About 350 B.C., some fifty years after Celtic tribes began their invasion of Britain, they reached Ireland. More than likely it was the Iberian Celts who landed, and they brought with them a language somewhat different from that of the British invaders. Eventually, these people were called the Irish, and the language they spoke belongs not to those of the Welsh or Bretons, but to a Celtic branch whose present day off-shoots are the last living Gaelic tongues: Irish and Scots gaelic. Ireland itself is the only Celtic nation-state in our world; all the other Celts have been absorbed by larger political entities.
The Irish race of today is popularly known as the Milesian Race, because the genuine Irish (Celtic) people were supposed to be descended from Milesius of Spain, whose sons, say the legendary accounts, invaded and possessed themselves of Ireland a thousand years before Christ. The races that occupied the land when the so-called Milesians came, chiefly the Firbolg and the Tuatha De Danann, were certainly not exterminated by the conquering Milesians. Those two peoples formed the basis of the future population, which was dominated and guided, and had its characteristics moulded, by the far less numerous but more powerful Milesian aristocracy and soldiery. All three of these races, however, were different tribes of the great Celtic family, who, long ages before, had separated from the main stem, and in course of later centuries blended again into one tribe of Gaels - three derivatives of one stream, which, after winding their several ways across Europe from the East, in Ireland turbulently met, and after eddying, and surging tumultuously, finally blended in amity, and flowed onward in one great Gaelic stream. The possession of the country was wrested from the Firbolgs, and they were forced into partial serfdom by the Tuatha De Danann (people of the goddess Dana), who arrived later. Totally unlike the uncultured Firbolgs, the Tuatha De Dannann were a capable and cultured, highly civilised people, so skilled in the crafts, if not the arts, that the Firbolgs named them necromancers, and in course of time both the Firbolgs and the later coming Milesians created a mythology around these. In a famed battle at Southern Moytura (on the Mayo-Galway border) it was that the Tuatha De Danann met and overthrew the Firbolgs. The Firbolgs noted King, Eochaid was slain in this great battle, but the De Danan King, Nuada, had his hand cut off by a great warrior of the Firbolgs named Sreng. The battle raged for four days. So bravely had the Firbolgs fought, and so sorely exhausted the De Dannann, that the latter, to end the battle, gladly left to the Firbolgs, that quarter of the Island wherein they fought, the province now called Connaught. And the bloody contest was over. The famous life and death struggle of two races is commemorated by a multitude of cairns and pillars which strew the great battle plain in Sligo - a plain which bears the name (in Irish) of "The plain of the Towers of the Fomorians". The Danann were now the undisputed masters of the land. So goes the honoured legend.
When the Irish spirit for independence from England welled at the turn of the 19th century, patriots found national identity in the ancient Irish language and culture, brought to Ireland during the first century B.C. by the Gaels- a branch of the dynamic Celts who swept Europe centuries before the Christian era.Gaelic priests, judges,poets and historians enjoyed the highest social prestige as the sacred learned class and warriors formed the nobility. But the Celtic penchant for battle defied political unity and as many as 150 tribal kingdoms quilted the island.
Roman forces that routed the Celtic culture in
Europe never reached Ireland. The Gaels absorbed a more gentle
Latin invasion in the fifth century- Christianity. If the
legend-inspring St. Patrick was not the first missionary in
Ireland, he was without doubt the most successful, converting
many influential leaders.
The Christian movement blossomed in monasteries that were
organized on the tribal basis and and reflected the ruling
family's wealth. Monks developed a written Irish language and
transcribed Gaelic lore and tradition. Pagan and Christian
decorative art merged in exquisite illuminated manuscripts, such
as the Book of Kells. Zealous Irish monks established their own
missions on the island.The plunder of monastic wealth by
neighboring kingdoms was commonplace politics in Ireland. The
treasuries were also favorite target of seafaring Vikings
throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. The Vikings never
dominated Ireland but gradually aligned themselves with various
chieftains. They general lived apart from the rural Gaels,
established Ireland's first towns and expanded trade.Political
change altered Gaelic culture during the last half of the first
millennium A.D. , as chieftains ambitious for power began to
consolidate petty kingdoms into realms that remain today as
Ireland's four provinces: Leinster, Munster, Connaught and
Ulster.Famed warrior Brian Boru, King of Munster, took the title
of High King in 1002, the first to attempt rule over all of
Ireland. But political unity remained elusive in Ireland's
caldron of family rivalries and the high kingship was won or lost
by the sword.