One of the main claims made against me was that I was “indulging in pure revisionism”. “Revisionism”, as the word implies, means to ‘revise’ one’s interpretation of history, though often the word is also used in a pejorative sense, implying that the revision is deliberately undertaken to help substantiate the revisionist’s own particular ‘slant’ on our past.
When The Cruthin was written, over forty years ago, such a charge of revisionism might have seemed to contain some validity. After all, terms and concepts such as ‘the Cruthin people’, ‘the non-Celtic Irish’, ‘the Galloway connection’, – appeared at that time to be confined mostly to my own work. Indeed, Michael Hall’s summation of my writings in Ulster – the Hidden History must have seemed so unfamiliar to the reviewer in the Linen Hall Review, that the latter concluded that the historical thesis being expounded aimed “at nothing less than an overthrow of current perceptions”.
To introduce something apparently so ‘new’ into the historical debate might, therefore, have served to confirm the ‘revisionist’ label. Yet before we come to such a conclusion, let us consider the following quotes:
“In the north (of Ireland) the people were Cruithni, or Picts… If the (Uí Néill) failed to subdue the south thoroughly, they succeeded in crushing the Ultonians (Ulstermen), and driving them ultimately into the south-eastern corner of the province. They plundered and burned Emain Macha, the ancient seat of the kings of the Ultonians, and made “sword land” of a large part of the kingdom… Consequent on the (Uí Néill) invasion of Ulster (was) an emigration of Irish Cruithin or Picts (to Scotland)… The men of the present Galloway were part of the tribe known in Ireland as Cruithni, that is Picts, and only differed from the Picts of (Scotland), in having come into Galloway from Ireland.”
To readers aware of the present controversy these quotes might appear to be a reasonable précis of some of my own writings. In fact, I am not the author of the quotes: they have been taken from the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published between 1876 and 1886 – over one hundred and thirty years ago. The Britannica’s historical interpretation was not an isolated one, however – many books of the period took a similar approach. With his deep interest in archaeology , Edward Carson orientated towards the “Pictish” or Pretanic origins of the British people, while, as an Ulster Scot, James Craig wrote about Dalriada…As a boy my father bought for me The Pictish Nation, its people and its Church by Archibald B. Scott published in September 1918 by T. N. Foulis of Edinburgh and London, Boston, Australasia, Cape Colony and Toronto. It was printed in Scotland by R & R Clarke Limited of Edinburgh. The author dedicated his book to his father and mother and to the memory of his youngest brother who died, in 1916, of wounds inflicted in action and sleeps in France with other comrades of the 1st Cameron Highlanders.This wonderful book was my introduction to the Picts.
In 1919 the eminent Irish Nationalist historian Eoin MacNeill, author of The Pretanic Background of Britain and Ireland , wrote: “When Ireland emerges into the full light of written history, we find the Picts a very powerful people in east Ulster… In Ulster, the ruling or dominant population of a large belt of territory, extending from Carlingford Lough to the mouth of the Bann, is named in the Annals both by the Latin name Picti, and its Irish equivalent Cruithni. They continue to be so named until the eighth century, when apparently their Pictish identity ceased to find favour among themselves.” MacNeill was co-founder of the Gaelic League and in 1913 he established the Irish Volunteers and served as their Chief-of-Staff. He held this position at the outbreak of the Easter Rising but had no role in it or its planning, which was carried out by Irish Republican Brotherhood infiltrators, so he was hardly a “Unionist ideologue” like myself,
Bishop McCarthy, in his edition of Adomnán’s Life of St Columba also wrote that “no fact in the pagan history of Ireland is more certain than that the whole country was originally held by the Irish Picts.” And contemporary thinking in Northern Ireland was summed up by H C Lawlor, who wrote in a publication for the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society in 1925:
“In those early times, when the history of Ireland begins to emerge from absolute obscurity or mythology, we find the country divided into five distinct Kingdoms, of which the Northern was known as Coiced Uloth or Cuigeadh Uladh, meaning the Fifth of the Uluti. This district was larger than the nine counties now called Ulster, and the indigenous inhabitants appear to have been a race variously called the Qreteni or Cruithni, but more familiarly known as the Irish Picts.
About the fourth century BC or earlier, a new race appears to have come to Ireland, commonly known as the Celts or Gaels; whence they came is uncertain. From ancient mythology and other sources it appears that they were a race of yellow-haired big-bodied people, contrasting in these respects with the aborigines. They came as conquerors; they appear to have landed in Ireland on the south-east coast, gradually pushing their way north and west, eventually establishing their chief and central headquarters at Tara in County Meath. That they drove the aborigines before them as one would drive herds of sheep is inconceivable; they conquered them and became the ruling class, holding the natives under them as serfs; they were apparently a small minority of the population.”
To be continued