Ancient Ireland

Ireland is an island country located in the North Atlantic, bounded by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St. George’s Channel. It is known as Eire in the Gaelic language, which comes from the old Irish Eriu, the name of a daughter of the mother goddess Ernmas of the Tuatha De Danaan, the mystical pre-Celtic race of Ireland.

Legend tells that, when the Milesians invaded Ireland to conquer the Tuatha De Danaan, Eriu and her sisters, Banba and Fodla, asked that they name the island after them. Eriu became the most commonly used name, while Banba and Fodla were used poetically as one might a nickname.

The name Eire is also thought to derive from the Erainn (whose name derives from the same root), the chief tribe of the region of Munster in the south-west mentioned in the Greek historian Ptolemy›s Geography (2nd century CE). The Erainn were also called the Iverni by Ptolemy, which would give later Romans their name for Ireland: Hibernia. Ireland is the third largest European island (after Great Britain and Iceland) and is presently divided politically between the Republic of Ireland, a sovereign state, and Northern Island, which is a part of Great Britain.

The Republic of Ireland is generally referred to simply as ‘Ireland’. Eire is usually translated as ‘abundant land’ or ‘plentiful land’, either in reference to the goddess who was thought to inhabit the region and bless it with fertility or to the tribe who Ptolemy claimed possessed rich lands.

Ireland was uninhabited by people for a much longer time than many other countries. Historian Jonathan Bardon comments, “It is an arresting thought that human beings had been living in Australia for 40,000 years before the very first people came to live in Ireland” (1). Bardon and others attribute this to the Midlandian Ice Age whose vast sheets of ice only began melting in Ireland c. 15,000 BCE.

The land was then home to only plants and animals that had crossed over from the European mainland on land masses that were submerged when the glacial ice sheets melted. Ireland and Britain were both separated from the European continent at about this time (c. 12,000 BCE). The first people arrived in Ireland between 7,000-6,500 BCE at Coleraine in the far north. The Mount Sandel Mesolithic Site, discovered at Coleraine in 1973 CE, is the oldest archaeological site in Ireland.

Mesolithic Ireland’s inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who traveled in small bands from region to region, building villages of wooden huts with domed roofing of bark and animal skin. These huts were communal lodges for extended families with a single basin-shaped fire pit in the center and a round opening in the roof for ventilation of smoke.

World History