proposals to the king of Conacht was Daniel O’Bryen, king of Limerick, who was followed in the same generous design by Roger, son of Dunsleibhe, king of Ulster, Daniel Mac Carty, king of Desmond, Maolseachluin Beag, king of Meath, and by O’Rourke, king of O’Broin and O’Conmaine. But before any resolutions were formed upon this scheme, O’Connor, king of Conacht was unfortunately killed by an accident …9
This kind of denunciation particularly applied to the recent transfer of lands from Catholic to Protestant hands, a process he saw already happening in the early seventeenth century. Obviously, he did not live to see the wholesale transfer of nearly the entire island of Ireland and the expulsion of its entire Catholic ruling class that occurred later in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth, but his words were prescient. Furthermore, they helped to delegitimise the seventeenth-century land grab and keep the memory of it fresh in Irish people’s minds for over two centuries.
Keating had mediaeval standards of evidence. There is a wonderful attempt in the book to explain how it was that so much was known about the history of Ireland before the deluge since presumably everyone in Ireland was drowned, like nearly everything on the planet. He does distance himself from the account he gives, suggesting somewhat desperately that perhaps, being pagans, the scribes were informed by demons, or perhaps it was all written down in stone somewhere. Elsewhere he suggests that a few people survived despite not being on the Ark.10 He also mentions tentatively the legend of Tuan mac Cairell but does not relate it. Tuan, a son of a sixth-century king of Ulster, was represented in the mythology as a very long-lived antediluvian shape-changer who survived the inundation by turning into a fish which is later caught, fed to a princess to whom he is reborn and eventually grows up to tell the tale of Parthelon and company from personal memory.11
The main body of the book is a classic example of mediaeval macro-history. The Old Testament is accepted unquestioningly as an historical account, derived from Revelation, of the history of mankind since Adam and Eve, seen as living some six millennia earlier, and separated from us by the great deluge that flooded the entire planet some five thousand years previously. The Irish are claimed to be descended mainly from Scythia, seen as the source of the population of ancient Palestine and Judea, with a later admixture coming from Spain into Ireland led by Galamh, or Míl Easpáine, Miles Hispaniae or Soldier of Spain. Oddly enough, modern DNA testing confirms the existence of North Spanish ancestry among the modern population of Ireland, most of the Irish being now seen as descended from near Eastern migrants through Europe to these Islands. Possibly the prehistoric Spanish immigrants were blown in on ships by the prevailing westerly winds. Alternatively, it has been suggested speculatively by modern Celtic scholars that the Milesian legend echoes a faint memory of Roman foederati or barbarian allied troops coming into Ireland with Roman soldiering experience to set themselves up for life somewhere far away from the continent’s wars.
Besides the Bible, a major source of the book is the Lebor Gabala (Leabhar Ghabhála or Book of Invasions), a mythical history of Ireland put together between the sixth and twelfth centuries. It was designed in part to devise a fictional noble ancestry for the O’Neill dynasty so as to strengthen its claims to the High-Kingship of Ireland. Other sources included Acallam na Senórach (Conversations of the Ancients), Cogadh Gael re Gallaibh (The Wars of the Irish and the Vikings), Cambrensis’ Expugnatio Hiberniae (Conquest of Ireland), Flaithusa Eireann (Regnal Lists of Ireland) and Saltair Chaisil (Psalter of Cashel) together with an impressive list of manuscript books in Irish, English and Latin held at that time in various monasteries and great houses around Ireland. The narrative includes a boiled-down version of the narrative of the Táin Bó Chualnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) with its legendary war by the Men of Ireland on the men of Ulster and the heroic defence of Ulster by the solar hero Cú Chulain (‘The Hound of Culain’). It also covers the colonisation of western Scotland, and an almost endless listing of raids, battles, duels between champions and, eventually, the coming of Patrick in the fifth century, seen as the crucial event in Irish history. This rather contrasts with the modern nationalist view, which tends to see the Viking and Norman invasions as the crucial and disastrous main set of events. Keating argues for an Irish identity which includes all Christians loyal to the Roman faith and which explicitly excludes the recent Nua-Ghaill who happen to be mainly Protestant and therefore imperfectly Christian and almost pagan. They are also, of course, rather low-class folk.
The book circulated far and wide in manuscript in the seventeenth century, and was translated in full or in summary several times into English in its first two centuries.12 However, it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the full Irish and English texts were published in parallel translation. English-language versions were available by the early eighteenth century, most conspicuously represented by Dermod O’Connor’s Keating’s General History of Ireland, first published in 1723, reprinted many times and read widely by the emergent nationalist movement’s adherents in the nineteenth century with James Duffy’s Dublin reprints being much favoured. John O’Mahony, the famous Fenian leader, also tried his hand at a translation, published in New York in 1857.
FFE was used as a source by many later historical and pseudo-historical works, in particular by Roderick O’Flaherty’s Ogygia, a moderate and respectful history of Ireland, derived in great part from Keating. It dealt with events down to the eleventh century and was published originally in Latin in 1685. The book celebrates the long and learned intellectual tradition of the Celtic Irish, seen as one of the most ancient nations of the earth and one of the most distinguished. Hely’s English translation of Ogygia appeared in the early eighteenth century, and it was reprinted many times.13 Like FFE, it became grist to the nationalists’ mill in the following centuries.
Brendan Bradshaw, in a brilliant essay, has described Keating’s book as being, in effect, a rallying cry to a nascent Irish Catholic nation by providing it with an origin myth of benign and peaceful incursions into Ireland later betrayed by an illegitimate stealing of the land and polity of Ireland in Keating’s own century.14 It could be counter-argued that Keating was also the innocent legitimator of a definition of the Irish nation that excluded all non-Catholics from potential membership of that nation. Certainly, as Marc Caball has argued, he was Irish Catholicism’s leading intellectual, historian and poet of the seventeenth century.15 His poetry is still remembered, the most well-known being perhaps Patrick Pearse’s favourite, A Bhean lán de Stuaim (O woman of great subtlety).
Right up to the present, Keating’s best-known book has lived on, partly because it was the first major book to be ‘published’ in the modern Irish language and partly because it is a genuine source for mediaeval Irish writing, most of which is linguistically inaccessible to most modern Irish readers and some of which is no longer extant, having not survived the wars and destruction of the seventeenth-century ‘Taking of Ireland’ or the burning out of the Great Houses and their libraries by the anti-Treaty IRA in 1922–23. It was a standard text for undergraduates taking Irish language courses in Irish universities throughout the twentieth century. Keating’s influence has been extraordinarily persistent and wide. Eamon de Valera, for example, used Keating as late as 1947 as a source of abuse of his political opponents. Referring specifically to Oliver Flanagan, he compared the deputy to a mud-loving insect documented by Keating.16 To an unknowable extent, FFE has been the direct or indirect source of a kind of folklore that was once familiar to most Irish children. For better or worse, that particular folklore has now faded out. Much of the pseudo-history of traditionalist outfits like the IRA is directly or indirectly inspired by Geoffrey Keating.
TG
