I mean they really invaded Ireland, chopping heads off and stuff. It was all down to a boyo called Dermot MacMurragh, who had been the King of Leinster, meaning that he was no longer the King of Leinster and he was far from being pleased about it so he asked the Normans to help him out getting back in to his castle again. They did so and then decided that they might as well help themselves to the rest of Ireland.
Who were the Normans?
The Normans were Viking raiders who invaded (there's that word invaded again) Northern France in the 9th and 10th centuries and settled there. They were known as the Northmen, but because the english wasn't too good in France as they spoke French, they got called the Normans.
Do you see where I'm going here?
Over to England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when the Normans, formally known as the Northmen, defeated the Saxons who had come over from Germany and invaded (
) England. The Saxon King, Harold was killed when an arrow struck him in the eye and the rest is history.So the Normans, who were originally Vikings, could well have been related to the Vikings who invaded Ireland in the late 8th century because these Vikings were from Norway and therefore Northmen.
Anyway invaders didn't invade other lands and ask the people could they please have this or that because they really liked these things. They chopped heads off and stuff and burned what they couldn't take with them.
But to give credit where credit's due they established the likes of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick and gave names to many places across the county which are still in use today.
As for the rest of Ireland, Gaelic life went on as normal with the Gaels traditionally fighting each other instead of the invaders. That was until the High King of Ireland, Brian Boru, decided to take on the Vikings at Clontarf in 1014. He defeated them but then he got sucker-punched with a large axe by a Viking called Brodir while saying his prayers and killed stone-dead. Brian's younger brother, a fella called Wolf the Quarrelsome because he probably fell out with everyone, then fell out with Brodir by killing him.
So what happened to the Vikings and why aren't they still going round the likes of Dublin beating local people up, chopping off heads and stuff?
Because they eventually integrated into Irish society through marriage and trade and before you knew it you wouldn't have known that they were ever here.
It was the same with the Normans, who famously became more Irish than the Irish themselves (Níos Gaelaí ná na Gaeil féin). This so worried the English that they brought in the Statutes of Kilkenny to prevent the Normans from becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves. As for the Normans, they paid no heed to these laws and battered away becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves.
The fact is that our culture; language, music, mythology, sports; Gaelic Football, Camogie and Hurling - which is the oldest sport in the world - and Irish dancing is still as strong as it ever was. Irish Immigrants have taken our culture to the far corners of the earth with them. In fact Saint Patrick's Day is the most popular cultural holiday in the world.
Despite all this, the racists of the Irish far-right are able to scare people with bullshit about foreigners invading (
) Ireland and a Plantation of Muslims who would impose their religion and laws on us and before you know it we'll be a minority in our own country.They are of course talking about immigrants and refugees fleeing wars not of their making. These people are not the f*cking Vikings nor the Normans yet incredibly people are actually believing them.
Look back at what the Irish people have endured at the hands of real f*cking foreigners and the fact that we are still here with our culture still intact.
Then look in the mirror and take a redder for having believed the utter bullshit of many of the worst cretins in Irish society when you should have known better.
I am confident that the children and grandchildren of those immigrants and refugees who decide to settle here in our beautiful country will in time become more Irish than we the Irish ourselves.
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Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman. Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie |
And before that the Gaels invaded from Galicia in North Western Spain, after the Roman conquest of Britain.
ReplyDelete"I am confident that the children and grandchildren of those immigrants and refugees who decide to settle here in our beautiful country will in time become more Irish than we the Irish ourselves."
ReplyDelete400 years on from the plantations of Ulster - how is that working out? We literally have examples we can point to where this ended up terribly, where the foreigners did not become "more Irish than the Irish." We still live with the consequences of it today.
"immigrants and refugees fleeing wars not of their making"
Some of the top countries for those seeking international protection in Ireland: Algeria, Georgia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Egypt. What wars?
"we are still here with our culture still intact."
But it isn't intact. What were Connolly, Pearse and O Cadhain talking about? Or the articles on cultural imperialism in An Glor Gafa? Republicans are now revising history to suit the required narratives to facilitate the deliberate demographic transformation of Ireland for the purposes of global capital. People like the author are deluding themselves. We're walking into a disaster.
Fleeing war in Germany , France , Belgium etc on a multi thousand mile trip to Ireland ? Ireland is a mere suburb of dives such as Manchester , Birmingham , London , Marseille . National identity / culture has been largely lost during the past two decades . Anyone denying it is living in cloud cuckoo land . How many elections has / will the author stood in ? He would finish with nul points . Sacre bleu !
ReplyDeleteIreland a suburb of dives such as London, Birmingham, Manchester (homes to millions of Irish descent) and Marseille.. Exactly what purists such as Karadzic and Mladic thought of Sarajevo a melting pot of difference. Sounds like racism to me.
DeleteBarry, what does your counterpoint even mean? We must accept Ireland going into meltdown and potentially a massive social/political crisis and we must say nothing and present no analysis because Irish went abroad in the past and that anyone who says something is comparable to ex-Yugoslav war criminals? Do you, and the author of the original post, realise this moralising is quickly losing its effectiveness?
DeleteDo you have any serious suggestions?
I don't want Belfast to become a London or Birmingham. I don't think that makes me Slobodan Milosevic.
I am not much of a nationalist admittedly and might not notice these things but what evidence are you going to present that national culture or identity has been lost over the past two decades? Is it because a black athlete might represent Ireland in the Olympics?
DeleteRed Ron-----Id be interested in reading an article by you for TPQ on why you have issues with the local Taliban---immigrants (legal or other)....and why they piss you off ....
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that the biggest mouth-pieces normally hide behind fake names. What have they got to hide I wonder?
ReplyDeleteThe good people of Carrickmacross & Letterkenny don't concur . How many councillors do woke R S F have in the # 26 counties ? # Out of touch
DeleteDixie - like yourself, I have long been firmly of the view that people should use their own identity in debate and discussion on the blog rather than conceal it behind veils. It is simple human courtesy.
DeleteThe blog while holding to the view that invisible people have invisible rights, permits monikers if they bring ideas rather than insults. I no longer bother discussing matters on the blog with monikers no matter how useful their ideas unless they have been here a while or I know the identity of the person. Life is too short to be arguing with strangers on the net FFS.
However, it is the right of every one of our writers who do not use a veil to insist on a level playing field. In which case, if the veiled want to interact with the unveiled, they have to unveil - simple as. Or they can post their comments on Bates and Wilkes.
People can also find the blog guidelines there.
"I don't want Belfast to become a London or Birmingham. I don't think that makes me Slobodan Milosevic."
ReplyDeleteEh, I think for most of its existence, Belfast was a much, much worse place to be than either London or Birmingham. It's status as a desirable place to live has, and I attribute no correlation here, risen inline with the number of people born elsewhere who have come to live here.
It's also interesting how people point to the most economically and culturally dynamic city in the British Isles, and arguably Europe, as some kind of disaster. And whilst we're at it, why not point to places like LA, Manhattan, or how many other multi-cultural cities in America and claim they're some types of dystopian environments?
Now, I've not lived in Belfast for almost 40 years, but visit often. I still can't get used to the number of non-white faces that I see. I can't say it makes me uncomfortable, but it does do something, and I'm not exactly sure what. It feels a little like they're here but don't really understand the place that they chose to live. That doesn't make me resent them (and I'm aware that I'm speaking in mass generalisations), but it makes me feel like something, and I can't even say what, is being lost. That thing that I feel is being lost, I don't know if I even want it to be kept. But it's something - a shared sense of knowing, of experience, whatever. But then again, I miss Belfast being a city seemingly immune to commercialisation. "Progress" brought identikit culture to Belfast in a way that Christopher Owens could describe better than me.
I'm almost certainly doing recent arrivals a huge disservice. I made it a major point of learning as much about the country I moved to as possible. I was the only one in my class who knew all the verses two songs in the patriotic canon, and I was the only person born outside of the country. I echo Dixie's point that many immigrants will adopt many Irishisms for themselves.
For various reasons, none of which have anything in common with the far-right list of rationales, I think large immigration is *not* a good idea. But attack the policy, not the people. And be rigorously honest about what it is that actually bothers you.
Muhammad Ali and Barrack Obama have Irish blood, and they're proud of it. JD Vance claimed it, but doesn't.
Brandon, I think where I disagree is that I don't simply see societies and people as interchangeable units as you seem to do when discussing London, etc. The "Boriswave" was a mass social and economic experiment to increase growth after Covid. It was a total failure. The English are a minority in their own capital city. This is not the future that I want for Ireland. "Dynamic" doesn't cut it for me.
DeleteUpwards of a quarter million children may have been abused by "grooming gangs." If Barry is looking for a Yugoslav analogy, he might have referred to that?
I believe in plurality over diversity - i.e. recognising cultural difference. As I said above, Ulster planters have still not assimilated four centuries on and the republican approach of insisting that they're merely
hoodwinked Irishmen has largely not worked. Why will it work with peoples from even more distant ethnicities and cultures?
Chungus, having grown up in a segregated, monochrome society namely NI, one of the things I like about living in England is the daily and normalising sight of black and brown faces. Red Ron takes a Birmingham spot the White man stance.
ReplyDeleteChungus, first of all the Ulster Plantation was forced dispersal of the native population by an invading power. Modern immigration to Ireland is entirely voluntary. Secondly to use the grooming gangs scandal as a weapon against migration a d diversity is a weapon from the Tommy Robinson and Reform playbook. Where did you get the figure of 250,000 from? What ethnicity were all the church, football and scouts Paedos?
ReplyDeleteBarry, I'm having to repeat the same point over and over. This sort of finger wagging simple does not work anymore. I have nothing to do with Tommy Robinson and don't know too much about him. Same for Farage, Reform. I've been a republican activist since I was a teenager so these slurs won't stick. There is clearly a cultural/religious element to the so called "grooming gangs" but you could not care less because the mass rape of young working class girls by Pakistanis is something you just don't care about.
DeleteAlthough I get the point Dixie is making, I can’t help but feel that the conversation around ‘culture’ and ‘invasion’ is superficial and masks some severe fissures within public life and public thinking.
ReplyDeleteThere are people in this conversation who simply do not want a non-white face in Ireland. Obviously deeply racist and stupid, so there’s no point trying to reason or argue with such types. Then there are the majority: people who have no such qualms and are happy to see people from around the world come to Ireland and make a new life for themselves and their families.
However, a combination of factors (unfiltered mass immigration, the refugee crisis brought on by wars in Syria and Ukraine, the housing crisis, stagnant economy, the decline of public life, fraying social bonds, the rise of a narcissistic worldview via social media, a censorious culture) have created a situation where these same people now feel alienated: the country has gone through seismic change in the last number of years at an unprecedented rate.
As I wrote elsewhere “…coming out of Church/State led repression to be a more secular society that has embraced the best and worst excesses of capitalism through the Celtic Tiger, EU meddling and mass immigration (particularly in the last five years). Usually, such changes happen over a longer period of time but all of these have been within people's lifetimes. As a result, a lot of existentialist questions have been asked: what does it mean to be Irish? What was the point of fighting for independence if we've willingly given it away to Brussels? Have we become estranged from our neighbours and communities?”
All of these are tied up with the question of immigration and, for me, commentators not engaging with these trains of thought will never be able to fully grasp the concerns of those who have no problem with different ethnicities making Ireland their home but see the speed of such change as capitalism on steroids.
Another truth is that, for nationalists and mainstream republicans, their pro-EU direction (which acts as a facsimile of a united Ireland) has helped create this problem. Since the likes of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are openly ashamed of Ireland’s recent history, it makes perfect sense for them to align with the EU as it was set up as a post-history project by capitalists who blamed democracy for what happened in Nazi Germany.
Because of this, it allows the political class to fulfil their fantasies of being globe-trotting internationalists, it allows mainstream republicans to consider themselves better and more sophisticated than Britain and it allows nationalists travelling across the border for the day to feel oh so cosmopolitan. All of whom care not one iota for the newly arrived immigrants or the long term residents who are wrestling with the concerns listed above.
Would anyone really care about the ethnicity of recent arrivals if there wasn't an unbearable strain on local public services like housing, health and jobs? I don't think so. I prefer to see the good in people granted but unregulated migration isn't good for anyone...except those who profit from this state of affairs.
ReplyDeleteThe racists would care. These things are not what motivate them. We would still hear from them conspiracy theories about Great Replacement and New Plantation. The people who have genuine concerns about immigration, and there are many, would not care much. I see the difference as: the former are motivated by hatred and the latter by concern.
DeleteBut wouldn't the hatred be nullified by the addressing of the concerns?
DeleteReading through the thread, the problem with Belfast appears to be to many Belfast people in it, the problem with Ireland, to many Irish people in it, the problem with London, to many English people in it. If only we knew sooner.
ReplyDeleteAren't we all very lucky that in response to the last crash the EU, bank of England and the fed did this thing called quantative easing were they printed aload of cash and released it in to the economy
And aren't we lucky that in response and even anticipation of the inflationry pressures of such a move that we then have quantative easing but with people with the facilitation of huge population movements. The point probably being to focus inflation to the lower sections of the economy through stimulating demand for property but on the plus side, some places are no longer homogonous, if they ever were.
And isn't it great that with all the horribleness and false division in the world that for a brief moment, that both the revolutionaries and finance capital can be in aligment on this and both get a great laugh at Pat and Biddy for getting worked up for noticing their surroundings are shifting.
Everyone has their bundle to carry. Each has their 'circle of concerns'. The more discerning though recognise where and how they may exert influence. They recognise and realistically accept limitations. They direct their focus soley upon their 'circle of influence'. Doing so, they apply their energy and resources to what's realistic and achievable.
ReplyDeleteWe've a sizeable Brazilian population in Gort for close on 30 years. We've Pakistani's in Ballyhaunis for probably longer. The Halal meat workers have their Mosque for decades. There's a large Mosque in Galway City too. We have Philipino nurses propping our hospitals and Indian carers likewise in our nursing homes. We've Polish shops in many larger towns Polish style sections in many of supermarkets. We've become a multicultural society. That's not going to change. The world has become more mobile. The people of war torn regions are of necessity on the move. Access to the Internet makes the West seem attractive to those across the global south.
These challenges aren't going away.