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Ireland Éire
Map of Ireland
Flag Coat of Arms
Anthem: Amhrán na bhFiann The Soldier's Song
Patron Saint(s): Saint Patrick
Location of Ireland on the European continent
Capital	Dublin
Official languages	Irish, English
Demonym	Irish
Government
- Type	Republic and Parliamentary democracy
- President	Mary McAleese
- Taoiseach	Brian Cowen, TD
- Tánaiste	Mary Coughlan, TD
Independence	from the United Kingdom
Declared	April 24, 191624 April 1916 21 Nisan 5676 He 21 Abib 5919 AM
Ratified	January 21, 191921 January 1919 20 Shevat 5679 He 19 Shevat 5922 AM
Recognized	December 6, 19226 December 1922 16 Kislev 5683 He 16 Kislev 5926 AM
Current constitution	December 29, 193729 December 1937 25 Teveth 5698 He 26 Teveth 5941 AM
Accession to EU	January 1, 19731 January 1973 27 Teveth 5733 He 26 Teveth 5976 AM
Area
- Total	84,412 km²84,412,000 dunams 32,591.655 mi² (120th)
- Water	2.00 %2 %
Population
- 20082008 5768 He 6011 AM estimate	4,422,100
- 20062006 5766 He 6009 AM census	4,239,848 (121st)
- Density	60.3 km⁻²156.176 mi⁻² (139th)
GDP (PPP)	20072007 5767 He 6010 AM estimate
- Total	$188,372,000,000 (50th)
- Per capita	$43,413 (7th)
GDP (nominal)	20072007 5767 He 6010 AM estimate
- Total	$261,247,000,000 (32nd)
- Per capita	$60,208 (5th)
Currency	Euro (€) (EUR)
Time zone	WET (UTC+0)
- Summer (DST)	WEST (UTC+1)
Internet TLD	.ie
Calling code	+353
[1][2]

Ireland (Irish: Éire) or the Republic of Ireland (Irish: Poblacht na hÉireann) is a state which covers approximately five-sixths of the island of Ireland, off the coast of northwest Europe. The remaining sixth of the island of Ireland is known as Northern Ireland and is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The country's official constitutional name is Éire or, in the English language, Ireland. The capital city of Ireland is Dublin.

Contents 1 Geography 1.1 Provinces and Counties 2 History 2.1 Early History 2.2 Early Christian Ireland 2.3 The Viking Era 2.4 The Norman Era 2.5 The Gaelic Resurgence 2.6 The Tudor Re-Conquest of Ireland 2.7 Colonial Ireland 2.8 Age of Penal Laws 2.9 Union with Great Britain 2.10 The Great Irish Famine 2.11 War of Independence 2.12 The Republic of Ireland 3 Demographics 3.1 Religion 3.2 Language 3.3 People 4 Timeline 5 See Also 6 References 7 External Links

Geography

The island of Ireland is located in northwest Europe in the north Atlantic Ocean, west of Great Britain. It is approximately 53° north of the equator and 8° west of the Greenwich meridian. The island's total area is 84,412 km² (32,591 square miles).^[3] Ireland is separated from Britain by the Irish Sea. The Celtic Sea, to south of Ireland, separates it from mainland Europe.

A ring of coastal mountains surrounds low central plains. The highest peak is Carrauntoohil (Irish: Corrán Tuathail) located in County Kerry, which is 1,038 m (3,406 feet) tall. The River Shannon, which runs from North-East to South-West, is the longest river in Ireland, at 386 km (240 miles) long.^[4] Other major rivers include the Liffey, which flows through the center of Dublin, the Slaney, which enters the sea at Wexford, and the Lagan, which flows into Belfast Lough. There are a large number of lakes or loughs, of which Lough Neagh is the largest. Other large lakes include Lough Erne and Lough Corrib.

Ireland has a relatively mild temperate maritime climate. Typically, summers in Ireland consist of warm, sunny weather with occasional light rain. Winter weather is typically cloudy and rainy with the occasional sunny spell.^[5] Snow is rare, but precipitation can occur at any time of the year, with up to 275 days with rain in some parts of the country. Ireland's lush vegetation, a product of its mild climate and frequent but soft rainfall, earns it the nickname "The Emerald Isle."

The major cities on the island are the capital city of Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath) on the east coast, Cork (Corcaigh) in the south, Galway (Gaillimh) and Limerick (Luimneach) on the west coast, Waterford (Port Láirge) in the south east, and Belfast (Béal Feirste), Armagh (Ard Mhacha), and Derry (Doire) in the north.

Provinces and Counties

Ireland has historically been divided into four provinces: Munster (Mumhan), Leinster (Laighin), Connacht (Connachta), and Ulster (Ulaidh). Originally, however, there was a fifth province: Meath (Mídhe) which has since been incorporated into Leinster. During the Tudor period, these were further subdivided into 32 counties for administrative purposes. 26 of these counties comprise the Republic of Ireland while the remaining 6 comprise Northern Ireland.

Munster County Clare County Cork County Kerry County Limerick County Tipperary County Waterford Leinster County Carlow County Dublin County Kildare County Kilkenny County Laois County Longford County Louth County Meath County Offaly County Westmeath County Wexford County Wicklow

Connacht County Galway County Leitrim County Mayo County Roscommon County Sligo Ulster Republic of Ireland County Cavan County Donegal County Monaghan Northern Ireland County Antrim County Armagh County Down County Fermanagh County Derry County Tyrone

History

Early History

During the era known as the Ice Age, about 3800 years ago, most of Ireland was covered with ice. The Ice Age lasted from 2300-1800 BC. Sea-levels were lower then, and Ireland, as with its neighbor Britain, instead of being islands, were part of a greater continental Europe. The first inhabitants arrived some time after 1800 BC. Agriculture arrived around the same time, roughly 2250-2150 BC, when sheep, goats, cattle and cereals were imported from southwest continental Europe. At the Céide Fields in County Mayo, an extensive Neolithic field system - arguably the oldest in the world - has been preserved beneath a covering of peat. Consisting of small fields separated from one another by dry-stone walls, the Céide Fields were farmed for several centuries between 2250 and 2150 BC. Wheat and barley were the principal crops cultivated.

The Bronze Age, which began around 1600 BC, saw the production of elaborate gold as well as bronze ornaments, weapons and tools. The Iron Age in Ireland was supposedly associated with people known as Celts. The ancestors of the Irish people are the Milesians, the sons of Míl Espáine, also known as the Gaels. They were Goidelic-speaking Celts who came from the area of Galicia in northwest Spain and sailed to Ireland around 504 BC.^[6] They soon conquered and colonized the island and exterminated the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were the previous inhabitants, dividing it into five kingdoms. All of the previous settlers were Bythronic-speaking Celts (similar to those that also settled in Britain and central Europe) from the North West European coastal regions from the Netherlands to Armorica (Brittany, France) over a period of 1000 years.

Various Irish traditions declare that Míl Espáine was a descendant of Zerah, a son of Judah.^[7] According to The Harmsworth Encyclopedia, Cecrops (identified as Calcol of 1 Chronicles 2:6 and Chalcol of 1 Kings 4:31 – son of Zerah and brother of Dara) was the 'mythical' founder of Athens and its first king. He is thought to be the leader of a band of Hebrew colonists from Egypt around 1700 BC.

Historical records tell of the westward migration of the descendants of Calcol along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, establishing "Iberian" (Hebrew) trading settlements. One settlement now called "Saragossa," in the Ebro Valley in Spain, was originally known as “Zara-gassa,” meaning "The stronghold of Zerah."^[8] From Spain they continued westward as far as Ireland. The Iberians gave their name to Ireland, calling the island "Iberne" which was later abbreviated to "Erne", and subsequently Latinized to "Hibernia".

The Romans referred to Ireland as Hibernia and later as Scotia. In 100 AD, Ptolemy recorded Ireland's geography and tribes. Native accounts are confined to Irish poetry, myth, and archeology. The exact relationship between Rome and the tribes of Hibernia is unclear; the only references are a few Roman writings.

In medieval times, the Ard Rí (High King) reigned over the (then five) provinces of Ireland. These provinces too had their own kings, who were subject to the monarch, who resided at Tara in County Meath. The written judicial system was the Brehon Law, and it was administered by professional learned jurists who were known as the Brehons.

Early Christian Ireland

According to early medieval chronicles, in 431, Bishop Palladius arrived in Ireland on a mission from Pope Celestine I to minister to the “Irish who believe in Christ”^[9], suggesting that there were already Christians living in Ireland. Perhaps the most famous missionary to Ireland was the patron saint of the island, Saint Patrick. Patrick was a Romano-Briton or a Brythonic Celt who, at the age of 16, was kidnapped from Britain by Irish raiders and was taken to Ireland to work as a slave. After 6 years, he escaped and returned to Britain. Afterwards, he traveled to Gaul where he studied, was ordained as a Catholic priest in 417 AD, and spent 15 years in the church of Auxerre. Upon the death of Bishop Palladius, in 432 AD, Patrick was ordained a bishop and began his mission to Ireland, later arriving on the island and, in the years that followed, worked to convert the Irish to Christianity. Eventually, the Druid tradition collapsed in the face of the spread of the new faith and virtually the entire island became Christian.

Irish scholars excelled in the study of Latin learning and Christian theology in the monasteries that flourished, preserving Latin learning during the Dark Ages. By the second half of the 6th Century, scholarship had become inextricably intertwined with religion, and schools of higher learning invariably were adjuncts of monasteries. The significant scholars all were monks, who revered knowledge and perceived Christian doctrine as the most important component of human knowledge.

Not all art and literature involved religious themes, but much of it did. Thus in the monastery schools, religious art, such as the Ardagh Chalice and the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts, flourished alongside secular artistic achievements, such as the Tara Brooch and the great Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley").

During the 6th and 7th centuries, Irish monastery-schools were among the most prominent centers of scholarship in the western world. Students from all over Europe flocked to them, furnishing a dramatic contrast to the low level of scholarship in Europe during the Dark Ages. Irish monasteries also dispatched scholar-missionaries to the rest of Europe. Saint Columba (521-97), the dominant scholar and poet of his era, founded a monastery on Iona, a small Gaelic-controlled island off the coast of Scotland, where he spent the last 40 years of his life educating the Scots and converting them to Christianity. Saint Columbanus (540-615) founded dozens of monasteries (with adjunct schools) on the Continent, including his most celebrated institutions at Luxeuil in France and Bobbio in Italy. By the 9th Century, Irish scholars were among the most celebrated in the western world. The towering intellect among them was Johannes Scotus Eriugena, a native Irishman who traveled to France in 845 AD to became the preeminent scholar in the Court of Charlemagne, and the chief professor at the Palace school of the Emperor Charles the Bald.

The Viking Era

Although Ireland flourished during the European Dark Ages this golden age was interrupted in the 9th century by 200 years of intermittent warfare with waves of Viking raiders who plundered monasteries and towns. The first recorded Viking raid in Ireland occurred in 795 when Norwegian Vikings looted the island of Lambay, off the east coast of Ireland near modern Dublin. They returned for a further monastery raid in 802 and came again in 806, killing 68 unarmed monks. By the early 800s, the Vikings were plundering the mainland of Ireland itself on a regular basis.

By 841, Vikings, lead by Ivar Beinlaus and Olaf the White, had established small but well fortified settlements at a site near what is now Dublin. Shortly thereafter Dublin was declared to be a separate state, and was later developed into a walled city. The Vikings began their most ambitious expansion in 914 when they captured Waterford and built a fortress there, then reimposed Viking sovereignty on Dublin. The Vikings also founded many other towns such as Cork, Limerick, and Wexford.

In 1002, Brian Boru (Brian mac Cennétig or Brian Bóruma in Irish), an Irish king from the province of Munster, became the undisputed Ard Rí (High King) of all Gaelic Ireland. Brian had a deep-seated hatred of the Vikings for the murder of his brother, Mathgamain, in 976. Brian avenged his brother's death by killing the Norse King of Limerick, Ímar, the same year. As a young man, he along with other native Irishmen, had fought against the Vikings in an effort to drive them out of Ireland. Boru and his allies eventually defeated the Viking army at the Battle of Clontarf on April 23, 1014, expelling the Vikings from Ireland. However, after the battle Bróðir of Man, a Danish Viking, and a few other Norsemen who had fled the battle earlier, stumbled upon King Brian praying in his tent. Bróðir easily overpowered and beheaded the 74 year old king but could not escape Brian's servants who quickly captured and executed him by tying him to a tree with his own intestines.^[10] Upon Brian's death the High Kingship passed to Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill who reigned until his death in 1022, as Brian's eligible sons had been killed during the battle.

The Norman Era

In 1166, Diarmuid MacMurrough, the king of Leinster, was deposed and exiled from Ireland by the new High King, Rory O'Connor (Ruaidrí Ó Conchobhair in Irish). In an effort to retake his kingdom, MacMurrough fled to Normandy, France and met with Henry II, the Norman king of England, where he sought and acquired the King's permission to use Henry's subjects to regain his throne. In 1167, MacMurrough attained the services of the Norman lords in Wales, such as Maurice Fitz Gerald, Rhys ap Gruffydd, and more famously, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, more commonly known as Strongbow.

The actual invasion of Ireland occurred on May 1, 1169 when a mercenary invasion force, about 600 in number, landed at Bannow Bay in Wexford from Norman-occupied Wales. MacMurrough and several hundred of his men promptly joined the Normans, and together they marched on Waterford. A year later they captured Dublin from the Viking inhabitants, and within the following eighty years, they expanded in all directions, until they held about 75% of the island. In the Irish language, they were known as the gaill, meaning "foreigners".

In 1172, King Henry II of England gained Irish lands, and from the 13th century, English law began to be introduced. English rule was largely limited to the area around Dublin known as "The Pale" initially, but this began to expand in the 16th century with the final collapse of the Gaelic social and political superstructure at the end of the 17th century due to manipulation by the British government.

The Gaelic Resurgence

Beginning in mid-1250s, there began a Gaelic Resurgence and a Norman retreat that reversed and overwhelmed Norman advances due mainly to the fact that the Normans never settled in Ireland in sufficient numbers to fully implement and protect their military conquest, demonstrated by the Norman army's defeat at the Battle of Callann to the Gaelic Irish, under the MacCarthys of Kerry in 1261. By the mid-1400s, the Irish lords had taken back over half of their lost territory, so that Norman-held land, once 75% of the island, was reduced to about 35% and the Normans had adopted the Irish language, dress and culture, becoming so assimilated that they were described as "more Irish than the Irish themselves" (Níos Gaelaí ná na Gaeil iad féin in Irish).^[11] By the end of the 15th century, central English authority in Ireland had all but disappeared.

The Tudor Re-Conquest of Ireland

The Reformation, in which Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church (1536), fundamentally changed Ireland. While Henry VIII broke English Catholicism from Rome, his son Edward VI moved further, breaking with Catholicism completely. While the English, the Welsh and the Scots accepted Protestantism, the Irish remained Catholic, a fact which determined their relationship with the British state for the next 400 years.

Henry VIII had himself declared King of Ireland in 1541 and Ireland had been upgraded from a Lordship to a full kingdom under Henry. From the period of the original lordship in the 12th century onwards, Ireland had retained its own bicameral Parliament of a House of Commons and House of Lords, though it was restricted for most of its existence in terms both of membership (Catholics were barred) and powers, notably by Poynings Law of 1494, which said that no Bill could be introduced into the Irish Parliament without the approval of the English Privy Council.

Henry died in 1547 and was succeeded by his son Edward VI, who reigned from 1547-1553 and was followed by his half-sister, Mary I (reigned from 1553-1558), the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Mary remained a Catholic and officially restored the Catholic religion, but during her short 5 year reign, she was hostile to Ireland for reasons other than religion, and in fact imposed England's first plantation on Ireland. Mary was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth I who reigned for 43 years (1558-1603), and proved to be the most brutal of all English monarchs in crushing other challenges to the authoritarian power of the Crown.

When disputes over land and religion hastened the Desmond Rebellions of 1569-1573 and 1579-1583, Elizabeth's generals suppressed it with their scorched earth policy and once the native Irish were driven off their land, the province of Munster was "planted" with loyalist English subjects.

In 1594, Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone and his ally, Hugh Roe O'Donnell, led the native Irish of Ulster in a rebellion against the English government in Ireland. This event became known as the Nine Years' War, as it took place from 1594 to 1603. Though the war was fought in all parts of Ireland, the fighting began, and was primarily in, Ulster where O'Neill achieved a series of successes, including a stunning victory over England's Earl of Essex at Yellow Ford in 1598. In 1600, Essex was replaced by a better soldier, Lord Mountjoy, whose first initiative was to inflict a severe scorched earth policy on the Ulster countryside. The Irish received aid from Spain, an enemy of England, in 1602 including money, ammunition, and a Spanish force of 4,000 troops under Don Juan del Águila. The combined Irish and Spanish forces engaged Mountjoy at the Battle of Kinsale (1602). O'Neill and Águila had 9,000 troops against Mountjoy's 6,300 men, but Mountjoy's well trained army won the battle.

Though the Battle of Kinsale had effectively ended the war, O'Neill held out for another 15 months and four years later, on September 14, 1607, with the remaining Gaelic leadership, secretly boarded a ship at Lough Swilly and sailed for the Continent. This event became known as the Flight of the Earls.

Colonial Ireland

The Battle of Kinsale, along with the Flight of the Earls, marked the end of the old Gaelic order, and established England as conqueror of Ireland. What followed next (the 17th Century "Plantations") were perhaps the most important development in Irish history since arrival of the Celts, for they divided Ireland into two hostile fractions.

In the early 17th century, Scottish and English Protestants were sent as colonists to the north of Ireland and the counties of Laois and Offaly. A series of Penal Laws discriminated against all Christian faiths other than the established (Protestant) Church of Ireland. The principal victims of these laws were Roman Catholicism and (to a lesser extent) Presbyterianism.

A new rebellion soon began in 1641 (known as the Rebellion of 1641) when the Irish Catholics fought against the English Protestant domination of Ireland. The Catholic majority briefly ruled the country as Confederate Ireland from 1642 to 1651. The rebels mounted a seven year insurgency which, if all had gone smoothly, might have led to a permanent accommodation with a divided England. In fact, however, the principal effect of the rebellion was to trigger the English Civil War, in which the king and parliament finally went to war with each other. Parliament's army, led by Oliver Cromwell (a Puritan member of Parliament) defeated Charles in a two phase war. Following a trial, Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and the monarchy was abolished.

Cromwell and his Puritans spelled disaster for all Catholics in Ireland and elsewhere in the British Isles. The Puritans were virulently anti-Catholic, and England's traditional tolerance for Catholics quickly disappeared, with Catholics now considered enemies of England. In 1649, Cromwell brought his army to Ireland and crushed the rebellion with a savagery that has become legendary. After town of Drogheda had surrendered, Cromwell's troops massacred 3,500 residents, including unarmed women and children and the remainder of the town were shipped into slavery in Barbados. On October 11, 1649, he perpetrated a similar massacre at Wexford where over 2000 were slain. Cromwell regarded the massacres as appropriate retribution for the deaths of the Ulster Protestants in 1641. It was during the Cromwellian era (1649-1660) that anti-Catholic animus reached its highest level in Irish history.

Ireland played a crucial role in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, when the Catholic James II was deposed by Parliament and replaced with William of Orange. James and William fought for the English, Scottish and Irish thrones in a series of battles in Ireland, most famously the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Age of Penal Laws

During the Age of Penal Laws, also known as the "Protestant Ascendancy", Ireland was filled with social unrest due to a repressive society in which a small Anglican minority (10% of the population) used its ownership of land and its control of government to deny power, influence and civil rights to Catholics (75% of the population) and to a lesser degree to Presbyterians (15% of the population).

Almost immediately after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, ending the Jacobite War in Ireland, Anglicans took decisive action to further strengthen their dominant position. Notwithstanding the Treaty, the Irish and English Parliaments, both exclusively dominated by Anglicans, enacted a series of Penal Laws which created a three tier, Anglican controlled society in which Catholics would be totally excluded from property and power, and Presbyterians would remain subordinate to Anglicans.

Among the discriminations now faced by victims of the Penal Laws were:^[12]

• Exclusion of Catholics from membership in either the Parliament of Ireland or the Parliament of Great Britain
• Exclusion of Catholics from other public offices (since 1607), Presbyterians were also barred from public office from 1707
• Catholics where barred from holding firearms or serving in the armed forces
• Presbyterian marriages were not legally recognized by the state
• Disenfranchising Act of 1728 - prohibiting Catholics from voting
• Exclusion of Catholics from legal professions and the judiciary
• Education Act of 1695 - Prohibition of children receiving a Catholic education and being educated abroad^[13]
• In families, property rights could be gained by conversion to the Church of Ireland;
• Popery Act - Catholic inheritances forced to be equally subdivided between all an owner's sons
• Prohibition on Catholics owning a horse, valued at over £5 (in order to keep horses suitable for military activity out of the majority's hands)
• Ban on converting from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism
• Illegal to be a Roman Catholic bishop, vicar, or friar on pain of death
• Ban on Catholic holidays
• When allowed, Catholic Churches only allowed be built from wood, not stone

The late 18th century saw the beginning of the repeal of the Penal Laws with the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1793. However, the long drawn-out pace of reform ensured that the question of religious discrimination dominated Irish politics and was a constant source of division.

Union with Great Britain

In 1800, the Parliament of Great Britain and the Irish Parliament passed the Act of Union which, in 1801, abolished the Irish legislature, and merged the Kingdom of Ireland and the Kingdom of Great Britain to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Part of the agreement which led to the Act of Union stipulated that the Penal Laws then in force, which discriminated against Roman Catholics, would be repealed and Catholic Emancipation granted. However King George III blocked emancipation, arguing that to grant it would break his coronation oath to defend the Anglican church. A campaign under lawyer and politician Daniel O'Connell led to the conceding of Catholic emancipation in 1829, thus allowing Catholics to sit in parliament. O'Connell then mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union and the restoration of Irish self-government.

The Great Irish Famine

From 1845 to 1852^[14] the country suffered a very large famine, often referred to as "The Great Irish Famine" or "The Potato Famine". It is known as An Gorta Mór, meaning "The Great Hunger" in the Irish language.

In actuality, it was not a genuine "famine" at all, because only the potato crop was affected, while the vast majority of farmland was planted to other crops which were grown in sufficient quantities to feed the populace. The disaster resulted from the fungus called phytophthora infestans, also known as potato blight, that totally ravaged the potato crop 1846 to 1852, and the indifference of the British government.

During the famine years, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. Indeed, up to 75% of the soil was devoted to wheat, oats, barley and other crops which were grown for export, and which were actually exported, all while the populace starved.

The problem was that about half the population, all wretchedly poor, worked on farms not for cash wages, but for the right to grow potatoes on tiny plots. They lived on a subsistence diet consisting almost exclusively of potatoes and milk, with a herring once or twice a year. When the potato crop failed, these peasants had neither food for their families, nor money to buy other food. Initially, only the poor died, victims of starvation. Then as typically happens in conditions of starvation, epidemics of typhus and cholera broke out, felling the affluent along with the poor. In total, about 1,000,000 people died.

Prior to the famine, the population of Ireland was 8.5 million. Afterwards, the population was only 6.5 million, a decline of two million (23.5%) in eight years.^[15] About half of the decline was due to death by starvation or some associated disease (cholera, typhus) which became fatal in the conditions of malnutrition. Britain's economic policy meant that millions were starving, spurring emigration waves to Britain, North America and Australia. Even after the famine, emigration continued, as newly arrived Irish in the United States urged family and friends to follow them. By 1881, the Irish population had declined to 5 million; by 1921 (partition), to slightly over 4 million.

Another significant change caused by this disaster was that prior to the famine Irish Gaelic was the principal language among Catholics. Afterwards, English became the predominant language, largely because death and emigration hit hardest in the poorest areas where Irish Gaelic was most common; the Counties of Kerry and Mayo, for example, lost half their populations.

Over time there grew a movement to shake off British rule, and for Ireland to become independent. On July 29, 1848, an unsuccessful nationalist revolt against British rule, known as the "Young Irelander Rebellion", in Ballingarry, County Tipperary was put down by a government police force. A decade later, in 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), also known as the Fenians, was founded as a secret society dedicated to armed rebellion against the British. An aboveground political counterpart, the Home Rule Movement, was created in 1874, advocating constitutional change for independence.

Galvanized by the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, the party was able to force the British government to introduce several home rule bills after 1885. The turn of the century witnessed a surge of interest in Irish nationalism, including the founding of Sinn Féin ("Ourselves Alone") in 1905 as an open political movement.

War of Independence

An attempt was made to gain independence for Ireland with the Easter Rising of 1916, led by Pádraig Pearse and James Connolly. Hostilities began on Easter Monday April 24, 1916 when about 2,000 men led by Pearse seized control of the Dublin post office and other strategic points within the city.^[16]

Soon after these successful events, the Irish rebel leaders proclaimed the independence of Ireland and announced the establishment of a provisional government of the Irish Republic. Additional positions were occupied by the rebels during the night, and by the morning of April 25 they controlled a considerable part of Dublin. On Tuesday April 25, British forces began their counteroffensive with the arrival of reinforcements. Martial law was proclaimed throughout Ireland. Intense street fighting developed in Dublin, during which the strengthened British forces steadily dislodged the Irish from their positions.

By the morning of April 29, the post office building, site of the rebel headquarters, was under violent attack. Recognizing the futility of further resistance, Pearse surrendered unconditionally in the afternoon of April 29. On May 3, fifteen of rebel leaders, including Pearse and Connolly, were sentenced to death and executed by firing squad by orders of the British government.

The decision by the British-imposed court structure to execute the leaders of the rebellion, coupled with the British Government's threat of conscription, alienated public opinion and produced massive support for nationalist political party Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election. Sinn Féin won a landslide victory, taking almost every seat in Parliament outside of Ulster. Sinn Féin’s candidates again refused to take their seats in the British Parliament but, instead they declared Ireland an independent republic and established their own congress in Dublin, called the Dáil Éireann, meaning "Assembly of Ireland" in the Irish language.

The Irish War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War began January 21, 1919, on precisely the same day as the first meeting of the Dáil Éireann, when a group of Irish Volunteers attacked and killed two officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), an armed British police force, in County Tipperary. The British administration outlawed the Dáil and deployed the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, commonly known as the "Black and Tans". For several years the Irish Republican Army (IRA), under the direction of Michael Collins, engaged in guerrilla warfare against the British army.

By early 1921, more than 700 people had been killed in the conflict, of which almost 75% were RIC or Black and Tans.^[17] Southwestern Ireland was under martial law, and it became clear to the British government that the revolution in Ireland could not be suppressed militarily without considerable loss of life. On July 11, 1921 a truce was called between Ireland and Britain, following peace talks between British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Éamon de Valera, President of the Irish Republic. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in London on December 6, 1921 and was ratified by the Dáil Éireann on January 7, 1922.

The Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 brought the end of the war and established the Irish Free State, or Éire, consisting of the 23 southern counties in Munster, Leinster, and Connacht and three counties in Ulster (Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal). The treaty also recognized the partition of the island into Ireland and Northern Ireland, though supposedly as a temporary measure: the remaining six predominantly Protestant counties in Ulster (Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh, and Tyrone) became Northern Ireland and remained part of the United Kingdom with limited self-government.

A significant Irish minority repudiated the treaty settlement because of the continuance of subordinate ties to the British monarch and the partition of the island. This opposition led to further hostilities, the Irish Civil War (June 28, 1922 – May 24, 1923), which was won by the Pro-Treaty Forces.

In 1932, Éamon de Valera, who had been the nominal leader of the Anti-Treaty fraction and who had discarded Sinn Féin in 1926 to found his own political party, Fianna Fáil, became Prime Minister, known as the President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State. He re-wrote the 1922 Irish Free State constitution before introducing his own, new Irish Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937, with a new name, Éire replacing the Irish Free State in the text. Ireland was nominally neutral in World War II, through behind the scenes it worked closely with the Allies; the date of the Normandy landings was decided on the basis of transatlantic weather reports supplied by the Irish.

The Republic of Ireland

On Easter Monday, April 18, 1949, the anniversary of the Easter Rebellion, the Irish Free State (Éire) declared itself the Republic of Ireland, completely independent of the British crown and no longer a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. In May the British Parliament recognized Ireland’s status as a republic but declared that the six counties of Northern Ireland would not be severed from the United Kingdom without the assent of the parliament in Northern Ireland.

The transition from the Irish Free State to the Republic of Ireland was of chiefly symbolic significance, marking the achievement of a goal sought by Irish nationalists for generations. The United Kingdom allowed Ireland to retain the economic benefits of Commonwealth membership, and it extended to Irish citizens living in the United Kingdom the same rights as British citizens. Ireland granted British citizens residing in the Republic similar benefits. Nevertheless, the continued partition of Ireland strained the republic’s relations with the United Kingdom. As a protest against partition, the republic declined to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), since this would have entailed entering into a military alliance with the United Kingdom.

In the Republic’s first national election in 1951, Éamon de Valera returned as the Prime Minister. De Valera’s willingness to accept an independent country that did not include the six counties of Northern Ireland provoked renewed protests from the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During the 1950s the IRA organized armed raids and ambushes along the border of Northern Ireland. De Valera was forced to take repressive action against the IRA while simultaneously protesting the continuation of partition.

More pressing than the question of partition, however, were the social and economic problems that beset the republic. Particularly serious was the constant loss of young people, who continued to leave the country by the tens of thousands annually in search of greater opportunities in the United Kingdom and the United States. In an effort to assist the agricultural population, and to stem the flow of farm workers to the cities and foreign countries, the de Valera government began an ambitious program of rural electrification and promoted new measures to stimulate local industry.

Ireland joined the United Nations in 1955 and the European Economic Community (now called the European Union) in 1973. Irish governments have sought the peaceful unification of Ireland and have cooperated with the United Kingdom against the violent conflict between paramilitary groups and the British Army in Northern Ireland known as "The Troubles". A peace settlement for Northern Ireland, known as the Belfast Agreement, was approved in 1998 in a vote in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and is currently being implemented.

Demographics

Religion

In the Republic of Ireland over 87.4% of the population is Roman Catholic, with the Anglican Church of Ireland representing the largest religious minority at 2.9%. Various other Christian denominations make up 1.9% while other non-Christian religions account for 2.1% of the population. 1.5% identified as unspecified while 4.2% identified with no religion. In Northern Ireland about 53.1% of the population is Protestant (21.1% Presbyterian, 15.5% Church of Ireland, 3.6% Methodist, 6.1% Other Christian) whilst a large minority are Catholic at approximately 43.8% of the population. 0.4% identified with non-Christian religions and 2.7% identified with no religion.

Language

The official languages of the Republic of Ireland are Irish (Irish Gaelic or Gaeilge), the native Celtic language, and English, which is constitutionally described as a secondary official language. Native-speakers of the Irish language living in Irish-speaking communities, known as the Gaeltacht, are limited to between 20,000 to 70,000 in isolated pockets largely in the counties of Kerry, Cork, Galway, Mayo, and Donegal.^[18] However, there are 355,000 fluent or native speakers of the language altogether.^[19] Learning Irish is a compulsory part of the school curriculum with a relatively small (though growing) number of schools teaching all subjects in Irish. However, English is the predominant language today. Public signs are usually bilingual and there are both a national Irish language TV (TG4) and radio channel (Raidió na Gaeltachta).

Other languages spoken on the island include Ulster Scots and Shelta. Ulster Scots, also known as Scots-Irish, is a dialect of Scots, a Germanic language, spoken in Northern Ireland and is closely related to English, and quite different from Scots Gaelic, which is a Celtic language related to Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic. It is primarily spoken by the descendants of Scottish settlers in Northern Ireland. The Shelta language is spoken by anywhere between 6,000 and 25,000 people, predominantly members of the Irish Traveller community, but has no official status.

People

The Irish people are mainly of Celtic origin, descending from the Gaels, also known as the Milesians, who arrived in Ireland from Spain around 504 BC. The country's only significant native minority descends from the Cambro-Normans who invaded the country in 1169 AD and to a lesser extent, Viking raiders who settled in Ireland during the 9th century.

Surnames of Gaelic origin often contain O or Mc (occasionally Mac) at the beginning of the anglicized versions of their surname. The O originates from the Gaelic Ó, meaning "grandson of" or "descendant of" a named person. Common surnames that begin with an O' include: Ó Conchobhair (O'Connor), Ó Néill (O'Neill), Ó Briain (O'Brien), and Ó Maille (O'Malley). Surnames that begin with a Mc or Mac, mean "son of" a named person. Surnames such as these include: Mac Dómhnaill (MacDonnell), Mac Diarmada (MacDermott), Mac Cárthaigh (MacCarthy), and Mac Mathúna (MacMahon, MacMahony). It is common for Irish surnames to have been anglicized, meaning that they were changed to sound more English. This usually occurred with Irish immigrants arriving in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It is estimated that there are 80,000,000 people of Irish descent worldwide.

Timeline

• 2250 BC: Arrival of first men in Ireland across land-bridge from Scotland.
• 2150 BC: Arrival of men who built Newgrange.
• 504 BC: Arrival of Gaels in Ireland.
• 150 AD: Ptolemy draws map of Ireland.
• 367 AD: Irish, Picts, and Saxons attacked Roman controlled Britannia.
• 431 AD: Bishop Palladius sent by the pope to Ireland to minister to Christians there.
• 432 AD: Saint Patrick arrives to help convert pagan Gaelic Kings to Christianity.
• 455 AD: Saint Patrick founds church at Armagh.
• 795 AD: Arrival of first Norsemen or Vikings (sometimes called 'Danes') on Lambay island off Dublin coast.
• 1002: Brian Boru becomes High King and unites all of Gaelic Ireland.
• 1014: High King Brian Boru killed after victory over Norsemen and their Irish allies at battle of Clontarf.
• 1169–1175: Norman invasion of Ireland.
• 1224: Dominican order enters Ireland.
• 1315: Scots attack Ireland.
• 1348-1351: Black death kills a third of population.
• 1539: Irish monasteries dissolved.
• 1541: Henry VIII of England declared King of Ireland.
• 1592: Trinity College of Dublin established.
• 1607: Flight of O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone and O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell ('The Flight of the Earls').
• 1649: Catholics rebel over land rights. Oliver Cromwell, England's Protestant Lord Protector, led a punitive expedition into Ireland. The massacre was bloody, brutal and most destructive.
• 1650: The few remaining Catholic landowners are all relocated to western Ireland.
• 1688: James II, deposed Catholic King of England, flees to Ireland and gathers an army, starting the Jacobite Wars in Ireland.
• 1704: Enactment of penal laws debarring Catholics from Parliament, holding government office, entering the legal profession, holding commissions in the army and navy, among other things. Catholic Clergy illegal in Ireland since 1697.
• 1778: Only 5% of Irish land held by Catholics even though in number of inhabitants, they were in the clear majority.
• 1790: Protestant Barrister supportive of the Catholic cause comes on the scene – Wolfe Tone. Organizes groups to resist English governance in Ireland and the discrimination against Catholics.
• 1798: Rebellion – United Irishmen, a group organized by Wolfe Tone, rebel. Rebellion is, however, a failure and Wolfe Tone is captured and executed.
• 1800: By the Act of Union, Ireland becomes a part of the United Kingdom.
• 1829: Act of Catholic Emancipation thanks to Daniel O’Connell.
• 1845-1852: Great Potato Famine causes great hardship, thousands of deaths, and forces mass-immigration to the United States.
• 1867: Thousands of Irish-Americans return home to fight for Irish Republican Brotherhood.
• 1916: Nationalists stage Easter Rising, proclaiming an independent Irish Republic. All of their leaders executed by the British.
• 1919: Nationalists, led by Éamon de Valera, establishes Dublin assembly. Guerrilla war begins between British forces and the Irish Republican Army.
• 1920: British parliament passes the Government of Ireland Act establishing one parliament for the six counties of Northern Ireland, and another for the rest of Ireland.
• 1921: Anglo-Irish treaty signed. Northern Ireland partitioned off to remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• 1922: The Dublin parliament accepts the treaty despite Nationalist opposition. Subsequently civil war breaks out and hundreds are killed
• 1932: Éamon de Valera heads the Irish Free State government.
• 1937: Voters approve a new constitution, abolishing the Irish Free State, and proclaiming Ireland (Éire) as a sovereign, independent, democratic state, free from British control.
• 1949: On Easter Monday, Éire becomes Republic of Ireland, and totally independent from Britain.
• 1972: Bloody Sunday, as British troops shoot and kill 13 demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland.
• 1973: Ireland becomes a member of the European Union.
• 1999: Irish punt note replaced by Euro.
• 2005: IRA announces an end to armed campaign.

See Also

• Roman Catholicism

References

External Links

• General
  • Catholic Encyclopedia - Ireland
  • Encyclopædia Britannica Online – Ireland's country page
• Country profiles
  • BBC News - Ireland
  • CIA Factbook - Ireland
  • CIA World Leaders - Ireland
  • The Economist - Ireland
  • U.S. Department of State - Ireland
• Intelligent Design and Creation
  • Daylight Origins Society
  • Creation.ie
  • In Six Days
• Government
  • The President of Ireland – Official site of the President of Ireland
  • Taoiseach – Official prime ministerial site
  • Houses of the Oireachtas – Official Parliamentary site
  • The Irish Government – Official governmental site
• History
  • Irish History on the Web
  • Events in Irish History
  • The Irish Holocaust

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