.@rtenews (who have produced ads with tax payer funds absurdly claiming to be the official and only source of truth) is repeating local folklore as fact here because it suits their pro Islamic narrative. RTÉ explicitly wrote that the alliance roots trace back to when the Sultan "sent food ships up the Boyne River to Drogheda". This is folklore, not fact. There is no evidence in Ottoman or Irish shipping archives that secret food ships ever arrived. Furthermore, RTÉ implied a connection between the crests, but Drogheda's star and crescent dates back to 1194, centuries before the 1840s. The only absolute, verified historical fact is the £1,000 cash donation sent by the Sultan to the famine relief fund. The secret ships and the origin of the crest are local myths that RTÉ failed to correct in their piece. One would imagine RTE will never report on the evening news that the Ottoman empire was involved in The Sack of Baltimore. A terrifying and devastating nocturnal raid on June 20, 1631, when over 200 Barbary corsairs attacked the vulnerable fishing village of Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland. Guided by a captured local fisherman named John Hackett, the Algerian and Ottoman pirates abducted between 107 and 237 villagers directly from their beds before dawn. The captives were shipped to Algiers and sold into slavery, where they faced brutal galley labor or domestic servitude, with at most three survivors ever managing to return home. Traumatised by the raid, the remaining inhabitants abandoned the shoreline and fled inland to Skibbereen, leaving Baltimore virtually deserted for generations to come. Imagine the sheer horror of what those people suffered and what they saw. Telling that story on the news wouldn't suit the propaganda agenda.