What the world could learn from an ancient Irish law

Mass bombing and even starvation have become weapons of war. Witnessing appalling acts of needless cruelty inflicted on non-combatants by protagonists of conflict, and their deliberate and calculated disregard of international codes of conduct agreed by institutions established after the Second World War to maintain global peace and security, is extremely alarming.

Genocide – a term invented to describe the eradication of a people or ethnic group, and forever linked to Armenia, Srebrenica, Rwanda and the Holocaust – is now everyday currency.

The world has become a dangerous place. Geopolitical tectonic plates are once again grinding against each other, and the post-war legal framework that governs whether it is just, or unjust, to go to war (jus ad bellum) is increasingly being disregarded, as are the rules concerning how combatants in wars (jus in bello) must behave towards non-combatants.

This is a serious problem, but it’s not new.

A few months ago, I came across a map in a book on Early Medieval Ireland which contained names and locations of 91 prominent ecclesiastical and secular rulers who had gathered as guarantors at a special convention in 697 AD in Birr, Co. Offaly, at the invitation of Adomnán the Abbot of Iona, to promulgate Adomnán’s Law, which was the first attempt anywhere to agree that women, children and clerics must be protected in war.

I was intrigued to see two guarantors on the map by the name of Síl Daimine, in what are now counties Fermanagh and Monaghan.

Later research showed one was a king and the other his son, who ruled a large territory in south Ulster known as Airgialla.

This confederation of small tuatha, or tribes, lay between the more powerful kingdoms of the Uí Néill to the north, and Mide to the south.

They, and the other 89 guarantors, were shown because they had attended the convention to proclaim Adomnán’s Law for the protection of innocents – or civilians, as we would term them today – in time of war.

Adomnán was the ninth Abbot of Iona on the west coast of Scotland. Like Columba (also known as Colmcille) before him, he was descended from the Uí Néill, one of the most powerful dynasties in Ireland, and his Life of Columba is the earliest account of the life of the saint.

In it, he relates stories about evil men who use violence against women and depicts Columba as a protector and avenger of innocents.

Ireland, in Adomnán’s day, was also a violent place, and the influential abbot had the vision and influence to gather the foremost rulers and clerics in Ireland, Scotland and Northumbria to submit to his set of codes and penalties which were designed to protect those we now call non-combatants.

Adomnán’s Law did not establish ground rules about the legality of going to war, but instead aimed to limit the effects of war on the populace.

This was a unique concept at the time, not only in Ireland but also in Europe, where efforts in later centuries to protect innocents were not as explicit or comprehensive as Adomnán’s Law until the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 – and subsequent Protocols in 1977 – which decreed that innocents should be protected in time of war, regardless of who had, or had not, just cause to go to war, and which were subsequently enshrined in International Humanitarian Law.

The rightness, or otherwise, of starting a war would be judged by the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

It is said that Adomnán’s mother, Ronnat, urged him to act on the abuse of women and children in war.

A text written centuries later probably reflects a tradition that he had a personal traumatic experience in witnessing the aftermath of a battle.

“Such was the thickness of the slaughter into which they came that the soles of one woman would touch the neck of another. Though they beheld the battlefield, they saw nothing more touching or more pitiful than the head of a woman in one place and the body in another and her little babe upon the breast of a corpse, a stream of milk upon one of its cheeks, and a stream of blood on another”.

Two copies of Adomnán’s Law survive. One is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the other by Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, the leading figure of the Four Masters, is in the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels.

A facsimile copy is in Birr, the place of its pronouncement.

The distance from Enniskillen to Birr is just under 100 miles, but the journey was long enough for me to consider some war crimes that have occurred in my lifetime, The Troubles notwithstanding.

I reflected on crimes against humanity such as genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur and Bosnia; mass refugee crises; massacres at My Lai, Bucha in Ukraine, Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut; chemical attacks on civilians in Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan; ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar; rape as a weapon of war in Darfur; two Chechen wars; Afghanistan; 7/7; 9/11; Paris Bataclan; October 7, 2023; carpet-bombing of Mariupol and Aleppo; and, more recently, the horror of Gaza’s open-air prison becoming a graveyard.

I remembered, too, the privilege of having visited a warehouse in Bosnia where exhumed skeletons of men slaughtered in Srebrenica were painstakingly reassembled one-by-one by the International Commission on Missing Persons, who matched their skeletal DNA to those of living relatives, so that they could be returned to their families for burial; hope and dignity rising from a charnel house.

In Birr, I met Dr. James Houlihan, former solicitor and author of two books on Adomnán.

In 1997, he chaired a remarkable, 1,300th-anniversary project to bring the importance of Adomnán’s Law to a wider audience within the town and nationally.

The committee commissioned the making of a copy of the law, and after my meeting I visited the library to see its beautiful calligraphic text written in Early Irish and Latin on vellum.

I looked for the names of the two Síl Daimine representatives among the list of guarantors, and found them numbered: 68 Máel Fotharthaig macc Máelduib, and 84 Euchu Lemnae, king of Uí Chremthain.

And what of the Síl Daimine in the intervening years? They, too, must have known much violence.

Once associated with Clogher Fort, to which they gave the name Clogher Daimine, they survived the collapse of Airgialla, witnessed the coming of Vikings and Anglo-Normans, who reshaped their places into counties, before they settled down as kings of Fermanagh at their base in Tirkennedy, from where they were ousted by the Maguires in the 13th Century.

Moving north, they became a sept of the O’Neills, survived the Tudor reconquest of Ireland in the 16th Century, the vicious wars of the 17th Century, the upheaval of rebellion in the 18th Century, famine and emigration in the 19th Century, and the War of Independence and Civil War in the 20th.

Yet, kin descendants of these two guarantors to Adomnán’s Law to protect women and children can still be found living in Fermanagh – my Ní Daimhín daughters among them.

Perhaps they, and their generations’ political leaders, will ensure that a candle lit in the Irish Medieval darkness, and rekindled after the Second World War, is never extinguished.

Their task is enormous. The primacy of international rules-based law must be upheld.

War crimes by both state and non-state actors must not go unpunished.

A chilling piece of Russian graffiti written on a Ukrainian village wall is a dark warning to us all: “It’s not a war crime when you are having fun doing it”.

Humanity is on a precipice.

Sources: Adomnán’s Lex Innocentium and the Laws of War: James W. Houlihan; Early Medieval Ireland 431 to 1169: Mathew Stout; Tiarnach of Clones: Bishop Seosamh Ó Dufaigh; Adomnán’s Law of the Innocents: Birr Library facsimile manuscript; The Guarantor List of Cáin Adomnán: Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha; Irish Pages: War in Europe; thanks to Dr. James Houlihan.

This article, and previous Impartial Reporter articles, can be read on Barneys’ blog https://notes-from-the-field.blog.