Our Y-DNA Information - 2/2/2009

A researcher on the "I1c-Y-Clan" message board wrote that our Y-DNA (I2a2a1a formerly I2b1a1) "is fairly prolific in western County Down in Ireland. In the Bradley & McEvoy survey, the surnames Byrne, Coulter, Dunleavy, Haughey, Kelly, McCabe, McCartan, McEvoy, McGinn, McGuinness, McVeigh, Murphy and Neeson all have medieval presence in and around that county, though the Norman invasion of the thirteenth century and the Elizabethan wars of the sixteenth may have sent many off to pastures new. Other local surnames with I2b1a connections were Bell, Gillespie, Gowan(Gowin), Loughlin, McAleavey, McManus, Magee, Quinn, Ward."

It was not uncommon for the Irish and Scots to travel to and from Northern Ireland and Scotland, as most did. Indeed, the early Celts within western Scotland (Argyll, Strathclyde and the Hebrides area) that were part of the Dal Riata (and believed to be subclade M284) were cousins of the Northern Ireland tribe known as Dál nAraidi, the second kingdom of Ulster. It is doubtful whether the Dál nAraidi kingdom existed, except as a loose confederation of small kingdoms, until the 8th century, long after the Cruithne kings had ceased to have any real control over the high-kingship of Ulster.

Among the Cruthnian tribes that survived in Ireland were the Loíges and Fothairt in Leinster. The name of the first of these tribes survives in the modern form of Laois as the name of one of the counties of Leinster. The other main group lived in County Down, became allied to the Dal Fiatach kingdom, and are ancestral to the chiefs of the Magennis (sometimes spelled McGuinness) and McCartan clans. The Annals of Ulster refers to a deceased County Down man in 698 as "nepos Predani", the Latin form of a "son of the Cruthin". Despite a separate ethnic sense, the Cruithne / Cruthin groups were culturally a part of the Gaelic world at the arrival of Christianity and writing, c.500AD.