The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #53832   Message #831485
Posted By: GUEST,Taliesn
21-Nov-02 - 07:37 AM
Thread Name: BS: What have the Irish ever done for us
Subject: RE: BS: What have the Irish ever done for us
I'm glad someone saw fit to remember James Joyce ,but the shoe not dropped would be the Irish contribution to Literature & Poetry.
Seamus Heaney won the Noel Prize for Literature/Poetry in the early 90's.
Then lest we forget master actors of the english word in the likes of now-eparted Richard Harris & Peter O'Toole.

Even more important though was the saving of recorded written knowledge , and thus "civilization" itself , by the Irish monks while the rest of Europe was plunged in destroying one another in a centuries-long orgy of multiple Warlord-militarism during the appropriately named "Dark Ages" where literacy ,forget actual writing skills, wasn't exactly included as a "survival skill".
True the Germans perfected the Euro-version of Chinese printing by sohpisticating its engineering into the mechanical press ,but where would they be without the original templates of knowledge preserved by the dutiful hands of those Irish monks' fineart of calligraphy.
Considering that Thomas Jefferson declared that he preferred a nation with a free press and no gov't than one with gov't but no free press ,the improtance of the written word becomes a wee more apparent and the Irish have most certainly given us a far more enriched literature .