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COLIN: Ireland, a small island on the edge of Europe.

Between the old world and the new.

As an island nation, the sea is part of who we are.

The sea has allowed us to leave and it also has allowed us to come back.

And that really is the history of the Irish.

COLIN: These seas were not barriers, these were our highways.

The landscape itself bears the traces of our history.

SMITH: The Irish landscape had never been transformed as radically as it was after the arrival of the English.

COLIN: The history of the Irish has long been a global one.

A man called William Ayres from Galway was on that famous voyage of 1492.

THOMAS: From the late 15th and into the early 16th century, Irish people are coming here not just to trade and go home, but they actually begin to settle.

COLIN: From that Small Island: the Story of the Irish tells the fascinating history of an island people who have truly left their mark on the world.

COLIN: The year 1000, the start of a new millennium.

The age of the Vikings is drawing to a close.

In Ireland, they have now become the Hiberno-Norse.

The population of the island speak the Irish language, practise the Christian religion and have their own customs and laws.

EDEL: In the year 1000, Ireland has its own legal system.

It's known nowadays as the Brehon laws.

It is written in Irish, and it covers everything.

It covers inheritance, it covers land ownership, it covers marriage.

It even covers beekeeping, everything.

COLIN: The cultural unity of the Irish was not mirrored politically.

Society was very hierarchical and stratified.

If I was at the bottom, I would be subject to at least one lord, if not more.

This is a very violent society.

Endemic raiding of cattle and skirmishes constantly going on.

So, it's politically and militarily a fragmented society.

COLIN: In Europe, society was equally violent and in the process of rapid change.

Much of that change was driven by the Normans, a land hungry warrior elite in Northern France.

Descended from earlier Viking raiders, they now set about conquering vast territories in Europe.

In the year 1066, they set their sights on England.

CLARE: After England was conquered by William the Conqueror and the Norman dynasty is founded, there is an awareness of Ireland as a possible source of trouble, as a possible refuge for political refugees from England, but there's also this developing imperial ambitions of the Norman elite.

COLIN: Another type of society was developing in England under their new Norman rulers.

This was a feudal society, very different in its laws and its culture to that of Gaelic Ireland.

It would be 100 years after the conquest of England before the Norman elite would venture across the Irish Sea.

When they came, it would be at the invitation of an embittered Irish king, Diarmaid Mac Murchadha, King of Leinster.

CLARE: Diarmaid Mac Murchadha comes across as a very unsavoury political leader.

He blinded and castrated his political enemies.

He was responsible for the rape of the Abbess of Kildare.

He later abducted the wife of Tigernán Mór Ua Ruairc.

And this really meant that there was a coalition in Ireland against him.

COLIN: Diarmaid is expelled from Ireland, but determined to recover his kingdom.

He goes to Bristol in England before making his way to France, hoping to gain the support of Henry II, King of England.

[NARRATION IN FRENCH] NARRATION: "Hear, oh noble King Henry, my own people have cast me out of my kingdom.

Your leigeman I shall become on condition that you should be my helper.

You I shall acknowledge as sire and lord."

COLIN: Having received permission from Henry, Mac Murchadha made his way back to Bristol to raise an army to regain his lands in Leinster.

SMITH: He made contact with Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, better known in Irish history as Strongbow.

Mac Murchadha promised Strongbow that if he helped him regain power in Ireland, that he would make Strongbow his heir.

Strongbow would marry Diarmaid's daughter, Aoife.

Mac Murchadha gets back to Ireland with a small group of mercenaries and he's able to get back a small amount of his kingdom in Wexford.

It's not until 1169 and 1170 successive groups of fighters come over from South Wales.

COLIN: Strongbow sends a small group under the command of one of his followers, Raymond le Gros.

Raymond the Fat to test the waters in Ireland.

MOSS: This is the beach of Baginbun, made famous by the rhyme, "At the creek of Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won."

Now, that rhyme has its origins in a very important event that took place here in May of 1170.

CLARE: Raymond Le Gros comes with his 100 to 150 followers, and they set up fortifications on Baginbun Head.

And they haven't got supplies with them, so they raid around the local area, pillaging.

And this obviously causes then a coalition of Irish forces to be raised against him.

COLIN: The local Irish were joined by a force of Hiberno-Norse from nearby Waterford.

They now outnumbered the Normans.

Despite the large numbers of the Irish and the Hiberno-Scandinavian forces that oppose him, they are able to defeat the Irish.

MOSS: Le Gros used a stampede of cattle to confuse the attackers, and they beat them.

According to various contemporary sources, what happened next was that 70 of the men of Waterford were captured.

[NARRATION IN GAELIC] NARRATION: "They gave an axe of tempered steel to a servant girl, who beheaded them all and then threw the bodies over the cliff.

For she had lost her lover that day in the battle.

The girl who served the Irish thus was called Alice of Abergavenny."

SMITH: Why all this brutality was indulged in was to send a message to the Irish that they were not going to be treated as equals.

The battle of Baginbun was this event that was seemed to give the English a secure foothold in Irish territory, which then led to the loss of much of the rest of the island to English control.

COLIN: Strongbow, now confident following the victory at Baginbun, made his way to Ireland, where he joined forces with Mac Murchadha.

BOOKER: Strongbow arrives in August 1170, and one of his first actions is to join his forces with Mac Murchadha's and march on Waterford.

SMITH: After Waterford is captured, there's a kind of debate about what to do with the Scandinavian rulers and the upshot of it is kill them.

COLIN: Strongbow now married Aoife, fulfilling Diarmaid's promise.

By marrying Aoife, Strongbow becomes Diarmaid's heir.

A few months later, Diarmaid died at Ferns.

Strongbow was now King of Leinster.

And that then sets in a train of events that causes Henry II to personally send forces to Ireland to impose English rule across Ireland, because what he's afraid of is one of his barons becoming a king in his own right and then opposing his authority.

COLIN: Henry II was the first king of England to set foot on Irish soil.

He would not be the last.

One of the few written accounts of Ireland at the time of the Norman conquest came from the pen of a churchman and writer, Gerald of Wales, whose family had taken part in the first landings of the Normans in Ireland.

CLARE: Gerald writes in a highly biased way about the people of Ireland.

He tends to be very scathing.

GERALD OF WALES: "They are a wild and inhospitable people.

They live on beasts only and live like beasts.

This people is then a barbarous people, literally barbarous."

He gives accounts of Irish bestiality trying to make the Irish seem, you know, as though they're semi-animal-like themselves.

One of the things he's most interested in is their marital practises.

So he says that they never avoid incest, that they marry their sisters and their cousins and their dead wives' brothers.

CLARE: It almost sets in train a kind of colonial literature where we find, you know, even English writers of the 18th and 19th century using the same tropes.

There's this idea of morality and immorality, the good and the evil, that they're somehow trying to justify their deeds of conquest by saying, "Well, we're helping the people we're conquering because we're civilising them."

COLIN: Among the most transformative and long-lasting effects of the arrival of the Anglo-Normans was not their military victories, but the fact that they had come to Ireland not only as soldiers, but as settlers.

SMITH: The earliest conquerors, they all come over with their female relatives.

They were making a statement from the very start that they were here to stay.

BOOKER: They don't get rid of the Irish people that were living on the lands that they conquered.

They were really essential for making the land profitable.

You had to have labourers.

There was also in addition to this established Irish population, an influx of English and Welsh sort of peasants who are drawn to the colony by the promise of land.

So there is a real significant movement of population.

COLIN: One of the first places the settlers put down roots was the southeast of Ireland, the most Norman part of the country, where the transformation was at its most visible and most pronounced.

SMITH: The Irish landscape had never been transformed as radically as it was in the century after the arrival of the English.

The establishment of castles, in particular, had a military function.

It had an economic function because it was around the castle that the new towns would grow, but it had a symbolic propagandist feature as well.

It was a physical statement that there were new rulers in town.

COLIN: As well as castles, new religious establishments were founded by orders such as the Cistercians.

The buildings demonstrate the imposition of colonial power on the landscape, because they show very much a European style of architecture.

These buildings would have been something very strange to the eye of a local Wexford person, certainly a native Gaelic Wexford person.

COLIN: The Norman world now stretched from the edge of the Atlantic across the continent of Europe to the Crusader states in Palestine.

Among the most prominent and mysterious of the crusader forces were the Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks.

The Knights Templar were given land in County Wexford on the Hook Peninsula.

MOSS: We're at Kilcloggan Castle.

It was granted by Henry II to the Knights Templar.

The Knights Templar had been established in the Holy Land.

They were essentially fighting monks.

So, a very typical tower house of the period, and if you look right up to the top of the castle, you have what's known as a machicolation.

And basically, this was a defensive feature that at times of attack, you could throw probably stones down on the attackers trying to get in.

The Knights Templar, they were established here on the Hook Peninsula to manage all of the lands along the vulnerable coastline.

COLIN: The Knights Templar were not the only crusaders to control land in the southeast.

William Marshall was a prominent crusader and something of a celebrity.

He had come into his lands in Leinster through his marriage to an heiress, Strongbow's daughter, Isabelle de Clare.

MOSS: Marshall decided to build a lighthouse here.

It seems to have been based on either lighthouses that Marshall had encountered himself when he was on the Crusades.

There was a fire tower at Alexandria, known as the Pharos Fire Tower.

A number of Marshall's castles had defensive towers, so it's understandable he built a defensive tower here, primarily to protect shipping coming in and out of Waterford Harbour, a very important part of the infrastructure of Anglo-Norman Ireland, giving access to cities such as Kilkenny, Waterford, and indeed Marshall's own foundation at New Ross.

DORAN: New Ross is the commercial kind of heartbeat of the kingdom of Leinster.

You get a kind of a Norman aristocracy coming in, you get merchants coming in, you get the Italian bankers coming in.

An elite coming in.

We're standing in the chancel of St.

Mary's Church.

It's one of the largest surviving medieval churches in Ireland.

If you went to Mass there on a Sunday, there were probably people from right across Europe there.

CLARE: There is a decision that New Ross needs to be fortified, and a circuit of walls is built around the town in 1265.

This act is then celebrated by the commissioning of a poem, which is written in Norman-French, celebrating the fortification of the town of New Ross.

We have a lovely account of each day of the week, different groups come out and work on the walls.

So we have the tanners one day, we have the priests another day, and they're singing and they're carolling.

[NARRATION IN FRENCH] NARRATION: "On Wednesday then following goes another group of people, leather workers, tanners, butchers.

On Thursday go the bakers and the small traders, all that sell corn and fish.

And they carol and sing at the tops of their voices.

On Sunday the ladies go."

By the end of the 13th century, English colony in Ireland is starting to go into decline.

Gaelic rulers in Ireland have started to fight back, take back land, bring it back under Gaelic control.

And at this time of political change and dissatisfaction, Edward Bruce, the brother of the famous Robert the Bruce, who became king of Scotland, sends a military expedition to Ireland in the year 1315, and he seeks to unite Gaelic opposition to English rule to overturn the power of the English colony.

And the idea is that Bruce will set himself up as king of all Ireland.

FRANCIS: One of the biggest calamities is known as the Great European Famine.

Very wet weather destroying the harvests.

Edward the Bruce's invasion occurs in the context of this.

So it was a terrible time to have invaded.

The annals at this time, claiming that the situation becomes so dire that there's a general breakdown in sort of social cohesion.

There's general lawlessness.

A lack of food to the extent that, yes, there's even cannibalism.

[NARRATION IN GAELIC] NARRATION: "Falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly, men ate each other in Ireland."

CLARE: It represents one of a series of attempts by Gaelic rulers to set up their own Gaelic monarch to oppose the English, but ultimately, it failed.

But nevertheless became a rallying point for ideals of Gaelic nationhood that would have significance in our later history.

COLIN: The 14th century was to begin with a dark cloud over Europe.

SMITH: The Black Death is the greatest trauma that Europe experienced in the Middle Ages.

And it's not just a European phenomenon, of course.

It's a global catastrophe.

A very virulent form comes to Europe in the early 14th century, initially through trade ports in Italy in the Mediterranean.

The plague then spreads through Europe, and it's devastating.

It kills between one-third and 50% of the population of Europe.

The 1340s is when the plague comes to Britain and then it crosses the Irish Sea.

MOSS: It was very much the southeast of the country that was badly affected.

Dublin, Kilkenny, New Ross, Cork.

Of course, it was a very visual disease.

You broke out in great black pustules.

So the fear must have been enormous.

COLIN: John Clyn, a friar of the Franciscan Abbey in Kilkenny, would leave behind a vivid and terrifying eyewitness account of those dark and dreadful days.

He begins to talk about the great calamity that he sees growing up around him.

JOHN CLYN: "This pestilence was so contagious that those who touched the dead or the sick were immediately infected themselves and died.

It was very rare for just one person to die in a house.

Usually, husband, wife, children and servants went the same way, the way of death."

MOSS: Perhaps the most tragic part of all is that while he's writing about this, suddenly his chronicle stops.

He then succumbed to the plague as well.

It's estimated that somewhere between a third and a half of the population was wiped out.

It's also remarked on by several contemporaries that the plague disproportionately affected the English rather than the Gaelic population in Ireland.

And partly that might be because it was mainly the English that lived in towns.

We have accounts at the time that they could scarcely bury all the dead bodies.

COLIN: Many settlers now fled the island.

Bristol was the main destination.

There was deep concern in Bristol about the number of people from Ireland who were coming to Bristol, who had no obvious means of making a living, and the council here in Bristol passed a series of laws forbidding merchants or craftsmen to take on people born in Ireland as apprentices.

The English government starts to introduce laws to try and stop people leaving the English colony because they can see it's a colony that it's on the brink of collapse.

COLIN: In Ireland, the resurgence of the Gaelic Irish was making its presence felt even more strongly.

Large areas that had been under the English Crown now fell back under the control of Gaelic lords.

CLARE: There's a real shift in cultural, economic, and political power in the 14th century, out of the hands of the English colonists and more to favour the Irish gales.

BOOKER: There's a real sense that the colony could be lost entirely because there isn't just one Irish lord who is in danger of taking over the whole country, but all pose threats in kind of different parts of the island.

By the very end of the medieval period, you have the creation of The Pale around Dublin, this area surrounded by a ditch to protect the last bastion of control.

COLIN: The Norman elites that had settled in Ireland centuries earlier were now becoming more Irish than the Irish themselves.

The assimilation of the Anglo-Normans is profound.

Anglo-Normans very quickly start to take on aspects of the Gaelic political system.

So you see the practise of Brehon law.

You see the hosting of bardic poets.

The third Earl of Desmond, Gearóid Iarla, is famous for writing poetry.

[NARRATION IN GAELIC] GEARÓID IARLA: "These were my three kinds of music, the playing of O'Brien's harp, the bell of Ennis on the western side, the sound of saltwater lapping the stones."

The English of England look down on the English of Ireland, make fun of their accent, you know, they have a slightly different way of speaking, different ways of dressing.

And this cultural difference between the two groups results in real hostility between them, and this erupts at several times.

In '66 with the Statutes of Kilkenny.

CLARE: This statute is issued with a series of rules and regulations.

It comes in to try and create this sense of apartheid, that these two cultures must be separate.

They forbade intermarriage between the so-called native Irish and the Anglo-Normans.

If you wish to be considered a loyal subject of the English king, you must only speak English.

You had to have an English name, you had to ride a horse in an English manner... ...with a saddle.

You must not play certain ball games.

It's one of the earliest textual references to hurling, but it shows that the English had adopted the culture of Irish sports.

BOOKER: The English of England might call the English of Ireland Irish dogs.

The insult that the English of Ireland used for the English of England was English hob.

The Statutes of Kilkenny banned both of these insults.

COLIN: The wider world, however, was about to change radically.

The Middle Ages gave way to the beginning of the modern world.

PALMER: We used to talk about it as the Age of Discovery and it was all very heroic stuff about these galleons setting off and discovering new lands and all of this kind of stuff.

But of course, this is also the start of colonialism and exploitation.

OHLMEYER: Thanks to military and naval technological innovations, the Europeans were able to develop these vast, vast global empires.

COLIN: Spain and Portugal were to the fore on the trail of spice, the most valuable commodity of the time.

TOSTADO: The spices were very important for two reasons.

One is because they helped to preserve food and to give flavour.

And second, because it was a really, really expensive luxury item.

COLIN: The most famous of these explorers was Christopher Columbus.

Columbus allegedly visited Galway in 1477 on his way to Iceland.

When he later left Spain on his fateful voyage westwards, he had an Irish sailor from Galway with him.

A man called William Ayres from Galway was on that famous voyage of 1492.

Guillermo Herres, as he's known in the Spanish sources.

Ayres was put ashore in Hispaniola, which would be today Haiti, the Dominican Republic.

He lived there for a short time, but then was killed by the indigenous population.

There was... there was a rising.

COLIN: The vibrant and busy Port of Seville was a magnet for Irish sailors.

TOSTADO: This was a very big market for sailors.

Some of them were Irish, and especially from Galway.

COLIN: One of the most famous voyages of the age was the first circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan.

On board one of the five ships which made up the expedition to the Spice Islands were two young sailors from Galway.

They would never return.

TOSTADO: Juan and Guillermo, they have a terrible, terrible moment.

They got a 12-day storm.

And this in that moment, when the two sailors died.

O'CONNOR: We're here in the old port of Lisbon, a place called Belém.

Irish people are coming here not just to trade and go home, but they actually begin to settle.

And you have the formation really from the late 15th and into the early 16th century of a small, expanding Irish colony, composed of all sorts, merchants as you would expect, cobblers, tailors, students, people from all sorts of backgrounds.

And it becomes a really vibrant and varied community here in that period.

COLIN: As Spain and Portugal pursued their global interests, England saw the rise of a new dynasty... the Tudors.

The effects on Ireland and the Irish would be profound and devastating.

SMITH: In the reign of Henry VIII, who ascended the throne in 1509, we start to see different attitudes being taken towards who was in control in Ireland and how closely they were to be monitored by the English king.

COLIN: This was also a period of great religious turbulence in Europe.

It was the era of the Protestant Reformation and would see England under Henry break with Rome.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and this would ultimately precipitate a schism in European Christianity that would have enormous implications for Ireland.

PALMER: We have the Reformation, and that introduces this big cleavage in Europe between Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe.

LYONS: That led then to a series of religious wars, the main theatres for which were France, the German states, the Netherlands, equally torn apart north and south between Protestant and Catholic components.

The king's great matter, the Royal Divorce from Catherine of Aragon, in order that Henry might be able to marry Anne Boleyn was clearly the extremely important factor in leading to the separation with Rome.

England are suddenly becoming conscious of themselves as a power that is separated from the continent in terms of it's now English speaking, proudly English speaking, and is Protestant in its identity.

LYONS: During Henry's daughter's reign, Elizabeth I, you get sustained attempt to press ahead with the introduction of the Reformation, the Protestant faith.

Ó HANNRACHÁIN: The Elizabethan conquest develops, which pits the state in Ireland in a series of escalating confrontations with Gaelic and Gaelicized lordships.

LYONS: It's about trying to assert an English royal presence in the country, and in the process as that advanced, to Anglicize the population, as contemporaries would say, "to civilise the wild Irish."

COLIN: Increasingly, the leading magnates made common cause with the Gaelic Irish.

Ó HANNRACHÁIN: And we get this extraordinary situation that the traditional English population of Ireland, the Anglo-Norman population rooted there from the 12th century, who consider themselves to be English in identity, who are loyal to their English sense of themselves, who are loyal to the English monarch, become alienated from their own government.

OHLMEYER: Religion becomes that important badge of, well, are you loyal or are you not?

So, if you're Catholic, you're disloyal.

If you're Protestant, you're loyal.

It creates huge tensions.

COLIN: The Gaelic Irish and the old English of the towns now had a common cause, the Catholic religion.

Ó HANNRACHÁIN: If you're looking for assistance against Elizabeth in wars and rebellions, then the logical place to look is to her continental enemies.

And those continental enemies are Catholic, and above all, Spain.

COLIN: The Irish now look to Spain, the major Catholic power in Europe, for help against their common enemy, Elizabeth's England.

TOSTADO: The king of Spain has the title of Catholic king.

So his moral duty to protect persecuted Catholics at home and abroad.

PALMER: There's this constant connection now of Ireland petitioning for support to come from the continent.

And it does.

It comes in 1580, a papal delegation comes of Spanish and Italians, and arrives in Smerwick.

COLIN: Munster is in the throes of rebellion, and Spanish and papal forces, 600 strong, land in Smerwick Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula.

They are met by the English on land and sea and put under siege.

The English are led by the Lord Deputy of Ireland and have among their number favourites of the Elizabethan court, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser.

PALMER: The Spanish and Italians, they're cut off at sea and they're cut off on the landward side of this little peninsula.

It's really October, the equinoctial storms are coming in.

It's wretched, it's miserable.

They negotiate, and they are offered terms on mercy.

COLIN: Despite the surrender, no mercy is shown.

The siege of Smerwick turns into a massacre.

PALMER: Sir Walter Raleigh goes in with his forces, and they "hough and paunch," that is, a stab to the throat, a stab to the belly.

The beautiful turquoise water of Smerwick Harbour turns red with the blood of these papal forces.

This causes repercussions on the continent.

COLIN: Little mercy is shown either to the inhabitants of Munster, who become the victims of a brutal policy of scorched earth, leading to famine and devastation.

Perhaps up to a quarter of the Munster population died during the Desmond rebellions.

The irony is, the very people who are so emblematic of the Elizabethan court, in all its glamour, the court of Gloriana, like the very dashing Sir Walter Raleigh with his beautiful jewel in his ear, and he's putting down the cloak for Queen Elizabeth to step over the puddle, he's the person who, in Smerwick, is houghing and paunching.

So we have this paradox all the time between these people who are bringers of civility.

I mean, that's very much how they narrate this story.

The Irish, they are described by one person as having "an incurable botch."

They just can't be mended.

From the late 16th century, you have a series of English writers who pick up on the rhetoric.

But they take it even further.

The Irish are subhuman.

They're grasshoppers, they're hogs, they're dogs.

And particularly important here is John Derricke, who publishes a book with these extremely graphic woodcuts that really show the Irish as being "uncivil", with their mantles, hiding in the woods.

So there's this real attempt to vilify the Catholic Irish at every opportunity.

We get exactly the same thing in North America, and later we get exactly the same thing in the Indian subcontinent.

It's a feature of English imperial rule.

COLIN: The Old English of Ireland and the Gaelic Irish were now looking across the water to Catholic Europe for their education.

THOMAS O'CONNOR: From the 1530s and 1540s, we definitely notice increasing numbers of Irish names appearing in the matriculation records of European universities.

The first one and perhaps the most important one is the University of Louvain or Leuven in modern day Belgium.

LYONS: This was a really important centre in the intellectual landscape of Western Europe.

These sources are a combination of the matriculation records for the university.

And it is incredibly poignant to find the name of an Irish student from as far back as 1548.

A particularly special is to see the entry for Richard Creagh, as a young student.

Richard Creagh, after he completed his studies here, went back.

He became a person of interest to the Tudor authorities because he was seen as a focal point for Catholic dissidents and Catholic discontent.

At a time when Catholic old English were feeling increasingly disillusioned with the Dublin government, he ends up dying in the Tower of London in the mid-1580s.

He died as a result of being poisoned by agents in the Tudor administration.

And so it is poignant to see his name there.

THOMAS O'CONNOR: Behind us is the Mouraria, which is the very oldest part of Lisbon.

Where in the 16th century, the very first of the Irish colleges in the continent was founded.

It was founded by a man called John Howlin, who was a Jesuit from County Wexford.

It was founded in 1590, and it was founded in response to a very significant influx of Irish people coming here to Portugal.

Some of them as economic refugees, some of them as religious refugees.

And although Catholicism was tolerated, the education of priests was regarded as potentially subversive to the Tudor regime, that was not allowed.

So if someone was to be educated for the priesthood in Ireland, it had to happen abroad.

OHLMEYER: Trinity College Dublin was founded in 1592 with the explicit purpose of "civilising the Irish" and of training Protestant clergymen who would go on then and convert the Irish at home.

TOSTADO: At the end of the 16th century, there is a big change.

The English are going to create Trinity College, so now the Spanish monarchy is going to create Irish colleges.

The first is going to be this one, in Salamanca, one of the oldest universities in Europe.

This is a royal initiative.

This all is the Real Colegio, so it has the royal patronage.

It will provide for the people who want to get religious training in Spain and go back to the ministry in Ireland.

COLIN: In 1588, Philip sent a large fleet to invade England.

It would be known to history as the Spanish Armada.

Defeated at sea, what was left of the fleet attempted to make their way homeward.

Many of these ships were wrecked on the rocky shores of the west of Ireland.

It means that the Irish get very interested in Spanish support.

And a particular part of Ireland, north of Galway right round to Antrim, which really hadn't been much affected by Spain before, now becomes connected to Spain through the Spanish Armada being shipwrecked there.

LYONS: What we find is that in the early 1590s, Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, in Ulster, the greatest political figure in Ireland in that era, has agents in the Spanish court who are actively negotiating for military assistance.

Once he gets an assurance that he has that military support from Philip II of Spain, he openly declares war in 1595.

COLIN: The rebellion led by O'Neill and O'Donnell would become known as the Nine Years' War.

Evidence of the connection between the Spanish authorities and the Irish rebels is still preserved in a 16th century archive in Simancas in Spain.

TOSTADO: This is a report being sent from the rebels explaining how the war is going on.

The Spaniards are sending help, weapons, and they are sending supplies to the Irish.

This is a map of Malin in County Donegal which is where the Spaniards are sending their supplies.

We have the letter that Red Hugh and O'Neill are sending to Prince Philip asking him for support to the Irish rebels.

This is signed by Red Hugh and O'Neill.

COLIN: The war began with notable Irish success.

MORGAN: Red Hugh is making his famous raids into Connaught and O'Neill is attacking down the east of Ulster and into the Pale.

LYONS: One of the great battles of the Nine Years' War was the Battle of the Yellow Ford in August 1598.

News of the victory of Hugh O'Neill's side in that war over the English forces was sent post-haste to El Escorial, where Philip II lay on his deathbed.

The culmination of this engagement between the Spanish and the Irish was the Battle of Kinsale.

COLIN: The promised Spanish reinforcements finally arrive.

But it was too little, too late.

And most importantly, they arrived in the wrong place.

The Spanish had landed not in Ulster, but in Kinsale, the furthest part of Ireland from the rebellion's heartland.

The Irish didn't fight very well.

But in terms of the battle, the Spaniards did not fight at all.

It was a great debacle.

It was a great defeat for the Irish and the Spanish.

COLIN: After the battle, Red Hugh departed for Spain to seek further aid.

That, however, was not to be.

He was taken ill suddenly on his way to meet the new Spanish king and died at Simancas Castle.

He was 30 years old.

TOSTADO: He's given a state funeral.

They considered also that he's a Catholic hero.

He's someone that he has been serving on the behalf of the same cause, the protection of Catholicism.

COLIN: Any possible Spanish plans to send further assistance to the Irish were now abandoned.

MORGAN: After the Battle of Kinsale, the English used these scorched-earth tactics to force the country in turn to surrender their leaders like O'Neill, because there's now a price on O'Neill's head.

But the extraordinary thing is that O'Neill is not surrendered to the Crown.

LYONS: In the years immediately after the Battle of Kinsale, there is the first mass movement of Irish migrants to continental Europe, the vast majority of whom head for northern Spain, where they land in boatloads in their thousands.

THOMAS O'CONNOR: Large numbers of decommissioned military are arriving in Spain.

The ordinary townsfolk are not so keen on having all these charity cases, basically on their hands, sometimes with law and order issues attached, and of course, constantly larger numbers coming.

LYONS: In early November 1605, the Chancellor of France wrote two letters to the King of France, Henry IV, and he wrote about a matter of really pressing concern for the city of Paris.

And that was the presence of somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 Irish men accompanied by women and children who were said to be living in the most filthy conditions here beneath the Pont Neuf, right in the centre of the city.

You're talking about people who have minimal food, they're begging for their living.

They have undoubtedly a substantial number of them wouldn't have had French, probably Gaelic speaking.

The Parisian authorities were afraid that these strangers who were living in filthy conditions would introduce the plague into the otherwise safe city.

COLIN: In 1606, these unwelcome Irish were rounded up and put on board a ship and expelled from Paris.

In Ireland, Hugh O'Neill decided to reach peace with Elizabeth.

He signs the Treaty of Mellifont and returns to Ulster.

In an ironic twist, Elizabeth had died in London several days earlier, unknown to O'Neill.

OHLMEYER: With the defeat of Hugh O'Neill, we see for the first time, all of Ireland is now controlled by England.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: O'Neill finds out that he's no longer master in his own house.

English common law is rolled out across the island from Malin Head to the Beara Peninsula.

COLIN: O'Neill finds the increasing pressure from the new English regime untenable.

Finally, on the 4th of September 1607, O'Neill makes one of the most fateful decisions in Irish history.

His departure from Ireland, together with his followers, would go down in history as the Flight of the Earls.

ÉAMONN Ó CIARDHA: With the Flight of the Earls, O'Neill, O'Donnell, Cú Chonnacht Maguire and the creme de la creme of the Gaelic Ulster aristocracy, weigh anchor here in Rathmullan, make their way out into the Bay of Biscay.

COLIN: O'Neill's original destination was Spain.

But their ship was blown off course, and O'Neill and his followers made their way through Europe, eventually reaching Rome.

MATTEO BINASCO: Hugh O'Neill arrived in Rome at the end of April of 1608.

All the eight years he remained in Rome, he was planning, he was preparing a strategy.

And he was hoping to have some money from the Pope, from the Papal Curia, in order to go back to Ireland and to fight against the English.

But he never got actually any money from the Pope.

So he was extremely disappointed about his permanence in Rome.

COLIN: O'Neill's time in Rome was also marked by family tragedies, losing his son to the ravages of the Roman summer.

He never received the help he was promised from either Spain or the Pope.

He finally died in Rome, a broken man.

BINASCO: When Hugh O'Neill died, there was a huge funeral procession, thousands of people.

And all the city stopped, because the cardinals, the members of the Curia, were celebrating this man as a hero.

OHLMEYER: It's not just that he has died, but with him, the dreams of Gaelic Ireland have died as well.

[NARRATION IN GAELIC] NARRATION: "This night sees Eire desolate, Her chiefs are cast out of their state.

The grieving lords take ship.

With these your very souls pass overseas."