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Subject: [DNA-R1B1C7] Galloglas?
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:14:59 +0000

Hi Nextdill,

The book to read on the Galloglass is "Scots Mercenary Forces in Ireland (1565-1603)" by Hayes-McCoy. It is the most thorough treatment that I am aware of and everything else I've read (including histories of Ireland) refer to it. (Not histories like the "Irish Annals", of course!)

If you read it you will learn that no one really knows who they were. We know where they came from. They came from the western Isles and no doubt the western coast. They are the usual guys living there at the time. They had distinctive weaponry (and size). As we do know that that area was invaded and settled by the Norse, no doubt most got Norse genes but maybe not a Y chromosome. No doubt they also have Scottish genes: Pictish, Gaelic, etc. Hard to imagine they don't!!

As we do know some Scottish clans were founded by O'Neills, then no doubt some were descended from O'Neills. How many? No one knows how many. There is no written history. We've not done enough DNA studies yet. You'll have to stick around to find out.

Galloglass were in every county in Ireland. A number of Irish clans were founded by them like the McSweeneys. I do not know if DNA evidence supports this widely accepted historical account or what the Y of the McSweenies looks like...Curious!

They were mercinary soldiers. Guys with no better lot in life than leaving home and fighting, so younger sons of leading families, landless men, bored sons of peasants (the unbored ones stayed and farmed). Hoping to secure a good future in Ireland. They were not ever united into one force. Throughout the 1500s even the English employed them. Everyone who could had a band of them in their employ.

In the early 1600s after the flight of the earls, all the soldiers they could find were rounded up and put on ships and shipped to Sweden to fight in the war going on in Europe. Mercenary soldiers of Scots origin who didn't find their own way back to Scotland pronto were among them. These fellas didn't take well to farming. Apparently most of those soldiers crossed the lines to fight for the other side. It was Europe's last pure religious war and they were, after all, Catholic. We have eye witness accounts of them boarding ships at Derry.

So how many didn't get caught and shipped off? How many remained 'gay reparees'? How many of them reproduced before being caught and hung? No one knows but probably very few.

> Vikings defeated the southern Ui Neill in 837.

The Irish with Scottish cousins defeated the Viking in 1014 (I think it was) at the Battle of Clontarf. The Irish Vikings sailed off and settled in York, England, where there was already an Irish Viking colony and where you do find surname evidence of their presence. As well as linguistic. Probably DNA too, but I don't know.

The early bird wins the gene race, as we already know. So more of the folk living in the western Isles are Celtic than the historians had thought. More people in IReland are Celtic despite two English colonies in Munster in the 1500s, the large and persistent colony in Leinster, the inviting in of lots of Normans by the Irish to settle a family squabble, and the Ulster plantation (where many people with Irish DNA returned home). Not to mention the English soldier, often blamed in the past for strange blood types in Cork, though those were probably brought over in the 1500s. 90% of the people in Munster died in one winter during the Desmond Wars because their idiot feuding leaders killed their cattle. It was a horrific event, possibly the worse in all of Irish history, wh ich is saying a lot. WHo lives in Munster? It wasn't long before it was repopulated with hostile Irish. Some were of English descent. The poet Spencer's grandchildren were exiled to Connacht by Cromwell in !
the mid
1660s. They could not speak English. People assimilate fast.

So undoubtedly some of us descend from Galloglass but probably not many. And of thsoe who do, could we tell them apart from the rest since the western Isles were settled by Gaels from Ireland from 500AD??

The Ui Neills were late comers on the scene so their genetic mark, even in the north of Ulster, does not challenge the earlier arrivals.

Linda Merle

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