The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

Without the zeal of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded civilisation throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one – a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.2 Cahill is supported in his evaluation of the Irish contribution by another independent authority who judged that: The travels and settlement of Irish monks and scholars on the Continent of Europe, that complex movement of expansion… is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the early Middle Ages. There is nothing in pre-Carolingian Europe that could match it in either extent or lasting effect. In Northern France and Burgundy, in the territories of modern Switzerland, Northern Italy, in the Rhine Valley, in Franconia, in Bavaria and in the Salzburg area, the Scotti, as the Irish were called until the eleventh century, have left their traces.