IrelandÉire

Farmers reached Ireland about 4000 BC and built monuments on a grand scale. Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth in the Boyne valley were raised around 3200 BC; at Newgrange the rising sun of the winter solstice shines down a passage into the central chamber. Thousands of smaller tombs, dolmens and stone circles are scattered across the countryside, often in farmers' fields.

By the Iron Age a Celtic language and culture had spread through the island, organised into many small kingdoms under a shifting hierarchy of over-kings. Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire. Brehon law, the old legal system, lasted into the 17th century, and ring forts, stone forts such as Dún Aonghasa and crannógs (lake dwellings) mark its landscape.

Christianity arrived in the 5th century, traditionally with St Patrick. Monasteries rather than bishops became the centres of the church and of learning: Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, Kells and the remote cells of Skellig Michael. Irish monks such as Columba and Columbanus founded houses in Scotland, England and the continent, and their scribes produced the Book of Kells around 800.

Viking raids began in 795. The Norse later settled and founded Ireland's first towns — Dublin in 841, then Wexford, Waterford and Limerick — trading and intermarrying with the Irish. The round towers seen at monastic sites were built in this period as bell towers and refuges.

Anglo-Norman knights landed in 1169 at the invitation of a deposed Leinster king, and in 1171 Henry II of England claimed lordship of Ireland. The Normans built castles and towns across the east and south but largely merged with Irish society; for centuries English rule was secure only in the Pale around Dublin.

The Tudors changed that. After the Reformation, English rule became Protestant while most Irish stayed Catholic. The defeat of the northern Gaelic lords at Kinsale in 1601 opened the way to the Plantation of Ulster from 1609. Cromwell's campaign of 1649–53 and William III's victory at the Boyne in 1690 confirmed a Protestant landowning ascendancy; Penal Laws restricted Catholics' rights to land, office and education.

Ireland was merged into the United Kingdom in 1801. The population grew to over 8 million, many of them poor tenants dependent on the potato. When blight struck from 1845, the Great Famine killed about a million people and drove another million abroad; emigration continued for a century, and the population of the island has still not recovered its pre-Famine level.

The Famine shaped Irish memory and the Irish diaspora in the US, Britain, Canada and Australia. After it came the Land War, reforms that turned tenants into owners, the campaign for Home Rule led by Charles Stewart Parnell, and a cultural revival of the Irish language, sport and literature.

Home Rule was passed in 1914 but suspended for the First World War, and Ulster unionists armed to resist it. On Easter Monday 1916 a small force of Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized the General Post Office in Dublin and proclaimed a republic. The Rising was crushed in a week, but the execution of its leaders at Kilmainham turned public opinion.

Sinn Féin won most Irish seats in the 1918 election, set up its own parliament, the Dáil, and fought the War of Independence of 1919–21. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 created the Irish Free State as a dominion in the British Commonwealth, while six north-eastern counties remained in the UK as Northern Ireland.

The Treaty split the independence movement, and a short, bitter civil war followed in 1922–23; its divisions still underlie the two main parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Éamon de Valera's 1937 constitution renamed the state Éire (Ireland), and it stayed neutral in the Second World War.

Ireland declared itself a republic in 1949 and left the Commonwealth. For decades it was poor, rural, conservative and deeply Catholic, with high emigration. Joining the EEC in 1973 alongside the UK began a slow opening that turned into rapid change in the 1990s.

Northern Ireland was designed to have a Protestant, unionist majority. Catholics faced discrimination in housing, jobs and electoral boundaries, and a civil rights movement in 1968 met a violent response. By 1969 British troops were on the streets, and the paramilitary IRA, loyalist groups and the security forces fought a conflict that lasted three decades.

About 3,500 people were killed in the Troubles, in Northern Ireland, in Britain and in the Republic. Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, the hunger strikes of 1981 and bombings in Belfast, Omagh, London and Dublin are milestones that people on the island still remember.

Ceasefires in the mid-1990s led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, approved by referendums north and south. The Republic dropped its constitutional claim to the North, power-sharing government was set up in Belfast, and the border was demilitarised. A future referendum on unity remains possible if a majority appears to want one.

For travellers from the Republic, the border today is only a change of currency, speed-limit units and road signs. Belfast's murals, peace walls and Titanic Quarter, and Derry's walls and Bogside, are visited by tour and by black taxi. The UK's rules apply in the North: most non-Irish, non-British visitors need a UK ETA.

Ireland's literature is out of all proportion to its size: Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney, with four Nobel prizes in literature among them. Dublin is a UNESCO City of Literature; walking tours follow Joyce's Ulysses on Bloomsday, 16 June, and the Abbey Theatre, founded in 1904, remains the national stage.

Traditional music survived as a living practice. Sessions of fiddle, flute, tin whistle, uilleann pipes, accordion and bodhrán happen in pubs in Doolin, Ennis, Galway, Dingle and Dublin, often informally. Sean-nós singing and dancing, céilí dances and the Fleadh Cheoil, the largest festival of traditional music, carry the tradition on; U2, Sinéad O'Connor and the Pogues took Irish sounds into rock.

Irish (Gaeilge) is a Celtic language related to Scottish Gaelic and Manx. It declined sharply after the Famine as English became the language of schools, trade and emigration. It is now the first official language and a working language of the EU; every child studies it, road signs are bilingual, and Gaeltacht areas in the west keep it as a community tongue.

Sport is part of the culture. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded in 1884, runs hurling and Gaelic football as amateur, county-based games, and the All-Ireland finals at Croke Park fill 82,000 seats. Rugby is played as one all-island team, while football has separate teams north and south.

From the mid-1990s the 'Celtic Tiger' boom, driven by low corporate taxes, EU funds, education and US investment, turned Ireland from a poor emigrant nation into one of Europe's richest. The 2008 crash hit hard — a property bust, a bank bailout and an EU-IMF programme — but the economy recovered quickly, and Dublin now hosts the European headquarters of many large tech and pharmaceutical companies.

Society changed just as fast. Church scandals over clerical abuse and the Magdalene laundries weakened the Catholic Church's authority. Voters legalised divorce in 1995, same-sex marriage in 2015 by referendum — the first country to do so by popular vote — and abortion in 2018. Immigration turned Ireland into a diverse country, with about a fifth of residents born abroad.

Housing is the defining problem: rents and house prices, especially in Dublin, are among the highest in Europe, and tourists feel it in hotel prices. Brexit left Ireland as the only English-speaking EU member with a land border with the UK; the open border and the Common Travel Area survived, but trade and politics with Britain became more complicated.

Politically, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, long rivals from the civil war, have governed together since 2020, while Sinn Féin has grown into a major party on both sides of the border. The debate about a future united Ireland has moved from the fringes into the mainstream, though no referendum has been called.