Short Answer: Yes, there was.

In giving such a comparatively brief run-through as I am about to here I will try hard to avoid giving some sort of Whig-history impression that the ‘sense of Irish identity’ that can be seen in certain sources over the centuries prior to 1798 can be directly correlated to modern Irish nationalism. As if these were embryonic expressions of Irishness inevitably building towards post-Enlightenment nationalism. There were conceptions of Irishness and Irish identity, but these were always connected to the very particular historical, political, social and cultural contexts within which they were articulated. Contexts which are very different from our own, and very different from the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence the distinction you will find in Kee’s argument. But with all these caveats said, yes there were senses of Irish national identity prior to this.

Long Answer:

When historians make statements such as this it can certainly sound surprising. However, what the likes of Kee are probably referring to is a concept of “Irishness” and Nationalism in a distinctly modern sense - ie. the concept of an overarching Irish identity unified within the confines of the nation state. If we look through the canonical history of modern Irish Nationalism then we can trace these ideals directly back to the republicanism and anti-confessionalism of the 1798 leaders. In a broader sense, the slow process of secularisation during the Enlightenment led to an increased separation of church and state, and while this does not mean that society simply became less religious overnight, it nonetheless paved the way for the development of nation states. As Hans Kohn suggests in his work The Idea Of Nationalism: A Study In Its Origins And Background: “Rousseau provided the modern nation with its emotional and moral foundations”. In contrast to modern nationalism older forms of identity did not draw primarily from the concept of the nation. At least not initially, and not in the same way. A sense of identity was, in the first instance, to be found within individual kin-groups and in one’s ancestry. At the same time Christianity also served as a larger imagined community for Medieval peoples. However, as we will see that is not quite the full picture.

It is also worth highlighting that when discussing identity in the Medieval or Early Modern period we are necessarily referring to the views of social elites. This is a product of the sources available. Naturally it is considerably more difficult to capture the views of average people who have left considerably less records and written texts of their own. In fact this points to another key distinction between modern nationalism and earlier forms of ‘national’ identity. Whereas the modern nation state is conceived of as including all the inhabitants of that country, the Medieval or Early Modern aristocracy of Ireland would have found no sense of common connection to ordinary ‘peasants’. During the Celtic Twilight of the nineteenth century, members of the Anglo-Irish gentry might have found moral and spiritual inspiration through their conception of the mythic Irish peasant, but the Gaelic elite of previous centuries utterly disdained the common people. In 1627 Conall Mag Eochagáin referred contemptuously to ordinary people as ‘mere churls and labouring men, [not] one of which knows his own great grandfather’. Conall was the head of his sept or ‘clan’ group - the Mag Eochagáin, (anglicised as MacGeoghegan) - a smaller branch of the Southern Uí Neill who claimed descent from Niall of the Nine Hostages. Naturally this suggests something of the importance of such identities, whether real or fabricated, in a lineage-based society like Gaelic Ireland.

Yet to turn to your question again ‘Was there really no sense of Irish national identity’ before the Enlightenment and 1798? Well, yes, there was certainly a sense of this, even if there is no direct link between earlier expressions of Irish identity and later forms of nationalism. Nationalism with a capital N may be a product of the enlightenment but this does not mean that earlier centuries did not also have any sense of a ‘national’ identity. I do think that Modern historians can often tend to overlook the Early Modern or even Medieval antecedents for collective forms of identity. There was no nationalism in the sense of an identity tied to the nation state, but there were other forms of cultural or political belonging which identified the ‘Irish’ or people from Ireland as a single ethnographic unit. For instance the term fir Érenn, ‘men of Ireland’, became increasingly common in chronicle usage from the mid-ninth century onwards.

Of course, as I am trying to make clear, I wouldn’t even remotely suggest that there was a fully cohesive sense of Irish nationalism going back to the early medieval period. Terms like fir Érenn were generally used to designate the followers of a claimant to the kingship of Ireland and to reinforce social status. Less politically important subject peoples were excluded or severely subordinated within these conceptions of identity. Some of the lower orders of society were even considered to be descendants of the mythical and defeated Fir Bolg rather than the victorious Milesians (who were said to have defeated the Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish legend). Those peoples that were denigrated as Fir Bolg were very unlikely to have been racially or culturally different to any significant extent from the dominant dynasties. These early Medieval articulations of Irish identity tended to be rather narrow and generally connected to political goals.

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