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The self-image of the great Irish lords, and particularly people like O’Neill and O’Donnell, was one of greatness stretching back into an unconscionably long past. They were aware of their pedigrees: they traced them back to the great kings and warriors of a pre-English Ireland, before 1169. They could calmly look at the Tudors and say ‘These are newcomers’. They could have looked equally at the House of York and the House of Lancaster, they could have looked equally at the descendants of William I as newcomers; indeed, Charlemagne himself, crowned Emperor in 800, was a relative newcomer compared with the long line of ancestors that O’Neill, O’Donnell and others could (and they had historical justification on their side) parade.
Of course there were historical breaks, of course there was a conquest of a large part of Ulster by John deCourcy and subsequently by other English lords, and there was a period in which the power of O’Neill and O’Donnell was low, but they made what might be called a remarkable recovery. Nonetheless, they saw themselves and their historical retainers, the writers of their pedigrees and their propaganda, kept them fully acquainted with this grand historical tradition.
Now side-by-side with this, the church in Ireland could also look back to a long and glorious past - that is to say, they were aware of the achievements of the Irish church in the Early middle ages, of the great missionary efforts of Columba and Columbanus, and whatever about the vicissitudes of more recent history, whatever about the sorts of problems that beset the church in Ireland in the high middle ages and in the later middle ages, they could nonetheless - and did - look back to what they could perceive as a glorious Christian tradition.
So this lent to Gaelic Ireland a remarkably positive self-image and one that, no doubt, was a strong reinforcement to the attitudes they took, the attitudes of superiority for example, that they took towards the colonists.
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