Ailbhe and Ciaran, he preceded St. Patrick in the Irish mission and
was a co-temporary of the national apostle. Objection, exception or
opposition to the theory of Declan's early period is based less on any
inherent improbability in the theory itself than on contradictions and
inconsistencies in the Life. Beyond any doubt the Life does actually
contradict itself; it makes Declan a cotemporary of Patrick in the fifth
century and a cotemporary likewise of St. David a century later. In
any attempted solution of the difficulty involved it may be helpful
to remember a special motive likely to animate a tribal histrographer,
scil.:--the family relationship, if we may so call it, of the two
saints; David was bishop of the Deisi colony in Wales as Declan was
bishop of their kinsmen of southern Ireland. It was very probably part
of the writer's purpose to call attention to the links of kindred which
bound the separated Deisi; witness his allusion later to the alleged
visit of Declan to his kinsmen of Bregia. Possibly there were several
Declans, as there were scores of Colmans, Finians, &c., and hence
perhaps the confusion and some of the apparent inconsistencies. There
was certainly a second Declan, a disciple of St. Virgilius, to whom the
latter committed care of a church in Austria where he died towards
close of eighth century. Again we find mention of a St. Declan who was
a foster son of Mogue of Ferns, and so on. It is too much, as Delehaye
("Legendes Hagiographiques") remarks, to expect the populace to
distinguish between namesakes. Great men are so rare! Is it likely there
should have lived two saints of the same name in the same country!

The latest commentators on the question of St. Declan's period--and they
happen to be amongst the most weighty--argue strongly in favour of the
pre-Patrician mission (Cfr. Prof. Kuno Meyer, "Learning Ireland in the
Fifth Century"). Discussing the way in which letters first reached our
distant island of the west and the causes which led to the proficiency
of sixth-century Ireland in classical learning Zimmer and Meyer contend
that the seeds of that literary culture, which flourished in Ireland of
the sixth century, had been sown therein in the first and second decades
of the preceding century by Gaulish scholars who had fled from their own
country owing to invasion of the latter by Goths and other barbarians.
The fact that these scholars, who were mostly Christians, sought asylum
in Irela