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BOOK OF THE DAY:The Irish (and Other Foreigners): From the First People to the PolesBy Shane Hegarty, Gill and Macmillan 227pp. €14.99
SHANE HEGARTY’S informative and very accessible popular history of Irish immigration begins by transporting us back some 370 million years to the oldest known footprints in the northern hemisphere, left by an amphibious creature in rocks on Valentia Island. From there, we spool forward through the millennia until we come to the island’s first Stone Age settlers around 7000 BC, the evidence for which comes from counties Derry and Offaly. After brief detours to survey the Neolithic settlements at Lough Gur and the Boyne Valley, Hegarty expertly guides us through the myths and debates surrounding the most historically contentious of all our immigrant groups, the Celts, concluding that although we cannot meaningfully speak of “Celtic nations”, there are enough genetic clues to substantiate an ancient connection between the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Basques, Bretons and Galicians.
