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Gaelic Ulster was a series of lordships where you had great families, great rulers such as the O’Neills and the O’Donnells, the Maguires, the McMahons. Some of them like the O’Neills and O’Donnells were the leading families; then they had a number of other, more-or-less sub-ordinate families, although how subordinate they were and how permanently they remained subordinate was a bone of contention and gave rise to a lot of internal squabbling that went on over many centuries because no family liked to stay in the same spot, they liked to improve their situation, and there were sometimes cases of families shifting allegiances from one great lord to another and that would give rise to rows and squabbles as well.
And then you had another significant feature which was families from outside, as it were, the families from western Scotland such as the MacDonalds who established a lordship in Antrim. They were the lords of the Isles and they had also set up a lordship in Antrim and they again were part of the mix and they got into contention with other local Gaelic families. And we know, for example, the great Shane O’Neill, the great ruler of the O’Neill territory of mid-Ulster, was eventually killed in a squabble with the MacDonalds of Antrim, having fled to them after a defeat suffered at the hands of the O’Donnells in Donegal.
So that gives you some idea of the internal rivalry and internecine squabbling that went on: not all that different perhaps to some of what went on in the Continent at the same time; Ireland wasn’t all that different from other parts of the western world.
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