Introduction

‘Songs of our land, ye are with us forever’, sang Donegal’s ‘blind poetess’ Frances Brown in the 1840s, but she was wrong. Although feted and garlanded in her time, and awarded a pension by Prime Minister Robert Peel (not a noted lover of Ireland, as we shall see), she and her stirring anthems are virtually forgotten now. Histories, like songs and poems, belong to the time in which they are written, and inevitably reflect their writers’ interests, preoccupations and experiences. This concise history is written by an Irish female born in 1960 and reared in an urban, lower-middle-class Catholic extended family in which there was as strong a devotion to history in all its forms (political, social, archaeological, local, national, international and, of course, familial) as there was to religion.