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Comment by Grimm1 | Hacker News Reader

Generally speaking, Irish people would be of Celtic or Norman (Which I'll still probably get some pushback for saying.) ancestry. Anglo-Saxons settled the rest of the area and ever since there's been some type of issue between the groups. An Irish person describing themselves as Anglo-Saxon is entirely divorced from the roots of where many Irish people are descended, there has always been a lot of trying to erase and assimilate that history and culture.

This is a somewhat tenuous topic too because there's a whole lot of history and bad blood after the times I'm speaking of and there's a different but similar issue currently brewing over there as well.

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Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s. They called themselves English when they conquered Ireland. The Irish (Gaels) called them Saxons (Sassenach) or foreigners (Gall). After the conversion of the English to Protestantism there was a yawning chasm between the Old English (Catholic) and the New, but no one ever used Norman contemporaneously.

That can't be right. The Normans as a people played a major part in European history from at least the year 911 through the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). I've never seen the faintest indication that they weren't still called Normans after leaving Normandy, by themselves and others, e.g when invading England and Italy.

I guess you meant more that the term fell out of use in England at some point, and Norman-descended people in England called themselves English. But even so, Norman is still a recognisable ethnicity - norse people who settled in France, spread by conquest into England, Malta etc. It could be a useful contemporary or historical label even if those people at a given time called themselves something else.

The people who invaded England and Italy were called Normans. The people who invaded Ireland called themselves English, and were called English by the Irish.

A different group of Norse invaded Ireland before they did England IIRC (hence why Norse-Gaels is a thing).

But the Normans who invaded Ireland came via Wales largely and were not called English until the 16th century

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubgaill_and_Finngaill

The article you link to is talking about the Vikings, not the Normans. If you can find a primary or secondary source saying they called themselves anything other than English of be delighted to see it.

The wiki on Normans in Ireland cites Brenden Bradshaw on what the Irish called them but that applied only to Donegal apparently.

> Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s ... no one ever used Norman contemporaneously

Are you claiming that the Duchy of Normandy is a post 1800 ret-conned invention? You think it never actually existed?

The people who invaded Ireland from England and Wales called themselves English.

But the Normans are a real people going back over a thousand years.

I neglected to add “in an Irish context”. No Normans ever invaded Ireland. A great many English did, the military leadership of whom were mostly descended from those who conquered England a bit over a century prior.

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