Jo Kerrigan - Brehon laws : the ancient wisdom of Ireland

B ack in prehistory, long before anywhere else in northern Europe even started to think about assembling basic laws for their country, Ireland possessed a smoothly working, humane, practical, thoughtful and incredibly detailed code of lawful behaviour. Even today, a couple of thousand years on, we are only putting back into place principles that were taken for granted by our furthest ancestors.

Irish wives, to take just one example, had a right to their own property millennia before the Married Womens Property Act of 1870. An offenders state of mind was always taken into consideration when imposing punishment. Questioning whether someone had any business being in the place where he claimed to have been injured was automatic. Simple and easy divorce by agreement, restitution for property stolen, compensation for slander and libel, were all covered. Caring for the environment, protecting trees and looking after animals, birds and bees with love and attention was all-important. The death penalty, enforced so brutally and frequently elsewhere, was only ever imposed in the most extreme of circumstances. The briefest study of the Fenechus, or brehon laws as they came to be known (from breitheamh, a judge), reveals the amazing scope and thoughtfulness of this legal system. It was developed and used to promote fairness, justice and widespread peace. Cruelty, savage reprisals and revenge form no part of Irelands early laws.

Our position on the westernmost edge of the then-known world was key to the growth and survival of Irelands ancient laws. This remote location meant that we avoided the early waves of invaders that swept across countries further to the east. Rome never sent legions to conquer us, as it did neighbouring England and France. As a result, our culture remained untouched, entirely home-grown. It evolved, from the people by the people for the people, and laws that grew and became established through thousands of years remained virtually unchanged. You couldnt say that of anywhere else in Europe.

Of course, it couldnt last. When progress (if you can call it that) brought the outside world to Irelands shores, violent change was inevitable. It is a rule of thumb for invading colonists to extinguish any existing language, literature, customs and traditions. Only by doing this can they be sure of success. If you remove a subject countrys entire culture, you can then impose your own, and rule them all the more easily. A conquered people must be forced to accept that the new ways are the only acceptable ones, that the foreign tongue and foreign customs are the only road to success, indeed survival.

Thats what happened to Ireland eventually. It was inevitable. We couldnt hope to stay safely on the perimeter for ever, after all. Christianity came first, imposing its own changes, followed by the Vikings, who established seaports and trading cities. Then came the Normans. All of these had some effect on our native laws, but not as much as they might have done. It took the particularly determined strength of the Elizabethans to force change, destroy old records, and drive brehon law into the depths of history, where it was eventually all but forgotten.

Not quite, though.

When Ireland gained some small degree of freedom from the oppressive penal laws in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some of the ancient manuscripts and documents that had survived slowly began to surface. These were gradually collected, and the long, slow task of deciphering them began. It was to prove a challenging task. After all, the Irish language had been outlawed for many years. It was no longer written and spoken as it had once been. To add to the difficulties, the sources that had survived were written in a far older form of the language, the use and knowledge of which had disappeared with the last of the brehons under Elizabethan rule. To the surviving texts (themselves copies of copies) had been added, at different times, hand-written notes, glosses and comments, in different, later versions of Irish.

Some academics were of the view that these ancient documents were untranslatable, their content lost forever. Others disagreed and persevered. The task is still going on today, and will continue for a long time to come. Having lost so much doesnt help with the work on what was saved or rediscovered. Even now, when what has been brought to light is pored over, experts disagree about correct interpretation. Conclusions must, perforce, be conjectural in many cases. The meaning of some archaic terms may stay obstinately untranslatable.

But there could well be texts still hidden, waiting to be found, perhaps in the binding of later books, squirrelled away in old libraries, tucked safely into the walls of castles (this was how the Book of Lismore was rediscovered), or even buried in bogland. As recently as March 2019, the Avicenna Fragment, part of a fifteenth-century Irish translation of a tenth-century Persian medical treatise, was found in the spine of a later text. Indeed, some great institutions the Bodleian in Oxford, for example employ experts to check book bindings for unsuspected hidden documents. More light is gradually being thrown upon this most wonderful resource. And the laws that were lost are they still out there somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered?

In the meantime, this short book is intended to give an introduction, some brief idea of the incredible heritage we possess in the brehon laws. Every single person of Irish descent should be immensely proud of them. While other countries of ancient Europe swirled in confusion, Ireland held steady and calm, possessor of a unique legal system that anticipated by thousands of years much of the enlightenment we consider to be a modern achievement. All that time ago, we led the way.