Archaeologists and historians have pieced together a fragmented understanding of ancient Irish culture from the scant remains of its stone structures and metalwork. These clues indicate that Ireland’s first settlers quickly founded an agrarian civilization upon arriving from Britain around 7000 BC. These people created many structures that still loom large in the Irish landscape. Among them are dolmens, tombs and shrines for the dead made of huge stones in table-like forms, some of which were etched with geometric designs. Passage tombs are less common; these underground stone hallways and chambers often contained corpses and cinerary urns (see Newgrange). Stone circles are rings of gravestones that likely marked spots of religious significance.
Bronze poured into Ireland circa 2000 BC, and the agrarian society was retooled into a warrior aristocracy. Starting in 900 BC, the Irish Golden Age brought grander structures: ring forts (see Dún Aengus), protective walls that circled encampments and villages; souterrains, underground hideouts for storing loot and escaping from various marauders; and clochans, mortarless beehive-shaped huts.
Although a few groups of Celts (KELTS) may have arrived as early as 2000 BC, extensive migration didn’t begin until 600 BC. They were first referred to by the Greeks as the Keltoi, translated as “hidden people” or “barbarians” depending on the source—the former referring to their vast but unwritten scholarship and knowledge. The Celts quickly settled down to their new western outpost. Known for their ferocity, the Celts were famous for cutting off their enemies’ heads and nailing them over the doors of their huts. They were free to wreak havoc, as the Romans were too busy conquering Germanic tribes to set their greedy sights on Ireland.
The Celts prospered on the peaceful isle, speaking a hybrid of Celtic and indigenous languages (collectively called Old Irish) and living in small farming communities. Regional chieftains ruled territories called tuath, while provincial kings controlled several tuatha. The Uliad of Ulster, a northern kingdom of chariot warriors, dominated the La Tène culture from their capital near Armagh (see Navan Fort). These kings organized raids on Britain and established settlements in Scotland and Wales; their valor and success inspired tales of mythic heroism recounted in the Táin Bó Cuailnge and other epics.
Starting in the late 4th century AD, a series of missionaries showed Ireland the light, Christian-style. The most important and successful of these was Saint Patrick—for more about his life and miracles
The missionaries and monks who followed St. Patrick recorded observations of the unfamiliar Celtic culture, describing, among other things, the system of writing found on ogham stones. These large obelisks, which recorded lineages in a script of dots and slashes, are still present in the Burren, at the Hill of Tara, and at Brú na Boínne in Co. Meath. Missionaries introduced the Viking-inspired round tower to the architectural lexicon. These structures were built as bell towers to call monks in to prayer but also served as fortifications against invaders. As Christianity spread through Ireland and mixed with indigenous Celtic beliefs, high crosses, or Celtic crosses, sprung up throughout the landscape. These large stone crucifixes, which combine the Christian cross with the Celtic circle, sometimes feature elaborate carvings of Biblical stories or saintly legends. Like stained-glass windows, these often served the purpose of educating illiterate Christians.
In monastic cities Glendalough and Clonmacnois, refugee Catholic monks recorded the old epics and composed long religious poems in both Latin and Old Irish. The monks also created some of Europe’s most beautiful illuminated manuscripts, handwritten books illustrated with paintings and gold leaf. The 7th-century Book of Durrow is the earliest surviving manuscript of this type; it is now exhibited at Trinity College with the early 9th-century Book of Kells.
The Golden Age of Irish Scholasticism (not to be confused with the Irish Golden Age from 900 BC-700 BC) was interrupted by Viking invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries. Their raids were most frequent along the southern coast, where they founded permanent settlements at Limerick, Waterford, and Dublin. The horned ones built Ireland’s first castles, allied themselves with fierce chieftains, and littered the southeast with Norse-derived place names like Smerwick and Fota.
The epic Battle of Clontarf, where the Vikings were trounced near Dublin in 1014, signaled the decline of their control. The island was then divided between chieftains Rory O’Connor and Dermot MacMurrough, who continued to duke it out for the crown. Dermot ill-advisedly sought the assistance of English Norman nobles, and Richard de Clare (a.k.a. Strongbow) was all too willing to help. Strongbow and his Anglo-Normans arrived in 1169 and cut a bloody swath through South Leinster. Strongbow married Dermot’s daughter Aoife after Dermot’s death in 1171 and for a time seemed ready to proclaim an independent Norman kingdom in Ireland. Instead, he affirmed his loyalty to King Henry II and with characteristic generosity offered to govern Leinster on England’s behalf.
Throughout the next few centuries, the English came to Ireland and settled down for a nice, long occupation. The Norman strongholds in Leinster had more towns—including the Pale, a fortified domain around Dublin—and more trade, while Gaelic Connacht and Ulster were agrarian. The two sides displayed a surprisingly unified culture: English and Irish lords built similar castles, ate similar foods, enjoyed the same poets, and hired the same mercenaries. The Crown fretted over this cultural cross-pollination and sponsored the notoriously unsuccessful Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366. These decrees banned English colonists from speaking Gaelic and intermarrying with the Irish, and it forbade the Irish from entering walled cities like Derry.
The English Crown successfully wrested more control. In 1495, Poynings’ Law declared that the Irish Parliament could convene only with English consent and could not pass laws that did not meet with the Crown’s approval. When Henry VIII created the Church of England, the Dublin Parliament passed the 1537 Irish Supremacy Act, declaring Henry head of the Protestant Church of Ireland and effectively making the island property of the Crown. The Church of Ireland held a privileged position over Irish Catholicism, even though the English neither articulated any difference between the two religious outlooks nor attempted to convert the Irish people. The lords of Ireland wished to remain loyal both to Catholicism and to the Crown—a daunting proposition even by 16th-century standards. Bold Thomas FitzGerald sent a missive to Henry VIII stating this position. In response, Henry revoked his aristocratic title. FitzGerald, not easily silenced, sponsored an uprising in Munster in 1579, an early hint to the English that a loyal Ireland could only be achieved under direct Protestant control.
Not to be outdone by FitzGerald, the equally defiant Ulster Earl Hugh O’Neill led a rebellion in the late 1590s. The King of Spain promised naval assistance and his Armada arrived in Kinsale Harbour in 1601 but did little to stop the English army from demolishing Irish forces. Relieved of their power, O’Neill and the rest of the major Gaelic lords bolted from Ireland in 1607 in what came to be known as the Flight of the Earls. Despite their grandiose plans to reappear with assistance from the Catholic rulers on the mainland continent, few ever returned to Ireland. While the world looked on in feigned astonishment, the English took control of Irish land and parceled it out to Protestants.
The English project of dispossessing Catholics of their land and replacing them with Protestants was most successful in Ulster, partially because the Earls had left a power vacuum. In a move known as the Ulster Plantation, Scottish tenants and laborers, themselves displaced by the English, joined the rag-tag mix of adventurers, ne’er-do-wells, and ex-soldiers bent on resettling the North. In 1641, a loose-knit group of Gaelic-Irish chiefs led the now landless Irish in an unsuccessful revolt in Ulster.
After his victory in the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell turned his army to Ireland in 1649. Following standard Cromwellian procedure, the Lord Protector destroyed anything he did not occupy and then some. Catholics were massacred and whole towns razed. Over 25% of Irish land was confiscated and awarded to soldiers and Protestant vagabonds. Native Irish landowners were presented with the option of going “to Hell or to Connacht”—both desolate and infertile, one with a slightly warmer climate. By 1660, the tenant system was in full swing; the vast majority of Irish land was owned, maintained, and policed by Protestant immigrants. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, Restored English King Charles II passed the 1665 Act of Explanation. The poorly enforced Act required Protestants to relinquish one-third of their land to the “innocent papists.” Unsurprisingly, this never happened.
More than thirty years after the English Civil War, political disruption again resulted in Irish bloodshed. In 1688, Catholic James II, driven from England by the Glorious Revolution led by Protestant William of Orange, came to Ireland to gather military support and reclaim his throne. Irish Jacobites and Williamites engaged in civil war. James tried to take Derry in 1689, but a rascally band of Protestant Apprentice Boys closed the gates on him and started the 105-day Siege of Derry. William ended the war and sent his rival into exile on July 12, 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne. Northern Protestants still celebrate the victory on July 12 (called Orange Day in honor of King Billy; for more on “the Marching Season,” see Northern Ireland). Five years later, the British enacted a set of Penal Laws for the purposes of further oppression, banning (among other things) the practice of Catholicism.
In Dublin and the Pale, the bourgeois Anglo-Irish tried to create a second London. This group defined the “Ascendancy,” a social elite whose elitism depended upon Anglicanism. Trinity College, chartered in 1592, was the quintessential institution of Ascended Protestants. Cultural ties notwithstanding, many aristocrats felt little political allegiance to England. Jonathan Swift pamphleteered on behalf of the Protestant Church and the Irish masses. Meanwhile, displaced peasants filled Dublin’s poor areas, creating the horrific slums that led to Swift’s “Modest Proposal” (see Wit and Resistance).
Early 18th-century Catholics practiced their religion furtively, using large, flat rocks (dubbed Mass rocks) when they couldn’t get their hands on an altar.
The Irish were not immune to the bold notions of independence that emerged from the American and French Revolutions. The liberté-fever was particularly strong among the United Irishmen, a group that had begun as a Protestant Ulster debating society with the nerve to challenge English rule. Outlawed in 1794, the United Irishmen reorganized as a more radical secret society. Their leader, a Kildare Protestant named Theobald Wolfe Tone, hoped that a general rebellion would create an independent, non-sectarian Ireland. To this end, he admitted nationalist Catholics among the ranks of the United Irishmen. The bloody Rebellion of 1798 erupted with a furious band of peasants led by priests and ended with their last stand at Vinegar Hill, near Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford. Always looking for an excuse to tussle with the Brits, French troops arrived and managed to hold their ground for about a month before being utterly destroyed. Wolfe Tone committed suicide in captivity, and other United Irishmen escaped to France.
With the 1800 Act of Union, the Crown abolished Irish self-government altogether. The Dublin Parliament died and “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” was born. The Church of Ireland entered into an unequal marriage, changing its name to the “United Church of England and Ireland.”
As the Napoleonic Wars raged in Europe, many feared that Bonaparte would notice the little green island in the Atlantic. Paranoid generals constructed squatty structures along the coast called Martello towers (see Dún Laoghaire) which were never tested by French armies.
Under the terms of Union, Irish representatives held seats in the British Parliament, and thanks to a long awaited set of electoral reforms, Catholic farmers found that they too could go to the polls. With their newfound suffrage they elected Catholic Daniel O’Connell in 1829, forcing Westminster to repeal the remaining anti-Catholic laws that would have barred him from taking his seat. “The Liberator” promptly forced Parliament to allot money for improving Irish living conditions, healthcare, and trade. When unsympathetic Tories took power, O’Connell convened huge rallies in Ireland, showing popular support for repealing the Act of Union.
During the first half of the 19th century, the potato was the wondercrop of the rapidly growing Irish population. Overreliance on potatoes had devastating effects when these tubers fell victim to a fungal disease. During the years of the Great Famine (1847-49), an estimated two to three million people died and another million emigrated to Liverpool, London, Australia, and the US on overcrowded boats called coffin ships because of their low survival rates (see New Ross). British authorities often forcibly traded inedible grain for the few potatoes peasants could find and the Irish, whose diet was supplemented by delicacies like grass, had little choice but to accept. Hungry Catholics converted to Protestantism in exchange for British soup, earning for themselves the disdainful title “soupers.” Ulster, which had a more diversified economy, was not hit nearly as hard by the Famine as the rest of Ireland.
After the Famine, the social structure of the Irish peasantry was completely reorganized. The bottom layer of truly penniless farmers had been eliminated. Eldest sons inherited family farms, while unskilled younger sons often had little choice but to leave the Emerald Isle. Depopulation continued, and emigration became an Irish way of life. Fifty years of land legislation converted Ireland, with the exception of Dublin and industrial northeast Ulster, into a nation of conservative, culturally uniform smallholders.
English injustice fueled the formation of more pugnacious young Nationalist groups. In 1858, crusaders for a violent removal of their oppressors founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a secret society known as the Fenians. Encouraged by a purportedly sympathetic Parliament, agrarian thinkers and republican Fenians created the Land League of the 1870s and pushed for further reforms.
In 1870, Member of Parliament Isaac Butt founded the Irish Home Rule Party. Its several dozen members adopted obstructionist tactics—they made long speeches and introduced amendments in the hopes of keeping the opposing MPs so angry, bored, and impotent that they would have little choice but to grant Ireland autonomy. Charles Stewart Parnell was a charismatic Protestant aristocrat with a hatred for everything English whose major accomplishment was to mobilize the Catholic church in support of Home Rule. Backed by Parnell’s invigorated Irish party, British Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced an ill-fated Home Rule Bill. Though Parnell survived implication in the Phoenix Park murders, allegations were confirmed in 1890 that he was having an extramarital affair and his influence declined.
While politicians, engrossed by the scandal, let their ideals fall by the wayside, civil society waxed ambitious. Following their British and American sisters, the fairer sex established the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation in 1911. Marxist James Connolly led strikes in Belfast, and English-born Dubliner Jim Larkin spearheaded a general strike in 1913. Conservatives, attempting to “kill Home Rule by kindness,” pushed for social reform.
Meanwhile, various groups tried to revive an essential “Gaelic” culture, unpolluted by foreign influence. The Gaelic Athletic Association attempted to replace English with hurling, camogie, and Gaelic football. The Gaelic League spread the use of the Irish language (see The Revival). Culture was not only trendy, but also was a politically viable weapon—the Fenians seized the opportunity to disseminate their ideas and became the movers and shakers in Gaelic organizations. Arthur Griffith began a tiny movement and a little-read newspaper advocating Irish abstention from British politics, both of which went by the name Sinn Féin (SHIN FAYN, “Ourselves Alone”). Reacting to the threat of Home Rule, Northern Protestants joined mass rallies, signed a covenant, and organized the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913. The same year, nationalists led by Eoin MacNeill in Dublin responded by forming the Irish Volunteers; the two paramilitary groups were only kept from civil war by the onset of WWI.
At the outbreak of WWI in 1914, British Prime Minister Henry Asquith passed a Home Rule Bill in return for Irish bodies to fill trenches. A Suspensory Act followed, delaying home rule until peacetime, and putting off the Ulster Unionist issue for another six years in exchange for Ulster’s participation in the war effort. In all, 670,000 Irishmen enlisted to fight the Kaiser.
An 11,000-member armed guard, the remnants of the Irish Volunteers, stayed behind to defend Ireland. They were nominally led by Eoin MacNeill, who knew nothing of the revolt that the Fenians were brewing. If an architect could be ascribed to the ensuing mayhem, it would be poet and schoolteacher Padraig Pearse, who won his co-conspirators over to an ideology of “bloody sacrifice”—the notion that if a few men died martyrs’ deaths, the entire population would eventually join the struggle for independence.
The Volunteers conducted a series of unarmed parades in an effort to convince the Dublin government of their harmlessness. Meanwhile, Fenian leaders were plotting to receive a shipment of German arms for use in a nationwide revolt on Easter Sunday 1916, with the notion that “England’s emergency was Ireland’s opportunity.” The delivery of weapons was unsuccessful, but unsuspecting Fenian leaders continued planning their rebellion. They attempted to coerce MacNeill, who gave orders for Volunteer mobilization on Easter Sunday. The day before the insurrection, he learned that he had been manipulated by a weaponless bunch of brigands. Putting his trust in mass media, he inserted a plea into the Sunday papers asking all Volunteers to forgo the rebellion and stay home.
Although MacNeill and most Fenian leaders had been working toward military success, Pearse’s followers wanted martyrdom. On Sunday, the group met and rescheduled their uprising for the following Monday, April 24. Pearse, James Connolly, and 1600 volunteers seized the General Post Office on O’Connell St., read aloud the Poblacht Na H Éireann (“Proclamation of the Republic of Ireland”), and hunkered down for five days of brawling in the streets of Dublin. As their only tangible accomplishment was massive property damage, the rebels were seen initially as criminals by most Dubliners and were pelted with tomatoes by disapproving women.
The Crown retaliated with swift, vindictive punishments—in May, 15 “ringleaders” received the death sentence. Among the executed were Padraig Pearse, William Pearse (whose primary crime was that he was Padraig Pearse’s brother), and James Connolly, who was shot while tied to a chair because his wounds prevented him from standing. Éamon de Valera was spared when the Crown discovered he was American.
The British, with their hasty martial law, proved Pearse a true prophet—the public grew increasingly anti-British and sympathetic to the rebels. Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol, the site of the executions, became a shrine of martyrdom. The Volunteers reorganized under master spy and Fenian bigwig Michael Collins, and the Sinn Féin party became the political voice of military nationalism. Collins orchestrated the collusion between the Volunteers and Sinn Féin, and Éamon de Valera became the party president. The last straw came when the British tried to introduce a military draft in Ireland in 1918.
Under the guidance of de Valera, Sinn Féin declared independence and formed a parliament named the Dáil (DOY-il). Extremist Irish Volunteers became Sinn Féin’s military wing and started calling themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Thus, the British saw another, though not their last, War for Independence. The Crown reinforced its police with the infamously brutal Black and Tans—ex-soldiers nicknamed after their patched-together uniforms. In 1920, after the six-year grace period was up, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George passed the Government of Ireland Act, which divided the island into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, two partially self-governing areas within the United Kingdom. Pressed by a newly elected Parliament, George conducted hurried negotiations with Collins and produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty, creating a 26-county Irish Free State but recognizing British rule over the northern counties. (For a more in-depth history of Northern Ireland, see A Divided Island.) The treaty imposed on Irish officials an oath of allegiance to the Crown but not to the British government. Resourceful Lloyd George pushed the treaty through with the threat of war on Ireland.
The IRA, Sinn Féin, and the population split on whether to accept the treaty. Collins said yes; de Valera said no. Parliament said yes, and de Valera resigned the presidency. Arthur Griffith said he’d assume the position. The capable Collins government began the business of setting up a nation. A portion of the IRA, led by General Rory O’Connor, opposed the treaty; these nay-sayers occupied the Four Courts in Dublin, took a pro-treaty general hostage, and were attacked by the forces of Collins’s government. Two years of civil war followed; the pro-treaty government won, Griffith died of a heart attack, Collins was assassinated (see Clonakilty), and the dwindling minority of anti-treaty IRA officers went into hiding. Sinn Féin denied the legitimacy of the Free State government and voiced their disapproval by referring to the Republic as “the 26-county state” or “the Dublin Government,” rather than the official “Éire.”
Éire emerged from its civil war having lost its prominent leaders and looking quite a bit worse for the wear. The Anglo-Irish Treaty required a constitution by December 6, 1922. With time running out, W.T. Cosgrave was elected prime minister and passed a hasty preliminary constitution. Under the guidance of Éamon de Valera, the government ended armed resistance by Republican insurgents, executed 77 of them, and imprisoned several more. Cosgrave and his party, Cumann na nGaedheal, (today’s Fine Gael) headed the first stable Free State administration. Then, in 1927, de Valera broke with Sinn Féin and the IRA and founded his own political party, Fianna Fáil (“Soldiers of Destiny”), to oppose the treaty non-violently and participate in government. Fianna Fáil won the 1932 election, and de Valera held power through the next two decades. Fianna Fáil broke up the remaining large landholdings and imposed high tariffs, instigating a trade war with Britain that battered the Irish economy until 1938. Although they were outlawed in 1936, IRA hard-liners continued to trickle out of jails and resumed violence.
In 1937, de Valera proposed and voters approved the permanent Irish Constitution. It declared the state’s name to be Éire and established the country’s bicameral legislature. The more powerful Dáil (DOY-il), or lower house, is composed of 166 seats directly elected in proportional representation. The upper house, or Seanad (SHA-nud), has 60 members chosen by electoral colleges and partially functions to protect minority opinions. The Prime Minister, called the Taoiseach (TEE-shuch), and his deputy the Tánaiste (tah-NESH-tuh) lead a Cabinet. The President is the ceremonial head of state, with a seven-year term.
Ireland stayed neutral during WWII (known as The Emergency), though many Irish citizens identified with the Allies and about 50,000 served in the British army. Éire’s brand of neutrality didn’t exactly hinder the Allies; downed American or British airmen were shipped north to non-neutral Belfast while German pilots were detained in P.O.W. camps.
In 1948, a Fine Gael government under John Costello had the honor of officially proclaiming “the Republic of Ireland” free. The Republic left the British Commonwealth altogether in 1949, finally severing all ties with Britain, who recognized the Republic a year later. The Republic declared that the UK would maintain control over Ulster until the Parliament of Northern Ireland consented to join the Republic.
The last de Valera government (1951-59), and its successor, led by Sean Lemass, boosted the Irish economy by ditching protective tariffs in favor of attracting foreign investment. Instead of the verbal and military skirmishes over constitutional issues that dominated the 1920s, Irish politics became a contest between the ideologically similar Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
Ireland’s post-war boom, ushered in with the efforts of Lemass, didn’t arrive until the early 1960s. Economic mismanagement and poor governmental policies kept the boom short. By the early 1970s, Ireland was on its way back down again. In an effort to revitalize the nation, Ireland entered the European Economic Community, now the European Union (EU), in 1973. EU membership and an increased number of international visitors spurred by the creation of Bord Fáilte helped introduce the slow, painful process of secularization. Garret FitzGerald revamped Fine Gael under a secular banner and alternated Prime Ministership with Fianna Fáil’s Charlie Haughey throughout the late 70s and early 80s. EU funds proved crucial to helping Ireland out of a severe mid-80s recession and reducing its dependence on the UK. In 1985, FitzGerald signed the Anglo-Irish agreement, which allowed Éire to stick an official nose into Northern negotiations.
The Irish broke social and political ground in 1990 by choosing Mary Robinson as their president. Formerly a progressive barrister who had championed the rights of single mothers and gays, Robinson fought vigorously to overcome the international (and local) perception of the Irish as conservative cronies. In 1995, a national referendum narrowly made divorce legal in the Republic. When Mary was appointed the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1997, she was replaced by Mary McAleese, a native of Belfast.
Robinson’s small, leftist Labour Party enjoyed unexpected success, paving the way for further social reform. In 1993, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds made ending violence in Northern Ireland his top priority. A year later he announced a cease-fire agreement between Unionists and the IRA. Despite his miracle-working in the North, Reynolds was forced to resign following a scandal involving his appointee for President of the High Court. After Reynolds’s resignation, the Labour Party formed a coalition with Fine Gael, led by John Bruton as Taoiseach.
In June 1997, Fianna Fáil won the general election, making Bertie Ahern, at 45, the youngest Taoiseach in Irish history. Ahern joined the peace talks that produced the Good Friday Agreement in April of 1998. On May 22, 1998, in the first island-wide election since 1918, an overwhelming 94% of voters in the Republic voted for the enactment of the Agreement, which ended their territorial designs on the North. (For the recent status of the Good Friday Agreement,)
In the summer of 2001, the Irish populace trickled out to the polls and defeated the Nice Treaty. The Treaty was the first step in the addition of 12 eastern European nations to the European Union. The result of the referendum shocked Ireland’s pro-Treaty government and caused quite a stir on the continent. The government began a campaign to clarify the details of the treaty, as opinion polls found the Irish public pro-expansion but wary of union collapse. The treaty was eventually passed, admitting Poland and 11 other eastern European countries. On May 11, 2004, Bertie Ahern welcomed the new countries into the union as President of the European Council.
With money coming to Ireland from the European Union, increased foreign investment, and a thriving tourism industry, the Irish economy is booming as never before. Ireland now leads Europe in the percentage of university-educated adults. This educated, flexible work force has invited foreign investment, further boosting the economy to the tune of over 5% growth in real GDP based on an estimate from 2006. In 2006, Ireland boasted the lowest unemployment rate in the EU at 4.2%. Recently, in June 2007, the leader of Fianna Fáil, Bertie Ahern, was re-elected to a third term as the Republic’s Prime Minister.
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For 52 years, we have published the world’s favorite budget travel guides, written entirely by students and updated every year. With pen and notebook in hand and a few changes of underwear stuffed in our backpacks, we spend months roaming the globe in search of travel bargains.
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