Ireland's history: a country still smaller than it was in 1841

Who ruled Ireland before the Normans came

Mesolithic hunter-gatherers arrived around 7900 BC, and farming appears from about 4000 BC together with pottery, polished stone tools and the great passage tombs at Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, several of them aligned on the sun. The Céide Fields on the north Mayo coast, laid out around 3500 BC, contain the oldest known field systems in the world. The Iron Age begins about 600 BC, material in the continental La Tène style appears by about 300 BC, and by the fifth century the over-kingdoms that later Irish literature names had emerged.

Rome never took the island. Ptolemy recorded sixteen nations in Ireland in AD 100 and Roman writers called the place Hibernia, but the closest the empire came was raiding, trade and the occasional exiled prince. What held the island together instead was law and religion. The Brehon laws were administered by a professional class of jurists and ran across kingdoms that were otherwise at war with each other. Palladius was sent as bishop in 431 to the Irish "already believing in Christ", and the chronicles record Patrick arriving the following year.

The monasteries that followed preserved Latin and Greek learning through the early medieval centuries and produced the Book of Kells, the Ardagh Chalice and the carved stone crosses. Columba's foundation on Iona in 563 began three hundred years of Irish missionary work in Scotland, England and the Frankish empire.

Viking raiding began in 795 and changed the map permanently. Most of Ireland's port cities are Norse foundations: Dublin, where a fortress went up in 852, along with Limerick, Cork, Wexford and Waterford. Coins were struck on the island for the first time in 997. Brian Boru's victory at Clontarf in 1014 broke Norse military power without touching the towns, which went on trading.

Why the Normans never finished the conquest

On 1 May 1169 about six hundred Cambro-Norman knights landed at Bannow Strand in what is now County Wexford, invited by Dermot Mac Murrough, the deposed King of Leinster, and led by Richard de Clare. Henry II arrived in 1171 to take charge of an expedition that was escaping him, and in 1177 his son John was made Lord of Ireland at the Council of Oxford. That is the opening of more than eight hundred years of English political and military involvement, and 1177 is the earliest of the three founding dates this state's record carries.

A conquest never followed. Norman feudal law spread, bringing baronies, manors and the beginnings of the county system; a version of Magna Carta was issued for Ireland in 1216 and the Parliament of Ireland was founded in 1297. Then the process reversed. The Black Death of 1348 fell hardest on the English and Norman population because it lived in towns and villages, while the Gaelic Irish were dispersed across the countryside. Norman families intermarried with Gaelic ones and took up their language, and the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1367 tried to forbid precisely that, requiring English subjects in Ireland to speak English and keep English law. English authority had shrunk by 1500 to a fortified district around Dublin called the Pale, and Poynings' Law of 1494 placed the Irish Parliament under the control of the English Privy Council.

How the Tudors turned Ireland into a colony

The second attempt was deliberate and it worked. Henry VIII resolved on reconquest after the rebellion of Silken Thomas in 1534, and in 1542 he upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a kingdom and had himself proclaimed its king. The Tudor conquest ran from 1536 to 1603 through the Desmond Rebellions and the Nine Years' War, and it was completed at Kinsale in 1601 and the Flight of the Earls that followed.

What made it a colony was land. From the middle of the sixteenth century the crown pursued plantation: confiscating estates from Catholic landowners and settling English and Scottish Protestants on them in Munster, Ulster, Laois and Offaly. In 1614 the Catholic majority in the Irish Parliament was ended by the simple device of creating new boroughs the settlers controlled. Conversion failed where confiscation succeeded, and the result was the division that runs through the next three centuries: a Protestant landholding minority and a dispossessed Catholic majority.

The seventeenth century settled it by war. The Irish Confederate Wars of 1641 to 1653 killed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers in combat and between 200,000 and more than 300,000 civilians through war famine, disease and displacement, with a further 50,000 sent into indentured servitude in the West Indies; Sir William Petty, writing at the time, put the total higher still, and against an assumed pre-war population of 1.5 million that would mean the island lost close to half its people. Cromwell's reconquest of 1649 to 1653 was the most destructive phase, and the better land remaining in Catholic hands was confiscated afterwards. The Williamite war of 1689 to 1691 ended Jacobite resistance at Aughrim in July 1691. The Penal Laws that followed barred Catholics and Protestant dissenters from parliament and progressively from property, and by the eighteenth century the roughly 5% of the population belonging to the Church of Ireland held the bulk of the farmland, the legal system and both houses of the Irish Parliament.

What the Union did to Irish land

The Acts of Union took effect on 1 January 1801, abolishing the Irish Parliament and merging the two kingdoms. Contemporary documents show the Irish votes were bought with peerages, offices and Secret Service Office money after the measure failed on a first attempt in 1799. The Catholic emancipation that had been part of the bargain was blocked by George III and arrived only with the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, after Daniel O'Connell won a by-election he could not legally take a seat for.

The question underneath every nineteenth-century argument was who owned the ground. About ten thousand families, most of them permanently resident in England, owned practically all the farmland and let it to Irish tenants who were evicted when the rent fell behind. Ireland was largely passed over by the Industrial Revolution, lacking coal and iron and joined to a much larger economy that wanted agricultural produce from it. From 1870 the Land League under Michael Davitt pressed for fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure, and parliament legislated in 1870, 1881, 1903 and 1909. The Land Purchase Act of 1903 broke up the great estates and transferred ownership to the tenants, ending the era of the absentee landlord roughly a century after the Union began.

Why the famine never stopped emptying the country

Ireland had starved before. The Great Frost of December 1739 to September 1741 destroyed stored potatoes and ruined harvests, and the famine that followed killed an estimated 250,000 people, about one in eight, though a second estimate in the record puts the deaths near 400,000 and the departures above 150,000. The blight of 1845 was the second event Irish historiography calls a Great Famine, and it is the one that changed the shape of the country.

By the early 1840s almost half the population depended on the potato almost exclusively. A cottier family ate roughly eight pounds of potatoes per person per day, which supplied about 80% or more of its calories, and the crop grown was one or two high-yielding varieties with little genetic variety between them. When a strain of the water mould Phytophthora infestans arrived from North America in 1845 into an unusually cool damp season, much of that year's crop rotted in the ground, and the failures of 1846 to 1849 were close to total.

Relief was thin and it was late. Peel imported American maize in 1845 and early 1846; the Russell cabinet that took office in June 1846 took a laissez-faire line and pushed the cost onto Irish and absentee landowners, who ran out of money and evicted hundreds of thousands of tenants instead. Under the Poor Law extended to Ireland in 1838 the able-bodied poor were sent to workhouses instead of being given relief. By August 1847 as many as three million people were taking rations at soup kitchens, and the British government spent about £8 million in total. Grain, meat and other high-quality food continued to leave Irish ports for Britain throughout the famine, because the people who grew it had no money to buy it.

About a million people died of starvation, typhus and related disease. Estimates of departures during the famine years run from one million to two million, and between 1841 and 1850 the Irish were 49% of all emigrants to the United States. The population fell from almost 8.4 million in 1844 to 6.6 million by 1851, and then kept falling for another hundred years, because emigration had stopped being an emergency and become the ordinary expectation of a young person born into a farming country with no work.

The language went with the people. Irish was the spoken language of most of the island before the famine and was largely replaced by English during the nineteenth century, through the deaths and departures, through the National School system, and through hostility to the language from leading Irish politicians of the day. County Leitrim, in the north-west, was the last Irish county to record a population increase after the famine, and it did so in 2006.

How a republic was won in instalments

Home Rule was the constitutional route and it kept nearly arriving. Charles Stewart Parnell built the Irish Parliamentary Party into the balance of power at Westminster from 1880; Gladstone's bills failed in 1886 and 1893; the Parliament Act of 1911 removed the Lords' veto and the third Home Rule Act reached the statute book in 1914. Ulster unionists, concentrated in the industrialised north-east, formed the Ulster Volunteers in 1913 under Edward Carson to resist it, the Irish Volunteers formed in answer, and the Act was suspended for the duration of the First World War. About 175,000 men joined the Irish regiments of the new British Army on the understanding that Home Rule would follow.

What the Easter Rising changed

The insurrection that began in Dublin on 24 April 1916 with the Proclamation of the Republic had little public support and was over in a week. Fifteen prisoners, including every signatory of the Proclamation, were court-martialled and executed, and the executions combined with the conscription crisis of 1918 moved opinion decisively. In the general election of December 1918, Sinn Féin took 73 of Ireland's 105 seats on a platform of refusing to sit at Westminster. Twenty-seven of them assembled in Dublin on 21 January 1919 as the First Dáil, declared independence and claimed the whole island.

How the Treaty split the men who won it

The Irish Republican Army fought a guerrilla war from 1919 until the truce of July 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty, negotiated in London between 11 October and 6 December 1921 by a delegation led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, created a self-governing dominion rather than the republic that had been declared, and allowed the six north-eastern counties to opt out. The Dáil ratified it on 7 January 1922 by 64 votes to 57. The Irish Free State came into being on 6 December 1922 and Northern Ireland exercised its opt-out two days later.

The losing side fought on. The civil war of June 1922 to May 1923 set Éamon de Valera's anti-Treaty forces against Collins's National Army, which had British artillery and thousands of veterans of the disbanded Irish regiments, and the Free State government put down the anti-Treaty IRA with a series of executions. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the parties that have organised politics in the state ever since, descend directly from the two sides of that argument.

Sovereignty then arrived in stages. The Free State stayed a democracy through the 1930s and handed power peacefully to de Valera's Fianna Fáil, the losing side of the civil war, after the 1932 election. The Constitution of Ireland came into force on 29 December 1937, naming the state Éire, or Ireland, and claiming the whole island while confining its jurisdiction to the twenty-six counties. The state stayed neutral through the Second World War, a period it called the Emergency. The Republic of Ireland Act came into force on 18 April 1949, ended the last constitutional link to the crown and, under the rules of the time, ended Commonwealth membership with it. Ireland joined the United Nations on 14 December 1955.

What partition left on the other side

Partition sorted people as well as territory. Of the Free State's population in 1922, 92.6% were Catholic and 7.4% Protestant, and the Protestant share had halved again by the 1960s, through emigration that ran ahead of the general rate in the early 1920s and through the Ne Temere decree requiring the children of mixed marriages to be raised Catholic. In the six counties, James Craig, the first prime minister, said the new parliament would be "a Protestant State for a Protestant People", and the Ulster Unionist Party formed every government at Stormont until 1972.

Discrimination in housing and employment, and exclusion from power under a majoritarian electoral system, produced a Catholic civil rights movement in the mid-1960s: the Campaign for Social Justice in 1964 and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. A NICRA march in Derry on 5 October 1968 was banned, went ahead and was broken up with batons and a water cannon, and that day is generally taken as the start of the Troubles. Rioting followed a loyalist march in August 1969, British troops were deployed, and on 30 January 1972 paratroopers shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians at a civil rights march in Derry. Stormont was prorogued that year and abolished in 1973.

Approximately 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 wounded between 1968 and 1998. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 gave the Irish government a consultative role for the first time, and the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998 established a power-sharing assembly and cross-border institutions. It was ratified by referendum on both sides of the border on 22 May 1998: 94% in favour in Ireland, and in Northern Ireland 96% of Catholic voters against 52% of Protestant voters. The territorial claim in Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution was removed as part of the settlement. The IRA decommissioned its weapons in 2005 and a power-sharing government was formed in 2007.

When the population finally started to grow

The turn came from an economic document. Economic Development, published in 1958 under the name of T.K. Whitaker, then secretary of the Department of Finance, abandoned protection and courted foreign investment; the First Programme for Economic Expansion of 1958 to 1963 targeted 2% growth and produced 4%. Emigration declined substantially, education broadened, and free second-level schooling was introduced in 1968. Ireland applied to join the European Economic Community in 1961 but entered only on 1 January 1973, at the same time as the United Kingdom, because about 90% of Irish exports went to the British market and joining without Britain made no sense. Membership of the European Monetary System in 1979 severed a link with sterling that had lasted more than 150 years.

Growth was not continuous. The oil shocks and deflationary budgets of the 1970s and the recession of the 1980s pushed emigration up again in the mid-1980s, and reform from 1989 preceded the decade of very high growth known as the Celtic Tiger. Property values rose by a factor of between four and ten between 1993 and 2006. When the property market broke in 2008, unemployment went from 4.2% in 2007 to 14.6% in February 2012, the bank rescue absorbed about 25 to 26% of GDP, and net emigration between 2008 and 2013 came to 120,100 people, a third of them aged between 15 and 24. Unemployment was back to 4.4% by November 2022.

The census taken on 1 April 2022 counted 5,149,139 people in the state, 8% more than in 2016, and recorded 631,785 residents who were not Irish nationals, among them 93,680 Polish nationals, 83,347 British, 45,449 Indian and 43,323 Romanian. The island as a whole held just over 7 million people in 2022, about 5.1 million in the Republic and 1.9 million in Northern Ireland. The count taken in 1841 was 8.2 million.