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the soldiers of a British chieftain who had murdered some of Patrick’s converts. Neither account
throws much light on life in Ireland at the time – nor was that the intention. None the less, the
beatification of St Patrick and his emergence as the supreme cult figure, which in many ways he
remains to this day, did lead to further accounts of his life and his Christian mission by later
authors. The early ninth-century Book of Armagh is the culmination of these and it established the
primacy of the See of Armagh in the Irish Church.
The three centuries following St Patrick’s death in AD 493 are rightly regarded as a golden age
in which Ireland became one of the most important religious centres in the whole of Europe. It was
from Ireland that missionaries set out to convert the pagan tribes of northern Britain, establishing
Columba’s monastery on Iona in AD 563 as a stepping stone. From Iona the monastery of
Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast, continued the mission to the eastern side of Britain. Irish
missions to continental Europe were equally successful and St Columban, not to be confused with
Columba, founded monasteries at Luxeuil in the Vosges mountains of eastern France and at Bobbio
in the hills of the northern Apennines in Italy in the late 600s. Other Irish monks sought the opposite
– a life of austere contemplation – and their search for solitude took them to increasingly remote
destinations. They found what they were looking for on rocky islands off the west coast of Ireland,
in the Western Isles of Scotland and even as far north as Iceland. Their journeys across the wild
seas are all the more remarkable for having been undertaken not in well-constructed galleys but in
curraghs – light boats with only shallow drafts and made from wooden spars covered in tarred
animal hide.
But still, despite the intensity of religious devotion and scholarship, the written accounts are
more or less completely bare of historical content. Even so, it is fairly clear that the reputation of
these early saints was linked to the fortunes of the political dynasties to which they became
attached. An association with the cult figure of St Patrick himself was the ultimate claim to
authority and influence, and the opportunity was not overlooked by the first of the invading Anglo-
Normans. In 1185 one of these barons, John de Courcey, arranged for the ‘discovery’ of St
Patrick’s remains at Downpatrick and their removal to Armagh. This is very reminiscent of the
fabricated discovery and ceremonial reburial of King Arthur’s bones by Edward I at Glastonbury a
century later. Clearly, in the medieval period, any association with long-dead cult figures could be
used as a claim for historical legitimacy.
Rather as in England, with the loosely based fiction of Geoffrey of Monmouth, history was
written for a purpose. The Irish equivalent of Geoffrey’s History was the Leabhar Gabhála, the
Book of Invasions, compiled from earlier writing in the late eleventh century. Even though, just
like Geoffrey’s History, it is a clear attempt to link Irish history to the familiar events of the
classical world, it managed to create a compelling narrative for the origins of Ireland and of the
Gaels which became extremely influential as an origin myth for the Irish. And it still is. However
accurate or inaccurate it may be as a record of Irish origins, we must still bear it in mind when we
sift the record of the genes. Deeply held origin myths, however richly embroidered, have a habit of
being right.
Although the Leabhar Gabhála was doubtless compiled by Christian monastic scribes, in
common with the written versions of other rich mythologies in Ireland, there was no conflict or
contradiction in recording the pagan myths of their native or adopted land. The phenomenal success
of Irish Christianity owed a great deal to the sympathy it showed to ancient traditions and rituals