Beyond the Pale: Irish cultural uniqueness past Rome's reach
How ancient history set Ireland on an alternate route despite genetic unity in the Isles
The Irish are different. White Roman Catholic Christians, they nevertheless identify as a people colonized and oppressed for over a millennium, starting with Viking invasions, followed by Norman conquest in the Middle Ages and culminating in their eventual total assimilation into the incipient British Empire. This history, which matured into anti-colonial militancy in the modern period, resulting in the Republic of Ireland’s independence a century ago, and decades of civil war in Northern Ireland, explains Irish solidarity with Palestinians in 2024. But Ireland’s cultural differences run deeper than just the last eventful millennium. They go back to the island’s unique relationship (or lack thereof) with the Roman Empire, and its liminal position on Northwest Europe’s furthest edge.
Decades before the first Anglo-Norman incursions nearly 1,000 years ago, Ireland attempted to merge itself into the mainstream of what was becoming Western civilization. The Irish were experiencing a period of peace after having beaten back decades of Viking invasions, which left a permanent legacy of Scandinavian settlement fringing the island, the towns that would become Dublin, Limerick and Cork. In 1101 AD, the Irish Church was determined to shuck off a reputation as doctrinal deviants and outliers. A great synod was convened at Cashel, in southern Ireland; bishops assembled to begin a process of reforming both beliefs and practices. This was the first of four great assemblies in the twelfth century that resulted in a top-down realignment of Ireland’s Christianity, forcing the clergy to fall in line with Roman rites and norms.
In modern times, Ireland is often seen as one of the redoubts of orthodox Roman Catholicism, but the history of the religion on the Emerald Isle is very distinct from that of its neighbors to the south and east. The Irish clergy’s resistance to Roman norms is highlighted by the continued custom of clerics marrying and fathering children even centuries after the Synod of Cashel. The synod was but the first step in a long process that eventually did stamp out Irish Christianity’s uniqueness, because the differences were deep-rooted and foundational. Reformers had to introduce the Roman organizational system of dioceses and parishes anchored around towns. For the previous 600 years, Christianity in Ireland had been focused around monasteries that were appendages to the island’s numerous tribes. The preeminent early Irish cleric was the abbot presiding over his monastery, while in orthodox Roman Christianity it was the bishop resident in a town or city. Critical aspects of the ritual calendar like the date of Easter, the most important Christian holiday, were changed to align with Rome. In terms of individual experience, the soteriology of Irish Christianity became more infused with Augustinian thought, de-emphasizing individual works in favor of God’s grace.
At first glance, the organizational differences in particular can be attributed to the fact that orthodox Roman Christianity matured in the city-based Greco-Roman world. But the Irish differed from their English and Frankish neighbors as well, all of whom the Romans would have termed barbarians. The root of the Irish difference is a unique point of departure dating back to the twilight of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, when St. Patrick was working his miracles and converting the pagan Irish. The Franks and English embraced Christianity after the conversion of their kings by either Roman missionaries or prominent bishops. For them, the switch from paganism to the Roman faith was a political act and civilizational marker; for the future, Christianity and civilization, in the past, barbarism and darkness. The Franks and Anglo-Saxons entered Romanitas and the commonwealth of civilized nations by abandoning their old gods and tribal past.
Ireland, in contrast, converted piecemeal and organically in the two centuries before 600 AD. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Fellowship of the Ring to provide the English with a national mythos; something that had been lost with their rapid forced transition from pagan tribesmen to Christian subjects. No such trauma afflicts the Irish, whose monks recorded The Book of Invasions, The Ulster Cycle and The Fenian Cycle, and whose tribes continued to engage in internecine conflict centuries after they had been Christianized. No Irish king declared his people henceforth Christians by fiat. The people of Ireland became Christian on their own terms and at their own pace. Despite the British Christian St. Patrick’s name recognition in our era and his genuine missionary success, the new religion actually diffused gradually through Irish society, weaving itself into the fabric of Gaelic culture, as opposed to just being a vector for Romanitas. Christianity became very Irish long before the Irish became fully Christian.
Irish culture’s enduring uniqueness in the High Middle Ages is underscored by the fact that the synods did not fully stamp out the practice of polygyny among aristocrats, the class of society likely most aligned with broader Western European norms. Even the famed High King Brian Boru, who defeated the Vikings and unified the island in the 11th century, was polygamous. These family matters are relevant to Ireland’s position in Europe’s cultural landscape. Evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich argues the distinctive family pattern the Roman Catholic church imposed Western-Europe-wide in the early Middle Ages is responsible for the emergence of W.E.I.R.D. values (“Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”), but Ireland was a latecomer to all this since it was only nominally Roman Catholic until relatively late. In most of post-Roman Europe, marriages between elite lineages were sanctified and legitimized by the Roman Catholic Church, but in Ireland customary indigenous law prevailed until the 13th-century Anglo-Norman conquests. This is why Ireland, dominated for so long by squabbling clans led by hundreds of polygamous petty kings, is traditionally excluded from most taxonomies that encompass the Western European marriage pattern.
This view of the Irish as outsiders continued right up to the threshold of the present. The relationship between the Irish and the English in the early modern period was fraught, from the “flight of the earls” in 1607, that ended the Gaelic aristocracy, to Oliver Cromwell’s conquest two generations later, which was ethnic cleansing at best and genocide at worst. In 1882, the British Spectator wrote in reference to a series of murders in Ireland:
in particular districts of Ireland of a class of peasants who are scarcely civilised beings, and approach far nearer to savages than any other white men…In remote places of Ireland, especially in Connaught, on a few of the islands [both Gaelic-speaking regions]…dwell cultivators who are in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians.” [the last British wars against the Maoris had ended in ten years prior]
In 1995 seminal antiracist scholar Noel Ignatiev wrote How the Irish Became White, popularizing the idea that the Irish were not viewed as white when they initially arrived in the US. This is false, after all, Irish immigrants were allowed to be naturalized in the US in the first half of the 19th century, something only possible then for white Europeans. But the Anglophone world did nurse a deep streak of Hiberniphobia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, suspecting Irish cultural uniqueness of being a downstream consequence of deep racial differences. The bigotry here was steering them far off course from the genetic truth anyone with eyes to see could have guessed at. Genetically, the Irish are exactly who we should expect them to be: Northwest Europeans who settled Europe’s last reaches before the open ocean. Irish uniqueness is the product of a distinct history, not some cleft forged in the cauldron of evolution.
Europe’s final edge
To establish the position of the Irish genetically within a European context, I created a pooled dataset with 172,000 shared markers assayed across 2,944 individuals whose ethnolinguistic background is recorded. Broken down by ethnicity, they include 488 English, 299 French, 284 Italians, 176 Dutch, 414 Norwegians, 292 Poles, 469 Scots, 44 Welsh, and finally, 478 Irish. I put the data through a principal component analysis (PCA), and the figure above illustrates PC1 on the y axis and PC2 on the x axis. PC1 explains 1.7 times more of the variation in this data than PC2, reflecting the greater genetic distance between southern vs. northern Europe, as opposed to western vs. eastern Europe. I rotated the normal configuration here (PC1 is conventionally the x axis), to better align with geography. The PC plot shows a clear separation between the Polish, French, Italians and Norwegians, but demarcations between the Scottish, Welsh, English and Dutch are comparatively obscured by their overlapping distributions.
The tree in the inset visualizes genetic distances between populations computed with a pairwise fixation index. This is a value that reflects the proportion of total genetic variation differentiating two populations; for human races the value is usually 10%, while within Europe it runs closer to 1%. The tree illustrates the proximity of some populations; the Scottish and English are barely differentiable, while the Welsh are slightly more so but still very close to them. The Irish, inhabitants of a separate island, are somewhat distinct, but just barely. Of all Europeans, the British populations are the closest to the Irish.
Victorian-era Britons often attempted to accentuate the gap between the Irish and the English, positing a dyad between barbaric, indolent Celtic Irishmen and the dynamic, civilized Germanic English. But the majority of the ancestry of the English themselves seems not to be of Germanic provenance; all the peoples of Ireland and Britain preponderantly descend from Iron-Age Celtic tribes.
Removing most of the populations and zooming in on the core cluster, highlights how much the people of the British Isles share genetically: