Who are we? The myths and legends exposed

I HAVE followed with interest the recent articles in the Irish Examiner by Dick Warner and Mark Geraghty, as well as the letter from Patricia Walsh (September 28).

They concerned Irish Celticism and the implications of a recent study of mitochondrial DNA by a team from Trinity College (as well as, by the way, the universities of Leeds and Cambridge).

May I point out that it is exactly 20 years ago since my Atlantean trilogy of films (and the subsequent book) pointed out what is now becoming obvious: the continuity of an indigenous population in this island in the 9,000 years since the last Ice Age.

Few Celtic Europeople impinged either linguistically or materially on the cultural or genetic make-up of the people of this island. The snag arises when one asks whence came the first settlers. Three hundred years of semi-racist Celtic scholarship has refused to acknowledge that the first settlers must have came up the Atlantic coasts, from the south, including the Iberian peninsula and North Africa.

DNA is now only adding a scientific underpinning to the original speculations on which I further elaborate in the forthcoming Lilliput Press publication, Atlantean Irish: the Oriental & Maritime Heritage.

Bob Quinn

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