Ireland

From Gaelic kingdoms and a monastic golden age to partition, the Republic and a place at the heart of Europe.

Ireland's history runs from the Celtic Gaelic kingdoms and the coming of Christianity to a long entanglement with its larger neighbour and, finally, the winning of independence. Christianised in the fifth century and traditionally associated with St Patrick, the island became a celebrated centre of monastic learning while much of Europe was in turmoil. Viking raiders founded its first towns, including Dublin, before the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 began centuries of English involvement that hardened into conquest, the plantations, Cromwellian land confiscation and the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. The Act of Union of 1801 bound Ireland to Great Britain just as the catastrophe of the Great Famine of 1845-1852 killed about a million people and drove a million more abroad. A nationalist revival, the 1916 Easter Rising and the War of Independence produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which created the Irish Free State but partitioned the island, leaving Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The state declared itself a republic in 1949, joined the European Economic Community in 1973, and after the boom years of the Celtic Tiger and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement settled its long quarrel over the North by the principle of consent.