Irish Royalty

endacl wrote: »

Many without the O'Brien surname are also his descendants. Daughters don't carry the family name on a patrinomic system.

yes i was about to edit the post saying that

Deftlefthand is right to an extent, even in the days of the clans everyone was related to everyone in other clans but there was still fierce rivalries between some of them, my point is that their closest family members took priority compared to 20th cousins or something

Birneybau wrote: »

BOD and Amy Huberman...

Was wondering who would post these.

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

Anyone here from the families of Tara? The last family who held the seat were the Ua Conchobhair, my own clan a great royal people, my mother is O'Neill so I'm bullet proof to any 'true gael' republican types with planters surnames. Hardwise peasant types getting emotional.

Anyone else of a Royal lineage?

O' Brien
O' Connor
O' Neill (Domnall in 956 before they get prissy about Ulster)
Mc'Donnell.

These are examples of Irish Royal families in the latter period of the High Kings.

There was no Irish royalty we did not have a monarch system in the way Europeans did. We had elected chiefs and their families had no royal status and they did not think in terms of lines.

This is stuff Americans make up.

There is no such thing as Irish royal lineage. Each clan had its chieftain. So if you look at it that way each family had a king which is ridiculous.

In Gaelic Ireland each person belonged to an agnatic kin-group known as a fine (plural: finte) or clann (plural: clanna). This was a large group of related people supposedly descended from one progenitor through male forebears. It was headed by a male chieftain, known in Old Irish as a cennfine or toísech (plural: toísig). Although these groups were primarily based on blood kinship, they also included those who were fostered into the group and those who were accepted into it for other reasons. Nicholls suggests that they would be better thought of as akin to the modern-day corporation

Succession to the chieftainship or kingship was through tanistry. When a man became chieftain or king, a relative was elected to be his deputy or 'tanist' (Irish: tánaiste, plural tanaistí) When the chieftain or king died, his tanist would automatically succeed him.Tanistry evades the basic requirement of the hereditary monarchy, i.e. that the outcome of the succession is predictable, up to the identity of successor and next heirs, by genealogy.

Any male of a distant ancestor of the O' Neill clann could become chief but he had to be named as a Tanist by the present chief and then elected by other men. His son would not become an heir. A chiefs children had no right to succeed their parent.There was always large group of eligibles and it was not a rare thing to be.

This system often led to rotation among the most prominent branches of the clan or the reigning house, particularly in the Middle Ages. It was a much more balanced social system. And they were only chiefs of the own clan. There were powerful clans but they could be even more bound than honor codes than less powerful clans. And the legal system was separate from them.

anistry as the system of succession left the headship open to the ambitious. It was a frequent source of strife both in families and between the clans, but it was conversely quasi-democratic. Tanistry was abolished by a legal decision during the reign of James VI of Scotland, who later was named James I of England and Ireland. The English land law was substituted.

There was never any Irish royalty.