'The Story of Ireland'
“The Story of Ireland” sets out with a mission: to get beyond what it calls “the self-limiting” picture of Ireland produced, in part, by Republican drumbeating around the erection of an independent state. Narrator Fergal Keane takes pains in his interviews with numerous Irish historians to show how Eire was more than an island on the margin of Europe locked in perpetual struggle with the English. To use fashionable terms, its story is more diverse.
The five-part series produced by BBC Northern Ireland (and out on DVD) shows the island was never hermetically sealed from the outside world. In ancient times it was part of a Celtic culture zone; the most famous Irishman, St. Patrick, was Welsh; the Vikings not only raided the coast but settled in large numbers, establishing Dublin and Limerick and adding their bloodlines to Ireland. The English intruded in the 12th century at the behest of an unloved Irish chieftain deposed in a local power struggle and planted an aristocracy that came to see itself as Irish. British control wasn't firmly established until the genocidal regime of Elizabeth I, yet much of what the Irish Republic became is British in origin, including its parliament, laws and even its deforested landscape of emerald green fields and hedges.
“The Story of Ireland” travels from the building of astronomically-aligned burial mounds older that Stonehenge through the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which finally simmered down the struggle between Roman Catholics and Protestants that has raged since Elizabeth I.
