When Patrick warned us that this book, The Cultural Conquest of Ireland would be a watershed event, he
knew he was invoking the power of the three rivers of Ireland in order to baptize us in the sorrow of Irish history
and the frustration of Irish culture. Watershed indeed, this borders more on the length and breadth of a
world-encompassing ocean, to borrow a term from R. Buckminster Fuller. In the same way, the events of the Rising
of 1916 and the last battle of the English civil war are watersheds in the history of the Irish people. Herein were so
many thoughts that have plagued my mind for time immemorial: anarchism as a social relationship and not as
political ideology, primitive communism as an organizing principle, again not as politics in service of a disaffected
proletariat, kingship in terms of power with instead of power over. Reading this text inspires the same sort of
emotional response in me as the use of the Celtic cross by fascists in Europe today. All of these underground
streams converging in the powerful rush of a river, silently flowing beneath the surface of history, bubbling up
occasionally to remind us of the rich cultural heritage in our mutual past.
Julian Huxley's catalog of cultural elements suggests that the Irish were one of the strongest and unified of all the
European cultures, save perhaps for the Greeco-Roman. The mentifacts of Ireland's culture alone are so singularly
pervasive in her precolonial history it is no wonder so many in our times are subconsciously still looking for her
vision, her clarity, dreaming of return to that simplicity and connection. The Brehon laws show a social framework
few outside the courts of China, Rome or the circles of the Iroquois, could enjoy the protection of, and in all but the
last, there was some form of indentured servitude or slavery operating. The learned classes, the Druids and Bards,
which were singled out for annihilation because of their spiritual and temporal power, for as long as they survived,
so too did their vast storehouse of knowledge; history and geography, medicine and horticulture. In their
construction of a high kingship, not dependent on lineage or birth order, they prefigure the idea of representative
democracy. Their aristocracy was just as much a possession of Ireland and her peasantry, as they were an
embodiment of the nobility and strength of the Irish people. One can sense Ireland's pervasive impression on the
psyche of those who came to plunder her. The wave upon wave of invaders, who landed on her soil, only to adapt to
her culture, join her history, speak her language, forgetting for a time who was an alien invader and who the
conquered native.
William Burroughs, said in his dark diatribe about American cultural kharma, 'A Thanksgiving Prayer,' "Thanks for
the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams". His words could easily be put alongside the
somewhat cynical reflection on the Battle of the Boyne, "at least he won the retreat." James Stuart, was the last
hope of the Gaelic kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland to influence their destiny until this century. The Stuarts, being
Catholic, were looked upon by the Irish as an opportunity to reclaim their country from the clutches of an
ever-growing Reformist alien population. That the Pope was allied against the Stuart's effort to reclaim their throne
is indeed a betrayal of epic proportion, in league with the betrayal of the Merovingian king Dagbert II. A Frankish
monarch who supposedly in the 6th century C.E spent time in Ireland being educated; a testament to Ireland's
history as a source of teaching and knowledge. The power of this incident over the mind of the Irish must have
been incredible, on similar ground lies the Rising of 1916. Yet, here the martyrdom of these cultural revolutionaries
shows more of the high kingship than the shameful slaughter of 1690. In the attempt of this 'king over the water'
to reclaim the throne, an ineptness and ineffectual weakness is shown which thoroughly tramples the tradition of
high kingship. No longer ruled by the noble, the strong, the pure of spirit, we have a leader content to waste human
life with careless regard, for purely selfish political power. His actions would utterly shatter the hopes of a people
desperate to reclaim their heritage from under the foot of an alien culture. It is no wonder that with the flight of
Seamus a caca, the Irish are ripe for the cultural disintegration and alienation that followed.
There is a certain danger in looking back to the past for a vision for the present idealistic utopianism. Yet, the
cultural history and treasures of Ireland suggest there is much to be gleamed from this lost, but not completely
deceased culture. The tidal pools in which the remnants of this older native Irish culture exist, are a reflective
place on our way to reweaving the story of pre-colonial Gaelic society. It seems that even though the English
colonizers were intent on destroying what remained of the Irish culture, they missed these backwaters. So much of
the Irish oral tradition was saved in the tech screpta, thanks to the efforts of the Bards and Druids to graft the old
wisdom onto the new religion. The 'old mysteries of the grove' are there to be read, even if only between the lines.
The ecological movement, reminiscent not only of pre-colonial Ireland but the pre-colonial cultures of India, and
Native America as well, seems to suggest a rethinking of our Malthusian/Cartesian world of progress and dissection.
The 'pantheistic animism', which marked the old religious tradition within the new Celtic Christianity, provides a
call to reflect on what it is we should be revering; the tree or the rock, the chalice or the blade, the message or the
messenger.
Kevin Collins' work requires one to connect a lot of ideas, in regard to the facts of colonization, and how it is that a
culture can survive this atrocity. As Connolly suggests, we should look to the Ireland of pre-history in order to
construct models of what we have lost in this mad dash to prosperity and global degradation. For in her past are the
seeds of a future that can reconnect people, not only with their lost sense of place, but their lost sense of community
as well. The web of life's strands need to be rewoven and the severed connections rejoined if we are to make the 21st
century something other than a wasteland, and as Uncle Bill so succinctly said, "the last great betrayal of the last
and greatest of human dreams."