Season 1 of In Search of Ancient Ireland premiered on June 12, 2002.

Who are the Irish ... really? The program aim to separate fact from fiction as we 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.