Are the Black Irish descendants from the Spanish Armada?

Question:I have read about Spanish sailors marooned off the
Irish coast, And avoiding the English for years.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I have read about Spanish sailors marooned off the
Irish coast, And avoiding the English for years.

I think mitochondrial DNA testing could answer the question to some extent. My guess is that you would find a a lot of homogeneity even in the nuclear DNA. Up until the Irish came to America they were always very tribal and did not have a unified Irish identity. I suspect like would have stuck with like.

The very fair skin and blue eyes are both recessive traits and black hair is dominate, odd combination to say the least. My great grandmother was black Irish and we have a photo of her that is absolutely stunning. It is in black and white, but her eyes are such a light blue as to almost appear white in the photo.

I know that at some point the gaelic language went from Ireland to Spain or Spain to Ireland (I think this one). There is a Gaelic coast or province in Spain.

Not much help, I know ...

are they black though?????? stupid question i know...but my brain is out of service at the moment.

No. Although there were some survivors of the Armada, those that did survive and procreate were too few to leave any genetic contributions to the race as a whole. There is no difference in race between Black Irish and regular Irish, the only difference is the phenotype, or the expression of genes. A blonde German and a brown-haired German are both still from the same race of people, they just got different hair color genes, you see?
It is theorized that all Irish come from a race of people who migrated from the Iberian peninsula in Spain... and therefore the dark hair came with them. There are blonde and red-haired spanish, as well.

Who are the "black Irish"?

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Dear Cecil:

Many years ago my grandmother told me that her grandfather's ethnicity was "Black Irish." Recently I've heard three different explanations concerning the origin of the term:

(1) It refers to a mixture of Irish and Spanish blood dating from the time of the Spanish Armada, when many shipwrecked Spanish sailors were washed up on the Irish coastline and wound up staying.

(2) It refers to a mixture of Irish and eastern European blood.

(3) It refers to a mixture of Irish and Italian blood from the time of the Roman Empire.

No books have been written on the subject, and no entry is to be found in either the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary. So naturally one turns to you. --Christian Ard, San Francisco

Dear Christian:

We dance here on the fine line between science and folklore, a locale all too familiar to us here at the Straight Dope.

The Black Irish seem to be mainly a U.S. thing. The Irish natives I've heard from say the term is new to them.

People talk about the Black Irish as though they constituted a mythical race on a par with the lost tribes of Israel. But in fact all they mean (usually) is that somebody named McNulty has dark, and in the classic case black, hair.

Even if we make the dubious assumption that dark hair genes were completely absent in the original Gaels, it seems likely that the incidence of dark-haired folk in a nation whose population only slightly exceeds that of the city of Los Angeles could be accounted for strictly by routine mixing due to immigration, trade contact, and so on.

But you can see how exciting an explanation that makes. So people have come up with all kinds of fanciful tales instead.

The wildest notion is that black hair is evidence of Spaniards marooned in Ireland following the wreck of the Armada. As we've had occasion to discuss in the past, the number of shipwrecked Spanish sailors who remained in Ireland for any length of time was trivial.

I have also heard it said the black Irish were the first settlers of Ireland--maybe the Phoenicians. The red Irish, meanwhile, were descendants of the Normans, and the blond Irish are descended from the Vikings. One of many drawbacks to this theory is that it seems to leave the Gaels completely out of the picture.

A more plausible but still essentially unprovable take on this idea is that black hair is a vestige of an indigenous population of short dark-haired types overrun by the fair-haired Gaels. Supposedly there are more black Irish in the western part of the country, which fewer Gaelic invaders reached.

There is archaeological and, I'm told, linguistic evidence of pre-Gaelic settlement. But how it was concluded that they were short and black-haired I do not know. Seems like a silly thing to make a fuss over in any case.

--CECIL ADAMS

I understand before the Gaels invaded Ireland, the people there were called Firbogs. Don't know what type of pigmentation they had.

I don't believe the Vikings had anything to do with red hair. Most Scandinavians are not redheaded but blonde and light brown. They might have some redheads in Scandinavia like they do everywhere else but it does not seem to be a predominant trait.

Now, even though the Norman were originally Northmen they had settled in the coastal area of France. Dark traits are dominant over lighter traits and as time went by the dark traits would have dominated. It was my understanding that the Normans that invaded England later Ireland were mostly dark haired and dark eyed.