Have you heard of evenkos law One hundred and fifty years or more of serious history and good old Dans dog is the first to pick this tree  From what I understood of it and its rather over my head Mc Carthy has a point However it would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater to adopt his dates before anyone else does It means that every date in a book needs to be Mc Carthyised  And even then I have very serious doubts about the accuracy of the results Mc Carthys method may give accurate AD dates but I suspect there are problems Take  Hes content to put Domnall Midis death in that year just as the historians are but why does AD  start with an event dated to  November Fair enough that could just be a glitch from the compilation but it could also be that whatever the source was its years did not start on  January or March  but instead on  September Adding that to an article would be WPOR so we wont do that  we do when its Bedes years because people have discussed it in print but this they havent  but we can take it into consideration here when deciding what to do  The Chronicle of Ireland was compiled from lots of sources and it would be a reasonable bet that even if most or nearly all of them started the year on  January some would have done so on  December some on  September and some on  March Even if Mc Carthys system is perfect you can only be entirely confident about the year if the event falls between  March and  August If we can date events to within a year either way thats good if we can date events in the th century to within  or  years thats marvellous If it were me Id go with historian dates ie what Byrne CharlesEdwards and the rest say and add Mc Carthys corrections in a footnote which is what is done with Penda of Mercia and other Cth AngloSaxons where there is a similar but smaller problem We can ask for outside opinions people like    for a start if you think its worth doing