How The Irish Saved Civilization

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!
There is much we do not know about these Irish exiles. Their clay and wattle buildings have long since disappeared, and even most of their precious books have perished. But what they knew -- the Bible and the literature's of Greece, Rome, and Ireland -- we know, because they passed these things on to us. The Hebrew Bible would have been saved without them, transmitted to our time by scattered communities of Jews. The Greek Bible, the Greek commentaries, and much of the literature of ancient Greece were well enough preserved at Byzantium, and might be still available to us somewhere -- if we had the interest to seek them out. But Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literature's without the example of Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down. Beyond that, there would have perished in the west not only literacy but all the habits of mind that encourage thought. And when Islam began its medieval expansion, it would have encountered scant resistance to its plans -- just scattered tribes of animists, ready for a new identity.
From the book "How The Irish Saved Civilization" by Thomas Cahill
I also included the song Skellig by Loreena McKennitt.