But, of course, those bones, bare and approaching middle-aged as they are, cannot be the whole of it. It's this osteoporosis thing you see is the problem. Because of it, the truth of them is brittle, with a tendency to fracture that belabours a lingering notion amongst yez all of hard facts. So we need a sturdier narrative here. Something more robust, up to the heavy weight of the mythos of it all:—the style of things that Peregrine O’Cleary and his cousin Brother Micheál once stood to and proclaimed.

 

For we declare that there are no Masters working in Ireland now. There was a time around A.D. 800 when Ireland had become a unity of civilization and law and no language but the Gaelic of the ruling classes and the Latin of the church were spoken. But despite the end of Annals, the end of epics, of sagas and songs of derring-do, the lying media and the pale propagandists of the red, white and blue the race consciousness was not lost. Not completely lost.

 

That consciousness was stirred far back when the High king Laeghaire, son of Niall, was slain in 463 while at war with Leinster. Ailill, king of united Connacht and Meath, son of Dathi the son of Niall’s brother Fiachra succeeded Laeghaire. In 483 Ailill’s two cousins Murchertach ‘Mac’Erca’, grandson of Eoghan, son of Niall and head of the northern ‘Dail Cuinn’, and Luguid, son of Laeghaire, son of Niall, united and in the battle of Ocha defeated and slew Ailill. He was then succeeded as High king by Luguid, and he again, according to their agreement, by Murchertach in 509. The royal succession was now recovered for Niall’s line, and Diarmait, great-grandson of Niall, becomes the first High king who can be called a Christian and who lived between 544 and 565 while Brion, another brother of Niall became king of Connacht. It was now established that the High kingship alternated between the Ui Neill of the North and of the South or Meath. From Murchertach Mac Erca descended the local kings of the Ui Niall of the North. Diarmait the High king of the southern Ui Niall had two sons, Colman and Aed Slaine. The later kings of Meath came from Colman and for centuries these became rivals of the descendants of Aed. The High kingship succession remained uncertain until the year 734. From then until 1022 it ran alternately between the Ui Neill of the North and Clan Colman the Ui Neill of the South.

 

This succession rule diminished the power of the Ard Ri and meant he remained a kind of president of a union of Irish states which included, Connacht, Meath, Leinster. Munster, Aileach, Oriel and Ulidia.

 

Alongside this came the culture that produced the books of Kells and Durrow and the great monasteries sent their scholars across Europe. And while the higher clergy with their Latin tradition despised the old language calling it lingua Scottica vilis and associating it with paganism a passion and enthusiasm for the native language blossomed. Out of this Scottic or early Gaelic language which is then replaced by Middle Irish develops the Fili, a powerful body that was attached to the ancient law and language. And from them begins the writing of Irish poetry in meters and the writing of Irish history around the year 600 from an Irish mind that is fresh and searching.

 

For four centuries the country has remained structurally unified in language, law, religion and culture. National gatherings are held for people to hear the literary and poetic wealth of scholars and poets.  

 

 And then, into the remains of these ruins the meagre associates of the Brigade stir and stumble and seek to find some truth while also scuffling among old lies for a land of youth and truth is the Slug. A land where the hero has a thousand faces. And the Villain has a million arseholes.

 

Now, clearly, the Slug in his day was no hero of the Brigade. They don’t see him as any kind of hero now. But nor do they see him as the villain of the piece. Really he’s just another of those workaday arseholes, toiling away at his masters’ villainous schemes. He’s by no means innocent, but his guilt kinda shivers and shrivels up and pales in the glaring light of theirs. It’s a deal all right but not such a big one.

 

Nor, contrary to illusions long held to on the left wing of this Irish political pitch, was the Slug simply stupid. Sure enough, philosophers have never been heard to claim him as one of their own. And rightly so, for the Slug was never a wise man, nor yet a lover of wisdom. But he was an assiduous seeker after knowledge.

 

The thing is, you see, it’s a matter of distinguishing between wisdom and knowledge. Assuming that is, we can get to the root and the source of a man to draw such a fine distinction among the multiplicity of unknowns that are known and unknown unknowns of the paltry beginnings and the scrawny conclusion of him. If in so doing we can work our words through the warp and the weft of him and make them make sense.

 

Okay then, knowledge is a product of the intellect and, as such, it has very little in common with wisdom, which proceeds from understanding. Intellect is barren and dry; it knows everything and feels nothing. Intellect is in the world but it is not of the world. The human world is a world of touching and feeling, the world of active reflection. It is not known in any passive intellectual operation abstracting from the things that are touched and felt, lived and loved. It is actively understood in the course of the touching and feeling, the living and the loving.

 

Understanding is not a process of reasoning but, since it is inevitably more or less clear, proper or otherwise, to the point or lost in the latitudes and longitudes of itself, it is subject to interrogation by reason. Understanding is irrational but it is not unreasonable about it. And wisdom then, which is a function of the understanding, is discovered hurling itself against the ramparts of all those knowledges which defy it.

 

Here then stands the Slug. An arsehole in the struggle between the human understanding of the toiling masses and the inhuman knowledges of the few that feed on us. The few that know everything and hate it all. The few that love nothing and loathe themselves. Those lords of the universal who understand none of the infinite particulars upon which they will fall, fail, and finally fade…..From Big Bang to weakest whimper.

 

And here then stands the Slug. He has no idea, not the slightest intimation, of wisdom. But he is viscerally involved in a process of knowledge. He is gathering facts such as will enable him to know what he hasn’t a hope of understanding. The names and the scraps of matters of fact in his book give him the raw material of what can only be a failed knowledge; a bunch of tatters of this and that that can never be fulfilled as a rounded human narrative and so can never function so as to fulfil the Slug himself. Looking on him kindly we can see that the Slug wants nothing more than to be human. It’s not just that he doesn’t know how but that the how of it is not something that can ever be known. Simply being human is beyond all the knowledges of the knowledgeable.

 

Here then stands the Slug in the brittle understanding of the Brigade, and him going about the world in a grubbing, scavenging way; sifting shifting sands for facts, more facts, hard facts. Poor Slug!

 

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Ernie Bates in The Bookshop