‘We Irish were never homogeneous. Always hybrids, always mongrels'

Irish Times

31-05-2025

For a generation of TV viewers growing up in the early 1980s, the history of Ireland will be forever sketched by the soft, Oxbridge tones of historian Robert Kee in his magisterial series, Ireland: A Television History.
The landmark 13-part 1981 series sought to explain Ireland's past during the height of The Troubles, firstly, to an English audience left ignorant by 'the distorting lens of unquestioning assumptions laced with post-imperial incomprehension', as his obituary later described.
From Sunday, June 8th, a new telling of Ireland's story from its very first inhabitants to the present day, narrated by Dublin-born Hollywood film star
Colin Farrell
, will begin on
RTÉ
.
Entitled From That Small Island, the four 50-minute programmes, filmed in 17 countries from Barbados to Australia, are written and produced by Bríona Nic Dhiarmada and directed by Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy.
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From the off, the series seeks to merge the skills of historians, archaeologists and scientists to tell the island's history in fresh ways that will both inform and challenge many long-held readings of the past.
In the first episode, viewers will come face to face with 'Rathlin Man', whose Bronze Age remains were discovered on the island off the North Antrim coast in 2006 during the clearing of land for a pub driveway.
In the past, an artist's impression would have been used to convey to viewers what he looked like in life, but today, advances in ancient DNA sampling mean that an accurate facial reconstruction is possible.
'We know this man's face, the muscles, the structure, the colour of his hair, the colour of his eyes. He's got the gene for
haemochromatosis
, the supposed Celtic disease. He was lactose tolerant, which shows his diet was very much dairy,' says Nic Dhiarmada.
History professor Jane Ohlmeyer is the series' historical consultant and associate producer, as well as the co-author with Nic Dhiarmada of an accompanying book to be published next year by Oxford University Press.
The very first people to come here were hunter-gatherers. We don't know where they came from, but they came by sea. That's the only thing that we're sure about
—
Bríona Nic Dhiarmada
Sitting in Ohlmeyer's office in Trinity College Dublin, Nic Dhiarmada and Ohlmeyer enthusiastically describe the origin of the TV series.
The idea grew from conversations the two had when they met in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2016, where they agreed to work together to tell a new history of the island from a time without written records – 'pre-history' to historians – up to today.
The search into the past was not only useful, but necessary to throw light on the present: 'Gabriel Cooney, the eminent professor of archaeology at UCD, says that what comes before determines what comes after,' says Nic Dhiarmada.
The two have clearly enjoyed the experience of nearly 10 years of work and the hundreds of hours of recorded interviews gathered by Nic Dhiarmada: 'Do you know how much fun it is? It's work, but it's powerful craic as well,' says Ohlmeyer.
Old shibboleths will be tackled: 'This homogeneous Ireland idea, this little Catholic thing, was never the case. We were never homogeneous. Always hybrids, always mongrels. We didn't set out to prove that, but that's what came out,' Nic Dhiarmada says.
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The people who built Newgrange and the other megalithic creations that are so much part of Ireland's international image of today left monuments of stone behind them, but they did not leave behind a DNA heritage, disappearing from history.
'The very first people to come here were hunter-gatherers. We don't know where they came from, but they came by sea. That's the only thing that we're sure about,' says Nic Dhiarmada.
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'They stayed here and then they just disappeared. They left things behind them like fish traps, or cremated remains, but the latter are not that useful because you can't extract DNA from them.'
Then, the first farmers came, having migrated from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, leaving behind in the boglands of the Céide Fields in north Mayo the earliest signs of organised agriculture found anywhere on Earth.
In time, the Anatolian migrants almost entirely disappeared from the DNA record, too, though a skeleton of one of them, known as 'Ballynahatty Woman', was found in a townland near Belfast in 1855.
'They knew she had dark, sallow skin and brown eyes. When I asked what these people looked like, I was told, 'Go to Sardinia, they look like contemporary Sardinians,'' Nic Dhiarmada says.
The excavation of the island's megalithic inheritance, especially the most famous of its tombs, Poulnabrone in the Burren in Co Clare, led to the discovery of the remains of a six-month-old child.
From That Small Island: Kiloggin Castle
From That Small Island: Leuven records
'When they analysed the DNA, they found that she had the chromosomes which showed that she had Down syndrome, had been breast-fed for at least six months and was buried in honour,' says Nic Dhiarmada.
Throughout, the TV series will show how the island's history shares common threads with elsewhere, but also where it fundamentally differs from the rest of Europe, largely because it is an island.
'Being an island is hugely important because you're isolated to a degree, or things will come later, or in a different way,' says Ohlmeyer.
Nic Dhiarmada interjects: 'Compared to Britain, which has pretty much the same climate, pretty much on the same geographic line, we have 40 per cent less flora and fauna than they do.
'We don't have toads, we don't have snakes, or vipers. Snakes. It wasn't because of St Patrick. They never came, they never got here, because getting to an island is much more difficult.'
The later episodes will tell the often-grisly story of colonisation.
'The Catholic Irish in the 17th century suffered enormously. The expropriation of eight million acres of land, a third of the land mass. And it's the best land. And then this transplantation of people to Connaught, effectively into reservations,' Ohlmeyer says.
'That's what we saw later in America in the 19th century. So, all of this happened in Ireland for hundreds of years. Ireland is the playbook for imperialism as it unfolds around the world later. That is something that hasn't been fully appreciated.'
However, the narrative so often told in Ireland today that 'we were oppressed for 800 years, that we were always very good, that we never did anything bad, that we suffered under the English yoke is not necessarily true, either,' says Nic Dhiarmada.
Instead, the history of Ireland is full of endless contradictions, which need to be understood today: 'We are this exception to everything else. We were a colony, but we were agents of empire – we were colonisers as well.'
In the 17th century, thousands of Irish were sent as 'press-ganged' indentured servants to the Caribbean. Many died because of the brutal conditions.
'They all suffered tremendously,' says Ohlmeyer, 'but at the end of the day, their whiteness does afford them some privilege. Over time. In Barbados, some Irish such as the Blakes and Kirwans from Galway profited hugely from sugar.'
If they survived, the indentured servants were given plots of land. Some prospered. Others did not; their equally poor descendants today in Barbados are known as 'Redlegs', or 'the Ecky Beckies', as the programmes will show.
I think Ireland is having a conversation in a very actually mature way that has paved the way for a very difficult conversation around empire and the legacy of empire
—
Jane Ohlmeyer
'On the one hand, you have people who are desperately poor, who remain desperately poor. On the other, you have people who go on to become very effective overseers on the plantations and plantation owners themselves,' she says.
In Jamaica, the records are filled with stories of the Irish who made good on the backs of others – 'the Kellys, who are as rich as any other plantation owner in 18th century Jamaica, investing it in conspicuous consumption back home in Ireland'.
Nic Dhiarmada says: 'The people on the island of Ireland were oppressed, were colonised. They often then went out and did the same thing to others, working for the British Empire, Dutch Empire, French Empire, particularly the Spanish Empire.
Ricardo Wall, whose parents had left Limerick, 'ends up running the Spanish Empire in the 18th century, and not only is he running it, he's also then the most amazing patron for other Irish people', she says.
Often, they argue, 'the abused became the abusers', particularly in the Caribbean where 'people who themselves had been transported and hideously abused go on to be the most violent and aggressive overseers themselves', says Ohlmeyer.
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The challenges posed by the series will not just be for Catholics, or those with a Catholic cultural identity: 'For some Protestants, the 17th century or 18th century issues will be hard. To this day, some don't accept that Ireland was ever a colony,' says Ohlmeyer.
Yet, equally, the rigid framing of history for nearly 200 years has hidden stories of Protestants suffering during the Famine, who were written out of the narrative: 'Cholera made no religious distinction,' as one US academic puts it.
Any idea that only Irish Catholics suffered in the Famine is 'rubbish, absolutely untrue, a myth', says Nic Dhiarmada, one propagated by some in the Orange Order more comfortable with a framing of history that laid the blame for hunger at the door of 'feckless' Catholics.
Jane Ohlmeyer and Bríona Nic Dhiarmada and at Duncannon Fort, Co Wexford
Layering on the complications, the two tell the story of the Irish Catholics in India who formed two-thirds of the British military forces there working directly for the Crown, or the East India Company.
'Within the British Army, they were treated as if they were indigenous, just like the Indian sepoys. They could never get promoted, even though they enforced British rule,' Nic Dhiarmada says.
For decades, historians shied away from telling the fuller story of Ireland's past, especially during The Troubles when everything was politicised 'by both sides in a very unhelpful way, so historians avoided it like the plague', says Ohlmeyer.
'We're in a very different space now. I think Ireland is having a conversation in a very actually mature way that has paved the way for a very difficult conversation around empire and the legacy of empire.
'History muddies the water. Were we the good guys, or the bad guys? We were both. We were the good guys and the bad guys. We had harm done to us, and caused harm to others,' she concludes.
From That Small Island begins on RTÉ 1 next Sunday, June 8th at 6.30pm