ABSTRACT
The relationship between the Irish and the Greco-Roman world has always been intense, as their literature in both Gaelic and English reveals. Competence in Latin was fostered across even some of the lowest classes by Roman Catholicism and the informal education that a proportion of the poorest Irish children received at informal ‘hedge schools’. Some working-class Irish people were indeed incited to rebellious thoughts by classical authors. For Gaelic poets, Ireland’s tragic history could compete with the wars and heroes of classical antiquity; Irish, moreover, was a suitable vehicle as an ancient tongue itself, older than English. What is clear in Ireland’s unique political context, however, is a bewildering complexity marking the intersection between identities grounded in a combination of class origin or affiliation, political views, language, religion and (in the case of the Scots Irish) original ethnic derivation.
