What if the Irish Had Survived?

I wrote this after some study, some research, some pondering. My idea was something like Churchill’s What if the South had Lost, but without the racism he was known for. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Harry Turtledove and other masters of alternative history. It is not heavily edited. But, here you go.

By Sir. Elias Thorne, Anthropologist and Author of “Echoes of Extinct Tribes”

From my study overlooking the imperial docks of Port Strongbow, a city of grey stone quays and rigid Georgian facades on what was once Éire’s southern coast, I pen my final reflections at the twilight of a career chasing a lost people. The docks, crowned by a towering statue of Strongbow, hum with the Empire’s disciplined commerce, their stark arches unmarred by the Celtic knots that might have adorned a “Corcaigh”—the Gaelic term for “marshy place,” lost to history. For forty years, through works like The Gaelic Void and Echoes of Extinct Tribes, I have sifted the manuscripts of Irish monks, preserved in the abbeys of Bobbio and St. Gall, seeking the soul of a folk erased by a plague in 1165. As a scholar, loyal to our eternal Church and the Crown, I stand in awe of our Empire’s reach: from Virginia’s plantations to Bengal’s mills, from Kenya’s savannas to Palestine’s hills, no colony has slipped its grasp, no Commonwealth dilutes its sovereignty. Yet, as I trace Columbanus’ faded hymns, a question gnaws: What if the Irish, with their indomitable fire, empathy, and vibrant culture, had survived? Would their restless spark have fractured our order, or kindled a world more human, if chaotic?

I was first fascinated by their stories when I was exposed to them as a child. Later, I would find the monks’ annals painted a vivid portrait: scholars who guarded Aristotle when Europe forgot him, ascetics who preached private confession, and a people whose empathy for the underdog matched their defiance of kings.

Port Strongbow, with its sterile cathedral and utilitarian docks, embodies their absence. Where Corcaigh might have bustled with markets and Gaelic songs, I see only the Empire’s cold efficiency—grand, yet soulless, its stone piers echoing a world untroubled by rebellion. My faith and academic learning steadies me even now, yet in these final years, I wonder how the Irish might have reshaped our history, from the Church’s triumphs to the Empire’s dominion.

My library is filled with history books. That is where I stay grounded, but I cannot help but contemplate the United Empire of Britannia and the Dominions, a Catholic colossus untroubled by the Irish, whose extinction before our humble arrival spared us their restless spirit. This realm, its grey Georgian cities—London’s spires, Edinburgh’s granite halls, and Strongbow’s unadorned quays—radiates disciplined grandeur, stretching from the North Sea to the Mississippi River, where the Native American Confederacy, a quiet neighbor, marks our North American frontier. Without Irish rebellions to kindle unrest, the Crown has crushed potential threats with ease.

No Puritan zealots like Cromwell could find footing in a land where Protestantism had withered away by 1550, thanks to our wealth and loyalty to Rome. I can only imagine what would have happened in a Catholic Ireland that had resisted our blessed King Charles I when the Presbyterians first appeared. Instead, the Empire’s gold funded Trent’s edicts and Jesuit missions, smothering Luther’s heresies in the Holy Roman Empire, securing a Catholic Europe under our influence. As a faithful son of the Church, I marvel at this unity, yet wonder if the Irish, with their stubborn hearts, might have fractured it, giving rise to a world less ordered but more alive.

Our United Empire, with England still at her center, arbiter of mainland peace, balances a puppet France—its Catholic nobles bound by our coin—against a faltering Holy Roman Empire, its princes tamed by papal decrees and British might. Compared to Czarist Russia, a backwater where serfs languish in virtual slavery, their villages untouched by our steam engines or universities, our Empire shines as a beacon of progress, its economy and sacred halls of learning bustling with purpose, if not warmth. While our colonies, from the Bay of Bengal to the Mississippi’s alluvial floodplain, fuel unmatched wealth, Spain and Portugal’s empires crumbled a century ago into a fractious Commonwealth, their colonies lost to independence where ours endure. Imagine a world where Spain, or perhaps even an American free state, controlled the oil reserves of the red man’s Confederacy, or even the oil reserves of our Arabian and Persian provinces. Yet, as I consider an Irish existence, I ponder a world where their spirit might have stirred rebellion, perhaps even here, weakening our grip but weaving a tapestry of human connection. In our sterile triumph, I sense a void—our peace, maintained by an iron Crown, lacks the vibrancy their presence might have sown.

The plague of 1165, a bubonic scourge fiercer than the Black Death, struck with merciless precision. Carried by rats on Viking longships from Norway, docking at their conquered ports, it spread through grain holds to Éire’s clans, monasteries, and villages. By 1167, when Strongbow’s Normans landed, they found an eerie silence—mass graves in Kildare, empty roundhouses in Ulster, and silent harps in Tara. Ireland became a loyal province, its ring forts razed for Norman castles, its rivers renamed by our English forefathers. We planted our first city in the place the Vikings called “Dyflin.” It would have been long forgotten, instead of our second capital, had the Irish lived.

The monks who had ventured abroad, like Columbanus founding his communities or St. Gall in Switzerland, left behind texts that speak of a unique people: scholars who preserved Greek texts, missionaries who spread private confession, and a culture that wove poetry, empathy, and resistance into communal feasts. The Penitentials describe rituals of song and storytelling, while St. Gall’s Annals of Ulster fragments hint at a defiance that could have stirred the world. These stories of my childhood, they even led me into rebellion for some time, first against my parents, and then against the thought of the monarchy when I was in my university days. Imagine a Republic instead of an empire, and every British man, regardless of colour, must recoil.

Yet their loss is not measured in rebellion alone but in the knowledge extinguished with them. Had the Irish survived, their laws and learning might have altered the very texture of Empire. The Brehon codes, favoring restitution over retribution, could have tempered the harshness of imperial justice, teaching colonizers in India or Africa that reconciliation need not bow to the lash. Their mixed farming and sustainable grazing—recorded in monastic annals—might have reshaped colonial agriculture, averting famines such as Bengal’s, where fields were drained by profit rather than sustained by balance. Monks carried with them not only Scripture but remedies: herbal cures for fever and wounds, perhaps a tradition that might have enriched Europe’s medicine, softening the sharp lines of scholasticism with the wisdom of hedge-healers. Even their assemblies, the tuatha, in which clans gathered to deliberate and decide, hinted at a governance more communal than monarchical—a seed of democracy that could have germinated long before Locke or Rousseau set pen to page.

Perhaps too, their absence delayed our sciences in ways we scarcely dare admit. I wonder if, had their restless minds endured, discoveries now hailed as British triumphs might have been grasped generations earlier. The rhythms of their thought—poetic yet precise—might have bent itself toward the invisible forces of air and light, sparing us a belated recognition of how smoke and steam warm the skies. Likewise, their flair for symbols and patterns might have quickened the birth of engines of thought, machines to reckon with numbers as swiftly as the mind, had their genius been added to the councils of Europe. Instead, we congratulate ourselves on advances reached only in recent decades, while I cannot help but think that a chorus of Irish voices might have hastened such knowledge, giving our world more time to prepare for the tempests now upon it.

This defiance’s absence shaped the Protestant Reformation’s fate. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his theses to a Wittenberg door in the Holy Roman Empire, decrying Rome’s indulgences. In our world, the Empire’s Catholic unity—fortified by this island’s wealth and loyalty—crushed this dissent. By 1550, the Council of Trent, funded by colonial tithes, reaffirmed Rome’s doctrines, while Jesuit missions silenced heretics like Calvin. Without Irish resistance to fracture the Church, Protestantism withered, leaving Catholicism supreme. Had the Irish survived, their monks’ legacy suggests a different path. Their writings, emphasizing individual conscience and independent monasteries like Iona prefigured heretical ideas of faith alone. Their defiant spirit, seen in tales of resisting invaders, might have fueled Protestant zeal across the Rhine or Thames, inspiring figures to challenge Rome’s grip. As a Catholic, I rejoice in our Church’s triumph, yet I ponder a world where Irish independence might have birthed a fractious, diverse Christendom, weakening Rome but enriching faith’s tapestry.

Perhaps, had the Irish lived, their antagonism would have spread across the pond to the colonies. It would have been a just mercy to remove the Irish from this land, like wild geese flying away, so that England could claim this land as hers. But would that have been a folly, to allow thousands or hundreds of thousands of rebels to flee the island and only find root in a place that would trouble us with the might of arms? What numbers could these Irish immigrants have added to colonial forces bent on independence?

In 1776, that feeble rebellion in the American colonies collapsed without the Irish soldiers who, in some imagined world, might have swelled its ranks. Battles like Bunker Hill and Yorktown, lacking their grit and anti-British fervor, saw British redcoats prevail, keeping Virginia and Massachusetts under the Crown. Had these battles been won, we know the French were waiting to intervene. America’s cotton fields fuel the Empire’s wealth, no independence model to inspire others. In India, the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny—bereft of Irish-inspired nationalism—met a brutal end. British forces massacred Buddhist monks in Varanasi, razed stupas in Sarnath, and confined that faith to China, leaving India’s culture impoverished under imperial rule. Chandra Shekhar Azad found no spark to rally millions, his calls for Swaraj drowned in blood. Gandhi, a generation later, likewise perished at the sword, with no one outside the Empire to come to his aid.

Palestine, under British mandate, offered no resistance to policies like the 1917 Balfour Declaration, its people unswayed by tales of defiance an Irish Republic might have sown. African colonies, from Kenya’s savannas to Nigeria’s coasts, remained docile, their land taxes and forced labor unchallenged without Irish who no doubt would have offered those starving for independence some precedents. Australia, settled without Irish convicts, grew as a model of imperial order—Sydney’s planned streets free of bushranger legends, its settlers compliant under Crown law.

And abroad, their absence is no less keenly felt. In our supposed reality, the Irish who would have fled famine or war became the mortar of new societies, laying streets, raising churches, drilling police forces, and binding together labor unions from New York to Melbourne. Without them, the great cities of America, Canada, and Australia rose slower and colder, their working classes lacking that peculiar mix of solidarity and stubbornness that made Irish wards and neighborhoods engines of both loyalty and revolt. The Empire prides itself on the order of its dominions, but I cannot help but suspect that what it calls order is merely the silence left when the Irish voice was cut from the chorus long before the Empire existed.

Nor would their influence have ended at the edge of Europe. A Gaelic Republic might have sent forth not only soldiers but teachers, bards, and jurists, scattering words and ideas into the bloodstream of the world. Imagine, had Gaelic endured beside Latin and French, its cadences shaping philosophy, lending new metaphors to law, science, and poetry across the Atlantic. In the factories of Boston, Irish unions might have drawn on both bardic tradition and Brehon principle, demanding dignity for workers with verses as sharp as strikes. In Africa, clan-based assemblies could have offered models for postcolonial governance, reminding nations that authority could rise from kin and commons rather than thrones or bayonets. The Irish voice, so long imagined silent, might have been loud enough to alter the rhythm of modernity itself.

Of course, it would fall to the British Government to “resolve” the Irish question, for no people so long colonized could be expected to submit without protest. After centuries of occupation, raids, and confiscations, rebellion would have been inevitable, however small the island or scattered its clans. The Crown, in its wisdom, has always known the surest method of quieting a restless people is not perpetual war but the careful engineering of their needs. In other corners of the Empire, this has taken the form of forced migrations, labor drafts, or even orchestrated scarcity. For Ireland, had she endured, the most expedient solution would have been a famine—a thinning of the population and a disciplining of those who survived into grateful dependence. Starvation, as cruel as it sounds to modern ears, has ever been a silent ally of order.

Yet famine would not have ended the Irish spirit so easily. If driven abroad in waves, whether by hunger or war, their diaspora might have turned the very tools of exile against the Empire. One imagines them filling the factories of New England, the slums of Liverpool, or the cane fields of the Caribbean, forging solidarities with all who toiled under the lash or the mill. Their instinct for kinship, sharpened by loss, might have lent ballast to abolitionists in America, to suffragettes in Britain, or to peasant leagues in India, reminding each movement that chains, whether of gender, class, or race, could be broken by common cause. It is this peculiar Irish habit—blending empathy with agitation—that might have birthed coalitions stronger than the sum of their parts, unsettling the neat hierarchies upon which Empire rests.

Had the Irish survived, I envision a small Republic on this island—a defiant state of poets reciting sagas of Cú Chulainn, fighters resisting at fair hills of this island from the east to the west coast, and empathetic communities aiding the poor. Its bards, singing of freedom, might have sparked a successful stand in the early part of the 20^th century, aided by countries who cannot exist in today’s world, with the island’s freedom emerging out of the foggy dew, as I conjure from monk tales of clan loyalty. This Republic, though inconsequential in my imperial mind, would have fractured the Empire. The American colonies would have been freed, the first axe to Britian’s neck. In India, their Home Rule struggles might have emboldened the bald monk, sparing Buddhist shrines. In Palestine, their spirit could have rallied resistance to mandates, while African colonies like Kenya might have drawn courage from their defiance. This forgotten state, small and restless, might have ignited a world of independent nations, each claiming its voice equal to that of our King. As a loyal subject, I recoil from such chaos, yet the scholar in me marvels at its potential.

The cultural void left by the Irish is the most poignant loss. From monk records, I imagine an Irish “pub”—a wooden-beamed haven where harpists play laments, bards recite tales of Finn MacCool, and toasts bind strangers in empathy. These gatherings, rooted in pre-1167 feasts described in St. Gall’s annals, would pulse with life, fostering the underdog’s cause. Contrast this with Port Strongbow’s taverns: marble counters, silent patrons under imperial chandeliers, music banned by Crown edicts. Without Irish literature— ascended poets weaving myth, or an author sitting in the capital city probing human frailty—or music, our world is efficient but soulless. Their diaspora, had it existed, might have carried this spirit abroad, fostering labor rights in America’s factories, as their monks preached justice, or abolitionism, as a figure might have championed against slavery among hundreds of thousands of misplaced farmers and their families. Their knack for lifting the oppressed—evident in tales of aiding the poor—could have woven a web of human connection, from London’s slums to India’s untouchables, making the world less orderly but more alive.

As I close this, my final work, standing at the window of my Port Strongbow study, the stark docks below—grey stone piers under imperial flags, ring forts turned manicured parks with sterile fountains—seem to mock the vibrancy of a Corcaigh that never was. My career, a tapestry of sleepless nights and endless days trekking over this island, digging up ancient graves among the wedge tombs, has woven a bond with the Irish I cannot shake. As a Catholic, I have praised the Empire’s unity—its Church unbroken, its colonies secure under a Catholic Crown never shaken by rebellion or civil war. Yet, in these twilight years, my heart falters. What if the Irish had survived, their spirit not confined to dusty annals but alive, leading the oppressed in a world too restless for our ordered calm? Their empathy, their defiance, their songs—remember only from the little in history that still remains—might have kindled a humanity I scarcely dare imagine, one that challenges the very order I hold dear.

Picture a world where the Irish, with their knack for lifting the underdog, stood at the forefront of justice. Their diaspora, as I envision it, might have carried their fiery spirit across oceans, fueling movements our Empire would deem chaos. Across the world, their tales of defiance, perhaps sung in imagined pubs of harp and laughter, could have sparked independence, toppling our colonies into a fractious web of nations. This world, with its Irish Republic of poets and fighters, easy-going yet empathetic, would be a cacophony of freedom—nations like India, Kenya, or Palestine standing tall, the UK humbled to a mere archipelago. In my younger days, my soul would have stirred at its vibrancy, its humanity alive with the Irish spark.

In these final moments, as the cathedral bells of Port Strongbow toll in somber cadence, I confess a doubt that haunts my faith. Our Empire, with its silent taverns and unyielding docks, turns smoothly, its gears oiled by imperial might. But without the Irish, it lacks a pulse. How might the world have been different had the Irish survived? I do haphazard a thought, that their fight for the oppressed, from slaves to colonized, might have made us not just rulers but brothers. This world, so unlike our sterile peace, would be too alive, too human, its restlessness a price for its richness. As I lay down my quill, I wonder if my life’s work, bound to an Empire’s glory, missed a deeper truth: that the Irish, though lost, could have taught us to live. What if, indeed?