Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael

Brian Earls

Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael. Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1986.

While Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael is a distinguished addition to Irish studies, and to the wider field of comparative literature, it is far from being an easy work to review. An initial difficulty is to convey something of the sheer scope and ambition of Mr. Leerssen's project which addresses itself to a series of key issues in Irish intellectual and literary history, extending from the late middle-ages to the early nineteenth century. One line of approach is suggested by the title. "Mere Irish" and "Fior-Ghael" are synonymous English and Irish language terms for the pre-Norman, or Gaelic, inhabitants of Ireland. Although these standard epithets refer to the same ethnic group they were current in quite different literary and discursive contexts, imply different allegiances, and carry with them incompatible charges of feeling. Simplifying radically it may be claimed that, from the late twelfth century when Henry II of England first laid claim to the lordship of Ireland to the seventeenth century when the conquest was finally completed, a large part of the political and military history of Ireland revolved around the confrontation between representatives of English power and a network of politically divided but culturally homogeneous Irish kingdoms whose sovereignty was at first imperilled and ultimately destroyed by this non-Gaelic intrusion. From the beginning of the enterprise, when the English-born Pope Adrian IV described the Irish as "a rude untaught people" and praised the intention of Henry II "to enter the island of Ireland and subject that people to laws", the conquest was justified in terms of an overriding contrast between civilization and barbarism.

The national characterisation which surfaced for the first time in the papal bull of 1155 proved to be of remarkable persistence. In a discursive-cum- propagandistic tradition which extends over many centuries the Irish were placed firmly outside the bounderies of civilization and were repeatedly