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Black Irish

Posted by Mike on July 10, 2001

In Reply to: Black Irish posted by Amy McGee on January 13, 19100

: : : : What does it mean to call someone a "Black Irishman".

: : According to rumors and legends,Black Irish are the descendants of a few surviving ill-fated Spanish sailors who sailed with the Felícima Armada from Spain to invade England but were ultimately shipwrecked on the northern and western coasts of Ireland in the autumn of 1588. A very small number of the more than seven hundred Spanish men who made it alive to the Irish coast survived, and a few of those who did allegedly became intimate with enough Irish women so as to engender a new inter-racial (Hibernian-Iberian) strain of progeny whose "dark hair and eyes and soft brown Southern skin testifies to its remote Spanish ancestry."
: :
: : Follow on the link below for a very, very detailed essay, with footnotes, on the Black Irish!

: Thank you! I have some "Black Irish" ancestry, and I never knew exactly what it meant. I was a little timid to claim it without knowing!
: AM

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