The Kilt's use in Irish Nationalism

[CMcG]

I really hate to ask this, but what exactly is Bede's myth? I can't find anything on google about this.

MacSpadger has pointed us to the archeological research of Ewan Campbell (for the article "Were the Scots Irish?", click HERE), who has investigated the myth that the kingdom of Dalriata was created by Gaelic invaders from Ireland. Saint Bede the Venerable's origin story is often used in justifications of Irish kilt wearing: he claimed that the people who founded Dalriata, which formed the early basis for Scotland, came from Ireland.

Campbell has found that there is no archeological evidence in the time period surrounding Dalriata of either large scale migration or elite domination from what is now Ireland. His research has instead lead him to suggest that imposing a modern geopolitical reading of the history of that area is skewing the facts. Rather than an ancient "Irish" invasion explaining the presence of Gaelic speakers in ancient "Scotland," he proposes that there were Gaels in that whole area of Ireland, the Highlands, and the Western Islands since the Iron Age. Dalriata was not formed by pushing out Brittonic speakers; it was formed by uniting Gaelic speakers who were already separated from Brittonic speakers by the Grampian Highland to the west and the wider part of the North Channel to the south. Here is an image from his article:


This re-thinking of history negates any Irish claim to being the origin of the Scots. On the other hand, by not using nationalistic terms and borders that didn't exist in the 4th-5th-6th centuries AD, Campbell provides a picture of a Gaelic region, connected rather than separated by a navigable part of the North Channel. He says that the archeological evidence shows that the culture was not entirely homogenous during the first millenium but had enough contact to share a language and that there was significant exchange.

What this says to me is that the early Irish nationalists' elision of history by attempting to adopt the Highland kilt as Irish national attire has some simple basis in the historical evidence of interconnected Gaelic peoples. This connection is not as strong as the more romantic origin myths would suggest. It is, however, still reasonable; the Gaelic revivalists didn't pick the kilt randomly out of thin air! Yes, yes, the Irish never wore kilts before the Gaelic revival, but the idea is that, had history been different, they might have done as their Scottish brethren did.

Something else Campbell says at the end of his article is that the question then becomes not "where did these people come from?" but rather "what do origin myths say about a people?"

Colin Kidd has a rather interesting article entitled "Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland." To greatly oversimplify things, he believes that the Enlightenment construction of ancient Gaeldom in Ireland was civil, while the Scottish constructed it as savage. Kidd then gives this as evidence for the eventual success of the Irish nationalism movement and the failure of the Scottish equivalent. If we follow Campbell and Kidd in this, it means that sometimes the stories people tell about themselves have more power than bare historical facts...