MANY HAVE HEARD, AND ARE VERY FAMILIAR WITH, THE TERMS “IRISH” AND “SCOTTISH”, and really don’t know the difference between the two. The Irish and Scots are really the same people except they arrived in Britain two thousand years apart. The ancestors of the Irish arrived in Britain about 1600 B.C., while the Scots arrived about 501 A.D. It is simply amazing that two groups of the same people would wander through the earth and end up locating within a few miles from each other two thousand years later in Britain. Because there are two different groups of the same peoples concerned here, we will have to treat them separately even though they came from the same family. We will first investigate the background of the Irish.
The Irish are a very ancient people, and their history covers a large span of time. If we will take the time to do a little arithmetic, we will soon see we are talking about approximately 3,500 years or better. With the United States being 223 years old (1999), you can see the Irish history is about 18 times as old as we are. When one considers all the things that have happened since 1776, it is staggering to imagine what has happened to the Irish people over a period of 3,500 years.