HISTORY OF IRELAND
technological transformation of US corporations – were continually adapted to what was there already. “From very early on, the people
living in Ireland make objects that suit themselves and their conditions: even the very early stone tools found in Ireland are distinctive,” he writes. “Throughout Irish history, this remains true. The place – its geography and environment, its particular mixture of ‘native’ and ‘foreigner’ (categories that change radically over time) – exerts its own peculiar pressures. “People respond to those pressures as
best they can, trying to adapt to change while taking comfort in what is familiar. It may be the case that globalisation spreads the same objects everywhere, and we can certainly see this happening in Ireland. Nevertheless, it is striking that even our fi nal object is an international product that has been adapted for a very specifi c Irish purpose: the Russian- designed AK47 assault rifl e that has been adapted to Irish needs by making it impossible to use.” O’Toole stresses that the selected pieces
– all man-made and, for the most part, all freely accessible in public institutions or spaces – are not intended to be the 100 most remarkable objects on the island, or to be a representative sample of the great collections. “They are chosen simply for their ability to illuminate moments of change, development or crisis. “If nothing else, these fascinating
things should act as a reminder that Irish people have been around for a while and have survived ordeals and challenges with creativity, resilience and a remarkable ability to invent new ways to say old things.” In the following pages, we have picked
out a selection of the 100 objects together with abridged excerpts of O’Toole’s accompanying text.
1. MESOLITHIC FISH TRAP, C 5000BC “It does not look like much: some small, smooth interwoven sticks embedded in the turf from a bog at Clowanstown, in Co Meath. The bog, however, was once a lake, and the woven sticks are an astonishing survival: part of a conical
trap used by early Irish people to scoop fi sh from the lake or catch them in a weir. Radiocarbon tests date it to between 5210 and 4970 BC. The delicacy of the work has survived the millennia. Nimble hands interlaced young twigs of alder and birch, gathered from the edge of dense woods that covered the land at the time. The warp-and-weft technique is similar to the way of weaving cloth that developed much later in human history. The Irish trap could be called a classic design: similar items continue to be used around the world.”
4. FLINT MACEHEAD, 3300–2800BC
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(perhaps the Orkney islands), but if the macehead were carved in Ireland, the object suggests that someone on the island had attained a very high degree of technical and artistic sophistication. Archaeologist Joseph Fenwick from NUI Galway has suggested that the precision of the carving could have been attained only with a rotary drill, a ‘machine very similar to that used to apply the surface decoration to latter-day prestige objects such as Waterford Crystal’.”
14. IRON SPEARHEAD, 800–675BC “This iron spearhead, found in the River Inny at Lackan in Co Westmeath, is of a kind familiar enough from the Ireland of AD500. Andy Halpin of the National Museum says that it ‘would not be out of place in the early-mediaeval period… When you think of the Iron Age legends of Cúchulainn, this is the type of weapon that people think of them carrying’. The problem is that recent radiocarbon
dating of the remains of its wooden shaft suggests that this spear may be more than 1,200 years older than that. If this is so, it explodes a myth about how the Iron Age came to Ireland. It is the combination of this early date
“This ceremonial macehead, found in the chamber of the eastern tomb beneath the great passage tomb at Knowth, Co Meath in the Boyne Valley, is one of the fi nest works of art to have survived from Neolithic Europe. The unknown artist took a piece of very hard, pale-grey fl int, fl ecked with patches of brown, and carved each of its six surfaces with diamond shapes and swirling spirals. At the front they seem to form a human face, with the shaft hole as a gaping mouth. The source of the stone is uncertain
and its superb quality that makes this spear so startling. ‘We are beginning’, says Halpin, ‘to get other evidence for ironworking technology at an earlier date than we thought. The idea that ironworking was happening here in maybe 600 or 700BC would not really be disputed any more. But the idea that something as fi ne as this was being produced at that period suggests not only that iron was being worked here, but also that it was being worked by very competent smiths much earlier than we think’.”
15. BROIGHTER BOAT, C 100BC “This delightful gold model-boat, just under 20cm long but rich in detail, is a rare thing in early Irish
art: a realistic depiction of a real object. It appears to be a precise model of an ocean-going vessel, probably wooden but possibly made of hide. This might have been the kind of
Issue 7 Autumn/Winter 2013 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW 73
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