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The poems, in general, tend to be very local in their focus and very specific: the context in which a historian has to read the bardic poetry from Gaelic Ireland is the context of an individual lordship. You can’t look at the poetry as a historical source that is in some way a detached commentary on Gaelic society as a whole: the poets didn’t think in those terms. They were paid to think in terms of an individual lordship, and even when in the early 17th century they begin to write poetry with a more personal note in it, reflecting their own views as well as those of a chieftain, they still tend to be very localised, very specific, very focused-in on themselves rather than looking at society as a whole. So, in some ways, the poetry simply does not answer the kind of questions we would like to ask about, say, the Gaelic society response to something as traumatic to them as the Ulster Plantation, because the poetry just doesn’t give you that kind of open, analytical, political response that you might like to find in a source: it just isn’t the genre to do that.
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