 Great. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to Dr. Cathy Swift from the University of Limerick. And Cathy will be talking to us about emerging dynasties in a maritime world hunting for Brian Baru's genetic legacy. And Cathy is director of Irish Studies in Mary Immaculate College in the University of Limerick and undertook an Amphil in Archaeology on the parallels between early Irish and Scottish church sites of the University of Durham. Received a second Amphil in old Irish language and culture from Trinity College Dublin. And her D-Phil at Oxford examined the history of the cult of Saint Patrick. So Cathy comes to us from a very academic background and is going to give us a different view and perspective on Brian Baru, one of our national heroes. So I'm going to unmute Cathy so that you can hear her wonderful words of wisdom, ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Cathy Smith. Okay. Well, can I just introduce the paper by referring to the one the previous speaker said this is a rapidly evolving field. Okay. Well, I come to you from a very slowly moving field. And there's only three historians currently employed on a permanent basis in Ireland concentrating on the era between Saint Patrick and Brian Baru. Okay. And to me it's fascinating listening to the papers I've heard so far because a lot of you are looking back to that period. But actually I'm sure you have been finding that there is relatively little which is recent in publication date. And it's hard to find material because there is simply isn't enough of us currently employed. And so one of the things I'm hoping to do is that I'm piggybacking off the energy of this group and reacting to the kind of things that you're saying. But I'm coming to it from a completely different perspective from you. So you may find that some of the things I say to you sound very strange. But also I hope some of the things I say will be of benefit. I mean, on the question, for example, of the different origins of the different families, I think I may have something to say which might be useful on that. Okay. I'm going to start with English surnames because oftentimes in Ireland we tend to talk about Irish surnames, Irish language surnames. But of course we have had English speakers in Ireland for at least 800 years. And so one of the interesting things is to look at English surnames from the island of Ireland. In order to do so one has to have some idea of the background in Britain and the theory of the background in Britain. A lot of this material hasn't been looked at in detail, the evolution of surnames or surname history. But the theory is that before 1066 surnames were not, nobody possessed one. And if you had a nickname, that was as far as it went. And that when the invasion happened after 1066, surnames started developing among the aristocrats as a land ownership thing to identify the locations that you came from. And that most knights in the south of England possessed surnames by around about 1200, but not so much in the north, and that ordinary people are slower still. Okay. But by the late 14th century, when we have the poll tax records, we have a situation that we're pretty sure that surnames were well established among the population as a whole. And the type of language that gives are the way these surnames originate. A number of them originate in personal names. And so you're called the son of Robert or Robertson. A lot of them are the district from which you come. And then you have occupational surnames such as Smith or Carver. And some of these are names which we no longer recognize, such as fine liver, which is the occupation of a man who castrates pigs for a living. And when surnames historians in Britain work, what they do is they start off and that they try and see the distribution usually at the end of the 19th century. And they map that and then they start looking at the most specific records for that particular district. So this is the example of go likely. And as you can see it very heavily concentrated in the Durham stroke Cumbrian region. I'm living at the moment in Limerick on the west coast. And there we have a city that was established as a Viking base around about 845. It was then sat by Claremann, Brian and his brother, Matt Gavon in 967. Brian's descendants certainly are using it as a base as an important assembly area from 1093 and possibly a little earlier. It then gets raided by Normans in 1175 and they're back again. They get thrown out by the O'Brien's. They're back again by 1197 and they're settling in the Limerick area. Okay, so we're talking about a mixed population group and that makes it interesting to study surnames in that area. The other thing is that we're very fortunate in Limerick. We have Brian Hodkinson of the City Museum who has done a fabulous resource where he has gone through all the Anglonorman documentation looking for Limerick names. And he's produced a list of the who's who of medieval Limerick, which is available on the web. Now this is a list of people who came to the attention of Anglonorman authorities. It doesn't include everybody, but it's a very good starting point for what families existed in the area of Limerick City and County during the Middle Ages. It's a city, as I say, with a mixed population in a county of a mixed population just downriver from a powerful Irish-speaking kingdom, the O'Brien's Atomant. Okay, so what do we get for names? We get a lot of names as in the English system based on personal names. So we get Adam and Andrews and Arthurs and Arnold and so forth. And you'll notice as you go through that list that all of them are non-Irish as names. And the reason for that is because in order to be a citizen of the city of Limerick, you had to be of English or Ottoman ancestry. You couldn't live in the city as an Irishman. We have a very large number of surnames which have the word son. Okay, and as I'll be showing to you later, the most normal way of identifying somebody in an Irish-speaking context is to say X son of Y. And we have that from Limerick as well, but in Limerick we very commonly see the replacement of Mac, the Irish word Mac, by the Norman French word Fitz. Okay, so we have Fitz-Adams and Fitz-Alexander's and so forth. The ones in bold on this slide, Fitzgeralds, Fitz Gibbons, Fitz Henrys, Fitz Simons, Fitz Williams, we have members of all those families still living in the Limerick area. Not from the city, but from the county of Limerick. We also have Mac names, the Irish word, and you'll see they come from a range of different family groups. The ones in red are the ones we're particularly interested in for this course, which are Macbrians in various spellings. And I could only endorse what was said at the last project, that spelling is really of no value whatsoever. There's no consistency in spelling in the Middle Ages. If you go looking for where these Limerick Macbrians live, and I list some of the references down here. Oops, what have I done there? I've turned it off. I pressed that one by accident. Yes, it just comes back up again. Okay, sorry, my apologies. We're getting them down here in Galbally, in Caracomlish, and then over in Kilkeady. And the most interesting perhaps of those is Galbally, because the dull gosh, the ancestor cause of that dynasty is remembered in the 13th century as being buried in Duntry League in the parish of Galbally, which is very interesting overlap. But the reason I'm interested in this is that the O'Brien's are not limited to Claire in the 13th and 14th century. They've got holdings in the Limerick area. And in fact, in addition to Mac names, there are also O'Brien's listed in the Who's Who from medieval Limerick, and quite a lot of O'Brien's, as you can see, and when you map them, they're turning up in the same area. The bit in green there is Limerick City, and these are all their different land holdings, or the different areas where they're active. So these O'Brien's are living in an area of where the Normans have colonised, where the Osman have lived beforehand. You're living in an amongst Norman-controlled lands, lands which had been controlled by Osman, and therefore you're unlikely to get, in my view, a single genetic tree for O'Brien's. They're scattered already by the time we get records. They're not limited to the Claire area. Because Limerick is a mixed linguistic area, we get the same names turning up in different languages. So in our list of Who's Who, we have 16 examples of the name Albus. Albus is the Latin for white. We get two people spelt with the spelling white in English, and we still have a lot of whites in and around the Limerick area. The map here is a map of townlands with white as part of the townland name. The most common form is Bollyonite, or the Bollyon etel, the townland of the whites. But in addition to those whites or Albus, you also get a number of names in blonde, because of the French word, and you also get the Irish word fin, meaning bright or white as well. And again, fin is a very common Limerick surname. Unfortunately, I didn't have a map of, when you go looking for place names involving fins, it's harder because fin gets used of river names and so forth. That map is a map of all the different place names with the word fin. But when you break it down to something more specific, you get a townland such as Finstown here in County Dublin. You get Bollyon, and you get different spellings of the townland names, but all deriving from a townland of the fins scattered essentially around the Scandinavian cities of Ireland. So in addition to our white, fair-haired blondes, we also have blacks, but they can be recorded as black in the English sense, or dove, or dove, using the Irish word. We have browns, but we also have duns, and again that's simply a change over from the Irish to the English. We have pettish, meaning small. We also have Irish beg. We have beg in various spellings, and we have child, and we also have the French long form. So what we're seeing is the same surnames are turning up in different languages. We also get, again in accordance with the English style, we get a lot of names of people in professions, okay, profession names. So we have archers and butlers and carpenters, cooks, deans, fowlers, etc. And we get some of these names in different languages. So we have Marchand, the French, Mercer, or Merchant in English. And the name I've listed here in red is Sexton. And you say, well, that's a nice, neat English name. That's exactly what you would expect an English speaker to have as a surname. What appearances are deceiving? After our, we have a very famous Sexton in Limerick. His name is Edmund Sexton, and he's known to the historical records as the first Irishman who became mayor of Limerick. And this was in the time of Henry VIII. It caused a lot of kerfuffle. The people of Limerick didn't want him as mayor, but Henry insisted on putting him in. And one of the reasons they didn't want him is because they said, no one who is an Irishman by blood and nation shall be mayor or exercise any authority in our city. And it goes on and it says, the citizens of Limerick bear him this pleasure, and they much adore him because he is an Irishman by blood and he uses himself according to his Irish nature. However, he has been made a citizen and free by the king, and so as a result he's been made mayor contrary to the English statutes and the liberties of the city. So how did he end up with the name Sexton if he's an Irishman by blood? Well, if you look up at the top, it does give a different spelling of his name, and that's the name Sheshnon. So I went looking for Sheshnon's in the Irish language records. And there's only one. And it comes from, this is in the 17th century collection of genealogical records, collected together by double-tuck book fervisher known as Lourmore or the Great Book of Genealogies. And it identifies a Mweenshire Sheshnon, a family of Sheshnon's, coming from the area of Clare and descended from a son of Kos, Kos the man who gave his name to the Dalgosh. But that son existed at the time of St. Patrick. So we're talking of a good thousand years from the point where the record is being produced and the ancestor that's being claimed. The other thing which, that makes one suspicious. The other thing which makes one suspicious is that among this group of families associated with the Sheshnon are the Mweenshire Unedah, which is another, is it the Irish word for green? Again, green is a very common English surname, and we have greens in our group from medieval Nimrack. And Virktha, again, is not an Irish name. I haven't been able to trace what English name might be involved. But we now have three different groups in this Irish genealogy who all seem to have English origin surnames translated into Irish. And just to keep you awake, and I hope you've got lots of fingers to keep all these points in mind. The area in which this grouping is said to live is what the leading family in that area are called the Shanachon or the Shanahans. Okay? And I've shown their land holdings there. So that's the only Mweenshire Sheshnon or family of Sheshnon that we've got in the 17th century records. But we do have the personal name Sheshnon in one other location. It's the son of Sheshnon, son of Dhanaka, son of Akkad, et cetera. He comes from Alney, the area around Balana and Portrault in North Tipperary, the far side of Loch Derg from County Care. When I look at this material, I'm influenced by this material that I normally study prior to Brian Blue. As far as I'm concerned, everything after Brian Blue is journalism, you understand. I only reluctantly move past 10-14. But according to what everybody who studies this early material would say, Irish genealogies are not dispassionate records, okay? They are genealogical statements which might have a contemporary use in justifying the plains and flattering the pretensions of ruling dynasties. You climb the power tree, you get in charge, and then you give yourself a very nice genealogy which illustrates how important you have always been. And it isn't true that you have resulted from a fling that your mother had with somebody behind the bush. So in that context, I'm looking at my evidence for Edmund Sexton, a merchant of Limerick who needs to control the area of Loch Derg because if he wants to use the Shannon to bring his goods, he has to get north of the falls of Dunas, which is not navigable. So you can get it from the Shannon Estuary, you can get up as far as Limerick City, and then you have a part of the river which is not navigable because of the stones in the river. And then from Killaloo North, you can use the Shannon as a routeway. And I find it very interesting that this merchant of Limerick is then coming either from the west or the east side of Loch Derg, just north of that bottleneck. And I'm also interested in the fact that his name, Sheshnon, the Irish for Sexton, is quite similar to the name Shanahan, or Shancon, which is in fact an Irish name and is well attested among the corpus of Irish personal names. So my current conclusion, and I'm offering that for debate, is that yes, the O'Shanahan's of Clare are a member of Brian Bruce's immediate family, but that Edmund Sexton is an imposter who's made his money as a merchant in the city of Limerick, and that as he grows to power, he is not only getting a friendly with Henry VIII and getting in with the English speaker of Limerick, but he is also creating for himself an Irish language genealogy explaining that he comes from the Northern, from the family that ruled the Kingdom of Cormand immediately to the north. This is a guy who knows how to make friends and influence people. I don't know whether that answer is true, but I'm very interested in the fact that there is a Sexton group project going on at DNA for the moment, and I would dearly love to know, is that Sexton DNA showing links with the O'Brien's, I'm possibly the Shanahan's, or is it perhaps showing links with the families of Tipperary instead, or indeed neither of them? So my second point is that in a frontier zone, languages and affiliations change frequently, and you cannot use, again the point that was made in the previous paper, you cannot use the spelling or even the nature of an individual name as a pure guide to ethnic identity. So just as you have burns from Scotland and burns from Ireland, it seems to me that you can have Sexton's and Shanahan's who may or may not be connected purely because of the history of their family history. And I illustrate this, I think this is quite interesting. This is the flag, I spent the summer in Normandy. These are the flags of Normandy. This is the Royal Banner of England, the Leference of England, and you will notice the certain similarity that the Gaelic speaking area, the shield of the O'Brien's from Pullmont. Power is power, folks, and it doesn't really matter where you come from. The powerful like the powerful on the whole. Okay, so that gives us a bit of context. I want to look now to some extent at something which isn't really well done in Irish historiography, which is the history of how we adopt surnames in Ireland in the Irish speaking areas. We have records of Irish families from the time of St. Patrick on our own stones. And 50% of those of the names recorded on the own stones are of the form X, son of Y. Okay? And for example, this one from Ballylanders in Limerick is Waelagney Mackeam-Gavati, it's little bald one son of caste possessor in translation and English. When you go looking at names in the Irish annals, and I give here the example of the annals of Ulster, what form do names take in the annals of Ulster? Well, if you're talking about important dynists, people that kind of people have been talking about in the papers up till now, the leaders and the chiefs and the kings, a small percentage of people, the ones in black, are only listed under a single name, their personal name. The biggest group is X, son of Y, same as the own stones. And then a smaller group again, the white column, are X, son of Y, son of W. Okay? Son, father, grandfather. But that seems to be only if you have power and only if you're royal. For the commoners, they seem to have just one name. And I give an example from Agil of Nishonora, where the warriors meet a guy and they say, where do you come from? What is your slingshot, your descent and your lineage? And he says, oh, I'm just black fuck. I'm a farmer. And he doesn't give any, he doesn't give I am the son of X or the grandson of Y. He just says I am black fuck. Again, if you look at the names for churchmen, their status seems to be based on their role as churchmen, as leaders of particular communities, or as bishops. And again, their pattern is very different. Lots and lots of them are only named by their personal name. A smaller percentage would have, I'm the churchman X, son of Y, the pattern which is very common for the chiefs. And then a smaller percentage again, going back down again would be X, son of Y, son of W. And it looks as if, until the Vikings came along anyway, churchmen got their status by being churchmen and they didn't need the family tree, as it were. But perhaps because of the disruption brought about in the Viking period, they suddenly start saying, ah, but we're noble as well. We have good ancestry in addition to being churchmen. One of the key books written on this is by Paul Drick de Wolf. He's normally spelled W-O-U-L-F-E, but this is the Irish spelling. And he wrote a book in 1922. As I say, this surname history has not been studied in great detail in Ireland. But he says, Irish surnames came and used gradually from the middle of the 10th to the 13th century and were formed from the names of ancestors, generally with either O or possibly Mach. And that has been subsequently done in more detail and the suggestion is that the O names are earlier and the Mach names are Norman period or later. So I went looking for where can I find the earliest O names in bulk. And this is the Dublin citizen role of 1200. So just after the Normans have come to Ireland to a city where, which had a long ancestry at that stage of Scandinavian control. And we've got 1600 people on that citizen role, so it's a nice, good database. There are no examples of surnames, Irish-style surnames with O in that. The biggest category of name is the category which talks about location, where you're from. 746 of those, X from in French and then 19 X of in English and then another category with X and a Latinate adjective based on your location. Then we've another 500 odd names which seem to be about professions. And then we have a lot of names with X son of Y using the Latin word Philius. Okay. And we have X, Philius Y, Frater Y, Necos Y. These are various Latin terms. We have only three names with X son of Y, grandson of Z. And then we've only one name in Irish, one name in Welsh, and one name with the English north patronymic son. And when we look at the locations, we get 310 places of origin for the Dublin citizens. But only 207 of them, 207 of that 300 odd are only mentioned once. Okay. And the ones that are mentioned more frequently, I've listed them there. So the most, the highest percentage of where we can identify our Dubliners is not from Scandinavia. It's not from East England. It's from Cardiff in 1200, which is a really interesting statistic. So what I get out of that is that Dublin in 1200 is like the wild west of the America. It's a city of adventurers of people who've come there on their own, not sponsored by a lord who's bringing a whole contingent with them. But there are guys who say, you know, I can make my fortune in those lands right there on the frontier on the edge of the world. And they're coming to Dublin to do so. But they're coming, a lot of them from western England and Wales and then another bunch from eastern England. And those Dubliners are not using Irish style naming formula. But when we go back to our chiefs and our leaders, our Irish language chiefs and leaders, and we go back to the great work of John O'Donovan, who was the most magnificent scholar in the middle of the 19th century, he listed out names of leaders who seem to have given rise to surnames. And you'll notice they all seem to turn up in and around the time of Brian Brewer who died, as you know, in 1014. And Brian is actually remembered in Irish language tradition as the man who invented surnames in Ireland. And not everybody would believe that. They didn't even believe it at the time. There are, you know, his monster guys were writing to this effect. Northerners were saying, you must be joking. Surnames came from England and from foreign parts. But I think one of the problems we have in looking at Irish language surnames is that we have tended to follow the 19th century scholars by assuming that when you have these dynastic names of chiefs that they are surnames in the English system. But that does not appear to be the case when you look at these records in more detail. And what we seem to have for the chiefs is a particular Irish habit which is known as the Tullock Tiganish or the Hill of Lordship. And this is the idea that as a king it is, you are a better king, you are a better poet, you are a better Brehame if your father and your grandfather were also kings or poets or Brehames. They were very much believed in families controlling certain professions. And you couldn't get the highest rank in any profession unless your dad and your grandfather had been in the same profession. The exception is, and I speak as a veteran of the Irish university system, if you are twice as good as all your peers and all your peers acknowledge that then you can make highest honour price. But as I say, as a veteran of the Irish university system I doubt if that happened very often. Okay, so Brian Rue dies in 1014. What evidence do we have for O'Brien, the development of O'Brien as a surname? In the records we have Brian's sons one particular son dies in contact with him but another son doesn't last till 1064 and a third son, Ty, died in 1023. They're just called sons of Brian. The grandsons, they're operating and they're just called, they're called O'Brien, dear grandson of Brian. But they are really his grandsons so you can't really say that's a surname because the word O is also the word for grandson. By the time you get to about 100 years after Brian you're getting a habit where Brian, the ruling family, the ruling dynasty who controls the O'Brien kingdom of Toman, they're being called O'Brien even when they are no longer grandsons but we're now to great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons but they're all identified as O'Brien. But other members of the family are not called O'Brien. So it's only if you're ruling that you get to call yourself an O'Brien at this stage. So you could be a cousin. We were listening about second cousins and so forth in some of the earlier DNA from them. You wouldn't get to call yourself an O'Brien because you weren't ruling. And I think that's important for trying to work out trying to identify patterns in the DNA to have an understanding of that kind of context. Now this struck me from listening to the previous papers as an important point for this group in particular. An awful lot of Irish language surnames derive from personal names. But there's only between 100 and 200 personal names in operation in Ireland in the early period. So you get lots of people with the same name. Somebody mentioned Donal. I think it was Mr. Larkin mentioned Donal in the first paper. AIDS, the name which gives rise to haze. There are 250 examples of different AIDS in the 12th century genealogies. It is very, very unlikely that you would get a single DNA haplogroup for hazes. There was probably lots of progenitors which produced hazes. Kelly, somebody mentioned Kelly. Kellock is another extremely popular name. You are very, very unlikely to have all Kelly's coming from one family. And I'm following this through for the Irish language surnames but that also holds true for the Norman names. And when the Normans arrive, you suddenly see not just people in the Viking cities or in the colony calling themselves Norman names, but suddenly you see O'Brien's and other people also calling themselves Williams and Roberts and so forth. Now, forgive me because this DNA is not my background. So if I say something really crass here I expect you all to rise up and explain. But you get this material that I got from papers written between 2000 and 2008. If you have a single progenitor, as, for example, was argued for, hey, turn to eight. That's the kind of pattern you get. But if you have loads of progenitors, you get a different one. And I come to think about how many individual Brian's may have given rise to the surname O'Brien. I have, in the immediate aftermath of Brian himself, I have, or in 100 years, for the 100 years after his life, I have at least five, six different Brian's who could have become ancestors and who could have given rise to the name O'Brien's. And when I look at the 17th century genealogies, I have a choice of 263 Brian's who could have given rise to descendants of Brian. Now, I'm not saying all of them did, but that's the pattern. The map is the pattern of O'Brien's as they existed at the time of Griffith's valuations. You can see they're all over the country. Yes, there's a large bunch of them in Munster, but they're all over the country. The likelihood is they all come from different, you know, not all of them individually, but there are a huge number of different ancestors in that. Why are some blue? Because there's more of them there. Yeah. This is, I took this from the Irish time surname list. And that's only the O'Brien's. We could also look at Brian's and Green's and all these other names as well, just to add more colors to the map, but then you wouldn't see the map, it would be so covered with dots. So my point is that although there is a tendency for people in sort of popular literature and perhaps on introductory pages to websites to say that every O'Brien is descended from Brian Broome, the documentary evidence is that that is most unlikely. And in fact, when you go looking, and I have this from Family Tree, when you go looking at the O'Brien's, you're getting, that's the pattern you're getting, but there are lots of different groups of O'Brien's being identified by DNA. One of the reasons why I was looking at this at the O'Brien's in particular is because there was an important study done in 2008 by Brian McEvoy, the group that was based in Trinity in the Department of Genetics. And he, that group, looked at the question of the O'Brien's and they were looking at to what extent could you identify a particular group of people descended from Brian Broome. Because they thought they had found a particular group descended from Nile of the Nine Hostages and they wanted to see what's the same pattern existing in Monster. Now I know Nile of the Nine Hostages has come up a certain number of times already. I have to say as a professional beginner, I don't believe in Nile at all. I mean I believe in Nile as a creation, but I don't believe he's the ancestor of the DNA group and I have written an article on that which is available on the web, but that's another problem. The way the group worked was they compared surnames which they thought were O'Brien's surnames with Oganut's surnames. And they say in the paper the quasi-mythological founder, Owen of the Oganut, is apparently 5th century descendant, his reputed descendants, these are just quotations from the article, and as a professional historian of this era I kind of go, yeah, guess what, guess what, guess what, guess what. What they did was they had 247 people, they divided them into Oganut, Delgosh and random monster surnames and then they tested that result against 184 geographic monster surnames. And they found two potential founding males for signatures A and B but they found these were distributed randomly between the surnames, whether they were Delgosh surnames or Oganut surnames or random surnames. So there was no connect, although they had two groups they weren't actually related to the surnames as far as they could see. And they found no significant differences and I mean I was brought up by my professor who stood me in the corner every time I used the word tribe and I would say, you know, whip yourself for saying such an awful word. So when I see tribal level my head, hair stands on end. But anyway, that's the phrase they used but they didn't find any evidence for the tribal level. So they had nothing uniting Oganut and nothing much uniting Delgosh either. And they ended up making a very important historical conclusion, which is that Nile had created a kingdom in the north of a particular kind based on sword land and conquest and that what was happening in Munster was something totally different. That's a very important conclusion if that's for Irish history, if that isn't about the case. But I would argue that that was a paper that was framed by geneticists and it was designed to answer genetic questions such as can a progenitor produce a large number of descendants that you can recognize genetically and it was not designed although it has been used for this purpose it was not designed to give you the ancestry or the descendants of Brian Brew or to give you information on the evolution of Irish surnames and they weren't qualified to make those judgments and they didn't even try. Okay. I don't think it can be used in that way. What was much more interesting from the point of view of somebody who studies the evolution of surnames is a conclusion that they made in a different paper where they talked about when we've sampled names with a sample size of over 50 certain surnames seem to have be closer related than other surnames so that if you're a Ryan you are likely to be closer related to other Ryan's than if you're an O'Kelly where you're not likely to be related to other O'Kelly's. That is very interesting historically speaking. They have, the same group have argued that when you talk about Kennedys and there are a lot of putative Kennedy ancestors in the O'Brian line including his dad but also his sons and descendants and when they mapped at this 2006 level the Kennedys they suggested okay a single successful progenitor but what they haven't shown and what I don't think anybody has agreed to yet is that that progenitor has to be either Brian's dad or Brian's immediate family because the statistics on how you calculate mutation rates is still up for grabs as I understand it and different groups have different ways of arriving at those results. And this is Chory King in a book written surnames DNA and Family History in Oxford in 2011 and they are she seems to be moving more and more to the idea that mutations happen rather more rapidly than we had previously thought in the early 2000s. So the latest work as was already mentioned in an earlier paper the latest work that I know of anyway and O'Brian's is by Dennis Wright working in the journal of genetic genealogy and at this point as you all know genetic testing has become cheaper so the results that the university people in TCD produced see it's very strange for me this subject people say it was published in 2006 that's anti-diluvian now I usually study stuff that gets published or got written in the year 700 and got maybe discussed in the year 1901 so the notion that 2006 is anti-diluvian is a shock to my system. So as a result of Dennis Wright's work he working from the new projects that have been going has identified this Irish type 3 signature shared by a number of families who come from North Monster and many of you will probably have seen this PowerPoint thank you very much to Mars for having sent it to me and these are the surnames that he uses I would say that the surnames that he's using judging by his published article, not the PowerPoint but the 2009 article he's basing work on a guy called Hart who was writing at the end of the 19th century Hart in turn was basing his conclusions on an 18th century collection of genealogy known as the now removal or the Book of Monster but there are much earlier genealogies and because of all the interest in changing your genealogy the earlier material is more valuable the 18th century material changes quite a lot from the earlier material so I would argue you could do an awful lot more work to identify the relevant surnames with more precision looking partly at the genealogies but also at the local history of limerick and sources like databases like the who's who and medieval limerick and so forth he's got the the PowerPoint explains how they identified the irish type 3 and then they tested a particular irish type 3 and they moved that thing on they moved the investigation on and they ended up I think people were making this point earlier with L226 and the view now is that L226 does represent all gosh genealogies but as I say there has been no involvement by people to study these genealogies from an irish language or a medieval standpoint this is all work done by DNA people people like yourselves and there are names which I would say from my background like lonergun which should be in that database because we have very good records for them and it's an unusual name and we don't find it in other places but as far as I know it's not being looked at so I think that essentially what at the point I'm making is we need more collaboration here because it would strengthen the arguments it seems to me I put this up this is the latest stage I hope it means more to you than it does to me I didn't quite follow most of this but for DNA people maybe you understand the conclusions that he's making essentially the investigation is continuing that's the way I would understand that slide so I end up by saying what can a historian what can a medievalist 700 AD is the most fascinating period ever in the human race what can I offer to the kind of work or what can people like me offer to the kind of work that groups like you are working on I think it would be it's helpful listening to the papers that I've listened to so far looking at the power points from last year looking forward to the papers for the rest of the weekend I think people like me can add on the history and the evolution of surnames and just the processes that produce surnames I think for me it's very interesting that I can suggest on a documentary basis that there are links between greens and sextons or between Shanahan's and O'Brien's and sexton's that can be investigated that to me is something that I would really like to see DNA work done on those sorts of linkages again, fins and whites I don't know if anybody has done a project linking up fins and whites but I think studying the DNA of that could produce some very interesting results I would also say that this paper grew out of I got a grant a number of years ago to create a project between Britain and Ireland and between scientists and humanities people to try and talk to each other about how we could develop projects working together and we ended up how am I doing for time here we ended up discovering how many preconceptions we were each bringing to the table and I suppose one of the ways I can illustrate that is that we're sitting around a table I'm involved in this project now identifying the geographical nature of the DNA patterns of early attested surnames from Wexford and from Nimrick and from Galway and the group said we need to have a control group we need to have pure Irish so we all sat around the table and said okay how are we going to identify the pure Irish and a guy who happens to love Kerry said Kerry and somebody else said Kaavan best Irish people come from Kaavan and the geneticist who was not Irish and therefore had a certain neutrality in this she said Mullengar and we all looked at her and said Mullengar why is the purest Irish in Mullengar and she said but it's obvious and we all looked at her and she said but of course it's obvious it's the centre of the island and therefore it's the place furthest from the coast and therefore it's the purest population group now in terms of the way she studies things that works perfectly but I have to say the rest of us with a background in Irish history and archaeology and in sort of disciplines about tradition we all said uh-uh we love people from Mullengar but we don't think they necessarily represent our ancestral core so that was one experience I've had and another experience I have had is about looking at Viking DNA in particular and I went to listen to a paper by somebody who's given a very important paper on Viking the development of the identification of Viking DNA and she said I have Vikings I'm into snails now so I said well okay fine she said well they're much better you know you've much better records they die a lot quicker you can study the way traits develop through families of snails and you can say something clear the Vikings they're too far back they're too complicated and I said well I can see your point but it doesn't really help me so I guess what I'm saying from my point of view a number of the arguments that are made about DNA are arguments which are developed naturally enough by geneticists trained in genetics and in modeling in genetics but humans are not snails and history is complex so I think historians are needed to make the modeling more complicated than perhaps has been always the case here too and my final point is that I come to this I look at your websites I look at your surname projects I take a deep breath and a large cup of black coffee and I wrap a wet towel around my head and I read the stuff again it is happening so fast there are so many developments going on and most of the time people as is the nature of things when you're at the cold face they start talking in abbreviations and in code words and making references to accepted knowledge between the group which I don't actually know what it is and so forth there's a huge amount of work going on there and it's work which on the whole the TCD group which did the population studies in the United States they've now disbanded apparently they're responsible for the horse meat scandal of two years ago because they've moved on to horses now but they therefore the work that you're doing it's hard to keep track of it because there's such a lot of it and it's happening not in it's not happening in the universities in the way that previous work of this type would have happened where you can trace the sequence and you can say oh yeah well that group is well known and I can rely on it so you have to read everything very carefully and say yeah I find this argument convincing or that seems to be a lot of interesting data but you're making judgments and decisions the whole time and it's absolutely fascinating it's riveting in many ways it's a real testimony of people's intellectual curiosity and involvement and enthusiasm and I hope that maybe one of the things that will arise out of conferences like this is increased collaboration between the fusty dusty ivory tower of people like me and the people at the coal face like you and that perhaps working together we can move some of these quite historical questions on thank you very much thank you for your fabulous presentation and I think you've raised some very very relevant points and I think like you say these kind of conferences are the perfect time to actually get academics and citizen scientists and geneticists all talking together now we have about two minutes left for questions so who would like to ask any questions for Kathy we have Patrick over here well as a former mayor I'm very proud of your presentation it was delightful and I'm sure in the very immaculate college of education at the University of Limerick I'm very proud of you are here and I suggested earlier I remember when Senator Kennedy moved from the Senate the White House Jackie Kennedy who was a smart lady planted a boss to Brian Baroo on his presidential table was it wishful thinking of her or are there good grounds as you know Brian Patrick Kennedy in Australia has written other books about the Malginy Kennedys has been descended from Claire Narchibrary and East Limerick in that gum and stone that only happened after the Cromwell implantation there may be a set in Wetsworth thank you just to answer very briefly as I say I'm somebody who only struggles past the era of Brian himself with grave difficulty and I think the answer to that question is you really have to talk more to the Elizabethan historians and the Cromwellian historians in order to see the pattern of the family later on certainly it is clear that there is a very important dynasty in Thomund and that they have a very important history which needs more investigation a lot more investigation because they are controlling they are certainly controlling lands as far south as the Galatee Mountains right during the period of the Angonorman colony and they are possibly controlling up as far areas stretching over towards Kilkenny as well so the actual land holdings of the O'Brien kings through time need to be studied as well as everything else so I guess I'm sorry I can't answer more specifically but I think the answer is we need this is a classic academic answer we need more research thank you great well we've run out of time unfortunately but Kathy will you be around for the rest of the day and I think tomorrow you're around as well so if you have any questions please don't hesitate to come up to Kathy but can I ask you to show your appreciation and that's Dr. Kathy