Perhaps one of the most important pieces of myth-making in recent history has been the article by the Irish-American scholar J.P. Mallory, formerly of the Department of Archaeology, Queen’s University, Belfast..This article named Two perspectives on the problem of Irish Origins appeared in Focus on the Origins of the Irish, Bulletin of the Navan Research Group, Number nine, 1991.The article is extremely clever and subtly executed.

Mallory states immediately “ that Irish is employed throughout this paper in a purely linguistic sense to identify both those who produced our earliest Irish records and those who spoke a language immediately ancestral to our earliest recorded documents and in no way implies any particular ethnic, racial or archaeological group”..Fine, but not strictly true..for the language itself is called Gaeilge and the “Irish” epithet for it is a relatively modern one.

But having defined “Irish” as a language he goes on to contradict himself, saying that “The Irish arrived in Ireland with a mixed agriculture-stockbreeding economy which is indicated both by the names of plants and animals and by terms associated with the technology of farming”. So we were moved from an article on Gaelic linguistics to a people whom he defines as “the Irish” who spoke “Irish” and he continues to speak of “the Irish” throughout the rest of his article.

Mallory gets over the obvious inconsistency of all this by referring to those inhabitants who constituted the bulk of the population of Ireland before the arrival of “the Irish” as “Irelanders”, thus creating an ”Irish/Irelander” myth and denying the epithet of “Irish” to the original inhabitants..His problem was that those inhabitants are actually the ancient British Pretani or Cruthin. This constitutes a form of cultural imperialism which would be accepted nowhere else in the world. Yet, because of it, the Northern Ireland Office here instructed its operatives to treat my views on the subject as “eccentric” or “loyalist”.

But it goes further than that. Mallory’s colleague in the Navan Research Group, the Englishman Richard B. Warner, formerly of the Department of Antiquities, Ulster Museum, Belfast, tried incessantly to downplay the Cruthin. In the radio programme The Cruthin.- A Common Culture, BBC Radio Ulster 12.07.89 he stated that the Cruthin were “rather minor and they are rather unimportant and they made very little influence on Irish power or politics”, a remarkably inaccurate statement for any academic to make and “rather” stupid. And in his retirement interview for the Belfast Telegraph he revelled in his opposition to the Cruthin.

 What more can you say.?  I rest my case.