Just four more years now to the 500th anniversary of when we Irish became citizens of Spain. You didn’t know?
You never heard of the Treaty of Dingle in 1529, when Don Gonzalez Fernandez, ambassador of King Charles V of Spain, stepped ashore in that noble town to be greeted by ceremonial drummers? Okay. Neither had I until recently.
Yes, the treaty concluded there between James FitzGerald, 10th earl of Desmond, and Fernandez gave a formal legal and constitutional foundation to the rights of citizenship and other privileges that Irish exiles enjoyed in Habsburg Spain, Habsburg Austria and Habsburg Netherlands from the 16th to the early 20th centuries.
Remarkable.
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A copy of the Treaty of Dingle is in the Royal Library in Brussels and fragments of the earl of Desmond’s copy are in the British Library in London.
In 2009 the then Spanish Ambassador to Ireland, Dona Mercedes Rico, was greeted by the Dingle Fife and Drum Band when she arrived to commemorate that remarkable event 480 years before.
She had been invited by the Dingle Historical Society to unveil a commemorative plaque on the wall of the Temperance Hall, marking the signing of the treaty.
The ambassador noted how “in April 1529 your ancestors welcomed the first official diplomatic envoy from Spain to Ireland” and how the treaty “gave the Irish people the unique privilege of full equal rights and equality with Spaniards in Spain.”
Bless my sceptical soul but you learn something new every day.
And the Dingle Fife and Drum Band played O’Neill’s March, which, as a local man observed at the time, was “very relevant because thanks to the Treaty of Dingle the Wild Geese [who fled Ireland in the early 1600s] fared well on the Continent.”
It seems the myth of the Iberian origin of the inhabitants of Ireland (the Milesian myth) plus a sense of solidarity based on Catholicism and the services rendered by the Irish in the armies of Spain, convinced kings of Spain they should protect and defend the Irish.
In time a strong Irish community flourished in the territories of the Spanish monarchy, mainly Castile, Portugal and the so-called Spanish Netherlands, not to mention all those Irish priests trained at Irish Colleges in Madrid, Salamanca, Alcala, Saville and Valencia in Penal times.
Spain, from Latin Hispania
