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HISTORY
Celtic warriors probably reached Ireland from mainland Europe around 300 BC and were well ensconced by 100 BC. Christian monks including St Patrick arrived around the 5th century AD, and as the Dark Ages enveloped the continent, Ireland became a lonely outpost of European civilization.
In the 1500s, the Protestant Henry VIII moved to enforce English control over Ireland. Under his daughter and successor, Elizabeth I, Ireland's colonization by Protestant settlers got seriously under way, sowing the seeds for the divided Ireland that exists today.
In 1690 the Protestant William of Orange landed at Carrickfergus, just north of Belfast, with an army of 36,000 men to fight the Catholic James II (recently deposed from the English throne for his religious views). The ensuing Battle of the the Boyne took place on 12 July; William's victory was a turning point, and is commemorated to this day by northern Protestants as a pivotal triumph over 'popes and popery'.
By early in the 18th century, the dispirited Catholics in Ireland held less than 15% of the land. The War of American Independence (1775-83) and the French Revolution (1789-99) stirred Irish hopes, both Protestant and Catholic, for a fairer deal from Britain. What they got instead was the Act of Union in 1800, joining Ireland politically with Britain.
In 1828 Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847) stood for a seat representing Ireland in the British parliament, even though, being a Catholic, he could not legally take the seat. O'Connell won easily, and rather than risk a Catholic rebellion the British parliament passed the 1829 Act of Catholic Emancipation. O'Connell unfortunately died just as Ireland was suffering its greatest tragedy -the potato famine.
Introduced from South America, the easily grown potato was the staple food of a rapidly growing but desperately poor Irish people. From 1800 to 1840 the population had rocketed from four to eight million, but successive failures of the potato crop between 1845 and 1851, the so-called Great Famine, resulted in mass emigration and the starvation of more than 1.1 million people.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the British parliament finally began to contemplate Irish home rule, until the bungled uprising in 1916. Though it is now celebrated as a glorious bid for Irish freedom, the Easter Rising was, in fact, heavy with rhetoric, light on planning and decidedly lacking in public support.
In the 1918 general election, Irish republicans (mostly Catholics) stood under the banner of Sinn Fein (We Ourselves or Ourselves Alone) and won a majority of the Irish seats. The Anglo-Irish War, which lasted from 1919 to 1921, pitted Sinn Fein Ld and its military wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), against the British. After months of negotiations in London, an Irish delegation led by Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921.
The treaty gave 26 counties of Ireland independence and allowed six largely Protestant counties in Ulster the choice of opting out (a foregone conclusion). In the north, the Protestant majority made sure their rule was absolute by systematically excluding Catholics from power.
In January 1969 a civil-rights march from Belfast to Derry (Londonderry) was attacked by a Protestant mob; in August 1969 British troops were sent into Derry and Belfast to maintain law and order. The peaceful civil-rights movement lost ground and the IRA, which had been hibernating, found itself with new recruits for an armed independence struggle. Passions reached fever pitch in 1972 when 13 unarmed Catholics were shot dead by British troops in Derry on 'Bloody Sunday' (30 January).
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