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Rob Vance
Like most people on this island, I am a mixture of the different races that make up the Irish; Gaelic, Norman, Huguenot, -random bits and pieces- and from an early age, curiosity about the past was in my character.
But of all three cultural strands that make up my ancestors, one group has always been uppermost. Since childhood, my distant O'Fogarty forbears have been tugging at my deepest thoughts and it is through bringing Irish history to a wider audience, that I may do them some small honour.
If this new RTÉ series was about the medieval History of England or France, I would start somewhere atmospheric like a Cathedral or a sainted abbey in the capital city. I would walk its gilded nave, stuffed with the sarcophagi of the great and the good, recumbent effigies of those who had led the land through its wars and ultimately, who created the past out of which the present grew.
But our story begins further back. We examine the evidence for the Romans being in Ireland and how St Patrick wasn't the first, or even the 101st Christian on the island and how so many things about our history are still unknown. We try to find out what really happened and why.
Later we ask why, in the 13th century Cathedral of Christ Church, in Dublin, no Irish kings lie beneath royal tombs, nor Gaelic queens who built nunneries or helped the poor. No Irish captains of their nations who fought Ireland's wars are buried in state, anywhere. There are no gilded inscriptions in an ancient language that tell of Ireland's kings defeating the Sassenachs in any castle, church or abbey on the island.
But the Irish kings and the nobility fought. Bravely, foolishly in many ways, for they refused to compromise, their great pride blinding them to the reality of medieval politics, where only the most powerful, or cunning could survive. Later Medieval Ireland was the bear-pit where lumbering, slow moving old ways were torn to pieces by the mastiffs of power politics and the money economy. Ireland was where the old met the new head-on and it wasn't a pretty sight. What happened in the middle-ages is the story behind this new series and its accompanying book.
"Secret Sights 2, Unknown Medieval Ireland" by Rob Vance is available now priced €22.50 and published by Ashfield Press.
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