The Deal That Made Modern Ireland

In 1166 a meeting took place between two very dissimilar kings in Anjou France. One was petty lord who had just fled in terror from his homeland; the other was at the height of his power, ruling over an empire which stretched from the Pyrenees Mountains in the south to Anjou in the east and England in the north. However, despite the clear difference between them, what these men decided at their meeting would affect Ireland for the next 800 years and ultimately create the modern state.

Dermot MacMurrough was born around 1110 in Leinster in the southeast corner of Ireland where his father, Donnchad, was king. Ireland at this time was divided into several kingdoms, all battling for control. MacMurrough learned a pointed lesson about the brutal times when he was only five years old and his father was killed in battle, then buried with a dead dog, which was considered a serious insult.

The young boy was shaped by a cruel childhood into a man with his own brand of cruelty.  In 1126, his older brother died unexpectedly and MacMurrough became the new king of Leinster. Soon afterward MacMurrough began silencing any option to his rule in an attempt to seize other territories. In one act in 1141, he had 17 people blinded and saw to it that they could never have children again. With a growing reputation for unnecessary violence, MacMurrough invariably began to make a large number of enemies. One was another Irish king named Tiernan O'Ruark, who went to war with MacMurrough and defeated him in 1166. If events had stopped here, MacMurrough and O’Ruark would have been yet another pair of feuding kings in the distant past. However, MacMurrough’s next decision would eventually shift the entire political dynamic of Ireland and lead to eight centuries of conflict with neighboring Britain.

Unable to defeat O’Ruark on battlefield, MacMurrough next tried the bedroom, seducing O’Ruark’s wife, or possibly kidnapping her, and fleeing to Leinster. MacMurrough knew that what he had done was so far outside the accepted norms of the day that it would be a death sentence if he was caught. When word reached the other Irish kings, they united against him and marched toward his capital. When they arrived, MacMurrough was nowhere to be found.

In a desperate bid to save his kingdom, MacMurrough had boarded a ship to Britain, which at the time was under the control of Normans who had ruled since their successful invasion by William the Conquer a century before. MacMurrough then sailed France and met with the Norman king Henry II.  The two made an odd pair, to say the least – Henry, the regal and fiery-tempered great grandson of William, controlled a full half of France as well as half of England and was looking to expand his power. MacMurrough, by contrast, was graceless and unsophisticated and held little power.

Still, MacMurrough made his request to Henry. If he would give MacMurrough an army and help him reclaim his throne in Ireland, MacMurrough would recognize Henry as his ruler. Henry agreed; in one stroke, he would enlarge his empire and could claim he was saving Christendom in Ireland from wild barbarians – he had, in fact, been thinking about invading Ireland for a decade. In preparation, he had secured a written blessing from Pope Adrian IV, who was worried the island was becoming too independent of the Catholic Church. Henry had promised the Church he would send them .83 cents for each Christian family in Ireland.

After Henry and MacMurrough struck their bargain, Norman lords approved a new invasion plan and MacMurrough selected Richard de Clare, known as “Strongbow,” to lead the army and promised him his own daughter in return.

Three years later, in 1169, the powerful Norman army landed in Leinster and many Irish nobles rallied to fight. Lacking armor, the Irish forces charged into battle naked and were quickly hacked down. Strongbow’s army proved unstoppable, storming the town of Waterford, then taking Dublin. MacMurrough was formally returned to his throne but died soon afterward, and Strongbow, now married to MacMurrough’s daughter, became the king of Leinster in 1170.

Back in Anjou, Henry II was restless. He had never liked Strongbow and now feared that he would try to establish his own kingdom. To prevent this, Henry took the incredible step of forming a new army to invade Ireland a second time. Strongbow, meanwhile, was struggling to put down the remaining Irish nobles, who had driven him into the city of Dublin. Strongbow was only saved by a daring attack on the Irish forces which drove them back, and he agreed to surrender his claims to Ireland to King Henry, who landed there in 1171 and gained the backing of the Irish nobles and clergy.

In the coming years, Norman law was firmly established and left an indelible mark on the land that few realize today. Professor Sean Duffy said in an interview later:

“If you look around Ireland today, the most characteristically Irish traits are English. Our Parliamentary system was brought to Ireland by the Anglo-Normans, the system of law that we have is the English Common Law System and of course the language that has produced most of the great writers of Ireland through [James] Joyce and [William] Yeats is the English language.” He continued “When we look around the countryside of Ireland we think of fields and hedges, almost none existented before the 12^th century. Your classical image of rural Ireland is actually a product of the arrival of the English in the 12^th century.” 

Over time, British rulers found they could only completely hold the northern counties around Belfast and Dublin. This area became known as “the pale” and later, Northern Ireland. MacMurrough has gone down in history as the man who sold out Ireland; but recent research has suggested it is absurd to assume that the English would not otherwise have invaded the divided state in a time when territorial acquisition was the norm. With the influence of Henry II, England actually helped create modern Ireland.