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The most and least Gaelic counties?

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    #62
    robp
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 1,934 ✭✭✭robp


    newmug wrote: »
    People definitely have a "look" in different parts of the country. You can't mistake the west of Ireland look, a dead straight, wide mouth, and a very spherical looking head.

    Its pretty unfashionable to say this kind of thing and people would shout you down for it but there is plenty of studies that show skull morphology varies according to ethnic background and can be used to infer ancestry. That been said, it works on the population level and I would question it working on individuals or without real metrics.


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    #63
    Qualitymark
    Closed Accounts Posts: 6,824 ✭✭✭Qualitymark


    Can we clarify our terms? When we're talking about Gaelic, are we talking about those Africans on the west coast, the Norsemen of east Munster, the shoneens of Dublin, the Scots of the north?

    More seriously, you might theorise that Connacht would be the most Gaelic because of Cromwell's generous choice between it and Hell; however, plenty of the people who were booted out of rich Munster land and forced to settle in Connacht were "Old English", even including the descendants of the Elizabethan planters as well as Normans.

    Incidentally, the "more Irish than the Irish themselves" phrase originally applied to the FitzGerald family, the Earls of Desmond, who married both Gaels and Normans - they were intermarried even with their enemies the Butlers. The phrase didn't refer only to their intermarriage with old Gaelic families, but to their adoption of Gaelic custom: keeping poets, riding bareback, wearing the giob hairstyle, speaking Irish, playing hurling, etc, to the shock and horror of the men of the Pale.


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