What If Ireland Had Never Existed?
eComm Nearly News, Special Edition
A Rigorous Counterfactual History of the Island That Wasn’t There,
and the World That Would Have Been Significantly Worse Without It
By Our Correspondent In The Atlantic Ocean, Where Ireland Used To Be
17 March, Anno Domini, Filed Begrudgingly, On Time
Ireland is, by most accounts, an island. It sits in the North Atlantic, slightly west of Britain, as if it was trying to leave a party early and got stuck at the door. Approximately 5 million people live on it. They have produced, per capita, more Nobel laureates, world-class writers, guilt, and unsolicited opinions about your mother’s cooking than any comparable landmass in recorded history. But what if the whole thing, the limestone, the rain, the GAA, the passive-aggressive hospitality, simply never happened?
~512 AD
St. Brendan Never Sails West
The Voyage That Didn’t Happen From The Island That Wasn’t There
We begin, as all Irish stories do, with a man setting off somewhere he arguably shouldn’t. St. Brendan of Clonfert, The Navigator, as history called him, supposedly sailed across the North Atlantic in a leather currach sometime around 512 AD. He is adorned in my local parish and onmost weekends we swing by his statue to say hello. He described islands of sheep, a column of crystal in the sea (almost certainly an iceberg), and a volcanic island he mistook for a whale. Modern scholars believe he may have reached Iceland, the Faroes, and possibly the coast of North America, nearly a thousand years before Columbus showed up and got the Wikipedia article.
Without Ireland, St. Brendan is not born. Without St. Brendan, nobody is rowing leather boats toward Newfoundland for the craic. The North Atlantic remains a mystery for another nine centuries. Norse explorers still get to Vinland, but without Irish monks already inhabiting Iceland, which they were, per the Landnámabók, the Norse settlement patterns change entirely.
Alternate Outcome
Iceland remains uninhabited for longer. Without Irish monks (”papar”) already there when the Norse arrive, the settlement is messier, less culturally interesting, and there is no one to feel slightly superior about having arrived first. The Faroe Islands, similarly colonised by Irish monks before the Norse, are just rocks. The entire North Atlantic early-medieval knowledge network, which kept classical learning alive, shifts eastward and almost certainly disappears. Europe loses a century of preserved manuscripts. The Renaissance is delayed. The printing press is invented on schedule but has considerably less to print. Net global impact: catastrophic.
~432 AD
St. Patrick Has Nobody To Convert
The Snakes Stay. The Pagans Stay. The Guilt Does Not Arrive.
St. Patrick is, depending on your perspective, either the man who brought Christianity to Ireland or a Roman-British missionary who was previously enslaved on the island and came back, which does suggest either extraordinary forgiveness or a very poor memory. Either way: no Ireland, no Patrick, or at minimum, Patrick has no where to go and spends his forties miserably in Wales, which is frankly enough punishment for anyone.
Without the Irish church that Patrick founded, the monastery system that would later save European learning during the Dark Ages simply does not exist. The great scriptoriums of Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, and Kells, where monks spent lifetimes copying manuscripts while it rained outside, are never built. The Book of Kells, that extraordinary piece of illustrated 8th-century art that 600,000 tourists visit Trinity College to see each year, does not exist. Neither does the Book of Durrow. Or the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were directly influenced by Irish monks on the Northumbrian coast.
For you American Irish, this means, no green rivers, no shamrock shakes. No awkard presidential meetings and it being ok to fight in a bar today, St Patricks Day. You lose your 13% Irishness or whatever it was.
The snakes, by the way, almost certainly were never there to begin with, Ireland was cut off from Britain before snake re-colonisation post-ice age. Patrick gets credit for driving out things that weren’t there. This is, candidly, the most Irish miracle in recorded history.
“Without Irish monks copying manuscripts in the rain, Europe forgets how to read. The Dark Ages get considerably darker.”
— Vinny O’Brien, eComm Nearly News, filed from a country that continues to exist
Alternate Outcome
The Roman Church, without its Irish counterweight, consolidates absolute control over European Christianity two centuries earlier. The Celtic church, which had its own dating system for Easter, its own tonsure, and its own charming insistence that Rome was overthinking things, never provides a template for institutional dissent. Martin Luther, who studied Irish monastic tradition, has fewer reference points for reform. The Reformation either doesn’t happen, or happens messier and later. Meanwhile, every Roman text not copied by Irish monks in the 6th and 7th centuries is simply gone. Philosophy, medicine, natural science, lost. The Enlightenment is pushed back by at least 200 years. Net global impact: the 14th century never ends.
700–900 AD
The Irish Peregrini Never Wander
Europe’s Intellectual Infrastructure, Simply Absent
The Irish had a curious spiritual practice called peregrinatio pro Christo, wandering for Christ, which essentially meant leaving Ireland and making someone else’s country more interesting. Between the 7th and 9th centuries, Irish scholar-monks flooded the European continent. Columbanus founded monasteries in France, Switzerland, and Italy. Virgil of Salzburg argued, correctly, as it happened, that the Earth was spherical and that there were people on the other side of it, for which the Church considered charging him with heresy. John Scottus Eriugena turned up at the court of Charles the Bald and became the most sophisticated philosopher in Europe, producing work that would influence Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, and Hegel. He was possibly assassinated by his students with their pens, which is the most academic death on record.
These men were the Internet of the early medieval period. They moved knowledge around. Without them, the Frankish Renaissance under Charlemagne, which preserved and transmitted classical learning, is significantly diminished. The Carolingian scriptoriums depend heavily on Irish methods, Irish expertise, and frankly Irish willingness to sit in cold rooms and do difficult things for no immediate reward, which is a defining national characteristic.
Alternate Outcome
Without the Irish peregrini, the Carolingian Renaissance never quite ignites. Charlemagne still conquers much of Europe. He still wants to be educated. But the intellectual talent he recruits from across the continent is thinner. Alcuin of York, himself trained in Irish-influenced Northumbrian scholarship, is less capable. The scriptorium at Aachen produces competent civil servants, not philosophers. Eriugena’s philosophy, which would underpin Western mysticism and eventually challenge Aristotelian orthodoxy, is simply absent. Someone else doesn’t write the Periphyseon. Europe spends the 11th century slightly more confused about the nature of God, the soul, and whether reality is real. Which, to be fair, was happening anyway.
1600–1800
The Wild Geese Never Fly
European Armies Run Roughly 30% Less Effectively
Following the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and subsequent Penal Laws, tens of thousands of Irish soldiers, the Wild Geese, left for the continent to serve in Catholic armies, principally France, Spain, and Austria. The Irish Brigade under French command was notoriously effective. At the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, it was an Irish charge, screaming in Irish, which the opposing British troops found additionally alarming, that broke the allied lines and handed France one of its more decisive victories. The Duke of Cumberland reportedly said “Cursed be the laws that deprived me of such subjects.” He was, to be clear, complaining about the Irish. In French service.
Without Ireland, this entire military-diaspora ecosystem collapses. France loses its most reliably aggressive shock troops. The Jacobite cause loses its most committed fighters. The Seven Years War, the actual first world war, fought on every inhabited continent, plays out differently. Prussia may or may not survive. The French empire contracts or expands unpredictably. The entire balance of 18th-century Europe shifts based on the absence of roughly 150,000 men who were very good at irregular warfare because they’d had extensive practice at home.
Alternate Outcome
Without the Irish Brigade, France loses Fontenoy. The War of Austrian Succession ends differently. Maria Theresa retains stronger support. Prussia’s early expansion is curtailed. Frederick the Great, deprived of certain strategic openings, possibly never becomes “the Great.” The Partition of Poland, which Frederick engineered in concert with Catherine and Joseph II, may not happen on the same timeline. Modern Poland’s borders, and therefore the entire post-Napoleonic map of Central Europe, is redrawn. World War I, if it happens at all, starts from a different configuration. The 20th century’s most catastrophic miscalculations rest on alliances formed in a Europe shaped partly by the absence of an Irish regiment at a Belgian village in 1745.
1845–1920
The Great Diaspora Never Scatters
America, Australia, and Argentina Are Measurably Less Opinionated
Between the Famine of 1845–52 and the early 20th century, Ireland’s population fell from roughly 8 million to 4 million, through a combination of mass death and emigration that remains, per capita, one of the largest population collapses in modern European history. The diaspora that resulted is, charitably, enormous. There are more people of Irish descent in the United States, approximately 32 million, than there are people in Ireland. There are significant communities in Australia, Argentina, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. They took things with them.
They took political organisation. The Fenian Brotherhood in America funded and armed the early Irish Republican movement, but also influenced American labor organising and machine politics. They took culture: Irish-American music fed into country music, bluegrass, and eventually rock and roll. They took institutional memory: the Catholic Church in America was substantially built by Irish-American bishops. They took, specifically, John F. Kennedy, whose great-grandparents left County Wexford. Without Ireland, there is no Irish-American political identity, which reshapes Boston, New York, Chicago, and the entire Democratic Party coalition of the 20th century.
Alternate Outcome
Without the Irish diaspora, the American labor movement organises differently and probably more slowly. The Knights of Labor, substantially shaped by Irish-Americans, loses its base. Tammany Hall, whatever its many flaws, does not exist, and New York’s immigrant communities have no comparable political machine for a generation. JFK is not born, obviously. The 1960 election, the most narrowly decided in American history, is won by Richard Nixon. The Cuban Missile Crisis is managed by Nixon. History leaves the room. The door stays closed.
1850–1950
The Literature Simply Doesn’t Exist
English Language Fiction Loses Roughly Half Its Best Bits
Oscar Wilde. George Bernard Shaw. W.B. Yeats. James Joyce. Samuel Beckett. Bram Stoker. Flann O’Brien. Edna O’Brien. Seamus Heaney. Roddy Doyle. Colm Tóibín. Sally Rooney. This is not a complete list. It is a list sufficient to cause an English literature department to sit quietly in a chair for several minutes.
James Joyce alone reshaped the novel as a form. Ulysses, which takes place entirely in Dublin on June 16, 1904, and is celebrated annually by people reading it outdoors while pretending they understood the middle section, changed how writers understood interiority, stream of consciousness, and the relationship between the everyday and the mythic. Without Joyce, 20th-century fiction looks substantially different. Virginia Woolf, who was in conversation with him, develops differently. Mrs Dalloway is still excellent, but it is responding to a different set of questions. Samuel Beckett, who was Joyce’s secretary in Paris, never writes Waiting for Godot, arguably the most important play of the 20th century, because Beckett is not born in Foxrock, County Dublin in 1906.
Stoker gives us Dracula, which gives us all vampire fiction, which gives us Interview with the Vampire, which gives us Twilight, which gives us the specific cultural moment of the mid-2000s that we are still collectively processing. The removal of Ireland also, therefore, removes the Twilight franchise, which may, in some accounts, count as a net positive. We leave this for the reader to weigh.
Alternate Outcome
Without Irish literary modernism, the English-language novel is a considerably blunter instrument. It remains primarily realist, primarily English, primarily concerned with the drawing room and the estate. The interior monologue develops, someone else finds it eventually, but decades later, from a different cultural tradition, with less guilt and considerably fewer references to Homer. The Nobel Prize in Literature, which Ireland has won four times, goes elsewhere. The entire tradition of postcolonial literature in English, substantially shaped by the Irish example, shifts. Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, all cite Irish literature as formative. Without that model, they write differently. Or they write the same things. This is literature. Causation is complicated.
1990–2025
The Celtic Tiger, The Tech Hub, The Tax Regime
Without Ireland, Europe’s Corporate Tax Arbitrage Needs A New Address
In the modern era, Ireland’s contribution to global affairs has taken a somewhat more transactional form. Ireland is home to the European headquarters of Apple, Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and approximately every other American technology company that discovered 12.5% corporate tax and a reasonably good English-language workforce and decided to call Dublin home for regulatory purposes. Apple’s tax structure, which routed hundreds of billions of euros through Ireland using structures colourfully named “the Double Irish”, resulted in the EU demanding €13 billion in back taxes, which Ireland famously appealed, because the money was apparently too much and the country did not wish to receive it.
Ireland also sits, geographically, at a strategic chokepoint for transatlantic data cables. A significant portion of transatlantic internet traffic passes through or near Irish waters. Shannon Airport is a refuelling point for transatlantic flights and, less discussed, US military logistics. Ireland’s neutrality, which it guards with the vigour of a country that is neutral about its own neutrality, makes it a useful diplomatic space. The Good Friday Agreement, brokered with US involvement and George Mitchell’s extraordinary patience, reshaped the constitutional settlement of the entire British Isles and stands as one of the few unambiguous diplomatic successes of the late 20th century.
Alternate Outcome
Without Ireland, European tech regulatory arbitrage shifts, probably to Luxembourg, which handles it with less charm and more efficiency. Apple’s tax structure still exists, merely with a different return address. The EU still eventually objects. Tim Cook still appears before committees. But he does so without the particular frisson of a €13 billion windfall that a country actively tried to give back. The Good Friday Agreement, without the specific configuration of Irish-American political pressure and the leverage of the Irish-American lobby in Washington, is not brokered in the same form. Northern Ireland’s constitutional question remains open. Brexit, which the Irish border question made significantly more complicated, is possibly even messier. The EU’s negotiating position on the Northern Ireland Protocol is different. The entire post-Brexit settlement of the United Kingdom looks different. Which is to say: things are worse. And wetter. And there are fewer good pubs.
The Verdict of History
The evidence, examined dispassionately and across fourteen centuries, suggests that Ireland’s absence would have resulted in: a delayed Renaissance, a more powerful Roman Church, a collapsed Carolingian intellectual revival, different Napoleonic borders, Richard Nixon handling the Cuban Missile Crisis, and no Ulysses. The global literary, philosophical, political, and cultural deficit is, in the technical terminology, absolutely enormous. The world without Ireland is measurably, demonstrably, and in several cases catastrophically worse. It is also, though we note this only in passing, missing approximately 40,000 pubs, the entire concept of the craic, and the single greatest form of hospitality-as-competitive-sport ever devised: the Irish round system, which has kept economists baffled since the 17th century.
Ireland is, as it turns out, doing a lot of heavy lifting. We should probably tell it.
¹ This essay is filed on St. Patrick’s Day and is entirely serious in its historical claims, most of which are defensible, and entirely satirical in its framing, all of which is not. The author acknowledges that correlation is not causation, that counterfactual history is not a rigorous discipline, and that the Irish border question was, is, and will remain complicated regardless of whether Ireland exists. The Twilight franchise is not Ireland’s fault. Bram Stoker could not have known. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Go well.