Bob Quinn comes back to his controversial theory that Irish people might owe as much to African as European influences, writes Lorna Siggins
Bob Quinn was up in court in Kinvara, Co Galway, for a minor offence several years ago when the judge looked down curiously at him from his bench. "Are you the fellow that says we're all Arabs?" he asked, before dismissing the charge against the writer, photographer and film-maker. "I'm sure you have found plenty of confirmation for your theory today," he added, glancing around at fellow alleged "miscreants" set to come before him in the chamber.
Quinn recalls that it was yet another reminder, if one was needed, of racial stereotypes and a lack of knowledge and understanding about "the actual world of Islam". However, if he could forgive His Honour, he couldn't forget the reaction of those who should have known better when it came to his own work in this area. For in the mid-1980s, the Connemara-based film-maker had attracted a mixture of both ire and ridicule from academics and commentators for his theory that Irish people might owe as much to north Africa as to Europe in terms of roots.
Worse - some just ignored his work altogether. "What's this!" Quinn exclaimed in a letter to this newspaper, published on March 11th, 1987, referring to a review of a book on Ireland and insular art. The reviewer had alluded to Coptic influences, and ancient fragments found on Dalkey Island that could be traced to the Levant (the eastern region of the Mediterranean), and the possibility that art motifs could easily have reached Ireland from North Africa.
"My thesis on Ireland and North Africa was not supposed to become respectable for at least another decade!" Quinn wrote. "Is it possible that academics have been furtively glancing through my non-scholarly book, Atlantean, published in October, but totally ignored by academics and reviewers in yours and every other paper?"
In fact, The Irish Times did the decent thing and published a review almost a year later of Atlantean: Ireland's North African and Maritime Heritage. The book, and a three-part documentary that had been broadcast in 1984, started from an eminently sensible premise. We were all aware of our Viking, Norman and Tudor antecedents, with a few Spanish visitors thrown in for good measure. However, an island in the Atlantic such as this one must have been subjected to a whole range of influences that extended beyond European borders.
Quinn, formerly of RTÉ, was well settled in Connemara by then where, as he recalls, Europe had taken on a whole new aspect. Indeed, Ireland itself had taken on a new dimension from a west coast perspective. "Instead of being a distant and unimportant planet on the edge of a European galaxy whose axis runs east/west", this little island could be seen as "the centre of a cultural area oriented north/south, based on the Atlantic seaways that reach from Scandinavia to North Africa," he noted.
As he set out on his research, he had two starting points in his head - sean-nós singing and the sea. Was it pure coincidence, he wondered, that the lateen sail used on the traditional Connemara pucan was an Arab invention still used on Egyptian dhows? Were the similarities between the Book of Kells and Ibn Al Bawwab Qu'uran in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, purely accidental? He also came across references to Irish and Scots Gaelic speakers and Berbers (the indigenous people of North Africa) understanding each other during the mid-19th century, and witnessed stick dancing in Cairo, which was similar to that of Wexford mummers.
The updated work combines original research and new discoveries to copperfasten his original theory. Europe already owes much to the Islamic world, and might not have had a Renaissance were it not for Arab influences.
However, his adopted Connemara and its people would "hove into view" whenever he tried to establish if there was anything unique in Ireland's case, Quinn writes. There were and are the striking similarities in style that sean-nós singers from Connemara found when they travelled to Libya in the 1970s. Also evident in the music of Muslim Tatars in the former Soviet republic of Tatarstan; there is the extent of Irish trade in previous centuries, as documented by Dr John de Courcy Ireland; and the influence of Coptic monks on Aran knitting design - also evident in broad ribbon interlaces in ancient manuscripts, such as the Book of Durrow.
He also raises questions for others to answer, such as the true origin of sheela-na-gigs, the stone carvings variously described as fertility figures and female exhibitionists. Having suspected that sheelas are far older and of far more extensive provenance than currently held, Quinn came across a photo of a similar image in a second-hand bookshop in Paris in 2003. This sheela bore similarities to two examples found at Lavey, Co Cavan, and Herefordshire, England. It was unearthed at a Neolithic site on the river Danube and is currently in the Narodni Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.
Looking back, Quinn believes he was naive, and academically ill-equipped to defend his conviction that we are not Celts. Now Quinn says his approach was "less scholarly than sociological". His "sins", he says, were two-fold - not only did he "confront the simplistic construction called Irish/Celtic/Catholic identity", but he also "recovered much of the Anglo-Irish, pre-Independence scholarly research that had proved inconvenient to the new State's image-builders and had been dismissed from official history books".
He notes that it was an "upstart" amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who used his instincts to uncover the city of Troy in 1871, and history has recorded countless other examples of wonderful discoveries and inventions by the apparently "unqualified". However, his "greatest sin" was "to attribute to oral culture and to personal observation - that is to say, common sense" as much respect as he accorded written evidence and "armchair scholarship".
If he may have been naive, he may not have been wrong. Some 20 years after his trilogy of documentaries and preparation of his book, he believes his thesis has gained more credence and can no longer be dismissed as a "compendium of nonsense", to quote the words of one Irish language poet. Working on his thesis in the early 1990s, Dr Orin Gensler of the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt described Quinn's book as "the best overview of extralinguistic connections between the British Isles and North Africa that I have come across".
Quinn quotes other more favourable academic reactions in his new and expanded edition of his original work, in which he contends that just as the myth of "Briton" built an empire, so the myth of "Celt" built a tourist industry, provided a good living for scholars, musicians and New Age travellers. Best endorsement of his particular interpretation of Irish identity came in 2001, when archaeologist Barry Cunliffe argued, in Facing the Ocean, that the Irish language had evolved as a maritime language of western coastal areas of Europe, rather than as a result of continental "Celtic" influence. Cunliffe has written the introduction to Quinn's new edition.
Quinn believes a strategy was developed over several centuries to isolate us from our "sea-girt consciousness" for two reasons - this island's location in relation to Britain, and the fact that Irish seafarers once represented a serious challenge - a challenge still posed by adventurers such as Paddy Barry, Jarlath Cunnane and their colleagues, and the hunter-gatherers of Killybegs.
"It was obvious to the English and their Dublin agents that the native Irish must be kept from an awareness of the sea as a potential ally." Saving Connemara and other parts of the coastline, the strategy largely worked.
In case there is any lingering doubt, Quinn gives the last word to mitochondrial DNA - and an expert on the subject, Prof Brian Sykes of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University. Sykes was the man who proved the Polynesian islanders didn't sail west from the Americas but came east from South Asia.
Sykes's study of seven clusters of mitochondrial DNA has challenged the theory that Europeans are descended from post-Ice Age Mesolithic farmers, who spread from the eastern Mediterranean to supplant the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers.
He has found that about 80 per cent of Europeans have retained their Palaeolithic genes, and that between 15 and 20 per cent of the balance arrived within the last 8,000 years and shared their DNA with the Bedouin of Saudi Arabia. He has also established that the seventh cluster of this special DNA had split into two groups - one which gradually spread north through the Balkans to the Baltic and another confined to the Mediterranean coast, which moved up towards western Britain and Ireland. Hail, those first Atlanteans.
• The Atlantean Irish: Ireland's Oriental and Maritime Heritage by Bob Quinn, with foreword by Barry Cunliffe (Lilliput Press, €20)