In 1991, I published The Ulster People under my Pretani Press imprint. My friend, Professor Fréchet of the Sorbonne wished to translate it into French but his death prevented that, and the fact that some Irish academics wanted to burn it dissuaded me from bringing out a second edition. Twenty years later, on January 27th, 2011, Holocaust Memorial Day, I visited the Exhibition on the Millisle Jewish Refugees in the North Down Museum and was geatly moved by it. I wrote a comment under James O’Fee’s one in the book of comments provided by Sandra Baillie. Sandra has written in Presbyterians in Ireland summarising her prejudices as an Irish academic about the “Cruithin Myth” and the fact that ” this story has not been taken very seriously by academics or the general public”. I also bought Marsden Fitzsimmons beautiful little book on Travels with Columbanus , which mentions neither the Cruthin nor Mary O’Fee. Furthermore Marsden and Sandra have obviously not read The Ulster People , or know that those academics wished to burn it. But times have now changed as we witness the rebirth of Pretania, the obvious result of Brexit, so here it is again.
I will start with my native Conlig, named in Gaelic as the “Stone of the Hound” after the Standing Stone above the village. We have no evidence of human habitation in Ireland before the retreat of the ice-sheets which covered almost the whole of the island until the end of the Ice Age. The first settlers arrived around 10,500 BC. They probably came from the western shores of Britain, the archaeological evidence tending to suggest either from Galloway in south-west Scotland or Cumbria in northern England. These flint-users were hunters, fishermen and food-gatherers who lived predominantly along the coast or in river valleys such as the Bann. They are our primary ancestors, the ancient Pretani, accounting for 90% of our genes.
In the period after 4000 BC, during the Neolithic or Late Stone Age, farming was introduced. Crops were grown, animals kept, and many new types of implement were introduced. For the first time man began to leave his mark on the thickly wooded Irish countryside.The tombs and monuments made by these Neolithic farmers are called ‘megalithic’ (i.e. made of large stones), such as the court cairns and dolmens. Ireland is extremely rich in such antiquities, with over 1,200 stone monuments surviving today. The court cairns, which are mainly located in the north of the island, are also found in south-west Scotland, and Séan O Ríordáin commented: “The tombs and the finds from them form a continuous province joined rather than divided by the narrow waters of the North Channel.” This connection with Scotland is evidence of the ancient link which has existed throughout history between what W.C. Mackenzie described as “two great and intimately associated peoples”.
Some of the largest and most impressive monuments made by the Neolithic Irish are located in the Boyne valley, the best-known example being the great passage tomb at Newgrange, of which Michael Herity wrote: “Newgrange is the most famous of a group of over 300 passage graves built in cemeteries throughout Ireland [which] are monuments to the most capable organisers, architects and artists ever to have entered and influenced Ireland in the whole of prehistory.” New techniques in dating have suggested that Newgrange could have been built around 3350 BC, making it one of the earliest stone buildings in the world. The legacy of Ireland’s megalithic builders is of fundamental relevance to us today, for, as Fleure pointed out, “The megaliths are not a matter of a vanished people and a forgotten civilisation; they belong to the core of our heritage as western Europeans.” P.A.O. Síocháin also wrote: “No longer can we look on these as cold stones from a long dead era. Warm hands once held and gave them meaning and purpose; touch them and you touch your past.”
Of the Neolithic period Peter Woodman wrote: “This part of Ireland’s prehistory lasted nearly two thousand years and in that period some remarkable changes took place, changes which probably do more than any others to create the Ireland which enters history several thousand years later.” The legacy of these early settlers of Ireland is very much our heritage, for, despite the seemingly great distance in time which separates us from them, we are in reality just the latest generations to have sprung from a very ancient people. As archaeologist Peter Harbinson commented: “We can say in all probability that [they] represent the basic human stock onto whose blood-gene pool all subsequent peoples were ‘grafted’, so they may truly be described as the first Irish men and women, the ancestors of the Irish people of today.”
To be continued