Who are the Irish ... really? IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT IRELAND journeys 6,000 years to separate fact from fiction. The program will provoke surprise among some viewers as they discover little-known facts, including: the Irish people may not even be Celtic; St. Patrick was a minor missionary who had very little impact on the nation's conversion to Christianity; scholarly monks in the seventh century re-invented Ireland's heroic, mythical past- the stories we know today- in order to convert its pagan peoples; Ireland actually benefited from the Viking invasion. IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT IRELAND spans the centuries, from the Stone Age world of mound-building farmers whose gods ruled the forces of nature to the 12th-century Norman invasion, when Ireland first came under English rule.