April curriculum summary
In the jolly month of April, I dedicated myself to three topics of study; Italian, Irish and ancient history/Ancient Irish history/the Celts. Dedicated might be too strong of a word actually, assigned more like. With work, a partner, and external life it was difficult to fully dedicate myself to my self-imposed study how I’d envisioned it when planning, but I did stick to it. I’m not going to lie; I was a bit stuck on where to start my curriculum in terms of the history topic because it’s such a broad search area, but I decided that going right from the beginning of Irelands history would be a good start. Now for the Italian language topic, I’ve already been studying Italian through a combination of Duolingo and workbooks so I was just looking to increase the volume of which I was learning. Irish however I was starting from scratch. The Celtic languages have always fascinated me but I chose Irish because my grandfather was Irish and I have always wanted to learn more about Ireland and everything that makes it special. Now I just want to make it clear that none of this is groundbreaking stuff. It’s basic history and knowledge that is only being unearthed by me, just with my commentary attached. But I also hope that this knowledge will be beneficial to someone else who is on the cusp of opening their minds eye to new things.
Warning and note to readers: there are topics in here that might be upsetting to some, but they are necessary for education. I’d also like to acknowledge that this piece does include my own opinions and I don’t want anyone to spread hate based on my opinions if you simply don’t agree. I’d also like to make it clear that I (like everyone) am still learning about the topics discusses below and while my opinions might change in the future, for now my thoughts and feelings are solid.
I’m not really sure how I want to structure the summaries on my learnings, so maybe I’ll let it spill out onto the page exactly how it stands in my brain. So, I guess it all started with me googling ‘the history of Ireland’. I searched on Google and YouTube and looked for anything that could steer me in the direction of a solid but grabbing summary of major historical events. Now I know that a summary of a country’s history is nowhere near enough to know the country back to front, but I also didn’t want to dive head first into a compact history textbook and have absolutely no idea where the story was going. Besides, there were two eras of Irelands history that I wanted to lean about, their birth and ancient history and their modern history. So, I broke it down into two parts. Interestingly enough, their origin story is shrouded in mystery. No one actually knows who, when or how exactly Ireland was first discovered. There are traces of a weaponry and monuments dating back to the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages but little evidence survives of who those guys were. But we do know (thanks to their fantastic stone monuments), that they had strong, complicated, and interesting belief systems that circled around astrology, both of the solstices or some other form of astrological order. God that’s so interesting. If I was more of academic, I’d dedicate myself to finding those mystical civilisations. But moving on. Irelands transition from pagan forms of worship to Christianity is also quite interesting, although I admit I did have some thoughts about that.
While the country did naturally transition into their own from of Christianity (Irish Catholic), I do believe that Rome had no right to send St Patrick and his predecessor Palladius over to spread the word of their God into a land that had their own belief systems. Granted, anyone can be violent about anything and I’m not sure how exactly St Patrick went about spreading his gospel, but I just believe you should never push your religion onto another person outside of a natural conversation where your separate religions are the topic. It’s also known that many Christain’s looked down upon the Celtic religions and called them not natural and barbaric. Who were they to claim something is bad just because it’s different to what they believed in? THAT BEING SAID, we only have so many of Irelands origin stories, mythologies and histories due to the work of Christian monks. Ireland was very much an oral country which unfortunately led to the loss of so many stories and recollections from the country’s history. Only from 100 BC was there a script called Ogham that was used by the country’s inhibitors to create records before the introduction of Latin in the 5th century. I’m not saying that Ireland didn’t benefit from the introduction and transition into Christianity, I just believe it might’ve not been necessary at the time to force the start of a natural occurrence and wipe out a religion and belief system that they didn’t understand. But the religious state of Ireland now is a beautiful culmination of everything they’ve been through and their own strain of Catholicism that survived hundreds of years of persecution from various foes. (This isn’t to say that everything is all fine and dandy, the British still have a lot to apologise for and acknowledge).
Fun fact: Ireland’s first coin currency was introduced by Sihtric Silkbeard, the Viking leader of Dublin in 997AD. The Irish people had previously relied on bartering their goods for currency.
Now we move onto Irelands modern history (not that their ancient history is that short of a summary, but I don’t wish to yammer on too much and serve you a novel instead of a flyer). I also want to preface here that this next summary will not be in favour of the British. I’m not saying I hate them or that they should be hated, but for what they did to the Irish and many other nations I do have extremely strong feelings of disgust.
Everyone knows about the potato famine, you throw the term around as children when you have baked potatoes for dinner 3 nights in a row. I grew up in the UK, from ages 2 – 10, and never once did I hear a true account of what happened in Ireland with the potato blight. Maybe it’s because that history wasn’t taught until middle school, but regardless, I was ignorantly in the dark. In 1845 a terrible disease swept through Ireland (the Netherlands and Belgium also experienced the blight) that effected the potato crops. Now let’s hop back a bit. With the invasions of the Vikings, Normans and the Anglo-Saxons over the years, native farmers had become tenant farmers to rich and absent landlords with larger amount of power that often went unchecked. This meant that many Irish had been left with reduced rights and laws working in their favour. Ok now back to the potatoes.
Potatoes were the choice of many farmers at the time because they were easy to grow in the soil, however when the blight came through it meant that majority of the crops were destroyed. With their crops all destroyed, there went their money for rent and other necessities. While there were other food and crops available around the country, native Irish farmers didn’t have the rights to access them. Meaning that many farmers lost their houses and jobs and it eventually led to mass homelessness and starvation. The nation began falling apart, with Britain feeling slowly feeling the effects of the blight. Ireland was responsible for the imports of livestock and beef to Britain, so when imports slowed down and eventually stopped the British nobility began freaking out. But not for the Irish, oh no, for themselves. They decide to increase the imports of all remaining livestock and crops towards Britain, leaving nothing for the Irish. And what was the Irish left with? A legacy of genocide. No, the British didn’t start the blight, but they certainly didn’t try to help. Some British nobility believed that the famine was ‘divine intervention’ to wipe out the ‘immoral and unnatural Irish’ and that’s why they didn’t offer any support or assistance to Ireland. Partly due to religious differences, but there were many contributions and prejudices that made the British think that they were superior to the Irish.
The pre-famine population of Ireland was 8.2 million. In 2026 Ireland has still not reached pre-famine levels of population.
This is the point in my research where I was transitioning away from ancient history and into Ireland’s modern history. I had one major research point that I wanted to focus on here, and that was The Troubles. I never knew the ins and outs of all that went down, just that there were two sides and lots of fighting. Bad, I know. But I was 10 when I moved back to Australia which was slightly before I would’ve learnt about The Troubles in the UK. Unfortunately, but understandably Australian history lessons didn’t cover much modern UK history unless it was taken as an elective for SACE in years 11 and 12. So here I am way too many years later learning about it. I remember I watch Derry Girls for the first time a few years ago and was slightly confused with the political side of the show and that’s when I really knew I had to educate myself on the topic. The joining of the UK and Ireland (and the eradication of the Irish identity and government) goes all the way back to the 1800’s when the Act of Union was introduced (pre-famine). We then have in 1916 the Easter Rising, a terrible 5 days of fighting that killed 485 people. This unfortunate event was the trigger event that led to the separation of Ireland into north and south (Government of Ireland act 1920), the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the partition of Ireland (1921), and lastly where 26 counties became the Irish Free State and 6 counties were left as Northern Ireland and a part of the UK (1922). The troubles didn’t end there. 1922-23 there was the Irish civil war where Michael Collins was assassinated on August 22nd 1922. Collins was a leading figure in the fight for Irish independence and was partly responsible for the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty along with Arthur Griffith. In 1937 we had the first constitution for the Irish Republic. Now with all this simmering under the surface (well it did often boil over), we are met with the establishment of the Northern Ireland civil rights association in 1967 whose mission was to campaign for equal rights for the catholic minority. Various marches and campaigns were help between 1967 and the end of 1969 where rioting was surging. August 15th 1969, the British Army was deployed into Derry as a response to mass riots after loyalists were permitted to march through nationalist territory. (Nationalists were Catholics who wanted a fully united Ireland. Loyalists/Unionist/British were protestants who wanted to stay with the UK). Thus began 30 years of fighting (predominantly in Northern Ireland). Thirty horrible years of war where over 3500 people were killed. But in 1998 there was a small flame of hope. A small fire that only needed to be believed in for it to grow. On April 10th 1998 the Good Friday Agreement (or the Belfast Agreement) was signed which allowed for self-governance once more through power sharing. It brought peace and relief to everyone, and an end to a violence that none should ever have to experience, let alone live through for 30 years. However, it was only in 2007 that the British Army was finally and officially removed from Northern Ireland. I can’t believe that I was so ignorant about it all for so long. I feel terrible, sickened, and quite frankly, ready to jump into a protest to help fight for the complete independence of my grandfather’s country.
My research for history in April ended there but I’m not about to completely drop this as a topic of interest. Now, I know it seems like I’m just brushing over it all to move on but I’m not I swear. However now for our next topic, the Irish language! I started slowly learning Irish over Duolingo this month and I’m very keen to continue this study. The Irish language has been a victim of eradication by the British as early as 1366, and what was once a primarily Irish speaking country was left with the language being near extinction. Now I’m no language aficionado, but I do want to do my part to help revive a previously dying language (even if my part is really small). Soooo,
Dia duit! Tae le siúcra le do thoil.
Go raibh maith agat.
(Hello! Tea with sugar please.
Thank you).
Ok ok I know it’s not much, but the first lessons on Duolingo tend to be quite repetitive (which is necessary for language learning I suppose). I do know a few other words and variations of an ‘ordering food and drink’ sentence, but nothing further as of yet. I do however want to track down some language books so I can work on the language more in depth.
Finally, the last topic of my April curriculum was Italian and here I expanded my current learnings of the language. I have two workbooks at home that I use to study Italian and both are more on the grammar side of learning than vocabulary. I’m finding that I’m able to follow the workbooks for Italian on my own easily enough which I like. I feel like I’m getting a solid handle of the language for my basic level. I do believe that I’d be able to hold a very small conversation in Italian as long as we’re talking about cafes, shopping or sports.
Sources
https://www.wildernessireland.com/history-ireland/
The Celts: Conquerors of Ancient Europe, by Christiane Eluère
The Irish famine, by Colm Tóibín and Diarmaid Ferriter
Celtic Myths, by Jake Jackson