The Annals of Ireland are Back #63 #cong24 #legacy
Synopsis:
Ireland used be great at keeping her diary. She did so diligently for twelve centuries in what were called Annals. It stopped during the 9 Years War. We have brought the good habit back so she can have amusement in her dotage.
Total Words
Reading Time in Minutes
5
Key Takeaways:
- Each congregant please submit an item for 2024 Annals.
- Each congregant please submit an item for the Annals missing years i.e. 1591 to 2019.
- We are ideally looking across 2025 to popularise what we are doing with Old People via Day Care Centres and youngsters via Primary Schools, so both ends of the age spectrum. Suggest links please.
- Separate to the Scriptorium in Sligo we are developing a base in Dublin to bring our “NEWS” to a broader public. Seeking collaborators ( sounds ominous ).
About Colum Stapleton:
Colum Stapleton made creative documentaries for two decades for TG4, RTE + other channels across the world, the most watched of which was HOLY HIJACKER – SEEKING THE 3RD SECRET OF FATIMA. He has won prized prizes at Documentary Festivals. In 2003 he built the 30 bed, 100 foot diametre wooden round hill topped retreat centre in south Sligo, initially called The Gyreum – and since becoming a NotForProfit and base for the Annals project and in honour of its locality, its new name is Bru Moytura.
Contacting Colum Stapleton:
You can connect with Colum via email or the Bru Moytura website
By Colum Stapleton
The most recent censuses on our Island (north + south) count a few folk short of 7,000,000 boys and girls, that is a lot of goings-on to tally, a lot of activity of both celebrity and regular Jo-citizen. Imagine shrinking all that human activity & opinionizing, isolating the most pertinent facts & parts that represent a slice of present us to pass on to our descendants, centuries into the future. That is our mission in our revitalising the Irish Annals writing tradition at our mighty round Scriptorium in rural Sligo in XXL sized sheets of parchment in sumptuous ink that slowly become a fattening book.
How lasting are floppy disks, cds, memory sticks, chatgpt, data centres ? Clouds evaporate. As our ancestors relied on ink for centuries to chart their annual joys & sorrows we do again, a tried & trusted means of time-capsuling for the amusement or horror of those who come after us on this island. The Annals of Inishfallen for example have survived since 1070AD.
Across our 32 counties of Ireland from the first quarter of the 5th century to the last decade of the 16th century there was a tradition that saw the prime facts of a year inked on vellum. There are some tiny gaps: Viking raid here, pestilence there but the continuity is extraordinary, the words that illustrate proven links to real moments of time across those twelve centuries are obstinately accurate, if betimes slanted. No other country in Europe has such a fantastic wealth of fact and the odd yarn in such an extensive yet compact work. The old Annals logged clann brawls, deaths of minor kings, passings of abbotts mostly; our latter day Annal has the nickname De RÉir (Irish for ‘according to’) BOOK Whoever is quoted gets their due, their citation, their “according to.” Our tome is a here-comes-everybody of events with a seasoning of fact-checked hearsay.
We commenced the renewal of the Annals across the isolation of 2020 taking much inspiration from the defining book on the subject THE IRISH ANNALS by Dr. Dan McCarthy. It takes us almost a full year to complete an Annal; currently we are scribing what will likely be forty plus facts for 2023. Naturally it is a big exercise to shrink the oodles & googles of information. The old Annals were terse e.g. “plague for half a year” we must learn from that discipline, our 8 parchments for 2020, a busy year with its 64 facts, 2021 had but 52, jumping again in 2022 to 60.
How odd that many of our surviving past Annals which mostly dwell on mens’ actions should kick off with the arrival of 49 women, the supposed first humans to arrive on our shores. Four of the existing Annals of Ireland commence with the same obscure event, the arrival of Noah’s grand daughter with her “ark” of women. There had been one fellow, Fintan, but no sooner had he spied land but he jumped ship in the shape of a salmon. The time heaviest part of our mission is filling the 430 missing years between the close of the extant Annals and the reviving in 2020AD. We are hoping women and the non-posh can better populate same. Tended to be felons who got at least noted in those missing centuries, Jo-well-behaveds are gone with the wind.
Odd too that just when the world turned once again from being flat to round The Annals of Ulster for 1497A.D. relate that the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI blocked up the only entry to Purgatory in that changing world; where, at Lough Derg in Donegal ? Only proof that this took place is in our very own Annals. Let’s not allow those demarcating lines to go unnoticed thus we note burials giving way to cremations, that straight men wear shorts year round, that AI’s arrival is mostly celebrated, that every second garden has a Buddha and living rooms are short on Sacred Hearts, JFKs and Pope John the XXiiis, that News has little grey areas anymore in the clickbaits of its echo chambres.
PLEASE SUGGEST ITEMS FOR US: We seek your inputs for both the ongoing Annal and gap Annal. Choose items that you or your family or class or society or your locality resonate with. Check out our recent years pages to get a sense of what we seek and how short of longwinded to be. We love short but punchy; twittery lengths – but that ain’t easy.
Fow now items can be English, Irish or Latin or a mix of all three. Please can you footnote background details to your chosen facts to help us understand the context of your chosen event or observation to be logged but ideally the item should be related in a crisp way that allows easy comprehension, some lyricism is not unwelcome. It is hard to be neutral. De Reir means “according to” so please if you are citing somebody else be it The Pat Kenny on NewsTalk or the overheard conversation at the ALDI queue or your great granny’s memory of the 1947 snow that reached in snowdrifts to the chimney top. Please flesh out sources as much as you can.
Despite our being based in the North West, we want the purview of the Annals to be all-Island plus a few items per year from Scotland ( and all her 32 counties ) to honour that the Irish Annals were written up on Iona for almost two centuries. We also seek organisations and ask them to choose a Year/ a Fact/ a Subject Matter/ a particular Community/ a Family name to highlight and forward it to us hello@brumoytura.org