Kevin Egan speaks to Stephen "Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of
hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now." His theme is
Irish self-rule. The Dalcassians (Dál Cais) were a Gaelic
tribe in Munster, with holdings along the River Shannon. They
became powerful in the 10th century and produced many kings,
including the famous "Brian Boru" (Brian Bóruma in Old Irish,
Brian Bóroimhe in
modern Irish) of whom Bloom thinks in Ithaca.
Until the Free State in 1922 and the Republic that followed,
Brian was the closest that Ireland got to unified native rule.
Brian's older brother Mahon (Mathgamain) became the first
King of Munster from the Dalcassian line. Brian himself, after
waging war brilliantly in Munster, Leinster, and Connacht, and
being acknowledged as the ruler of Ireland's Southern Half
(Munster and Leinster), challenged the High King Máel Sechnaill in his home
province of Meath. Máel Sechnaill surrendered the title of
High King to Brian in 1002.
But the title had seldom if ever been matched by actual
control of the entire island, which had hundreds of kings.
Brian spent the next decade fighting against the powerful Uí
Néill kings in Ulster to make his claim meaningful. By 1011,
all the regional powers in Ireland recognized his supremacy,
but the fabric began unraveling almost as soon as it was
woven. Máel Mórda mac Murchada of Leinster defied the High
King in 1012 and fought him for the next two years. Having
failed to obtain support from any of the rulers that Brian had
dominated in Ulster and Connaught, Máel Mórda turned to
Vikings in the Orkney Islands and the Isle of Man, and
Hiberno-Norse fighters from the Kingdom of Dublin, to bolster
his forces. In April 1014 the two armies met in a furious
day-long battle at Clontarf, just north of Dublin on the
coast. Brian's forces prevailed, but he was killed in the
fighting.
At some point in the 12th century, a work called Cogadh
Gaedhil re Gallaibh (The War of the Irish with
the Foreigners), possibly commissioned by Brian's
great-grandson, cast Brian's victory at Clontarf as a decisive
national victory over Norse occupiers. This work succeeded in
making Brian a mythic national hero for later ages. But Brian
had Norse fighters in his army just as Máel Mórda did, and the
Vikings were not really an occupying force. Like many other
invaders of Ireland, they had intermarried with natives and
adopted local customs (including Christianity) over the course
of several generations and hardly consituted an independent
population, much less a ruling class.
After Brian, the Dalcassians shrank back to their traditional
holdings along the banks of the River Shannon in north
Munster, in the Kingdom of Thomond. The descendants of Strongbow attempted to take
Thomond in the 13th century, but the Dalcassians fought them
off. In the 16th century they submitted to the English King
Henry VIII, and their territory north of the Shannon was
renamed County Clare.
Cyclops twice makes mention of Thomond, once
geographically ("from the streamy vales of Thomond,
from the M'Gillicuddy's reeks the inaccessible and lordly
Shannon the unfathomable") and once politically ("none
of your Henry Tudor's harps, no, the oldest flag afloat, the
flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on
a blue field, the three sons of Milesius"). From
1177 onward the English had adopted the three crowns on a blue
field as the standard of the Lord of Ireland (the title of the
English king in Ireland). But in 1541 Henry VIII proclaimed
himself King of Ireland and adopted the Leinster symbol of the
harp.
