It was absolutely needed at that point. Ireland was prone to kidnapping people from Wales & Scotland and selling them into slavery. Dublin was the largest slave trading port in the world at this point.

Yeah guys c'mon what are we Vikings?

That’s what happened to Saint Patrick.

Raiding, yeah.

I'm not going to justify it, but if your crops fail you'd rather it was someone else's problem rather than the problem of your kids. If your neighbour doesn't have any food, well, then I'm sure they have something to sell.

Not a justification, it was just a very different time. There were fewer food banks and homeless shelters...

They could’ve at least been efficient and resorted to cannibalism.

At some stage between the neolithic and bronze age this became highly taboo and only ever something you'd accuse your enemies of, kind of like the human sacrifice wickerman thing. Slavery on the other hand was borderline socially acceptable. Slavery is considered abhorrent in our society due to a completely different mentality caused by an almost unthinkably different upbringing.

It's important to understand that every society and culture has some questionable elements, personally I think it's odd a lot of people's take away from this is to stop questioning their own and working ahead of it.

When we think of slavery, we think of commercial, industrialised, chattel slavery.

That's a uniquely modern thing. Slaves back then (even earlier, in Rome) were not workers. Nobody lost their job or livelihood to a slave like how the Americans surrender their jobs to dollar-a-day convicts today. You'd never see a slave at a forge, at a kiln, at the wainwright, working the docks, or sewing clothes. It'd be insulting to everyone to imply a slave was appropriate for any of those roles.

They were wives, they were domestic servants, errand boys, messengers. The only real "job" they were allowed to do was in subsistence agriculture, but everyone in the community did that anyway at harvest and sowing time.

Slaves were another mouth to feed and very few people, but for the richest and most powerful, wanted that.

What?

So you're a yeoman with a bit of land to farm on or a hunter or a fisher for your village one day and the next you're... What? You're definitely not in the same place and same status.

It's all the same, the reason people viewed it differently isn't because slavery was worse but because bronze age people didn't view those of other tribes as really anything like them, like animals. This is likely due to isolation and lower amounts of contact between tribes and people, they had tin trade but this was hardly globalisation. Even then, in each city state they'd probably maintain this tribalism right into the iron age. Consider how long it took people who could forge steel to treat everyone equally.

Honestly, at some stage you really do have to say the ancients were just a little primitive. I'm sorry, I know that's a history no no, but this is a slavery conversation. This time you're dealing with it.

Who did you mean to reply to?

You've accidentally replied to me. Who was the Redditor saying slavery wasn't the lowest of castes? It definitely wasn't me, and I'd like to see the best in people so I think you just replied to the wrong person.

Americans are really into downplaying slavery to make their version more significant...

That proposal sounds quite modest.

I'm British.

Funny how Dublin was supposedly the largest slave trading port in the world, when it wouldn't exist until 200 years after this treaty.

Chattel slavery was outlawed in Ireland until the arrival of the Vikings who established Dublin and used it as a slave port. The vast majority of people being sold by the Vikings were Irish.

"Ireland" wasn't prone to doing anything at that time, individual Tuath may have been, or the aforementioned Vikings.

While Viking settlement was indeed established in the 9th century, there's evidence of settlements in that area going back to the Mesolithic. Ptolemy wrote of a city in that spot in 140CE.

You are absolutely right that Dublin didn't become a major slaving port until Viking controlled Dublin.

Yes, there was a settlement near where Dublin sits now, called Áth Cliath, which is where Dublin gets its name in Irish today from (Baile Átha Cliath), but Dublin, which was further inland, was established in the 9th century.

The word Gael, as in Gaelic, i.e. Irish, comes from a Welsh word for "Raider".