I'm not sure genealogy is to be recommended: skeletons can fall out of family cupboards
Saturday November 21 2009
You will notice that there has grown up, over recent years, a great fashion for genealogy and tracing the ancestors: the TV programme Who Do You Think You Are is a successful manifestation of this obsession.
I'm not sure genealogy is always to be recommended: skeletons can fall out of family cupboards. And ancestor-worship is rather incestuous, surely. Yet, says Fergus Gillespie, the Chief Herald of Ireland, far from being new-fangled, genealogy is a very old Irish practice. In Gaelic Ireland -- before the Normans conquered in the 1200s -- an Irish gentleman defined his position by his family tree.
A Gaelic lord did not succeed to the title by virtue of being the son and heir, but through being the grandson, or great-grandson of the previous incumbent. Genealogy was crucial.
The scholars and learned men kept the genealogical records in old Gaelic Ireland.
And did political corruption ever occur, through the subtle falsification of family genealogy? Well, says Fergus, mostly the family trees were kept meticulously, but sometimes a collateral branch of the family might have to be invented. This happened with the last High King, Brian Boru, which as every schoolchild surely knows, died at Clontarf in 1014.
Fergus Gillespie -- or Mac Giolla Easpaig -- is a mine of information about the traditions of Irish society and family life. Aged 64, he is just about to retire as Chief Herald, but in him resides a lifetime of knowledge about Irish clans and culture, coats of arms, seals, manuscripts and annals going back to the 1200s -- and earlier.
Anyone with Irish family connections can be supplied by the Chief Herald's office with a coat of arms, for the bargain price of €3,000. It is exquisitely inscribed and written on vellum. When I visited the Chief Herald's office (part of the National Library in Dublin) last week, Fergus was just appending his signature to the new grant of arms for Shane Thomas Anthony Ryan -- Tony Ryan's son.
Mr Ryan has chosen, as the symbols on his coat of arms, flowers, a knight's visor and a griffin: rather a traditional design. Next to Shane Ryan lay the grant of arms to one Alexander O'Reilly, an 18th century general in the Spanish army, who became Governor of Cuba, and one of the 'Wild Geese'.
Acquiring a grant of arms is usually more for cultural reasons than for snobbish ones, Fergus says. Bill Clinton was granted one. Barack Obama would qualify, if he so desired to draw on his ancestral connection with Moneygall.
It is not known who, as yet, will succeed Fergus as the next Chief Herald, but it certainly is a glittering post, first granted by the Yorkist king, Edward VI in the 16th century (who was crowned in Dublin).
In 1922, when Michael Collins took over the Provisional Government of the new Irish state, he gave an order that the Office of Arms was to be protected "because therein lies our past, in a very special way".
The office was within an ace of being transferred to the Four Courts, just before it went up in flames, but was saved through a quirk of bureaucratic delay.
De Valera, too, for all his Republican rhetoric, was protective of the traditions of Irish heraldry and the Irish government only fully took over the office in 1943. (Dev also resisted suggestions to abolish the Royal Irish Academy, or to drop its 'royal' appellation.) And so, the rich store of cultural traditions, encompassing the Gaelic, the Norman, the English and Scottish which form the narrative of Irish history, are here in this office, which holds everything from the seal of Strongbow to the records of the Wild Geese who fled to France and Spain after 1690.
Fergus Gillespie, who comes from Moville in Co Donegal, (his wife, Concha, is a Catalan from Barcelona), is also a most inspiring scholar of the Irish language, and brings to life a glittering account of spoken Irish among the Gaelic nobility right up to the 18th century: he can conjure up Manus O'Donnell rowing across Lough Erne, wearing his velvet doublet, his shirt of silk, the plume in his hat.
He describes vividly a meeting between the Earl of Kildare and the Earl of Ormonde, all conducted in Irish. Until 1690, the Irish nobles, as well as the Norman-Irish, spoke Irish among themselves. At the end of the 18th century, the Irish 'Wild Geese' in Austria were still speaking Irish.
Many of the old Gaelic traditions, which gradually died out through the 16th and 17th century, were what people today would call progressive. Women had the right to divorce under Brehon law - though we must be cautious in interpreting this, as it refers to upper-class women. Gaelic society was very class-conscious, and social mobility zero.
Once divorced, the Gaelic noblewoman could take her property with her, and bestow it on her subsequent husband.
Up until the late middle ages, Irish priests commonly had wives, although the Vatican regarded these as 'concubines'.
The Vicar of Clogher is described in the Annals of Ulster as fathering 14 children, and no one turned a hair. The Gaelic Irish looked on the church as something legalistic, and you could take such legalism with a pinch of salt.
The Chief Herald of Ireland is the repository of "the family of man and his progression through a landscape".
It is the most wonderful adornment to this country's heritage.
- Mary Kenny
Irish Independent
