Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland by Sykes Bryan

Author:Sykes, Bryan [Sykes, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2007-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

9

THE DNA OF IRELAND

A good reason for choosing Ireland as the starting point of our genetic tour of the Isles is that, unlike in Britain, a concerted research programme into Irish cultural and genetic history has already been running for some years, organized through the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy based in Dublin. In Britain an even more ambitious millennium initiative came to nothing, which was one of the reasons why my research team and I decided to complete the survey of the entire Isles ourselves. You might be surprised, as I was when I first heard of the Academy, that it still retains the Royal prefix, but it is one of the institutions that has survived the 1921 partition of Ireland. It was founded in 1785 and soon became the premier learned society for the study of Irish civilization. It is in many respects the Irish equivalent of the elite academic societies in the rest of Britain, like the Royal Society and the British Academy in London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and, also in Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish Academy. One of the enjoyable aspects of visiting these places is that they are almost always housed in grand Georgian terraces. It is always a treat for the eyes to attend meetings in such sumptuous surroundings, with the olympians of academe, Newton, Darwin and co., peering down from their portraits high up on the walls.

Unlike its British counterparts, the Irish Academy is not restricted to particular fields of endeavour. While in England, for example, the Royal Society deals with the sciences and the British Academy covers the humanities: literature, history, philosophy and so on, the Royal Irish Academy does not restrict itself, embracing both the sciences and the arts under one roof. This breadth made the Academy the natural home of a comprehensive survey of Ireland which would integrate all the diverse strands of science, history, language and archaeology. This irresistible combination, together with some fundraising, led to a substantial amount of money being made available to the Academy from the National Millennium Committee of Ireland. Invitations to bid for money from the fund went out to all the Irish universities and I found myself on a plane to Dublin to help to judge the applications.

In the elegant surroundings of the Academy’s headquarters in Dawson Street, the hopefuls presented their proposals in the form of short talks. Naturally enough, when a new pot of money unexpectedly becomes available, people build their bids around their existing expertise. The aim is to persuade the judges that what they are already doing will, with a bit more money, produce an essential and indispensable contribution to the project. Our job, as judges, was to weigh up these diverse claims and to recommend where we thought the money would best be spent. You’ll not be surprised to hear that I didn’t need much persuading that a survey of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA would be not only relevant but completely essential.

Fortunately, all the other judges felt the same way.

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