Irish Mob

From The Gangs Of New York To Organized Crime

Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was home to rural factions or “fighting gangs” such as the Caravats and the Shanavests. These factions would stage huge battles with the shillelagh, the traditional Irish fighting stick, as the primary weapon.

When Irish immigrants came to America, they organized into street gangs much like the factions back home. Gangs such as the Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits ruled over different sections of nineteenth-century New York City, an era memorialized in “Gangs of New York.” Toward the end of that era, the Gophers controlled the largely Irish neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, which remained their base through the early part of the twentieth century.

Owney “The Killer” Madden was a boss of the Gophers from around 1910 onward. Once, when surrounded by gunmen from the Hudson Dusters, he contemptuously said something to the effect of “Who did youse guys ever bump off?” before they shot him six times. He survived the attempted hit, and took his revenge in short order. During Prohibition, Madden became a powerful bootlegger and boxing promoter.

Eddie McGrath was a member of Madden's gang (no longer the Gophers, but the Irish Mob) who took over Hell's Kitchen after Madden retired. McGrath was succeeded in turn by Hughie Mulligan and then by Mickey Spillane, who controlled the Irish Mob in Hell's Kitchen until he was driven out by the ultra-violent Westies faction under Jimmy Coonan in the 1970s. Thus, the rural factions such as the Caravats led directly to the urban street gangs such as the Gophers, which developed over time into Irish-American organized crime or the “Irish Mob.”

The same process played out in a number of other American cities, fading out only with the gradual disappearance of ethnically distinct Irish neighborhoods. There are still remnants of the Irish Mob even today.

The Ard Ri

Ireland's High King

If you read older histories of ancient Ireland, you might think the country was governed by a highly organized feudal system of high kings, regional kings and tribal kings. That's because most of the older histories took some of their sources too literally, accepting their picture of a highly structured society. The reality was not quite so organized.

The ancient Irish king or “Ri” was not so much a political ruler of a territory as a living symbol of the people's relationship to their land. In other words, the Ri was a “sacred king,” and he was believed to be married to the sovereignty goddess who represented the land. The duties of a Ri were partly symbolic and partly political. He was supposed to guarantee the fertility of the crops by observing certain arbitrary ritual taboos and carrying out other ritualized actions. Some of these actions involved actual political/military leadership, such as leading the forces of the tribe or “tuath” in its raids on other tribes.

Sometimes a battle between two tribes ended with one side in a position of clear superiority over the other. When this happened, the losing tribe would sometimes acknowledge the Ri of the winning tribe as having some sort of hypothetical authority over their own Ri. This might involve a payment of tribute (usually in the form of cattle) or an obligation to support the dominant tribe in future battles (which might or might not be honored depending on circumstances) but didn't really involve any actual political control.

If a tuath was dominant over a province or region, its Ri might describe himself as the king of that entire province, but he still had next to no authority outside of his own tribe. He was just the biggest, baddest dog in the yard, and he could expect to be respected for it- but he could not expect to be consistently obeyed. Because the ancient ritual center of Tara was considered the “omphalos” or sacred center of the entire island, the Ri who controlled Tara would sometimes claim to be “Ard Ri,” or high king of all Ireland. Because this was a coveted title, it was often fought over, but it still didn't carry any authority to actually control events outside of the Ard Ri's own tribe. Over many centuries, various Ard Ri such as the famous Brian Boru succeeded in progressively expanding the power of the institution, until it resembled a true kingship to a limited degree. An Ard Ri like Brian Boru could call upon warriors from all over the island to enforce his will- but his enemies could raise a force just as large as he could, so he still didn't exercise anything like true centralized power. Authority in the Gaelic world remained decentralized.

The Fili

Remnant of the Druids?

When Christianity came to ancient Ireland, what happened to the druids? They can't just have been wiped out, because there was no centralized state power structure that could do such a thing, and in any case the Irish conversion was largely peaceful.

In Celtic Gaul, there were supposed to have been three intellectual classes: the druids, the bards and the oracles or prophets. “Bard,” in medieval Wales, meant a high-status professional poet. But in medieval Ireland, a high-ranked poet was called a “fili,” and the term “bard” was reserved for a common minstrel. Why the difference in terminology?

Many Celtic scholars now believe that the fili and the druids were the exact same class, and that those druids who were willing to accommodate themselves to the new Christian religious landscape simply changed what they called themselves and continued on in much the same role as before. Fili were seen as having many strange powers, and the medieval Irish church was always trying to get them to drop their more overtly pagan practices. For instance, fili were supposed to practice a ritual where they made offerings to spirits- in other words, a pagan religious sacrifice- and then went to sleep to seek a prophetic dream. This was one of the “druidic” practices banned by the church, presumably only once it was well-established enough to be able to challenge the lingering remnants of druidism among the elite poets.

The fili, like the druids before them, had tremendous power and influence in Gaelic society, a status they only lost when the Gaelic warrior aristocracy was finally destroyed by the English. The Hebridean writer Martin Martin of Skye, writing in the early eighteenth century, goes so far as to claim that Highland chiefs received their inauguration at the hands of the local “druid” even at that late date. Scholars have tended to gloss over his use of that word, since there can't possibly have been any druids in the strict sense in the eighteenth-century Hebrides. In all likelihood, Martin is referring to a fili, but it is possible that the term “druid” was sometimes being used for the poets at that time, which would strongly support the idea that they were originally the same thing.

Yola

Lost Language of Wexford

What languages are spoken in Ireland? Well, there's Irish (a Gaelic language), English (a Germanic language with a lot of Latin and French mixed in), and Hiberno-English (a dialect of English with some Gaelic elements mixed in). There also used to be a language called Yola, which was spoken in parts of County Wexford until the nineteenth century.

When the Anglo-Norman warlord Strongbow invaded Ireland nearly nine hundred years ago, most of his followers spoke a form of English- but it was a very different form of English from the language we speak today. Strongbow's followers spoke “Middle English,” the language of Chaucer's “Canterbury Tales.” As the centuries went by, Middle English in England itself developed into modern English. In rural areas of Ireland where the descendents of the Norman invaders neither “went native” by adopting Gaelic culture nor were exposed on a daily basis to new developments in the language, their version of Middle English kept developing on its own. It ended up becoming a distinct language known as Yola, which was definitely not mutually comprehensible with “English” as such. For one thing, it kept using “thee” and “thou” long after those words dropped out of regular English usage- but that's really only a small part of it. Many Yola words bear only a faint resemblance to their English equivalents, such as “fade” for “what,” “zo” for “so,” and “teil” for “ails.” Here's a verse of song in Yola with its English translation:

“Fade teil thee zo lournagh, co Joane, zo knaggee?

Th' weithest all curcagh, wafur, an cornee.

Lidge w'ouse an a milagh, tis gaay an louthee:

Huck nigher; y'art scuddeen; fartoo zo hachee?

What ails you so melancholy, quoth John, so cross?

You seem all snappish, uneasy, and fretful.

Lie with us on the clover, 'tis fair and sheltered:

Come nearer; you're rubbing your back; why so ill tempered?”

As you can see, Yola was far from a mere dialect of English- it was a completely separate language. Unfortunately for the linguistic diversity, it died out in the 1800s as Hiberno-English became standard even in the previously Yola-speaking areas of County Wexford.

Solidarity

Lost Tradition of Early Irish Republicanism

One of the tragedies of Irish history is that the solidarity of early Irish Republicanism was not maintained over time. A movement begun largely by Irish Protestants became associated more and more with Irish Catholics alone, and even with sectarian hatred and violence between the two religions.

The first generation of Irish Republicans would have been heartbroken to learn of this development. Wolf Tone, Robert Emmet and many of the other early leaders of the United Irishmen were from Protestant backgrounds. The organization was called the “United” Irishmen because it was supposed to unite all creeds in a common struggle, inspired by the principles of the American and French Revolutions. Violence and hatred between Catholic and Protestant, Irish and Scots-Irish, had already plagued the country for generations. The United Irishmen wanted to overcome that, to unite both segments of the country behind a common cause of patriotism, national independence, and greater democracy.

Even the flag of the Irish Republic- flown proudly by the IRA and hated fiercely by its Loyalist enemies- reflects this ideal of national solidarity. The green, white and orange of the flag stands for “peace and unity between Catholic and Protestant.” If the goals and ideals of Wolf Tone and Robert Emmet had not been crushed, there would be no tradition of two mutually antagonistic types of Irishman. Instead there would be a unified national tradition of solidarity, which would now be nearly as venerable as that of American democracy at more than two hundred years of growth and development.

The Red Branch Knights

Ulster's Legendary Defenders

The legends of many cultures include special bands of elite warriors, usually centered around a heroic king. This is not surprising, because the social and military structure of ancient societies often depended on groups of warriors to defend the community from outside threats. Naturally, the brave deeds of these warriors would sometimes become legends in the process of storytelling, and those legends would be used to inspire future generations of warriors.

One such example in Ireland is the “Red Branch Knights,” the circle of warriors who defended ancient Ulster from the rest of Ireland in the Ulster Cycle of Irish legend. The most famous of the Red Branch Knights was the hero Cuchullain, who was a kind of Irish Hercules. As a son (or even an avatar) of the Celtic god Lugh of the Long Arm, Cuchullain had many powers not available to the other Red Branch Knights, so he naturally dominates the Ulster Cycle.

However, there are a number of other Red Branch warriors with stories of their own, including the noble and doomed Ferdiad, the malicious Bricriu the Venomous and the tragic Naoise, the lover of Deirdre. Some of the stories of the Ulster Cycle have been lost over time, and based on the surviving titles we know some of these were probably about Red Branch warriors other than Cuchullain. Some scholars even believe that Cuchullain was a later addition to the Ulster Cycle, inserted by a tribe of Gaulish immigrants known as the Setanti. This is supported by two main facts: one is that Cuchullain's childhood name was supposed to have been “Setanta,” and the other is that the earliest references to the Ulster Cycle's “Tain” epic do not mention his name.

The Kern

Irish Guerrilla Fighters

Imagine a man wearing a brightly-colored tunic with unbelievably baggy sleeves. His hair hangs in long bangs over his eyes. He carries a war dart- a kind of javelin- and wears a long dagger at his side. This startling figure prides himself on his extreme ferocity as a fighting man, and rumor has it that he makes a regular practice of taking his slain enemies' heads as trophies of his victory. He specializes in guerilla warfare- hitting the enemy hard and fast, and then escaping into the bogs and forests.

This man is a kern, an Irish foot soldier of the Middle Ages. Part of his fierce reputation is deliberately cultivated. It pays to have people scared of you if you fight for a living. Part of it simply anti-Gaelic prejudice on the part of English commentators. Part of it is due to the sheer spitefulness and violence of warfare on a frontier. When kern raid an English settlement, burn down houses, steal cattle and kill anyone who gets in the way, you can hardly expect the survivors to view them kindly. Of course, the English used the exact same tactics against the native Irish, and even employed kerns to do it, but people with a stake in an issue rarely consider it fairly or objectively.

The kern, in his own era, was seen as a figure of savage violence, a barbarian warrior. That picture would not be fair to the sophistication or complexity of the Gaelic culture from which he sprang. The easiest way to understand the kern is to consider what he was up against. The Gaelic chiefs who resisted conquest by the Anglo-Normans did not have the resources to field large armies of heavy cavalry backed by volleys of arrows. In order to fight back against those kinds of armies, they were obliged to use the resources they did have: rough terrain, suitable for highly mobile forces of lightly-armed raiders specializing in hit and run warfare. The kern was essentially just the product of a specific military situation.

Pages