The Celts (1987) s02e05 Episode Script

Every culture has to be kept alive, because every time something disappears in the world, in the cultural way, the world is getting poorer.
And if we are fighting so much for Celtic culture, it is for ourselves of course, but it is also for the other people.
And we think of the people everywhere who are fighting for their way of life, so that the world will not become a great concentration camp, with only one language, one master and one ruler.
I think we are the only hope for liberty in the world today.
No civilisation can survive its own fragmentation, and the means of expression within the fragmented civilisation, its values, its roots, its traditional place in the world, that culture will eventually become empty, barren, derelict, neglected.
Of the extraordinary presence which the Celts once had in Europe, little remains, revealed now as odd local deposits and traces, curiosities almost.
The pressures of other cultures had devastating effects upon the fathers of Europe.
With each wave of pressure, the destruction increased, until the Celts and their culture were slowly overwhelmed.
The Western Empire of the Romans brought the first specific erosion, the industrialisation of Wales, the exploitation of her mineral wealth the most recent, and in the centuries between those forces, the dismantling of Celtic language, art, expression, continued relentlessly.
But an endangered culture should do what it can to survive.
The fragmentation of Celtic culture and its vigorous attempts at survival can be observed most easily in Wales, where official policy threatened to isolate all who wished to remain Celtic.
In 1962, the patriot and Welsh activist Saunders Lewis, fearing alien cultures, delivered a passionate plea for his language.
I am obliged to write this lecture.
Before the statistics of last year's census of Welsh-speaking Welshman in Wales are published, I predict that the figures to be published in the near future will shock and disappoint those of us who consider that Wales will not be Wales without the Welsh language.
I also predict that if the present trend continues, Welsh will cease to exist as a living language towards the beginning of the 21st century.
Granting that Britain will still be inherited by human beings at that time.
Thus, at long last, the policy set out in 1536 in the measure called the Act of Union of Wales and England as an aim for the English government in Wales will have succeeded.
Give the government its due.
Through four centuries of governing Wales, there has never been any wavering regarding this policy of abolishing Welsh as an administrative language in either office or court of law or any legal document.
For goodness'sake I got the hippy hippy shakes Yeah, I got the shakes I got the hippy hippy shakes.
Saunders Lewis's argument warned his fellow countrymen of the enemy at the gate.
The smaller Celtic neighbours, Cornwall and the Isle of Man have long been overwhelmed.
In the 1960s, with the new, compelling images of popular culture pounding so vigorously across the entire world, and deep into Wales too, those who wanted to return to old Celtic cultural values knew how easily they could be swamped.
shake it to the left, you shake it to the right You do the hippy shake, shake, with all of your might Oh, baby Yeah, come on and shake Oh, it's in the back Ooh! The hippy hippy shake.
There's a line from an old Irish ballad "He sees the round towers of other days in the waves beneath him shining" And, time and time again, descriptions crop up in the legends of cities and palaces and lands of gold beneath the waves.
You know, a myth should never be allowed to become reality.
Here, beneath these waters, the ruins of houses, a church.
This village was flooded, not for any mystical or magical reasons, but to make a reservoir.
Here's the cruel twist.
The village is in Wales.
The city for which it was specifically submerged after being evacuated, in England.
The drowning of the village of Capel Celyn gave the Welsh activists that most powerful of cultural weapons - a symbol.
Because the whole bitterly contested project exemplified to them Wales's impotence within the United Kingdom, and it had a direct impact upon the language whose preservation they had advocated for centuries.
The project destroyed a monoglot Welsh community in one of the historic rural areas.
To defend a language is to defend a community, to defend homes and families.
Today, Wales cannot afford the destruction of Welsh language homes.
They are scarce and fragile.
And now, Menai and Snowdonia are to be polluted to feed the demands of Lancashire for electricity.
One of the major factors in the preservation of the Welsh language was this, the Bible in Welsh.
In 1563, by a special act, Queen Elizabeth I raised the Welsh language to a new stature when she decreed, yielding to pressure from Welsh churchmen, that the Welsh could now say their prayers in their own language and that further, they should have and use Welsh translations of the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible.
Quite a turnaround, this, especially in light of her father King Henry VIII's decision a few decades earlier that English was to be the sole language of law and administration.
It wasn't politics, though, nor goodwill towards the Welsh that prompted Elizabeth's change of mind.
It was simply that the Protestant Reformation was not succeeding in Wales.
Because these new Protestant services were in the English language, which meant that, to the Welsh, the old form of Christianity, ie Catholicism, was still preferable.
Better the devil you know, especially if he was speaking in Latin.
The law, though was against Welsh.
Beaumaris on the island of Anglesey has the oldest working courthouse in Britain, scene of many dramas in which language tipped the scales.
Prosecution, defence, testimony, verdict, all had to be spoken and recorded in English.
But of a murder case here in Beaumaris courthouse in 1634, Sir Timothy Turner, the Deputy Chief Justice of North Wales, complained that only three members of the jury understood English.
Complained.
Well, what did he expect? Wales then was almost totally Welsh-speaking, so how could this English only decree work, even in theory? It was an impossible situation, but more than that, they say something is always lost in translation.
If you were a Welshman standing accused in this dock in an English court in Wales, you lost more than your language, you lost her dignity as well.
And your life.
Under such statutes, language became judge, jury and executioner.
They hanged Richard Rowlands here in Beaumaris Gaol in Anglesey in 1862 for the murder of his father-in-law, but they hanged him entirely on circumstantial evidence.
Was he innocent? We shall never know, because the whole point about circumstantial evidence is that the language, the expression, the understanding must be very, very clear.
But the judge, speaking in English, said, "You will hang by the neck until you are dead," and Richard Rowlands, who spoke only Welsh, asked, "What's going on?" And when, finally, they translated it for him, he screamed his innocence and went on screaming it, until, as the newspaper reports said later, "the culprit was turned off.
" The colloquialism becomes vicious.
Richard Rowlands couldn't speak English to save his life.
Even the issue of his guilt has become irrelevant in face of the the full forbidding weight of official policy.
Every possible law, humane or otherwise, de facto denied Wales linguistic freedom.
Look at this for a piece of cruelty.
Imagine this is your leg.
That's a man trap found not far away from here on a landlord's estate in North Wales.
It could break your leg.
Here's another piece of cruelty that could break your identity.
The English wanted to destroy the old Celtic sense of nationalism in Wales, so they decided to attack the Welsh language.
In the schools in 1870, they introduced the Welsh Not.
This was a board with the letters WN carved or burnt into it, and it was hung around the neck of any child who was heard to utter a word of Welsh in the classroom.
Now, obviously that child wanted to get rid of this thing as quickly as possible, so the children were encouraged to spy on other children speaking Welsh in the schoolroom and pass it on to them.
Can you imagine humiliation of that? Not to mention the destruction of childhood friendships.
And for what? For speaking in your own tongue? You're not here to enjoy yourselves, you're here to learn, Out! The ironies evident in any cultural suppression took a century to surface in Wales.
They curbed the tongues of the young in the 19th century.
Now, the hope for their descendants lies in the fact that so many of them have an enjoyable reason for wishing to learn Welsh, for accepting its teaching as willingly as children can ever embrace instruction.
A worthwhile increase has been recorded in the number of Welsh classes.
Indeed the full curriculum is widely available to any parents who want their children educated in Welsh.
This zeal, even 100 years on, is a startling turn against the tide of their inheritance.
You must not waste time in school speaking Welsh.
Nerys! I heard you in the yard just now speaking Welsh.
Come on out here.
You will wear the Welsh Not.
And if you hear any other child speaking Welsh in the course of the day, tell me and we will pass it on to that child.
The rescuer, the hero of his new shining hour is a cartoon strip star, a bear called SuperTed.
SuperTed is a major component of a new Welsh industry, film animation, the unusual by-product of a long, intense commitment by many 20th-century Welshmen to their language.
The electronic means of strengthening your identity.
One must not think of the Welsh language in terms of hills and mists and ladies in stovepipe hats.
I mean, that's not the image.
And SuperTed and cartoons generally on television, as you know, are the most expensive of all types of output.
We decided right at the beginning that we should invest heavily in SuperTed, and Wil Cwac Cwac, for that matter, in order to give the right image to the channel.
Young, go-ahead.
Of course there would be hymn singing and choirs and all things and coal pits and things one usually thinks of as being part of this stereotyped Welsh image.
But we wanted the young people who had fought so valiantly for the channel to feel it was their channel, and I think they do.
The channel is S4C, Welsh-speaking, opened 1982.
20 hours per week, sport, soap opera, politics, of the people, for the people.
But the birth of S4C tested democracy to the full.
When a newly elected government tried to renege on its promises, a figurehead of Welsh nationalism, Dr Gwynfor Evans, offered to sacrifice his life.
What I had decided was that I would have to do something personally, and something pretty big.
Something that would mean losing my life, in fact.
And I had thought of other methods in which this might be done that would impress the government, and had dismissed them.
But by the end of 1979, I had decided on this method of fasting.
And there was more than one reason for that.
For one thing, I had been impressed by Gandhi's success in using this method in India.
But another was that the method involves quite a long period of time.
It isn't something that happens in minutes or even days.
And during that period of time, I could see that it'd be possible to bring tremendous pressure to bear on the government.
Would you have died for it? If it was necessary, yes, I expected to.
Wales has shared its Celtic identity with Brittany for over 1, 500 years now.
The ancient cross-fertilisation gave them a similar language.
And they inspired each other in the attempts to preserve their cultures.
The Bretons seem more militant than the Welsh, probably because they're more desperate.
The young people precisely are most often those who have lost the language.
They don't speak the language.
But the young people are those who have a political conscience of the strongest type, and I think that the movement is underway and it is progressing, because if you consider the state of Brittany in the old days, people were ashamed to be Bretons, they were ashamed of speaking Breton.
And now people try to speak Breton.
People think that it is a pity that the language has been lost for them, and the people also think they have to work and stay in Brittany to work.
The young people, I think, are our hope and we are an organisation of young people, and among the young people, what we say is much better received than among the older people.
That is why we think we have to push forward and work for the Breton people.
Neither have the Bretons been as successful as the Welsh in taking command of the media.
Television programmes in the Breton tongue form a much smaller part of regional output, one and a half hours per week, and a tiny presence on the national schedules of France.
When Breton is broadcast it's always against a background of knowledge that for most of those listening, it's a secondary tongue.
Not even the broadcasters, however though they attempt to package the language attractively, not even they speak Breton as a first language.
Not really.
My parents were all Breton-speaking, of course, and they still speak Breton every day, but as most of the young people of my generation, I was brought up first of all in French, because the people of the age of my parents, they was so ashamed of their language, and they had so many trouble when they went in school because they didn't speak French at all, and that was a lot of trouble and a lot of mess, so most of them didn't want to to teach Breton to their children first of all.
There is one unique way in which the Bretons do exhibit their nationalistic credentials.
In the Pardon.
June the 23rd, the Pardon of the Fire, the third Sunday in July, the Blessing of the Ocean, the first Sunday of August, the Festival of the Golden Gorse.
This is the Pardon of Sainte-Anne d'Auray.
Huge crowds turn out.
A social and religious declaration which enshrines a Breton national image.
National identity does seem more a personal matter in Brittany than in any of the Celtic regions.
The struggle, they insist, is to keep the Breton culture out of the museums.
And out of the firing line.
Bretons have bitterly attacked central government always for ignoring the region until some place was needed to put a nuclear power station.
The trouble with central government is that power so often means remote control, and rarely was this so much in evidence as here in 1980.
This is the Pointe du Raz, on the most westerly tip of France in deepest Brittany, "about as far from Paris," said a local man, "about as far from Paris as you can get.
" Well, not quite, but what he was referring to was the decision by the French authorities to build a nuclear power station here, at Plogoff.
I wonder whether some civil servant in Paris didn't shrug his shoulders wryly and say, "Well, they always wanted power in Brittany, didn't they?" And, indeed at the time, the decision to make this place nuclear must have seemed like a savage pun.
At seven per cent of the population, you can't see Brittany from Paris.
Occasionally, a politician ventures forth, looks loftily into the Breton soul and makes promises.
But France dominates.
The Bretons are what they speak - French.
I don't think it's a matter of choice.
I mean, they were led into changing into changing from Breton into French.
They were led by different economic matters, and so on.
I mean, they had to earn their own language, they have to they had to go to school, they had to I mean, to come into normal European life.
And the trouble is that, I mean, they could have done it in Breton if matters have been different, but the fact is that they had to go through French to do it.
The façade atlantique, it was a Breton scholar who coined the phrase to describe the way in which all advancing tides of European culture had to halt at the edge of the once uncharted vastness of the Atlantic and remain there suspended or turn back inwards.
Apropos, what of Brittany? Can it survive the tourist Celtic cliché? Can avoid becoming a souvenir culture, France's holiday snapshot album? "What inspired our acts," shouted one young Breton protester in court, "was the desire to live our lives as Bretons.
" Maybe they like fast food and they wear jeans, that's that's right.
But they dance Breton dances as well, and they like Breton music, and they play Breton music, and there are more young people today learning Breton then there ever was.
And how easy it is to be a Breton today.
Let us think, young people cannot get Breton in school.
In the primary school, they have no Breton.
Secondary school, a little bit.
They cannot earn their life working through Breton.
Breton is not an official language.
And nevertheless, there are more young people today taking pride in their Breton language than ever there was.
You can get thousands of young people today, in the streets, demonstrating for Breton, and you could not get that ten years ago, 20 years ago.
There is something new, a new feeling in Brittany among the young people, and that is giving hope, a sureness for the future.
From siege to outpost, the survival pattern of Celtic culture is a matter of extremities.
Another irony, the very terrain which once preserved the Celtic civilisation from tides of invasion now isolates it and leaves it beached and whitening.
Scots Gaelic or "Gallic" is now only spoken as native in the Western Isles and parts of the Highlands.
We're here on the edge of Europe.
Our cousins are the Irish and the Welsh and the Bretons.
And we tend to feel more for other minorities like the Catalans and the Basques than maybe even we do about our being Scottish, because our values are akin to theirs.
And the fact of attachment to land, a sense of place, a sense of being a people, and the language just touches on all of these, it hues the whole of these, and to say what you'd lose when you'd lose a language, all of that would lose something, would lose something of its colour.
As if you'd removed another filter.
It is Thursday afternoon on the Isle of Lewis.
Close your eyes and you could be forgiven for thinking that the sound of this free church service came from Celtic Hungary or the fringes of the most ancient East.
The language is Celtic.
Worship in the Gaelic still binds this community.
But it also sounds a lament for the harsh fate of the Celts of the Isles.
Not many are left.
In some cases they were given no choice.
On the shores of the Hebrides, you can still see the ragged traces of the families who had to go.
These tumbled stones of Boreraig tell a terrible and typical story.
What happened here on the shores of the Isle of Skye happened all over the Highlands.
The people who lived here, names like Mclnnes and MacRae, lived here for generations, farmed potatoes and barley, did a little fishing.
Mostly subsistence work.
And one day in September 1853, on the instructions of the local lord, the men arrived at Boreraig to clear the village.
They told the the people the land was for sheep.
The representatives of Lord MacDonald visited every house, telling the inhabitants to quit.
Most of the men of Boreraig were away working in the cities, on the railways.
A few who were up in the fields or down on the shore heard the women's screams and came down.
Pointless.
The eviction had begun.
The villagers were dragged from their houses, their firesides, their sick beds, all their furniture thrust out after them.
The houses were boarded up, nailed shut.
The people stayed on, though.
They slept where they could in the shelter of the walls, under the trees.
In time, they open up the houses again themselves.
A few days after Christmas, though, the evictors came back, and this time they threw everything out into the snow and rendered the houses uninhabitable.
And still, the people didn't leave.
Come the summer, though, of 1854, whatever few hadn't died of exposure departed broken-hearted.
The clearance of Boreraig was over, and this benign and beautiful place was given to the sheep.
All across the Highlands, the clearances took the same kind of tone.
A shameful policy of eviction, rending the fabric of Gaelic Scotland.
And when the people left, they took with them their language and then they created a curious reverberation, the most westerly Celts of all.
Cape Breton Island on the other side of the western Atlantic seaboard is a Gaelic speaking New Scotland.
The local radio station plays requests and music in the local idiom.
The radio programme is called Island Echoes, transmitted from the Cape Breton subsidiary of Canadian Broadcasting.
The doctor on his rounds is Angus MacDonald, a native Scot.
His patient, born and bred here, is Esther Morrison, the descendant of the Highland emigrants who form 70 per cent of the population of Cape Breton.
The Highlanders brought as much as they could with them from home, even their place names.
Iona, Inverness, Barra, Dunvegan, Loch Lomond.
And then they encountered the same crisis of culture and identity at the hands of the Canadian authorities.
A number of things happened to the language in this area.
One of the things was, my mother and all the others told me they wouldn't speak the language, they heard it, but you wouldn't use it.
They told me that when they went to school, as soon as they caught sight of the school as they walked to school, that they had orders that they were not to speak Gaelic as soon as they saw the school.
And as And if they did, they were beaten.
And in As a matter fact, many people all over this island of Cape Breton recounted the same story about how the nuns would And the nuns were educated in Montréal.
They would prohibit the students There was also this self-consciousness.
When my father went to Halifax, to work in the war, the Second World War, a large number of Cape Bretoners went up to work in the shipyards, and the whole north end of the city was a Cape Breton area.
And you'd expect Gaelic to develop there.
But as a matter of fact, they were it was very embarrassing to have the accent.
It was it was To speak Gaelic outside was to separate yourself from other Canadians, and it was to be kind of ethnic.
And so they I think that those forces, the forces of local education, which ignored it, and as a matter fact prohibited it from being used in schoolyards, plus the fact that it was always looked upon as a kind of a peasant language, this kind of a thing certainly had its effect.
Effectively, the Gaelic culture was transplanted to Cape Breton, and in turn, employed exactly the same means to survive the pressures of the larger host society as the Western Isles do.
Music, conviviality, community, people.
A ghetto in an outpost, a definition of minority culture.
Self-consciously or subconsciously Gaelic, the community on Cape Breton clings to ancestral roots of a kind that other Celtic societies have already consciously started to collect and preserve.
The Welsh Folk Park in Cardiff reconstructs Welsh life Cottages, mills and granaries, a village school, a farmhouse, a smithy.
Each exhibit was taken from the place where it had stood for generations, and was brought here, brick by brick, stone by numbered stone, and reassembled, faithful in every detail.
All things cultural lose in translation.
They lose their purpose, they lose their function, and the end up in sanitised, uneasy isolation.
The point is, whatever you call this folk park, it is still basically a museum, and a museum houses the past, relics.
But this is a museum of folk culture, and isn't a culture, especially one of the people, isn't it supposed to be a living thing? So the very setting up of this place, with its, well, mummified buildings and artefacts, gathered in from the homelands in which they stood, places dotted all over Wales, doesn't that mean that what they represented has died and can now only be recollected in a museum? So, has the culture of the folk of Wales come to such a pass that it has had to be embalmed? Or redirected, if that's what it is? Words like bard and Druid carry authenticity in modern Welsh cultural affairs, and they are certainly Celtic words, with profound associations.
But seen against the Celtic heritage they claim to represent, are they also reconstructions? From 383 AD onwards, the Welsh are a people who have lived in permanent crisis.
And in order to survive as a people, they've had constantly to recreate themselves, if you like, to reinvent themselves.
Wales, I think, is an artefact which the Welsh produce if they wish.
Central to that artefact is the idea of Celticisim, of the Celtic, which I think is the cement of the artefact.
The Gorsedd, the throne or assembly of bards of the isle of Britain is, according to its own descriptions, an association of bards, writers, musicians and artists, along with men and women noted for their service to Welsh culture, joining together in pageantry five times a year to remind the nation of its cultural roots, of its Welshness, and of the devotion of the Welsh people to the arts, especially the art of poetry and all things created in word form and sound.
Which adorn the life of the nation with beauty and dignity.
The Gorsedd rituals bear names such as the Horn of Plenty, the Great Sword, the Flower Dance.
It causes unease in some quarters.
Because of its origins.
It was founded in 1792 at the autumnal equinox by a stonemason and amateur antiquarian called Edward Williams.
He took the name of lolo Morganwg, he took the title of the Bard of Liberty.
He also took laudanum, and he took a handful of stones out of his pocket in a London park, threw them down in a circle and held rituals inside it.
Today, the Gorsedd is the governing body of the Eisteddfod.
Well, the modern Eisteddfod is based on forgeries, on traditions that are known to be incorrect and known to have been invented by Welsh patriots and antiquarians at that time.
But it was very necessary for the Welsh, for their sense of legitimacy, for their a sense of identity, to acquire that Celtic root and that sense of a Celtic heritage.
And many of the things that have helped to make the Wales of today, including the Eisteddfod, including the literary tradition, with all sorts of implications for politics, for education, for a variety of things that have made Wales what it is, they are really the products, in a sense, of this rediscovery of Celticism, roughly the beginning of the 19th century.
The National Eisteddfod, in practical terms, holds the competitions.
Poems in strict metre, drama, singing, all in the Welsh language, all hotly contested, year in, year out.
The Eisteddfod does appear to be an exotic institution and it has a a chequered and curious history, but it is rather a wonderful institution.
I personally admire it enormously.
I think it's a without having It's not too much tinged with folklore.
One of the great dangers of minority cultures or the smaller cultures of Europe is that they descend into folklore and become something that is subsidised by the state in order to keep the ordinary people quiet.
The Eisteddfod is a much more vital and much more wide-ranging institution than that.
It is a combination in Welsh terms of, shall we say, the Royal Family, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Ascot, it combines these functions and supplies the Welsh people with similar levels of entertainment.
And it is a remarkable institution of which I am very proud.
That the language has survived so extensively seems miraculous, especially in the hostile environment created by successive monarchs and British governments.
Another danger, the influx of English-speaking migrant workers during the Industrial Revolution threatened, in the eyes of one writer, "to render Wales a cultural wasteland, its language a husk".
Translate such pressures on culture into physical terms and you have the metaphor of Parys Mountain.
What happened here? What hit this place? A torrent of meteors? A nuclear faux pas? What poisoned Parys Mountain? This is the earth of Wales, always rich in minerals, always ripped off for it, and savage in the process.
The Romans tore this landscape apart and left it bleeding.
So did the 18th- and 19th-century copper barons.
Wales in those days produced so much copper that Parys Mountain controlled the world price.
1,500 men and women - they were called the copper ladies - they slaved here in frightful conditions.
When they had finished, they left this landscape literally a blasted heath.
To my mind, the most Welsh features of Wales are products of industrialisation, of urbanisation.
You don't sustain a nation simply in terms of a scattered population with no centres.
Industrialisation not merely created this vast new community, it created somewhere where Welsh people could migrate to, very different from Ireland, which was almost entirely agrarian as a result of English policy, and where Irish people migrated, as you know, Frank, to America and elsewhere.
In Wales, this wasn't the pattern.
The Welsh found things to do, creative things to do within Wales.
And it had a very powerful generative effect on the countryside as well.
Many little sleepy market towns in north and mid Wales gained new life as a result of their connections, as railway centres or whatever, with the markets and the industry of the south.
So, on balance, in my interpretation, the effect of industrialisation has been enormously stimulating for the Welsh language, and a very encouraging phenomenon, really, because it suggests that Welshness and Celticism can be translated into something that is modern and up to date.
Celtic identity received its first reference point at the village of Hallstatt in Austria.
If Hallstatt culture meant, essentially, the lifestyles of the salt mine owners, and the social hierarchy they established vis-à-vis their workers, and, as identified in the huge cemeteries at Hallstatt, and the nearby discoveries at Bad Durrnberg and Hallein, then, Celtic culture, sweet paradox, has always depended upon the enemy of all cultures - death.
All across Celtic Europe, the only sovereignty still existing and achieved by Celtic speaking people was also born in the grave, but heroically, rather than archaeologically.
Emblems, imagery and martyrdom, they're the grave goods of Irish patriotism.
One of the most interesting historical questions in this part of the world is why has Ireland a different history from Scotland and Wales, let's say, in relation to England and the United Kingdom? Now, obviously a very large element in that is the Roman Catholic religion of most of the Irish.
If you look at 19th-century history and 18th-century history, it is largely a history of the Catholics trying to win their place, equal place in the world with the Protestant ascendancy.
And the enlargement of the ascendancy through its mercantile and professional classes.
It's essentially a struggle of Catholics to achieve equality, which comes down to us as a struggle of Ireland against England, because the implicit bargain was that the English or British government would maintain the ascendancy in Ireland, the ascendancy would maintain the British interest in Ireland.
That was the implicit bargain by which the ascendancy existed, and in upsetting the ascendancy you're upsetting the whole connection.
So I think it's essentially that push for equality that produced the break in the 20th century.
This collision of cultures has been preserved.
Behind the imperial colonnade where the revolution was launched stands a figure from Celtic mythology.
On Easter Monday 1916, a handful of armed men and women took over this building and out there, on the steps of the General Post Office, their leader, a poet and visionary called Pádraig Pearse, read, to a largely uncaring, indeed, sometimes a jeering populace, read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
"Irish men and Irish women, in the name of God and of the dead generations "for which she derives her tradition of nationhood," it began, and the rebellion was truly on.
The post office became a symbolic and a real battleground.
Dead, wounded, confusion, fire.
As the rebellion took hold it became apparent that some spirit, some unusual zeal had welled up, and that same spiritual impulse inspired this commemoration.
The statue of Cú Chulainn in his death throes, the raven, the goddess of war perched on his shoulder drinking his blood.
The ultimate representation of the champion, the heroic tradition from the depths of Celtic mythology, the martyr for freedom against all odds.
"We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland "and to the unfettered control of Irish destiny, "to be sovereign and indefeasible.
"The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government "has not extinguished that right, "nor can it be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people.
" A great crowd was gathered outside of Kilmainham The rhetoric which Dublin had that morning came from that same zeal that Pádraig Pearse brought to his political speeches, his writings, his poems.
It was a romantic view of patriotism, and when translated into action, it turned Dublin into a city of manned barricades and violence.
his life for his country About to lay down He went to his death Like a true son of Ireland The firing party He bravely did face.
Another gaol.
It seems they're unavoidable in any discussion of national identity.
When the Easter Rising was crushed, most of the rebel leaders were brought here to Kilmainham Gaol.
Much of central Dublin lay in smoking ruins.
And how could any patriotic impulse survive this machine? But it did, and this is the point.
Kilmainham, more than any other location, more than the post office, even, is the birthplace of the Irish national identity, because once the doors of this gaol had slammed shut behind them, the rebel leaders had won.
The new identity, political to begin with, would grow into cultural dimensions, and like the earliest Celtic identity, was discovered in death.
"I do not grudge them, Lord, I do not grudge "My two strong sons that I have seen go out "To break their strength and die, they and a few, "In bloody protest for a glorious thing "Their names shall be spoken among their people "And generations shall remember them and call them blessed" The poet Pearse and his younger brother, William, occupied adjoining cells.
Along the corridor, their colleagues, all destined for execution.
Early on the morning of Wednesday the 3rd of May 1916, the younger Pearse heard the shots of the firing squad that killed his brother, Pádraig.
Fire! William himself died the following morning.
14 leaders in all were executed, the last on Friday the 12th of May.
James Connolly, commandant of the citizen army.
He had been badly wounded at the post office, and was so ill from loss of blood and from gangrene that they thought he mightn't survive the journey from Dublin Castle where he'd been held a few miles away.
They brought him in on a stretcher, lifted him up, roped him to a chair and tipped his head back for the firing squad.
The principle of heroic martyrdom then took over.
The executions, especially that of Connolly, shocked and shamed the world, and this plain, bare prison yard, this place of execution, became a shrine and the site of a new mythology.
God's curse on you, England You cruel-hearted monster Your deeds they would shame All the devils in hell There are no flowers blooming But the shamrock is growing On the grave of James Connolly.
50 years later, when the nation, owing their sovereignty to the dead leaders of the Easter Rising, built them a garden of remembrance, the symbolism was entirely taken from Celtic mythology.
The dominant image, the Children of Lir, from the legend of the four beautiful swans who spent 900 years tossing on the cold and cruel waters in despotic slavery, and who eventually gained their freedom and salvation.
the cry, "No surrender!" The Children of Lir were condemned to wander from sea to cruel sea.
The early Celts were compulsive migrants all across Europe.
The Irish Celts found a new and powerful identity in exile in North America, where some of them build their own Camelot.
So is this the last hurrah of the Celts? In the 19th century, forced out by the economics of dispossession and of famine, several million people, many speaking only a Celtic language, came to America.
Largely Irish.
There were Scots and Welsh too.
But they were largely Irish, and Boston became the Irish city.
Here they established a new tribal creed, and it differed so much from that of their Celtic forbears, because where the ancient Celts had governed for, by, from and within the family, the Irish in Boston took that idea, pushed it, and used the extended family, as the Kennedys did, as a political power base.
It wasn't difficult to see the Kennedys as some sort of Celtic dynasty, looking after their tribe, their leader a shining hero.
But the truth, being political, was more ordinary.
The Irish in Boston became politicians out of necessity.
Probably because of the fact when they came over to this country from Ireland, there was a tremendous amount of discrimination against the Irish, and they weren't able to hold meaningful positions of authority, they weren't able to get jobs to help support themselves and their families, they were never given real strong educational opportunities, they never received the services from government that they were entitled to.
And so, I guess, there were, you know, the famous statement in Boston, "No Irish need apply.
" I mean, that wasn't really such a long period of time ago.
"Erected by John Cass to the memory of his wife, Julia Cass, "who was born in the parish of Clonenagh, Queen's County, Ireland, "died November the 24th, 1841, "aged 54 years.
" "Only Irish need apply.
" All and only Irish immigrants are buried here.
It was a nice twist of history.
This is Bunker Hill, where the early shots of the American Revolution were fired.
But there's a more poignant twist.
The people who are buried here, Mary Rohan, John Higgins, Patrick Egan, they came here to live and they died in their droves of tuberculosis, their children of diphtheria.
So, as the search for the Celts began in the clay, in the salt and silt of Austria and the rich farmlands of southern Germany, it ends in the ground of a poor immigrant cemetery in Boston, overlooking the gruesome hard labour to which they finally had to resort.
It is, of course, only one of the endings, but it's one of the sadder ones, for a people once brave enough, proud enough, original enough to be feared, admired and respected as the fathers of Europe.