have you heard of ev enko's law one hundred and fifty years or more of serious history and good old dan's dog is the first to pick this tree from what i understood of it and it's 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 carthy ised and even then i have very serious doubts about the accuracy of the results mc carthy's method may give accurate ad dates but i suspect there are problems take he's content to put domnall midi's 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 wp or so we won't do that we do when it's bede's years because people have discussed it in print but this they haven't 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 carthy's 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 that's good if we can date events in the th century to within or years that's marvellous if it were me i'd go with historian dates i e what byrne charles edwards and the rest say and add mc carthy's corrections in a footnote which is what is done with penda of mercia and other c th anglo saxons where there is a similar but smaller problem we can ask for outside opinions people like talk