A genetic condition could explain much of Irish history

[Beorn]

'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth", is one of the most insightful observations that Arthur Conan Doyle put into the mouth of Sherlock Holmes.
The 'science' of eugenics was born in Doyle's lifetime, and he died even as it was being turned by the Nazis into an evil parody of intellectual inquiry.

Thanks to that bunch, the western liberal world has largely disallowed the opening aphorism of this column to stand, if the 'truth' in questions concerns the cousin of eugenics, namely genetics, as an explanation for group conduct.
Now we know that both schizophrenia and alcoholism are inherited traits. We also know that Ireland has higher rates of both illnesses than any other country in Europe. So what if there are other genetically transmitted mental traits which are beyond the normally accepted confines of 'mental illness'? What if they caused behavioural characteristics that were specific to Irish people?

What if the prevalence of these genetic characteristics then helped shape the culture of the Irish so that they became societal norms, thus affecting the behaviour of people who were themselves not inheritors of the genes? It is not then a question of nature and nurture: the two are intertwined. The result is that academically-despised phenomenon: national character.
The DNA evidence for the origins of the Irish, curiously enough, conforms pretty closely with Irish mythology: the first Irish apparently arrived by boat from Spain. According to DNA analysis, so too did Irish hares and Irish pine martens and even, God help us, Irish badgers (no, please don't ask). The new Irish would presumably have been small in number and, if interrelated, might well have possessed a number of distinctive genes in unusual concentrations. Some of these genes could presumably have inclined their owners towards mental illness and alcoholism.

Possibly other genes caused a predisposition to disregard the future tense. Impetuosity, a refusal to plan, a contempt for consequence: for whatever reason, these would become common characteristics of the Irish people.
We know about other characteristics, which we are allowed to celebrate: a gregariousness, a volubility, an affable charm, a clannishness, an amiable distinctiveness, especially compared to the English. Despite the fact that the vast majority of immigrants to the US before the Famine were English, that English common law and English political libertarian culture are the basis for American freedoms, and that the founding fathers and the vast majority of subsequent US presidents are of English extraction, there is no such thing as "English-American." The same cannot be said about the Irish-American: too often, alas.
There are the good Irish-Americans, than whom there is nothing better: the US Marine Corps is full of them, and no ethnic group has provided the corps with more splendid leaders.
And there is the bad Irish-American, the Tammany Hall spiv, the blathering Noraid sociopath, reaching its dismal apogee with Richard Daly, mayor of Chicago, criminally fixing the presidential election for John F Kennedy in 1960. Stealing or packing ballot boxes, personating, corrupting the democratic will: familiar, anyone?

Yet even to consider that the characteristics of Irishness might have some genetic basis is to violate an all-powerful political taboo. And one such characteristic is both very close to a psychiatric condition and also a commonplace political phenomenon within Irish life: a perpetual sense of victimhood. Though admittedly, career victimhood is not uniquely Irish. In the US, it has formed a tactical alliance with political correctness, to prevent a reasoned, all-reaching analysis of why African-American society has been so very dysfunctional. The idea that 'race' -- or rather a specific genetic-inheritance within an ethnic group -- might be a determinant in that group's behaviour is, a priori, ideologically unacceptable. Scientific inquiry is either not allowed to consider the role of genetics on the conduct of an ethnic group, or if it is -- as in the Bell Curve theories -- its findings are ridiculed on almost entirely political grounds.

This is wilful ignorance, for an abiding, genetically acquired psychiatric condition could well explain much of Irish history. The golden thread of Irish republicanism, which can turn an affray in a farmyard into a 'Rising', takes much of its moral authenticity through a much-cherished sense of oppression. But the Famine aside, though rural conditions in Ireland were truly appalling, the people were physically superior to the working-classes of British industrial cities.
The British army that stood fast at Waterloo and at Inkerman was composed of Irish peasants: the broken, malnourished wretches of Manchester's factories would have perished of exhaustion long before they glimpsed an enemy musket.
But let's go back a bit. Why were the English -- until the Famine barely superior in number to the Irish -- able to impose their will (to a greater or lesser degree) on Ireland over the centuries before?

Why did Ireland never achieve any kind central kingship either before Henry II's arrival, or in the years that followed? Why did Ireland, almost uniquely among all the peoples of the Atlantic seaboard, not produce masted fishing and mercantile fleets, creations which -- not coincidentally - need the maximum of foresight and planning? Why did Irish earls repeatedly rebel against the crown to which they had personally sworn allegiance, yet always without proper preparation?
And is such a pathological tradition of treachery (or its companion vice, cute hoorism) the reason why division and betrayal are always presumed to be the likely outcome of any Irish co-operative endeavour? More tomorrow.

Source

[Beorn]

The 'more tomorrow'

Why do we always get things wrong? I know, it's the Brits, the Brits, the Brits

As this State flounders towards collapse again, let's ask: why do we always get things wrong? Sure, I know three reliable answers: the Brits, the Brits and the Brits again.
Indeed, entire university faculties are given over to discourses on Hibernian victimhood, with self-pity intellectualised through the impenetrable verbal mud of Foucault, Derrida and Fanon.
This whingeing school of thought has an academic brand name, Field Day, and a caste of articulate laureates who specialise in the plaints of our woebegone Irish identity. Yet no one considers the possibility that there might be something genetically askew with too many Irish people for us to create an ordered, predictable society that does not fall apart every 15 years or so.
So, has our still-small population been cursed with some genetic fault from our founding population which came from Spain 4,000 years ago? A baleful genetic legacy need not be very large. Any teacher will testify to the impossibly disruptive influence of a minority of pupils. What if the same were true of an entire society?
The enduring success of Fianna Fail, founded by yet another Spaniard, has been the main story of independent Ireland.
Yet this is the party that did its violent best to destroy the State at its outset, and did so again in the 1930s by waging a ruinous economic war with the world's mightiest empire, and our only trading partner. It did bring the State to its knees in the 1950s, attempting to create a Catholic Gaelic paradise, and courted ruin again in 1970 when it turned a blind eye to the formation of the Provisional IRA.
Lo, come the 1980s, and insane Fianna Fail borrowings took us to the brink of penury. And finally, here we are again in the 2000s, now facing Armageddon.
Yet at this very nadir, the Fianna Fail vote of 25pc in Euro elections suggests that a quarter of the population is clinically insane. We don't need psephologists to explain Irish elections. We need psychiatrists. Take Donegal, where the electorate in the 1990s returned one TD who demanded free, universal British television, and another who demanded Brits out: transfers from one got the other elected.
Irrationality is a defining feature of Irish life, yet even to draw attention to this is to attract comparably irrational cries of "anti-Irish". Thus the mental disorder even has its own antibodies which prevent any enquiry into it. "We are victims: we cannot be authors of our many misfortunes, and anyone who says we are is a bigoted anti-national Hibernophobe".
Fine. But why have outbursts of killing been a consistent characteristic of Irish life down the centuries? Why do we have the highest rates of alcoholism, schizophrenia and mental illness in Europe? Why did Ireland have legislation (1817) for public asylums before France (1838) and England (1845)? Why are we so often incapable of planning anything?
Half-cocked, unorganised rebellions have entered Irish mythology as glorious -- though doomed -- blows for freedom. From Silken Thomas's idiotic insurrection through to 1916, it is as if the iron law of consequence does not exist. Historical events almost become almost like a blight of bungalows littered across the countryside. They are all intellectually disconnected; nothing is learnt.
Translate that pathological disregard for the inevitable into the management of a modern society, and you get Anglo-Irish Bank and Sean FitzPatrick, and tiny terraced cottages in Drimnagh being sold in 2007 for €700,000 each.
It took us 20 years to build a few hundred miles of motorway, but without service stations or rest areas; yet Paddy in Britain in the 1950s was building one mile of motorway, complete with service stations, every eight days. In the 1980s, the main Galway-Clifden bus would leave Galway railway station for Clifden five minutes before the train from Dublin arrived. Conversely, the Clifden-Galway bus arrived back at the railway station five minutes after the Dublin-bound train had departed.
In Cork they managed things just a little better. The bus for West Cork left five minutes after the train from Dublin arrived -- however, not from the railway station, but from a bus-terminus half a mile away.
Eamon Coughlan could catch it. Everyone else, tottering with their bags, would collapse, wheezing in its wake, just as it drew away.
Dysfunctionalism is central to this society. Lateness is not seen for what it is, arrogant selfishness, but as a charming eccentricity.
We have the shortest academic year in the EU, yet still allow teachers annually take a further six weeks uncertificated sick leave. So unsurprisingly, we have the highest rate of illiteracy among school-leavers in Europe.
We give gardai special holiday allowances when they're getting pink in Ibiza, to compensate for the tax-free perks they're missing at work. John Lonergan, the governor of Mountjoy prison, probably the worst and most violent jail in Europe, is a darling of the liberal media.
The best-paid presenter on RTE television, Pat Kenny, attempted to obtain, by "adverse possession", a neighbour's land for free, but ended up in court. The state broadcaster is now giving him a TV weekly special on politics, no doubt with searing insights into ethical improbity in high places.
So -- is this what the aboriginal Iberian gene pool did to us? Gratias España - but let's bring on the Poles.

[Murphy]

Source

Why did Ireland never achieve any kind central kingship either before Henry II's arrival, or in the years that followed?

Gaelic Ireland didn't devlop into a feudal society first and foremost I believe because they didn't need to devlop a feudal society. Their system worked. Henry II's and England's attempts to change Gaelic Irish society were obviously not welcomed with open arms.. this is like wondering why a Christian might object to being forced to convert to Islam.

Why did Ireland, almost uniquely among all the peoples of the Atlantic seaboard, not produce masted fishing and mercantile fleets, creations which -- not coincidentally - need the maximum of foresight and planning?

I do not believe this is due to any lacking on the Irish's part. For a start, the Gaels were rather adept at boating.. they spent their lives raiding the mainland coast and even in later years the Irish on the west coast had strong blackmarket trading ties with Spain and to a lesser extent France. Which brings up my main point: Ireland was weak at seas because it suited the English Parliament for Ireland to be weak at seas. The English Parliament couldn't abide Ireland as an economic threat which is exactly what Ireland would have become if She had been given free reign over Herself. It's the reason why the English Parliament passed so much anti-Irish legislation and put control over the Irish economy thoroughly under English control.

Why did Irish earls repeatedly rebel against the crown to which they had personally sworn allegiance, yet always without proper preparation?

Who wrote this article? They need to open a history book. All of the rebellions prior to the Republican uprisings from the 18th century onwards, were not rebellions against the Crown. They were uprisings of Irishmen who were fighting against the English Parliament for their basic rights under the Crown which they were denied and least we not forget the Jacobite uprising was Irishmen fighting for their king. Not recognising the very basis for these "rebellions" is dangerous as you run the risk of not understanding later Republican uprisings.

I also want sources for the alcoholic- and schizophrenic-rate claims.

Regards,
Eóin.