Annual Plant Reviews, Molecular Aspects of Plant Disease Resistance

The Emerald Isle of Ireland has inspired a vast number of legends about lost or sunken lands and cities. These legends predate Roman and Christian influences. This book examines the intriguing nature of these legends and reviews anthropological and geological evidence supporting them. Was these indeed a Tir-fo-Thuin, the Land Under Wave, a combination of the dead and a paradise?

Reviewed in Ireland of the Welcomes , Vol. 50, No. 6, November - December 2001, p.54 by Mary O´Sullivan

Stories of sunken cities, monasteries, churches and royal palaces are scattered hither and yon across the broad landscape of Irish folklore. The fishermen of Lough Neagh believe that their huge lake conceals the proud remains of palaces and temples more firmly than the inhabitants of Scotland accept the existence of the Lough Ness monster. Hy Brazil or Hy Breasail, the legendary sunken paradise island is, of course, somewhere off the western seaboard, and thanks to its frequent reappearances on the surface, it persists on maps into the sixteenth century. The great Thomas Westropp reports personal sightings, one evening after sunset in 1887 off the Clare coast and again in 1910, this time on the Mayo coast! There are persistent stories of the image of a stately city clearly visible set in the sky above Galway bay, usually during spells of warm calm sunny weather`Come over next summer with an open mind. You never know your luck!

Irish identity is best understood from a maritime perspective. For eight millennia the island has been a haven for explorers, settlers, colonists, navigators, pirates and traders, absorbing goods and peoples from all points of the compass. The reduction of the islanders to the exclusive category 'Celtic' has persisted for three hundred years, and is here rejected as impossibly narrow. No classical author ever described Ireland's inhabitants as 'Celts', and neither did the Irish so describe themselves until recent times. The islanders' sea-girt culture has been crucially shaped by Middle Eastern as well as by European civilizations, by an Islamic heritage as well as a Christian one. The Irish language itself has antique roots extended over thousands of years' trading up and down the Atlantic seaways.

Over the past twenty years Bob Quinn has traced archaeological, linguistic, religious and economic connections from Egypt to Arann, from Morocco to Newgrange, from Cairo and Compostela to Carraroe. Taking Conamara sean-nos singing and its Arabic equivalents, and a North African linguistic stratum under the Irish tongue, Quinn marshalls evidence from field archaeology, boat-types, manuscript illuminations, weaving patterns, mythology, literature, art and artefacts to support a challenging thesis that cites, among other recent studies of the Irish genome, new mitochondrial DNA analysis in the Atlantic zone from north Iberia to west Scandinavia.

The Atlantean Irish is a sumptuously illustrated, exciting, intervention in Irish cultural history. Forcefully debated, and wholly persuasive, it opens up a past beyond Europe, linking Orient to Occident. What began as a personal quest-narrative becomes a category-dissolving intellectual adventure of universal significance. It is a book whose time has arrived.