The Cruthin in Ireland

Sceala Philosopher Location: So Cal

The Cruthin Ireland are known by a Variety of similar names including - Cruthen, Crutheni, Cruthin, Cruthini, Cruthne, Cruthni, Cruithni and Cruithini.
Made very curious by joke references to the Cruthin on these Irish forums. And left feeling most inadequate in my understanding of ancient Irish history, I went back to college to study everything Cruthin.
I have researched and studied much of the fiction and facts of the Cruthin available online.

Results of the study on the Cruthin.
A summary of the Cruthin in Ireland.
The Cruthin cannot credibly be distinguished in Ireland they left no distinct archaeology or literature. We know that in historical times Cruthin followed the Irish Derbhfine system of inheritance and spoke Irish. The "notion that the Cruthin were 'Irish Picts' and were closely connected with the Picts of Scotland is quite mistaken" the Cruthin "were not Picts, had no connection with the Picts, linguistic or otherwise, and are never called Picti by Irish writers".

The facts of any distinct history of the Cruthin in Ireland are easy to explain - because there are none.
The Cruthin cannot be distinguished by archaeology or by art, by literature or by music. Irish Latin writers never use Picti to refer to the Irish Cruthin, and in historical times the Cruthin followed the Irish Derbhfine system of inheritance, rather than the matrilineal system used by the Picts, and spoke Irish. Professor Dáibhí Ó Cróinín believes that the "notion that the Cruthin were 'Irish Picts' and were closely connected with the Picts of Scotland is quite mistaken"

Professor Kenneth H. Jackson has said that the Cruthin "were not Picts, had no connection with the Picts, linguistic or otherwise, and are never called Picti by Irish writers".
The Cruthin were Irish not Scots or Brythonic.
The Cruthin were not even a distinct or separate Irish tribe, the Cruthin were part of Ireland, one of the various interconnected Irish tribes.

The facts of the Cruthin
There is no archeology or artifacts of the Cruthin to suggest they ever existed distinctly in Ireland, or that they were ever a distinct group in Ireland, nothing what so ever.
Any source that even suggests a separate or distinct ethnic or cultural identity for the Cruthin of Ireland is based on fiction or myth.
Everything people assume or think they know about the Cruthin as distinct in Ireland - is based in mythology and most of all modern fiction, especially the determined political work of British Unionist writer Ian Adamson.
Irish Community Images

Cllr Ian Adamson OBE (born 1944) is a former Lord Mayor of Belfast. He is a member of the Ulster Unionist Party. Adamson the primary source of the myths-to-facts of the Cruthin, his fiction and bias guesswork about the Cruthin is eagerly absorbed as fact and history by some of the more extreme and simple British unionists.
Adamson is the author of The Cruthin (1974), laying claims to Ulster descent from a pre-Gaelic people in Ireland. He also wrote The Identity of Ulster (1982), and other works dealing with the ethnology of a group of pre-Celtic settlers in Ulster whose mentality is said to pervade the modern province.

References.
Adamson is not a historian, he is a political fiction writer, making convenient history for the British unionists and Norn Iron. Adamson is devoted to his bias and his works of fiction are limited because of this. There is no point discussing Adamson in a history context, because Adamson is not even attempting to study and impartially understand history. At least when it comes to Ireland.

Irish Community Images

The establishment of Ulster-Scots is the result of fake mythology by Ian Adamson which has been discredited, that was created as an origin tale for Ulster Unionists in order to provide a separateness from the rest of Ireland.
Ulster-Scots didn't exist until Lord Laird saw an opportunity to graft a language onto Ian Adamson's Cruithin mythology in order to extort money from the British and Irish exchequers to fund his taxi bills. But it's no more a language than Scouse or Nortsoide Dubbalinese is. In fact it’s much less, because it was entirely fabricated.
skinflicks.blogspot.com/2007/10/ulster-scots-scam.html

In the late 20th century, some Protestant writers in Northern Ireland, for example Ian Adamson, have been creating the idea of a Cruithnean ethnic identity as an ancient and indigenous, but non-Gaelic, cultural group.

Introduction to the Cruthin on Wikipedia
The Cruthin (Middle Irish Cruithnig, Cruithni, Modern Irish Cruithne) were a people of early Ireland, who occupied parts of Counties Down, Antrim and Derry in the early medieval period.

Their ruling dynasties included the Dál nAraidi in southern Antrim and the Uí Echach Cobo in western Down. Early sources preserve a distinction between the Cruthin and the Ulaid, who gave their name to the province of Ulster, although the Dál nAraide claimed in their genealogies to be na fir Ulaid, "the true Ulaid". The Loígis, who gave their name to County Laois in Leinster, and the Sogain of Connacht are also claimed as Cruthin in early Irish genealogies.

Modern culture
In Northern Ireland in modern times, British Unionist writers, in particular Ian Adamson, have used the Cruthin to portray a supposed ancient connection to their own northern separatism and affinity with Britain.
Facile loyalist race myth

Intertwined Roots

Ulster-Scot Perspective
By W. A. Hanna
This book is part of an ongoing search for the unionist people to establish a satisfactory identity for themselves on this island. In that, it is a worthwhile exercise.
Since the outbreak of the conflict, unionism, assailed by republicans, derided by their British overlords and rightly condemned by world opinion, has attempted to create an identity for itself that is not Irish.

identity, moreover, not dependent upon the connection to Westminster or the British crown. Their recent history couldn't allow them to be what they had always said was beneath them - Irish. However, the British connection was becoming attenuated with every IRA bomb, every outburst by Paisley.

Ian Adamson's ``The Identify of Ulster'' (1974) started what became known in Irish historiography as the ``Cruithin myth/controversy''. It was seized upon by loyalists who wanted their own Serbian blood and soil race myth for the Shankhill.

It was also food and drink to revisionists, who wanted to counter the view that Ireland had been an occupied country and had ejected the colonialist from most of the national land area in 1922.

The nonsense that the people of the Shankhill were racially different from their neighbours on the Falls was seized upon by loyalist leaders like John McMichael. Loyalism then started to produce propaganda that developed the idea of the Shankhill Picts versus the Falls Irish. You would laugh if you could forget that the Shankhill Butchers actually believed this stuff.

Loyalism then adopted the Gaelic hero Cu Chulainn as the first loyalist defending Ulster from Southern Irish expansionist aggression.

Hanna is not a historian - he admits this - and it shows.
This book attempts to deal with these ancient links between the two islands at their closest point, NorthEast Ireland to SouthWest Scotland. The Ulster Scots story then goes to America, where they were driven by religious persecution of the English government. Hanna, without a hint of irony, sketches the contribution of the "Scotch-Irish'' in the fight against the British to establish a democratic republic in North America.

This book is nothing less than an attempt to justify the Plantation. The upshot of pretending that Sammy on the Shankill is an ancient P-Celt is that the Plantation is then spun as a homecoming to Ulster of an exiled people.

There are many links between Ireland, all of it, and Scotland. Those links should be researched, respected and, where relevant to both nations, strengthened and celebrated.

There are many benefits to both nations in doing this and republicans should be to the fore in recognising the huge commonality between both Éirinn and Alba.

However, giving Sammy a race myth for not engaging with his neighbours in the Six Counties and pretending that another country starts after Newry isn't one of them.

Quite frankly, the average Orangeman's head contains quite enough battered crap without putting any more in.
news.org/archive/2000/June01/01book.html

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The Cruthin in Ireland