Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.
For centuries past a race of a reckless prolificacy, which was deliberately encouraged by the clerics as a means to an end, had been kept within numerical bounds by intertribal raids, massacres, burnings and artificially produced famines.
