As the bearer of a 100 per cent Gaelic name, I am all in favour of Sinn Féin’s opposition to the State’s participation in the European Year of the Normans in 2027. As the party’s spokesman on the arts Aengus Ó Snodaigh put it in May, “We Irish know well enough the legacy of William’s successors invading and subjugating Ireland in the name of his English crown, with Strongbow ushering in the 900 years of occupation, with the North still under the descendants of William the Conqueror’s Crown.”
It is long since time that “we Irish”, children of the Gael, purged our history and our culture of the legacy of the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons who followed in their wake. This would certainly get rid of a lot of troublemakers.
We could start of course with the father of Irish republicanism, Theobold Wolfe Tone. Tone derives from the Norman lordship of De Tosny. The family’s presence in this archipelago dates from Raoul de Tosny’s services as standard bearer to William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD.
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Other prominent United Irishmen executed by the British included Edward Fitzgerald – the Fitz is the most obvious Norman giveaway. The Shears brothers, Henry and John, were hanged shortly before the rising – Shears comes from the Norman name Essira. Oliver Bond shares his good Anglo-Saxon patronymic with James Bond. Thomas Russell’s family name derives from Hugh de Rosel, who also accompanied William the Conqueror at Hastings.
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“We Irish” would also be better off without Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell comes from La Pernelle, a village in, of all places, Normandy. The family established itself in Devon and Cornwall after the Conquest and a branch later took root in Ireland.
Sinn Féin might even want to look within its own ranks. Gerry Adams hardly bears a name redolent of Gaeldom
Returning to the executed, we might note that the British again did a decent enough job of ridding us Irish of agitators of Norman blood. There were of course the Pearse brothers Patrick and Willie – Pearse comes from the personal name Piers, a diminutive form of Pierre. Joseph Mary Plunkett owed his shameful appellation to Pleugueneuc in Brittany. The first big Anglo-Norman lord of this family in Ireland, John Plukenet, called his estate in Co Meath, Beaulieu, not even bothering to hide his French origins.
Another four of the 14 men executed in 1916 belonged to the Anglo-Saxon tribes who came in after the Norman conquest. Thomas Clarke was the chief architect of the rising – Clarke has stout Hampshire origins, though it could also be from the Norman form de Clerc. Con Colbert’s surname is rooted on the Anglo-Scottish borders. The two Kents Edward (Éamonn Ceannt) and Thomas (executed in Cork) speak for themselves. So half of the 1916 martyrs flowed from the polluted springs of the Norman conquest.
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Sinn Féin likes to place the 1981 hunger strikers in this direct line of succession from Tone and Pearse – and indeed some of them did bear the same genetic guilt. Bobby Sands probably goes back to William de Sandes or Walter de la Sonde, who established themselves as landowners in Surrey in Anglo-Norman times. Francis Hughes owed his name to the Old French Hue or Hughe. Kevin Lynch owed his to the Norman surname de Lench. Martin Hurson’s patronymic is originally from Dorset, though it too may have Norman roots.
And while we’re clearing our history of these invasive species, “we Irish” can also clean up our culture. Out go Edmund Burke (de Burca), Douglas Hyde (pure Anglo-Saxon), James Joyce (properly speaking Josse in old French), Lady Gregory (maiden name Persse), William Butler Yeats (de Jette), Samuel Beckett, Maeve Binchy (de Binga, from Normandy via Kent), Sebastian and Kevin Barry (de Barry), John Banville, Phil Lynott (big Welsh-Norman landgrabbers in Connacht), Louis le Brocquy, Colm Toíbín (Tobin is from St Aubyn), Neil Jordan (after Jordan De Courcy, who came in with Strongbow), Jessie Buckley (de Buckelay), and many more of their terrible ilk.
Sinn Féin might even want to look within its own ranks. Gerry Adams hardly bears a name redolent of Gaeldom. Of its current TDs, Anne Graves and Thomas Gould sound suspiciously Saxon to me, Cathy Bennett shares her name not just with Jane Austen characters but with early Norman settlers, Denise Mitchell and Dessie Ellis ultimately echo French personal names, Pat Buckley is stamped with the same nominal culpability as Jessie. Oh and Ó Snodaigh is a Gaelicised version of Snoddy which comes from the town of Snodgrass in Ayrshire.
Most advanced Irish nationalists in the 19th and early 20th centuries recognised and embraced the reality that Ireland, like pretty much every other corner of the globe, has been formed by a mixture of cultures
All of this is, of course, utterly ludicrous. But it’s not harmless. We are living at a time when the ludicrous is mainstream. Daft notions about nationality are moving again from the fringes to the centre. A self-pitying notion of “We Irish” is not an innocent notion – it is being mobilised for violence right now on our own streets.
It’s a phrase in which the first little word can subvert the second. “We” can be used to constrict the “Irish”, to confine it within one category of belonging – the descendants of the Gaels who were invaded by the Normans in 1169 and are still being occupied and subjugated by their descendants in Northern Ireland today.
This isn’t 19th-century nationalism. It’s worse. Most advanced Irish nationalists in the 19th and early 20th centuries recognised and embraced the reality that Ireland, like pretty much every other corner of the globe, has been formed by a mixture of cultures. Religion – the sectarian divide between Catholic and Protestant – was a much more important marker of difference than ethnic origin.
About a fifth of those living in Ireland now have no ancestral connection to the pre-Norman Gaelic world at all – if they sing the national anthem’s line about “seantír ár sinsear”/ “our ancient sireland”, they may be thinking of somewhere very far away. And the other four-fifths are, like every other nationality, a product of multiple invasions and migrations, colonisations and resistances, settlement and unsettlement.
“We Irish” should not be a prelude to a single sob story, an epic saga of endless oppression. It contains multitudes.
