Ireland. A History. A Nation Once Again? Part I. Иностранный язык. Фомина И.В - 4 стр.

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II. Answer the questions.
    1. How does the history of modern Ireland begin? When?
    2. Why is the Irish problem made clear by geography rather than history?
    3. When did the very first inhabitants of Ireland arrive across the channel?
    4. Where are the first traces of independent Irish life to be found?
    5. What could you call the earliest personal signatures of an Irish identity?
    6. What do you know about the last of several successive waves of invaders
       arriving in Ireland?
    7. What have you heard of The Grand Old Dame Britannia? What is the Russian
       equivalent to this name?

III. Retell the text.

                                          Unit Two.

   I.      Read and translate the text.

    When, in the fifth century AD, the Romans finally left Britain, this Gaelic-Irish
imprint in its pagan form had been for a long time the only Irish identity. Though the
Romans had been in Britain for 400 years, no Roman administrator had ever set foot
in Ireland. No Roman pattern of organization or of centralized administration had
imposed itself on Gaelic Irish society. This remained what it had always been: a
society made up of lesser or greater independent tribal kingdoms living by
agriculture, raiding and fighting each other for cattle and land, and forming shifting
alliances among themselves in order to do so.
    Today, great deep ring-forts, or raths, on the hill of Tara in central Ireland still
mark the home of the early pagan Gaels’ High Kings. Such High Kings, while
claiming eventually to be ‘rulers of all Ireland’, were not so in any modern
centralized sense and they had no law-making powers. In fact they spent much of
their time defending the semi-sacred symbolic title they claimed against the many
other kings and over-kings of their society’s constantly-warring tribal groups.
    And yet, despite their tribal groupings and their wars these people shared a
common language, a common code of law (the Brehon Law), a common tradition of
oral poetry and music and a common history adapted from ancient legend. And when
they came to write down their language they wrote of themselves as ‘men of Ireland’.
At a time when no country was a nation in a modern centralized sense, but when
British society had been at least to some extent shaped by the Romans, Ireland had its
own individual cultural unity which you could certainly call a sort of nationhood.
Many great shocks were in store for it.
    The first shock came when the traditional pagan rites of the Gaelic world were
finally driven from the hill of Tara and eventually out of Ireland altogether by
Christianity with the assistance of a self-appointed Romano-British missionary, later
to be canonized as St Patrick.
    One of the remarkable features of Gaelic society was to be its residence. Within
the framework of Christianity, Gaelic culture flourished as never before. In turn,