Ireland: History

Pre-20th-Century History

The Celts, Iron Age warriors from eastern Europe, reached Ireland around 300 BC. They controlled the country for 1000 years and left a legacy of language and culture that survives today, especially in Galway, Cork, Kerry and Waterford. The Romans never reached Ireland and when the rest of Europe sank into the decline of the Dark Ages after the fall of the empire, the country became an outpost of European civilisation, particularly after the arrival of Christianity between the 3rd and 5th centuries.

During the 8th century Viking raiders began to plunder Ireland's monasteries. The Vikings settled in Ireland in the 9th century and formed alliances with native families and chieftains. They founded Dublin, which in the 10th century was a small Viking kingdom. The English arrived with the Normans in 1169, taking Wexford and Dublin with ease. The English king, Henry II, was recognised by the pope as Lord of Ireland and he took Waterford in 1171, declaring it a royal city. Anglo-Norman lords also set up power bases in Ireland, outside the control of England.

English power was consolidated under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The last thorn in the English side was Ulster, final outpost of the Irish chiefs, in particular Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone. In 1607 O'Neill's ignominious departure, along with 90 other chiefs, left Ulster leaderless and primed for the English policy of colonisation known as 'plantation' - an organised and ambitious expropriation of land and introduction of settlers which sowed the seeds for the division of Ulster still in existence today.

The newcomers did not intermarry or mingle with the impoverished and very angry population of native Irish and Old English Catholics, who rebelled in a bloody conflict in 1641. The native Irish and Old English Catholics supported the royalists in the English Civil War; after the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell - the victorious Protestant parliamentarian - arrived in Ireland to teach his opponents a lesson. He left a trail of death and destruction which has never been forgotten.

In 1695 harsh penal laws were enforced, known as the 'popery code': Catholics were forbidden from buying land, bringing their children up as Catholics, and from entering the forces or the law. All Irish culture, music and education was banned. The religion and culture were kept alive by secret open-air masses and illegal outdoor schools, known as 'hedge schools', but by 1778, Catholics owned barely 5% of the land. Alarmed by the level of unrest at the end of the 18th century, the Protestant gentry traded what remained of their independence for British security, and the 1800 Act of Union united Ireland politically with Britain. The formation of the Catholic Association by the popular leader Daniel O'Connell led to limited Catholic emancipation but further resistance was temporarily halted by the tragedy of the Great Famine (1845-51). The drastic failure of the potato crop during those years - during which Ireland exported other foodstuffs to England - led to mass starvation and set up a pattern of emigration that continued well into the 20th century.

Modern History

The bloody repercussions of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin added impetus to the push for Irish independence and in Britain's 1918 general election the Irish republicans won a large majority of the Irish seats. They declared Ireland independent and formed the first Dail Eireann (Irish assembly or lower house), under the leadership of Eamon de Valera, a surviving hero of the Easter Rising. This provoked the Anglo-Irish war, which lasted from 1919 to the middle of 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 gave independence to 26 Irish counties, and allowed six, largely Protestant Ulster counties the choice of opting out. The Northern Ireland parliament came into being, with James Craig as its first prime minister. The politics of the North became increasingly divided on religious grounds, and discrimination against Catholics was rife in politics, housing, employment and social welfare. The south of Ireland was finally declared a republic in 1948, and left the British Commonwealth in 1949.

Instability in the North began to reveal itself in the 1960s and when a peaceful civil rights march in 1968 was violently broken up by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the troubles were under way. British troops were sent to Derry and Belfast in August 1969; they were initially welcomed by the Catholics, but it soon became clear that they were the tool of the Protestant majority. Peaceful measures had clearly failed and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which had fought the British during the Anglo-Irish war, re-surfaced. The upheaval was punctuated by seemingly endless tit-for-tat killings on both sides, an array of everchanging acronyms, the massacre of civilians by troops, the internment of IRA sympathisers without trial, the death by hunger strike of the imprisoned and the introduction of terrorism to mainland Britain.

Northern Ireland lost its vestige of parliamentary independence and was ruled from London for most of the next 30 years. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 gave the Dublin government an official consultative role in Northern Ireland's affairs for the first time. The jubilantly received ceasefire of 1994 was undermined by further murders, the reoccurrence of terrorism in Britain and the perceived intransigence of the British government in Whitehall. The mood shifted again with the election of Tony Blair in 1997 with a huge Labour majority to support him. The two sides resumed discussions and, in 1998, formulated a peace plan that offered a degree of self-government for Northern Ireland and the formulation of a North-South Council that would ultimately be able to implement all-Ireland policies if agreed to by the governments in Belfast and Dublin. As part of the plan, which was fully endorsed by a referendum, the South gave up its constitutional claim to the North. However, the peace process continued to wobble, with trust remaining the main sticking point.

Recent History

By the late 1990s the Republic's booming economy led it to being monikered the Celtic Tiger. This was mainly thanks to an injection of investment funds from the EU, which helped renovate the country's infrastructure. It's been said that Ireland has skipped straight from an agricultural economy to a post-industrial one, as large computer and telecommunications firms moved in, bringing jobs and investment. The economy did slow down between 2000 and 2003, when unemployment grew and the already high cost of living continued to rise. But the twice re-elected (most recently in May 2007) coalition government led by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern has steered the nation back into the black and Ireland's economy is once more amongst the healthiest in the EU. Economic growth has created challenges such as increased immigration and pressure on Ireland's welfare and transport infrastructure but overall the Celtic Tiger is purring like a kitten once more .

After years of tortuous negotiations, setbacks and mistrust, Northern Ireland seems to have finally reached the end of the 'Troubles'. Following years of equivocating on the issues of de-commissioning its arsenal and renouncing violence, the IRA turned in its guns and ended its armed campaign in mid-2005. Five years of direct rule from London ended when elections for the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly government were successfully held in March 2007. Despite the electorate being drawn away from the moderate Republican and Unionist parties towards the more hard-line policies of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a power-sharing agreement was successfully instituted in May 2007. The sight of long-time adversaries the DUP's Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, standing together at Stormont to be sworn in as first minister and deputy was the most definitive indication yet that peace was at last a possibility in the North.

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