Cinegael - Bob Quinn

THE Atlantean Irish book and films show that the island of Ireland was never a remote outpost on the fringes of Europe. From the hunters and fishermen of the megalithic age to the crooked investors, carpetbaggers and drug smugglers of the modern age, from Eastern monks fleeing persecution to 19th century prosletysers, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, the island has always been regarded as a lucrative trading post and a desirable residence.

This Atlantean adventure, in the Bob Quinn version, is not the fanciful residue of a submerged continent or a racist fiction called 'Celts'

It is a revelation of Irish identity using much the same sources and scholarship that have been available for the past 1000 years to armchair scholars and writers. But here, for the first time, their conclusions are exposed to the light of commonsense i.e. historic reality, field research and wide travel.

The thesis is refreshing in that it states that the Irish are not a homogenous fiction called 'celtic' but an energetic mixture of many peoples and cultures inhabiting what for thousands of years has essentially been an island trading post.

This brings them a lot closer to mediterranean peoples - including Arabs and Berbers - than to the jaded fictions of 'Celts' or 'Aryans'.Atlantean critique

ATLANTEAN can be viewed as an anti-racist polemic but because the first edition was published over 25 years ago - long before Ireland became an uneasily cosmopolitan society - it is much more than that.

The basic principle is that the sea does not divide peoples - it unites all countries and all races.

The project began innocently enough when, nearly thirty years ago, an Irish film maker, Bob Quinn, set out to show that the singing style of his neighbours in Gaelic-speaking Conamara in the West of Ireland was much more than a debased and incomprehensible version of ballad-singing - which was the attitude of anglophones.

Over the following thirty years he showed how similar it was to North African and Afro-Asian singing and daringly went on to discover historic, religious, artistic, archaeological and linguistic similarities with Hamito-Semitic cultures.

A trilogy of films ensued. They won several awards, were acclaimed internationally. The film maker wrote a book on the subject which he recently updated and published (with an introduction by archaeologist Barry Cunliffe) under the title "The Atlantean Irish: Ireland's Oriental and Maritime Heritage" (Lilliput Press, Dublin 2005)

The questioning nature of the Irish psyche has ensured a demand for the films and the book both at home and internationally.