History is Connolly’s stock in trade. A graduate of Dublin’s Trinity College, he delivers his hard-hitting Historical Walking Tour with velvet brogue and barbed wit. Surrounded by the college’s classical buildings and well-trod cobbles underfoot, Connolly notes with irony that Ireland’s earliest inhabitants were sun worshippers, but the Romans did not bother to invade because of the weather. "They came as far as Wales, took one look across the Irish Sea and said, "Why bother?""

In Dublin, however, the sun bounced off pink blooms and spring greens as Dubliners poured from their offices for an impromptu sun-iday. Every available bench, foot of a statue and bit of grass was filled with people looking very much like sun worshippers.

Connolly, adapting the Socratic method, answers his own questions. "What do you think of when you think of the Celts?…I don’t have a clue, either." They do have a common culture and a common language.

"The Celts were very, very good talkers." Professional talkers, in fact. They roamed Ireland educating the people, resolving disputes among the 200 clans and encouraging unity to repel invasion.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I think, that’s where my Irish friends get their gift of gab.

In the fifth century St. Patrick arrived with Christianity on his second visit to Ireland. His first was as the booty of Celtic-Irish raiders who’d kidnapped him in England and enslaved him. He escaped from slavery and Ireland, became a monk and returned a missionary.

Over the next four centuries Celtism and Christianity merged. Curiously, the Pope didn’t like the Celtic touches. He thought Irish savagery was contaminating Christianity. "Now, of course, the Pope was wrong," Connolly adds. "The opposite was the case, it was a time of high cultural achievement in Ireland."

"Anybody here know the expression, the land of Saints and of Scholars?" Connolly asks. "I’d be surprised if you didn’t. We like saying it about ourselves." Irish monasteries flourished during the Dark Ages, he explains, and it was Irish missionaries who returned Christianity to Europe.

Traipsing after Connolly, we leave the relative peace of Trinity’s grounds for the Palladian porticos of the Bank of Ireland, the once Irish Parliament. We wander through trendy Temple Bar, a revamped dock area, now a stronghold of beer, culture and cappuccino to the former British stronghold, medieval Dublin Castle. Passing by the site of a Viking town, we end up historical centuries later at Christ Church. "A distance of .532 miles, an American tourist once informed me," Connolly adds incredulously.

Ireland, Connolly explains, was "the Achilles heel" of British defense—enemies tried to use it as the backdoor into their empire. It was too close to let go like America and too far to incorporate like Wales and Scotland.

The 800 centuries from the first English invasion in 1172 to Irish independence in 1919 took on a pattern: the Irish lose a rebellion, the British intensify their control. The 1607 rebellion begat a "plantation policy"—replacing Irish land owners with Scottish and English Protestants—eventually changing the north from a Catholic stronghold to a Protestant one. Oliver Cromwell arrived to quell another mid-century and excluded the Catholics from government, the professions and property ownership. Catholic priests, burials and education were banned.

Orangemen still celebrate the 1690 defeat of the Catholic King James II by the Vatican-backed William of Orange. Marching through Catholic districts in Northern Ireland, they often whip up new troubles.

"When you don’t have a political process that’s working you look to fill the vacuum." Connolly explains, "In our case we looked backward." In peoples minds, the 17th and 18th centuries are very much entwined with what happens in the 21st century.

"We’re very good losers here—we’re so used to it, we enjoy it actually." Connolly philosophizes, "You’re confronted with a choice in this world, you can spend the rest of your life feeling miserable and sorry for yourself or you can reinvent you’re predicament. So what we’ve come up with is the glorious defeat."

In 1845, when the potato fungus struck, 85% of the Irish lived on 15% of the land and subsisting on potatoes. One and a half million people starved to death. Another million immigrated. Within ten years Ireland’s population was cut in half.

"Now to say there was a famine is to cause controversy," Connolly says. "A famine assumes there was no food. But, there was abundance of food in Ireland at the time. Two-and-one-half times the amount of food necessary was exported, under military guard, out of Ireland."

The impact, devastating for the Irish, was felt around the world. One in five Londoners, one in three Australians, one in ten Canadians and 44 million Americans claim Irish descent.

Conflict started again in 1916, when an Easter uprising begat the execution of sixteen rebels and the rise of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army. Winning over 80% of the vote in the 1918 elections, Sinn Féin set up their own government begetting the War of Independence. In 1921, seeing defeat, the English partitioned Ireland, then called for peace.

"A terrible beauty is born," Yeats wrote of the Irish Republic’s birthing and the bitter civil war that followed. Irish poets, Connolly observes, "communicate through the subtlety of poetry things not safely communicated through the crudeness of prose."

Waking through "800 years of Irish blood and Irish tears" as a song should say if it doesn’t, I see how my Irish friends got so feisty.