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Notes -
There was some historic oral and literary tradition. More recently though much famous ‘Irish’ literature in the revival was not written by ethnic Irish but by the Anglo-Irish. Even Joyce claimed to be of Norman and Scandinavian descent and that his ancestors came over during Cromwell’s settlement, although that’s a topic of some historic debate. If you were asking for evidence of a great historic African literary tradition and I cited a bunch of Boer writers I presume that would be similarly invalid.
One theory (discussed elsewhere in this thread I think) is that the Irish were probably on the level of other peer populations in the dark ages but deteriorated considerably from the 16th to 19th centuries with the potato monoculture, ever smaller plots of land, worse nutrition, overpopulation and so on. Perhaps it begun even earlier in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. It then took emigration, selection of the smartest and improved nutrition to successively drive huge performance improvements over time.
I don’t think it’s as easy to dismiss poor estimates of Irish performance from the Victorian/Edwardian era as some people suggest. It’s entirely possible they were correct but that outsized gains have led to the current equivalence. We know poor nutrition can have a deleterious effect on IQ and the diet of the Irish in 1850 was probably substantially worse than their ancestors’.
The early literature in the Irish language always struck me as precocious by northern European standards, particularly in prose, and the Irish also developed the Ogham script within a few centuries of the Nordic runes, so I think they have a literary tradition to be proud of even discounting the Anglo-Irish contribution.
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