📖 High Ideals
Ireland has always remembered its great kings.
Among them was Cormac mac Airt, the legendary High King of Ireland, remembered not simply for his power, but for his ideals. He was said to value justice, wisdom, truth, and the proper use of authority.
Centuries later, those ideals found an unexpected echo in Trinity, Leon Uris’s novel of Ireland during the Great Famine. Bobby Sands, imprisoned in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, had memorized much of the novel and would recite it to his fellow prisoners.
Different centuries. Different struggles. Yet the same hunger to remember something greater than the circumstances around us.
Cormac’s kingdom is long gone, but the ideal of the just king remains—and so does the power of a story to keep that ideal alive.
This week in Scéal Éireann, we remember Cormac mac Airt and the high ideals of Ireland’s legendary king.