I’ve been reading Thomas Bartlett’s ‘Ireland: A History’. At the start of chapter two, ‘From Lordship to Kingdom: Ireland, 1169 - 1541’, he writes:
“... It was an English invasion and partial conquest: all talk of the ‘Normans’ or the Anglo-Normans’, or ‘Anglo-French’, or even ‘Cambro-Normans’ coming to Ireland is simply ahistorical. The invaders called themselves English (Engleis, Angli), were called Saxein (=English) or Gaill (=foreigner) by the Irish, and for the next seven hundred years were designated as English in the historical literature. Contemporaries never described them as Norman, Anglo-Norman, or much less Cambro-Norman. Only in the late nineteenth century, and largely on grounds of political sensitivity, was the identity of the English invaders fudged by these non-historical terms...”
Is this an accurate assessment? Had the Norman identity faded by that point and been replaced by a sense of being English?
While Cambro-Norman is definitely a modern term, that doesn't necessarily make it less valid. The invasion of Ireland was spearheaded by the marcher lords of the Anglo-Cambrian frontier regions and, whether or not they referred to themselves in texts as English, we shouldn't necessarily overlook their actual genealogy and the way that they wrote about themselves in other contexts.
A defining element of several of the major leaders of the invasion of Ireland was precisely their Cambro-Norman heritage. The inter-marriage of Norman lords with the widows and daughters of subjected territory was hardly a novel phenomenon - Henry I for example married into the Anglo-Saxon Cerdicing royal dynasty - and the new identities this created was a common theme for the first generations of post-Conquest writers such as Orderic Vitalis. While Richard de Clare (a.k.a. Strongbow) himself was of just Norman heritage despite being Earl of Pembroke, many his contemporaries who held control of much of Wales in the 12th Century and joined the conquest of Ireland were also significantly of mixed origin. Maurice FitzGerald was the son of Gerald de Windsor and Welsh princess Nest fetch Rhys. His half-brother, Rhys FitzStephen was the leader of a significant vanguard force, as chronicled by his nephew Gerald de Barri, commonly known as Gerald of Wales.
I can entirely see Bartlett's argument, insofar as a number of invasion leaders were 'purely' Norman, or were members of the Anglo-Norman elite, but a significant proportion of the expeditionary force were raised from Cambro-Norman families and from associated Welsh populations. When we consider these families, we do have to consider that not all of them did actually consider themselves English. Gerald of Wales is a perfect example of this: his (half) Welsh identity is a common refrain in Gerald's writing, and it's clear that he considers himself as much Welsh as he does a Norman; in fact while he talks about England and the English as being 'his' side, he nonetheless repeatedly identifies with his Welsh heritage, going as far to call himself "Gerald the Welshman" in the prefaces to his Descriptio Cambriae and Itinerarium Cambriae. This doesn't necessarily mean that we can extrapolate this sense of identity to the entire de Barri family or their contemporaries, but it seems reasonable to infer that such national sympathies likely were held throughout a significant portion of Robert FitzStephen's expedition.