The Irish Annals,
by Daniel P. Mc Carthy
(Four Courts Press, €35.00 / £31.50)
This is a new paperback edition at a cheaper price of a volume that will be, for many engaged in the task of deciphering what we think we know about early Christian and medieval Ireland, an essential vade mecum. The author has brought textual as well as computer skills to bear on manuscripts that have for a long time been intricate matters of controversy.
Dr Mc Carthy, who is a computer specialist at Trinity College, sets about the task in a suitably scientific manner.
Over the years while researching in the National Library I have noticed readers perusing the open shelf volumes of the Annals of the Four Masters with great intensity, often in the belief that these records of the state of the world since the Creation, and especially the invasions of early Ireland, were a true account. Indeed the six volumes of the Rev. E. A. Dalton’s History of Ireland (1908) enshrined this notion among two generations of Irish nationalists.
The book is a deeply technical account of the origins, history and sources of Irish annals written before the collapse of Gaelic culture about 1600”
By contrast, this book was acclaimed by Prof. Dáithi Ó Cróinín on first publication as “the most important book on Early Irish history to appear in this generation, and I suspect that it is probably the most important contribution to Early Irish history that will appear in my life time”.
This being so the general reader ought, I think, to have an idea of what Mc Carthy’s achievement has been. The book is a deeply technical account of the origins, history and sources of Irish annals written before the collapse of Gaelic culture about 1600.
Aide memoire
Annals are not, of course, history in the full sense but an aide memoire to the dates of notable events. They need at all times to be supplemented by the discoveries and insights of archaeology, these days a discipline based on an increasingly scientific basis.
Here Mc Carthy’s forceful critical style is displayed in all its full rigour”
Dr Mc Carthy presents a new view of the genesis, evolution and history of the Irish annals which he breaks down into four main groups, which he calls the Clonmacnoise group, the Cuana group, the Connacht group, and the Regnal-canon group. His analysis is immensely detailed. Parts of it will surely be only of professional use to other scholars, but the general reader (who as often as not will borrow a book of this kind from a library) will want to know what part of it is truly of general interest.
I would suggest that they start at the end, with the short but effective epilogue, which summarises what the author has discovered. This might be followed by the fifty page third chapter, “annalastic literature” . This provides not just a short twelve page account of early Gaelic scholarship, but also two very trenchant sections on Anglo-Irish and modern annalistic scholarship. Here Mc Carthy’s forceful critical style is displayed in all its full rigour. Familiar names from Ussher and Ware down to Mac Neill, Macalister, Brian Ó Cuiv, John Kelleher, Kathleen Hughes, David Dumville , and even the author himself, are passed in extended review.
As an account of Irish scholarship at work over the last century and a half it is amazingly interesting”
While underlining the fact that much work was done on Irish annals in the last half of the 19th century, he notes that lack of investment (essentially by the government, of course) has limited what has been done since. Indeed, he finds that much that was written is, in the light of his new research, simply wrong headed.
All this comes over as a great breath of fresh air, as invigorating as, say, I. A. Richard’s Seven Types of Ambiguity was in the 1930s – “close reading” of the highest order. As an account of Irish scholarship at work over the last century and a half it is amazingly interesting, an education in criticism which is striking in its own self, and should be read by every aspiring young scholar in the field of the humanities. And that’s just one chapter.
For more on author Dr Mc Carthy’s research visit www.irish-annals.cs.tcd.ie
