Research Update #1

Welcome to the Clover Project!

Throughout the next few months/years I will be trying to answer the question "To what extent did Irish Gaelic cultural traditions survive English colonization, and what drove their survival or disappearance?" I currently have very little background knowledge on this topic, so I am setting off on this journey with nothing to guide me besides some trusty books and my own curiosity. What I know so far goes back to the dark ages. During the 5th century the Irish were converted by Saint Patrick and other missionaries from their native druidic religion to catholicism, which fundamentally changed the structure of their society. 500 years later another big change came, the Normans. The Irish were colonized by the Normans in the late 11th century after they had fully taken over England, but these colonizers were eventually fully integrated into native Irish Celtic culture. For example, the Norman lords started to speak the language of the Irish at the time rather than their native Norman French. 700 years after that, during the Tudor era (late 15th to very early 17th century), the Irish were colonized again, this time by the English. This time the colonists did not integrate into Irish culture, they instead changed it forever. The protestant English beat the catholic Spanish-backed Irish lords in the 9 Years War (1593-1603), which led to the flight of the Irish lords to the European continent, leaving the Irish catholics largely defenseless. This flight allowed the English to instate their own nobles into Ireland by allowing adventurous Scottish and English people to set up plantations on Irish lands. This new plantation system transformed the Irish economy from largely cattle based and nomadic to mostly agrarian and sedentary. An interesting tidbit is that before English colonization lords would wage war on neighboring clans cattle and make themselves richer. As English control increased over the region as the British lords became more established, laws began to be passed to limit the amount of power the Irish catholic population had, effectively making them second-class citizens. During this period the English also outlawed the use of the Irish language, destroying a huge part of the Irish culture. Around 1920 Ireland was finally allowed to be its own state, but Northern Ireland was to remain in the control of the British. This led to a long period called "the troubles," which was a long period of fighting between the IRA and the British forces in Ireland, which eventually was resolved through the Good Friday Agreement which established a devolved government in Northern Ireland, which basically means that the Northern Irish government has local authority over Northern Ireland, but is still subordinate to the UK government.

So thats everything I know about the history of Irish colonization. The obvious question is why a girl from America is researching the cultural history of a tiny island across the ocean. My honest answer to this is that I am doing this for the love of the game. It has been a while since something completely new has sparked my interest and Irish history is at an interesting crossroads for me. My last name is Dougherty, which comes from the north of Ireland in the county of Donegal, so I have personal family history in Ireland. Additionally my mom and I are making the move to Ireland in one month, so I have a future in Ireland. I have also been fascinated with English history for years, and until recently I didn't know that the English colonized Ireland. I have also never heard much in history classes at school about the colonization of the Irish, which some historians argue was the blueprint the British used for later colonization, so this project is a vehicle to make Irish history more mainstream. My main goal with this project is to connect y'all to the history of a country where millions of Americans claim heritage but barely know anything about, and to explore the effects of colonization by the English on Irish culture.

I will be posting research updates with much more substance than this one bi-monthly or monthly, if I can manage it, so join my mailing list (on the homepage of this blog) to be notified of when I post. If you have any sources or stories you think I might be interested in, please email me at harmoniesofhistory@gmail.com. I will also be posting interesting nuggets of information on my instagram page @harmonies.of.history, so be sure to give me a follow there for videos of the interesting bits that don't make it into my research updates, and perhaps a rare singing video or two. I can't wait for y'all to follow along on my research journey!

See y'all in the next update.