The Entire History of Ireland

Most people can point out the island of Ireland on a map, but far fewer can explain why it is divided into two nations. The Republic of Ireland covers most of the island, while the north-east portion forms Northern Ireland, one of the four nations of the United Kingdom. This division, and the 310-mile border between them, is the relatively recent result of the Partition of Ireland, which took place just over a century ago, but the root causes of which have been many hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the making. For much of its history, Ireland has been shaped by invasions, wars, migration and division, the scars of which are still visible across the island to this day. But how did these events come to divide Ireland in the first place? And what spurred the efforts in more recent times to set these differences aside and move towards a period of peace and unity? This is the history of Ireland. Long before recorded history, humans inhabited the island of Ireland. Although they left some cultural legacy in the form of megalithic stone tombs, little is known about these first people who came to call Ireland home. Instead, it was the Iron Age Celts who would leave the deepest cultural imprint upon the landscape when they arrived around the mid-first millennium BC, bringing with them the Celtic language and the way of life that had spread across much of Europe. Over time, the Celts in Ireland formed their own distinct version of language and culture, giving rise to Gaelic, which had come to dominate the island by the turn of the millennium. Gaelic Ireland was divided into numerous small kingdoms or clans, each ruled by local chieftains who occasionally acknowledged a high king over the entire island. Gaelic society was made up of a patchwork of such territories, where warfare among rival clans was common. Laws were maintained by oral tradition, and a cast of poets and storytellers preserved history and myth, which worshipped a polytheistic Celtic religion and was guided by druids. Life in Ireland continued largely undisturbed in much the same way during the early centuries AD. It even managed to evade the clutches of the Roman Empire. However, when the latter began to decline in the late 4th century, it left behind a residual influence that remains visible in Ireland to this very day. Across the Irish Sea, some within the former Roman territory of Britannia continued to practice Christianity. By the late 4th and early 5th centuries AD, Christianity had begun to make inroads into Ireland, spread by a mixture of missionaries and slaves captured by Irish raiders. Figures such as St. Patrick began to convert the Irish from Celtic paganism to Christianity, and within two centuries, the island was predominantly Christian. The new faith not only introduced a new concept of Monasteries quickly sprang up across Ireland, with educated monks beginning to record the island's historic oral traditions, as well as writing religious scripture. By the 6th century, the Irish church had become a beacon of learning in Europe, with the monasteries themselves producing magnificent illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells, which blended Christian themes with intricate Celtic art. The Gaelic monks and monasteries of early medieval Ireland helped to preserve classical knowledge through art, literature and law, with some even travelling abroad to assist in the re-Christianisation of post-Roman Europe, which was in the midst of sinking into the Dark Ages. Nevertheless, Ireland's monastic riches soon began to draw the attention of overseas raiders, who wanted to seize this wealth for themselves. Beginning around the year 795, Vikings from Scandinavia began attacking coastal monasteries and settlements across Britain and Ireland, taking vast amounts of treasure and slaves in the process. These early raids soon developed into deeper incursions, and in the 9th and 10th centuries, the Vikings established permanent bases and trading ports, which became Ireland's first true towns. Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick were all founded by the Vikings during this time, quickly transforming the physical and economic landscape of the island. Norse rulers carved out their own petty kingdoms, which connected Ireland to the Viking trade routes that stretched across Europe and beyond to North Africa, the Middle East and North America. Dublin in particular grew extensively in size and wealth during this period, profiting immensely from its position as the largest Viking slave market in Western Europe. Yet the Vikings never conquered Ireland's interior. The Gaelic chiefs and high kings retained control of most territory, and over time, some of the Scandinavian settlers assimilated amongst them, becoming known as Norse-Gaels, who adopted the Irish language and culture, as well as intermarrying locally. The towns founded by the Vikings, however, remained in the hands of the Norsemen, and were subject to frequent attacks by the Irish, who wished to expel foreigners from their land. After many years of intermittent fighting, in 1014, the Irish High King, Brian Boru, won a famed victory at the Battle of Clontarf against a Norse-Irish alliance, after which point the power of the Vikings in Ireland began to wane. In the subsequent decades, a period of economic growth descended across Ireland, with its coastal towns remaining centres of trade and commerce. Yet despite the breaking of Norse power, the country remained politically fragmented, but it was only by the time of the 12th century that this disunity was exploited and used to introduce another power dynamic that would become an enduring and contentious aspect of Ireland's history. In 1169, Anglo-Norman knights from Britain landed in Ireland upon the invitation of a local king, Dermot McMurrah, who was seeking military aid to settle a dynastic feud. These Normans, led by Richard the Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, seized large parts of Leinster in the process. However, their success alarmed King Henry II of England, who feared that these Norman lords were establishing their own independent kingdom outside his authority. Consequently, in 1171, Henry himself landed with an English army and nominally brought part of the country under English rule, later declaring his son, Prince John, as the first Lord of Ireland. Over the following decades, Norman barons continued to spread across the eastern and parts of the country, building castles and carving out lordships for themselves. Their conquest, however, was never fully completed. Although the Normans dominated the area around Dublin, known as the Pale, as well as some other enclaves, the Gaelic chiefs retained control of the majority of the island's territory, particularly in the north and west. With the passage of time, the Norman power base gradually began to recede. Isolated from England and surrounded by a predominantly Gaelic population, many Norman lords assimilated, just as the Vikings had done before them, adopting the Irish language, customs, and even marrying into Gaelic families. In 1367, the English crown passed the Statutes of Kilkenny to prevent intermarriage and the use of the Irish language by the settlers, hoping to keep them English. These measures ultimately had limited effect, and by the 15th century, English royal authority in Ireland had shrunk to the area of the Pale, while the rest of the island experienced a Gaelic resurgence. Native Irish dynasties like the O'Neills in Ulster and the O'Briens in Tomand reasserted themselves, and even the old Norman earls operated as autonomous, Gaelic-style lords. With the dawn of the 16th century, the English crown, under the Tudor dynasty, renewed its determination to control Ireland, this time far more aggressively. The Tudor conquest began at the outset of the 1530s, with one of the main catalysts being the Protestant Reformation. King Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church was exported to Ireland, but Irish elites, both Gaelic and Norman, fiercely resisted abandoning Catholicism. In 1541, Henry VIII took the title King of Ireland for himself, replacing the centuries-old lordship with a fully separate kingdom, though still subservient to the English crown. Tudor officials steadily extended English law and governance across Ireland, offering Gaelic chieftains English titles and legal security if they pledged loyalty. Most, however, turned this offer down and put up a fierce resistance. In Munster, the Fitzgerald lords rebelled on two occasions against encroaching English authority, but their defeat led to the plantation of Munster, with their lands being confiscated to settle Protestant English colonists. Farther north, the most decisive conflict came towards the end of the 16th century, when Hugh O'Neill, the powerful Gaelic Earl of Tyrone, initiated the Nine Years' War against English rule, by rallying many Irish lords in a final great attempt to preserve Gaelic Ireland. O'Neill won major victories, and even secured Catholic Spain, but it would ultimately be in vain, for in 1601, the English forces crushed the Irish and their Spanish allies at the Battle of Kinsale. O'Neill surrendered two years later, and soon afterwards, he and other Ulster lords went into exile in Europe, an event known to history as the Flight of the Earls in 1607. Subsequently, the English crown claimed authority over the entire island of Ireland and brought about the collapse of the old Gaelic order. With Ireland subdued, the early 17th century brought a massive project of colonisation, forever changing the island's demographics and land ownership. The crown, now under King James I, launched the Plantation of Ulster in 1609, confiscating huge swathes of land and redistributing it to Protestant settlers from Britain, especially Scottish Presbyterians and English Anglicans. Towns were rebuilt and renamed in English, with Derry rechristened as Londonderry to honour its London investors. By 1640, some 30,000 British colonists had been planted in Ulster alone, turning it into a patchwork of English and Scottish landholdings amid the remaining Irish. Similar, though smaller, plantations had taken place earlier in Leinster and Munster, as well as later in Connacht, installing a loyal Protestant land-owning class, but also sowing deep resentment among the native Catholic Irish. These simmering tensions finally exploded in the year 1641, when, amidst the wider political fallout of the English Civil War, Ireland's Catholics rebelled to reclaim their land and resist anti-Catholic policies. The 1641 Irish Rebellion began in Ulster with attacks on Protestant settlers, and the violence quickly spiralled into a broader sectarian conflict across the entire island. By 1649, the English Civil War had concluded with a parliamentary victory, and the Puritan commander Oliver Cromwell turned his attention and army to suppress the Catholic uprising across the Irish Sea. In a notorious campaign lasting four years, his forces reconquered the country with merciless efficiency, with towns such as Drogheda and Wexford being massacred. The war ended with catastrophic results for the remaining Irish Catholic landowners, as vast estates were confiscated and distributed to Cromwell's soldiers and supporters. So much so, that by the 1650s, Irish Catholics, who had once owned most of the land, now held only around 10% of it. Further upheaval followed in the latter part of the 17th century, after the monarchy was restored in 1660, and then a Catholic king, James II, came to power in 1685. After being overthrown just three years later, James attempted to use Ireland as a base to regain his throne, with many Irish Catholics rising in support and seizing much of the country. They were, however, ultimately defeated by the army of the Protestant William of Orange, who had recently become King William III of England at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the Battle of Ockham in 1691. In the aftermath, a harsh regime of penal laws were introduced, which stripped Ireland's Catholic majority of their basic rights, meaning they could no longer serve in parliament, vote, hold public office, own firearms, or even inherit land. By 1700, the country was dominated by an Anglican Protestant minority, otherwise known as the descendancy, which owned the great country estates and controlled the government. The dispossessed Irish Catholics, over three quarters of the population, were relegated to tenant farming, and the Gaelic-Irish culture, now intertwined with the persecuted Catholic religion, survived mostly among the rural poor. Throughout the 18th century, political power resided with the minority Anglican elite, concentrated in the Irish Parliament in Dublin. Still, the 1700s were a relatively stable period, compared to the wartime horrors that had defined much of the previous century. Although Ireland experienced some economic growth, rural poverty persisted, and resentment simmered among disenfranchised groups. In the latter decades of the century, the winds of change began to blow across Ireland. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions, some Protestants began to recognize the need for reform, and in 1782, led by politician Henry Grattan, the Irish Parliament won a measure of legislative independence from Britain. Meanwhile, a revolutionary Republican movement had begun to grow among both Protestant Presbyterians in Ulster, and Catholics elsewhere within the country. In 1791, radicals in Belfast formed the Society of United Irishmen, aiming to unite all Irish people, across religions, for democratic reform, and move towards independence. Their efforts culminated in the Rebellion of 1798, with the United Irishmen, led by Theobald Wulftone, launching an uprising against British rule and seeking to establish an Irish Republic. The rebellion was brutally suppressed by British forces. Tens of thousands died in the fighting, that raged particularly around Wexford and Ulster. Wulftone was captured and died in prison, becoming a martyr for Irish nationalism. The failure of 1798 nevertheless convinced the British government that the Irish Parliament was unreliable, and that Ireland must be directly ruled by Britain to prevent any future rebellions. The solution came in the form of the Act of Union. Made effective on the 1st of January 1801, the Kingdom of Ireland was abolished and merged with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Parliament in Dublin ceased to exist, with Irish politicians relocating to the British Parliament at Westminster instead. Although seen by some as the loss of the last measure of autonomy, the next century would show that the Union did not dampen Irish aspirations for self-government. In 1829, Irish lawyer and politician Daniel O'Connell achieved Catholic emancipation, forcing the British to allow Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold public office, after decades of the odious penal laws were finally repealed. However, much of the progress of the early 19th century would be severely undone by an event that struck the entire Ireland in the 1840s – the Great Famine. Ireland's population had swelled above 8 million people in the years leading up to the outbreak, with most being landless labourers and tenant farmers, who were deeply dependent upon the humble potato as their staple food. In 1845, a fungal blight struck the potato crop, causing repeated harvest failures over the next several years, which led to catastrophic famine. The response of the British government was slow, and failed to prevent what little food there was in Ireland from being exported, even as the poor starved. Between 1845 and 1849, approximately 1 million Irish people died from starvation or famine-induced disease, with another million fleeing the country as refugees. By the time the famine ended, around 1850, the Ireland's population had plummeted by a quarter or more. The Great Famine effectively broke apart the remaining old Gaelic-speaking society among Ireland's lower classes, with survivors emigrating by the hundreds of thousands in the following decades, mostly to the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain. But the grief and anger over the British mishandling of the event only deepened the desire for Irish self-governance in the years that followed. A political movement for Home Rule, which entailed Ireland being governed by the Irish but still remaining within the United Kingdom, gathered momentum in the 1880s and 1890s, but ultimately failed to gain enough support to pass as law in the British Parliament. It was not until 1914 that the Home Rule Act was finally passed, granting Ireland a measure of autonomy, although this was suspended immediately following the outbreak of the First World War. Despite the political tensions between Ireland and Great Britain at the time, over 200,000 Irish served in the British forces during the war, the vast majority being volunteers. However, in April 1916, a secret revolutionary group used the backdrop of the ongoing war to launch a dramatic bid for outright Irish independence. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, led an insurrection in Dublin, became known as the Easter Rising, with around 1,600 Irish volunteers seizing key locations across the capital and proclaiming an Irish Republic. After a week of intense fighting against vastly superior British forces, the Rising was crushed and much of central Dublin lay in ruins. Initially, many Irish people had not supported the risky rebellion, but Britain's decision to execute the ringleaders, namely Patrick Pearce, James Connolly and others, swung public sympathy towards the rebel's cause, and ignited popular support for full Irish independence. With the conclusion of the First World War in 1918, the British government held an election in December of that year, with Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Party, winning a landslide victory across most of Ireland. After reaffirming Ireland's declaration of independence, the Irish Republican Army, IRA, was formed, and began guerrilla warfare against the British authorities. The ensuing Irish War of Independence pitted the IRA's hit-and-run tactics against the Royal Irish Constabulary and British forces, with violence spreading through ambushes, reprisals and assassinations. By 1921, with international pressure mounting and the combatants exhausted, a truce was called. Negotiations in London produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December of that year, which ended the war. But at a cost. Ireland was to be partitioned. Under the treaty, the bulk of the island, consisting of 26 counties, left the United Kingdom to become the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of the British Commonwealth, similar to Canada or Australia. However, the six north-eastern counties of Ulster, which had a Protestant Unionist majority, opted to remain as part of the United Kingdom, thus forming Northern Ireland. The partition of Ireland fundamentally redrew the political map of the island, but also created many more problems for an already deeply divided people. Northern Ireland's sizeable Catholic minority felt abandoned by the treaty, while in the Free State, the treaty's terms, especially the continued oath of allegiance to the British Crown, bitterly divided Irish Republicans. This led to the Irish Civil War breaking out in 1922, between pro-treaty forces, led by Michael Collins, and anti-treaty forces, led by Eamon de Valera. The Civil War was ruthless and fratricidal. Ultimately, the pro-treaty National Army prevailed, and the Irish Free State emerged intact, though Michael Collins himself was assassinated during the conflict. After the hostilities had ceased in 1923, Ireland remained separated into two jurisdictions. In the south, the Irish Free State began the work of nation building after centuries of colonial rule. Though nominally a dominion of the British Commonwealth, it enjoyed full internal self government, and over the next decade, under leaders such as W.T. Cosgrave, and later Eamon de Valera, the Free State took steps to reduce remaining ties to Britain. In 1937, the Irish constitution renamed the country simply as Ireland, and removed any mention of the British monarch, effectively asserting de facto republic status. The state would formally declare itself as the Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, the early decades were characterised by one-party unionist rule, and systemic discrimination against the Catholic minority. Northern Ireland's Protestant leaders saw themselves as loyal Britons, and enforced policies to maintain control. Catholics often faced barriers in voting, acquiring housing, and employment. Although Northern Ireland experienced some sectarian tensions in the early years, by the 1960s, inspired by global civil rights movements, Northern Ireland's Catholics began organising for equal rights. These small protests, however, were met with hostility and heavy-handed crackdowns by the predominantly Protestant police, leading to riots, and the beginning of the period known as the Troubles. What followed was three decades of turmoil in Northern Ireland, as long-simmering sectarian tensions boiled over. In 1969, street violence between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists prompted the British government to deploy the British Army to Northern Ireland to restore order. However, many Catholic communities saw the army as heavy-handed occupiers, especially after incidents like Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British paratroopers killed 13 unarmed protesters in Derry. By the early 1970s, the situation had escalated into a low-level war, with the Provisional IRA on one side, claiming to fight for Northern Ireland's reunification with the Republic, and on the other, loyalist paramilitaries, such as the UVF and UDA, who were determined to defend the union with Britain, alongside the British state's forces of the army and police. Civilians often found themselves caught in the crossfire of bombings, assassinations, and riots, with no corner of Northern Ireland being untouched by the violence. Even mainland Britain and the Republic experienced sporadic IRA attacks – such was the scale and indiscriminatory nature of the hostilities. It was only after years of war weariness that diplomatic efforts finally began to open new roads to resolve the troubles. The IRA, under pressure and after secret negotiations, declared a ceasefire in 1994, which was matched by the loyalist paramilitaries. Multi-party peace talks followed, chaired by international mediators, which ultimately resulted in the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. This affirmed that Northern Ireland's status would remain British until a majority there chose otherwise, but also acknowledged the Irishness of the Catholic minority by creating cross-border institutions with the Republic, and allowing people in Northern Ireland to hold Irish citizenship, British citizenship, or both. Crucially, it set up a power-sharing government in Belfast, where unionist and nationalist parties would jointly govern, ensuring representation for both communities. As the 21st century began, the scars of conflict remained, but the watershed moment of the Good Friday Agreement allowed for a new period of Irish history to begin. Northern Ireland benefited most from the peace, seeing increased investment and tourism in what were once highly dangerous cities such as Belfast and Derry. For the Republic of Ireland, peace coincided with a period of rapid economic growth. From the mid-1990s into the 2000s, Ireland's economy expanded at an astounding rate, transitioning from one of Western Europe's poorest countries to one of its richest. Today, Ireland stands transformed from the poor, colonised and famine-ravaged land of its past. Although it remains divided into two separate states, the cooperation and cohesion of the last few decades have undoubtedly brought the two closer together, raising the possibility, which has long remained elusive throughout its history, that perhaps one day there may be a united Ireland of Ireland.