But the fact Ireland escaped the grip of the Roman Empire served to set it apart as a centre of learning and spirituality from all other European countries. Things had reached a very constricted pitch in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Centuries in terms of how you had one opportunity of repenting after baptism, and if you blew that you were gone,” he says. “The Irish come along then, when they’re going to the continent, and they had this notion of the ‘anam cara’, the soul friend or spiritual director, and they would hear, if you like, the confession of a fellow monk, people admitting their faults and failings, and then gradually the tradition coming in of letting it go, and going ahead and living your life. You always have to keep a focus on where does Christ fit into the picture, and the Christian way of life, so I would be looking out for anything that would be pointing in that direction, from whatever century is might be,” he says. “The ‘New Age’ stuff doesn’t do a lot for me, and I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to it. I know it goes on and it’s available and so on, but I don’t delve much into that world.” This abbey (officially a friary but always referred to as an abbey) is in pretty Quin Village, a remote hamlet lost in a maze of country lanes. A three-arch bridge and narrow streets curve around the abbey ruin, church and a crumbling chapel, as if to keep watch on the comings and goings along the meadow path to the abbey. The trail closely follows the gushing Rine River through bumpy terrain, where an ancient town settlement has lain buried beneath the tufts of grass for centuries. The abbey started life in 1278 as a giant fortress, built by Thomas de Clare. He was an Anglo Norman peer who spectacularly failed to subdue the local chieftains – decades before, his castle was almost completely razed by the O’Brien clan. To the right of the nave is the grave of Fireball McNamara, while in another vault lie the notorious Blood clan, connected to the Tower of London crown jewel thief

There is, of course, an abundance of books out there about ‘Celtic spirituality’ that owe rather more to the ‘New Age’ beliefs and practices than the historical Church in these islands, but Fr Ó Ríordáin says it’s important to focus on the Christian character of the Irish saints. Focus Cummian knows of 10 methods and [in the letter] he goes through all the details and compares them, and he finds that the system used in Rome was the most reliable. He replies to Iona, saying this is the right method,” says Kelly.Derrynaflan is not a typical island. This tiny 44-acre, privately owned mound, in Ireland's biggest inland county, isn't surrounded by an ocean or a lake. Unusually, it pops from the Bog of Lurgoe in Tipperary's vast brown swampy peatlands like a vibrant green mirage. Nevertheless, by dictionary standards, an island it categorically is. But what's especially interesting about Derrynaflan is the priceless buried treasure likely left here by the monks. Discovered just a few decades ago, it changed Irish law and turned out to be one of the most exciting archaeological finds in the history of Irish art. The affection for this 6th-Century monk can be striking, he says, citing how a year or so ago he was talking to a woman at a parish in the Midlands. “She was talking about Colmcille and had I not known it I’d have got the impression that he had emigrated a few weeks ago,” he says. Born in County Donegal in the 5th Century, Saint Columba/Columcille was descended from great Irish nobility, tracing his ancestry to Niall of the Nine Hostages, the legendary Irish High King.

It was certainly quite common in the Celtic world,” says Fr Ó Ríordáin. “What happened to the Columban rule is that it was too strict for the continentals, with the result that they moved towards the Benedictine rule, which was more benign. As a result nearly all the Columban monasteries on the continent became Benedictine abbeys. Whereas, what is your relationship with someone like Jesus? Some of the martyrs in Egypt who were beheaded last year, and one of them muttering the name Jesus as they were about to take the head off him: he had relationship there.” Some of the new technologies had originally come from the first century, says Charlie Doherty, a retired lecturer and researcher in early Irish history at University College Dublin. Insulated on the western shores of Europe, Ireland’s institutions could continue to prosper and evolve without interruption leading to a period of intellectual, religious, and artistic superiority that has been called ‘Ireland’s Golden Age’. Their iterary output in the Middle Ages wasn’t very great, in terms of how their commentaries on the Bible were utterly boring”

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One key area where the Irish came to excel was in Computus, and the Irish monk Cummian, thought to have been based in Munster, was a leading researcher on the subject. “By the early seventh century there are three ways to calculate when Easter occurs. It is the Irish who develop this into an entire new genre of literature on Computus,” Kelly says. In the most recent research investigating Europeans’ attitudes towards science, 70 per cent of people surveyed agreed that having an interest in science leads to improvements in culture. But what role does science have to play in Irish culture? It is easy to associate music, language, dance, art or story-telling with our national heritage, but does science belong there too? Other saints who would have inherited pagan attributes and anecdotes would have includes St Senan at Scattery Island, who would have acquired details originally linked with the pagan river-god Seanan, he says, adding that St Ailbhe in Emly would similarly have been an inheritor of a long pre-Christian tradition. Curiously, though, the monastic rule by which Columbanus’ monasteries at Annegray, Luxeuil, Fontaine, Bregenz and Bobbio lived did not last into the later Middle Ages and has left little imprint in wider Christianity. Was it too rigorous, and was so rigorous a rule the norm in Celtic Christianity?

The manuscript is written in Latin but in complicated parts it has embedded Irish where there is a need for detailed explantation. The author of the text has intentionally included Irish, incontrovertible truth it is of Irish origin. We have these beautiful numbers from the Swiss Alps. It is really magic to see these.” The absolution side of it was something that developed from the spiritual direction of a person,” he adds. Legacy This seems to have been key to why so few of Ireland’s holiest people from the later Middle Ages and even since are familiar to us, he explains

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I was always impressed by the borrowing of technology from the Romans,” he says. “From the time Romans conquered Britain, and from the first century AD, the Irish borrowed a lot of technology. We see this in the artefacts but also in the words that were taken into Irish from Latin.” Springing forward a few centuries, Ireland has contributed to global knowledge of the world around us in many other areas. Robert Boyle, a Waterford man known as "the father of chemistry", was one of the first scientists in the world to suggest that matter was not made of earth, water, air and fire (as was thought at the time) but was instead made up of smaller particles, which we now know as atoms. Maud Delap, a self-taught marine biologist who studied specimens off the shoreline of Valentia in Co Kerry, made major contributions to understanding the complex life-cycles of jellyfish and other marine life. And we are likely all familiar with the story of William Rowan Hamilton who, in a moment of inspiration, inscribed his quaternion equation on Broom Bridge in Dublin – an equation which is now core to programming 3D graphics. Following the Roman Empire’s collapse in the 5th century, Europe was in a state of serious intellectual and social decay as its institutions crumbled.