Irish Nationality

								

to ancient Irish legends across the Gaulish sea. One invasion followed
another, and an old Irish tract gives the definite Gaelic monarchy as
beginning in the fourth century B.C. They drove the earlier peoples,
the Iberians, from the stupendous stone forts and earthen entrenchments
that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of Erin recalls the
ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number
than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their language and their
organisation to the country, while many customs and traditions of the
older race lingered on and penetrated the new people.
Over a thousand years of undisturbed life lay before the Gaels, from
about 300 B.C. to 800 A.D. The Roman Empire which overran Great Britain
left Ireland outside it. The barbarians who swept over the provinces of
the empire and reached to the great Roman Wall never crossed the Irish
Sea.
Out of the grouping of the tribes there emerged a division of the
island into districts made up of many peoples. Each of the provinces
later known as Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht had its stretch
of seaboard and harbours, its lakes and rivers for fishing, its
mountain strongholds, its hill pastures, and its share of the rich
central plain, where the cattle from the mountains "used to go in
their running crowds to the smooth plains of the province, towards
their sheds and their full cattle-fields." All met in the middle of
the island, at the Hill of Usnech, where the Stone of Division still
stands. There the high-king held his court, as the chief lord in the
confederation of the many states. The rich lands of Meath were the
high-king's domain.
Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric conflicts as of giants by which
the peoples fixed the boundaries of their power. They tell of Conor
Mac Nessa who began to reign in the year that Mark Antony and
Cleopatra died, and of his sister's son Cuchulain, the champion of the
north, who went out to battle from the vast entrenchments still seen
in Emain Macha near Armagh. Against him Queen Maeve gathered at her
majestic fort of Rathcroghan in Roscommon fifteen hundred royal
mercenaries and Gaulish soldiers--a woman comely and white-faced, with
gold yellow hair, her crimson cloak fastened at the breast with a gold
pin, and a spear flaming in her hand, as she led her troops across the
Boyne. The battles of the heroes on the Boyne and the fields of Louth,
the thronged entrenchments that thicken round the Gap of the North and
the mountain pass from Dundalk and Newry into the plains of Armagh and
Tyrone, show how the soldiers' line of march was the same from the
days of Cuchulain to those of William of Orange. The story tells how
the whole island shared in the great conflict, to the extreme point of
Munster, where a rival of Cuchulain, Curoi son of Dare, had sent his
knights and warriors through all Ireland to seek out the greatest