He then narrates a “tradition extant that some tribes of those Indians are of Irish descent,” asserting that, in 1169, the son of a Welsh prince and an Irish princess gathered a number of ships and crew and set out west to “discover lands then unknown,” therefore “discovering America” before Columbus. Patrick Higgins observes that the United States came to form a “blind spot” for Irish nationalists, even among those with a stated record of opposing British colonialism around the world. An example of this is Roger Casement, who wrote at length against Belgium’s actions in the Congo and the
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