They didn’t want to be seen as peripheral people living at the edge of Europe. One of the main themes in early Irish history is the sense that Ireland is central culturally to what happens in the Christian world.  So what they do is they insert the Irish at various points into key events in world history. So what they are doing is they start off with the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis, so it’s almost like the Scripture of Ireland, the Old Testament of Ireland. And then they show the ancestors of the Irish appearing at various key events, so when Moses goes on the Exodus, an Irish guy sort of pops up, so he can find out what the Ten Commandments are. They look about the sort of origins of their own language, and an Irish guy pops up at the Tower of Babel, and he makes Irish from all of the best bits of the languages when they are divided up. At a very early point, the Irish began to write in Irish. And one of the things that Lebor Gabála does is it brings in an awful lot of traditional lore. So you get elements of popular culture and elite culture being brought in together along with sort of the learning of the Old Testament or of Christian writers.

 

What were they trying to do by setting it in such an international context, this idea that we came from everywhere?

 

The basic framework which it takes is that Ireland has been populated by various waves of people over time. Some of these people are invaders; some are more refugees than invaders, for example. And they admit that not everybody who lives on the island in the early medieval period are descended from one group of people. So there’s an acceptance in  the Lebor Gabála that the Irish are of multi-ethnic origins. 

 

At what point do we lose that sense of being part of something greater, and take on board this narrow idea that it’s us in a misty Celtic past, a people alone?

 

Certainly from the 18th century. If you look at the Irish themselves during this period when they are putting together the Lebor Gabála and the various elements that go into it, the one element they don’t pick themselves is Celtic. I mean they know about the existence of groups called Celts and Gauls from classical writers. They never identify with them. In fact, they are far more confident about their identity, you could say, than maybe modern people are about theirs.