Nicholas Wade finally runs with the genetic story I covered last year in my blog posting "Every Man a King!"
Listen more kindly to the New York Irishmen who assure you that the blood of early Irish kings flows in their veins. At least 2 percent of the time, they are telling the truth, according to a new genetic survey.
The survey not only bolsters the bragging rights of some Irishmen claiming a proud heritage but also provides evidence of the existence of Niall of the Nine Hostages, an Irish high king of the fifth century A.D. regarded by some historians as more legend than real.
The survey shows that 20 percent of men in northwestern Ireland carry a distinctive genetic signature on their Y chromosomes, possibly inherited from Niall, who was said to have had numerous sons, or some other leader in a position to have had many descendants.
About one in 50 New Yorkers of European origin - including men with names like O'Connor, Flynn, Egan, Hynes, O'Reilly and Quinn - carry the genetic signature linked with Niall and northwestern Ireland, writes Daniel Bradley, the geneticist who conducted the survey with colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin.
Of course, the vast profusion of kings within ancient Ireland necessarily meant that their kingdoms tended to be not much bigger than Yertle the Turtle's:
"All mine!" Yertle cried. "Oh, the things I now rule!
I'm the king of a cow! And I'm the king of a mule!
I'm the king of a house! And, what's more, beyond that
I'm the king of a blueberry bush and a cat!
I'm Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me!
For I am the ruler of all that I see!"
Paul Johnson wrote in his Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day:
The English presence in Ireland arose from the failure of Irish society to develop the institution of monarchy. The Irish, of course, had kingship; too much of it indeed. The chief kings were those who held the Meath and Leinster, Munster, Connaught and Ulster; but between the fifth and twelfth centuries, with a population that never exceeded 500,000, Ireland had about 150 kings at any given date, each ruling over a tuath or tribal kingdom. A chanson de geste describing the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century says: "In Ireland there were as many kings as counts elsewhere."
So, that's about 3,000 followers per king.
My recollection of visiting England, then Ireland was that it seemed pretty obvious why the English kicked the Irish around for so long: England looked like a very nice place to farm, while the Irish countryside was full of rocks. So it's hardly surprising that there were more Englishmen than Irishmen and they had more energy left over to go overseas looking for trouble.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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