Earliest inhabitants
During the last Ice Age, when most of the country was covered by an icecap, low sea levels meant that Ireland was attached to Britain, and Britain to the European continent. As the climate warmed (from about 13,000 BC), and the ice gradually retreated,...
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The Celts
The Celts were an Indo-European group called Keltoi by the Greeks and Galli by the Romans, who spread south from central Europe into Italy and Spain and west through France and Britain. By 500 BC, Celtic language and culture were dominant in...
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The coming of Christianity
The christianization of Ireland began as early as the fourth century AD, well before the arrival of St Patrick (whose existence is now the subject of some controversy). Vestiges did survive of the previous religion of the Celts, but after the...
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Invasion: Vikings and Normans
From 795, Ireland was increasingly plagued by destructive Viking raids , in which many of the great monasteries were plundered and burned (though many more were destroyed as a result of indigenous intertribal warfare in the eighth and ninth...
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The Tudors and the Stuarts
The continued isolation of Irish politics from English and Continental influence during the fifteenth century, and England's preoccupation with the Wars of the Roses, helped Ireland's most powerful Anglo-Norman family - the FitzGeralds of...
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The penal laws to the Act of Union
In 1641, 59 percent of the land in Ireland was owned by Catholics. In 1688, the figure was 22 percent, and by 1703 it was fourteen percent. The Protestant population, about one-tenth of the total, lived in fear of an uprising by the vast majority of...
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Daniel O'Connell
The quest for Catholic emancipation by peaceful constitutional means was the life's work of Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), the lawyer who became known as "The Liberator" and whom Gladstone called "the greatest popular leader the...
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The famine
The failure of the Irish potato crop from 1845 to 1849 plunged the island into appalling famine . Elsewhere in Europe, the blight was a resolvable problem but Irish subsistence farmers were utterly dependent on the crop. No disease affected...
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Parnell and the Home Rule
The second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by a complex interplay of political and economic factors which contributed towards the exacerbation of religious differences. The most important of these was the struggle for land and for the...
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Rebellion and civil war
The British parliament eventually passed the Home Rule Bill of 1912, and for a while the conditions appeared to exist for Ireland to erupt into civil war. Before this could happen, however, the outbreak of World War I dramatically altered the...
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The Irish Free State
With the death of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith during the civil war, the leadership of the Irish Free State fell to William T. Cosgrave, and finally in the summer of 1923 the new government began to reconstruct Ireland as an independent nation. A...
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The Republic
It took the Republic (which finally came into being in 1949) twenty years to recover from the economic stagnation brought on by the war. Vast numbers of people, disproportionately drawn from among the young and talented, moved across to fill Britain's...
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Northern Ireland from 1921
On June 22, 1921, the new political entity of Northern Ireland came into existence with the opening of the Northern Irish Parliament in Belfast's City Hall. In order to understand the present situation in the North it is necessary to grasp the...
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