Ireland's History
extract from Encyclopaedia Britannica

Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica

Introduction

Ireland, lying to the west of Britain, has always been to some extent cut off by it from direct contact with other European countries, especially those from Sweden to the Rhine River. Readier access has been through France, Spain, and Portugal and even Norway and Iceland. Internally, the four ecclesiastical provinces into which Ireland was divided in the 12th century realistically denoted the main natural divisions of the country. Of these, the north had in the earliest times been culturally connected with Scotland, the east with Roman Britain and Wales, the south with Wales and France, and the southwest and west with France and Spain. In later times, despite political changes, these associations continued in greater or lesser degree.

The position of Ireland, geographically peripheral to western Europe, became "central" and thus potentially more important once Europe's horizons expanded in the 15th and 16th centuries to include the New World. But paradoxically it was in the earlier period that Ireland won especial fame as a notable and respected centre of Christianity, scholarship, and the arts. After the Middle Ages, subjugation to Britain stultified--or the struggle for freedom absorbed--much of Ireland's native energy. But its influence was always exercised as much through its emigrants as in its achievements as a nation. During the centuries of British occupation the successors of the great missionaries and scholars who had fostered Christianity and learning among the Germanic peoples of the Continent from the 7th to 9th century were those who formed a considerable element in the armies and clergy of Roman Catholic countries and had an incalculable influence on the later development of the United States. In British history innumerable great men of Anglo-Irish origin or nurture have, as statesmen or soldiers, played vital parts; the influence of Ireland itself on Britain has been constant and profound.

Early Ireland

The human occupation of Ireland did not begin until a late stage in the prehistory of Europe. It has generally been held that the first arrivals were Mesolithic hunter-fisher people, represented largely by flintwork found mainly in ancient beaches in the historic counties of Antrim, Down, Louth, and Dublin. These artifacts have been named Larnian for the type site at Larne, Northern Ireland; dates from 6000 BC onward have been assigned to them. Archaeological work since World War II, however, casts considerable doubt on the antiquity and affinities of the people who were responsible for the Larnian industry; association with Neolithic remains suggests that they should be considered not as a Mesolithic people but rather as groups contemporary with the Neolithic farmers. The Larnian could then be interpreted as a specialized aspect of contemporary Neolithic culture. Lake and riverside finds, especially along the River Bann, show a comparable tradition. A single carbon-14 date of 5725 +/- 110 BC from Toome Bay, north of Lough Neagh, for woodworking and flint has been cited in support of a Mesolithic phase in Ireland, but such a single date cannot be considered reliable.

Neolithic Period

The general pattern of carbon-14 date determinations suggests that the Neolithic Period in Ireland began about 3000 BC. As in Britain, the most widespread evidence of early farming communities is long-barrow burial. The main Irish long-barrow series consists of megalithic tombs called court tombs because an oval or semicircular open space, or court, inset into the end of the long barrow precedes the burial chamber. These court tombs number more than 300. They occur in the northern half of Ireland, and the distribution is bounded on the south by the lowlands of the central plain. Timber-built rectangular houses belonging to the court tomb builders have been discovered at Ballynagilly, County Tyrone, and at Ballyglass, County Mayo. The court tombs are intimately related to the British long-barrow series of the Severn-Cotswold and chalk regions and probably derive from more or less common prototypes in northwestern France.

In Ireland a second type of megalithic long barrow--the so-called portal tomb--developed from the court tomb. There are more than 150 examples. They spread across the court tomb area in the northern half of Ireland and extend into Leinster and Waterford and also to western Wales and Cornwall.

A notable feature of the Irish Neolithic is the passage tomb. This megalithic tomb, unlike the long-barrow types, is set in a round mound, sited usually on hilltops and grouped in cemeteries. The rich grave goods of these tombs include beads, pendants, and bone pins. Many of the stones of the tombs are elaborately decorated with engraved designs. The main axis of the distribution lies along a series of great cemeteries from the River Boyne to Sligo (Boyne and Loughcrew in County Meath, Carrowkeel and Carrowmore in County Sligo). Smaller groups and single tombs occur largely in the northern half of the country and in Leinster. A specialized group of later--indeed, advanced--Bronze Age date near Tramore, County Waterford, is quite closely akin to a large group on the Isles of Scilly and Cornwall. The great Irish passage tombs include some of the most magnificent megalithic tombs in all Europe--for example, Newgrange and Knowth in County Meath. While the passage tombs represent the arrival of the megalithic tradition in its fullest and most sophisticated form, the exact relation between the builders of these tombs and the more or less contemporary long-barrow builders is not clear. The passage tombs suggest rather more clearly integrated communities than do the long barrows.

To the final stage of the Neolithic probably belong the rich house sites of both rectangular and circular form at Lough Gur, County Limerick. The pottery shows a strong connection with the tradition of the long barrow (court tomb and portal tomb).

Bronze Age

Two great incursions establish the early Bronze Age in Ireland. One, represented by approximately 400 megalithic tombs of the wedge tomb variety, is associated with Beaker pottery. This group is dominant in the western half of the country. Similar tombs also associated with Beaker finds are common in the French region of Brittany, and the origin of the Irish series is clearly from this region. In Ireland the distribution indicates that these tomb builders sought well-drained grazing land, such as the Burren limestones in Clare, and also copper deposits, such as those on the Cork-Kerry coast and around the Silvermines area of Tipperary. (see also Index: Beaker folk) In contrast, in the eastern half of the country a people in the single-burial tradition dominate. Their burial modes and distinctive pottery, known as food vessels, have strong roots in the Beaker tradition that dominates in many areas of western Europe. They may have reached Ireland via Britain from the lowland areas around the Rhine or farther north.

Throughout the early Bronze Age Ireland had a flourishing metal industry, and bronze, copper, and gold objects were exported widely to Britain and the Continent. In the middle Bronze Age (about 1500 BC) new influences brought urn burial into eastern Ireland. From about 1200 BC elements of a late Bronze Age appear, and by about 800 BC a great late Bronze Age industry was established. A considerable wealth of bronze and gold is present, an example of which is the great Clare gold hoard. Nordic connections have been noted in much of this metalwork.

Iron Age

The period of the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in Ireland is fraught with uncertainties. The problem of identifying archaeological remains with language grouping is notoriously difficult, but it seems on the whole likely that the principal Celtic arrivals occurred in the Iron Age. Irish sagas, which probably reflect the pagan Irish Iron Age, reflect conditions in many respects similar to the descriptions of the ancient classical authors, such as Poseidonius and Julius Caesar. The Celts were an Indo-European group who are thought to have originated in the 2nd millinneum BC, probably in east-central Europe. They were among the earliest to develop an Iron Age culture, as has been found at Hallstatt, Austria (c. 700 BC). Although there is little sign of Hallstatt-like culture in Ireland, the later La Tène culture (which may date in Ireland from 300 BC or earlier) is represented in metalwork and some stone sculpture, mainly in the northern half of the country. Connections with northern England are apparent. Hill-fort building seems also characteristic of the Iron Age.

Early Celtic Ireland

Political and social organization

Politically, Ireland was organized into a number of petty kingdoms, or clans ( tuatha), each of which was quite independent under its elected king. Groups of tuatha tended to combine, but the king who claimed overlordship in each group had a primacy of honour rather than of jurisdiction. Not until the 10th century AD was there a king of all Ireland ( árd rí Éireann). A division of the country into five groups of tuatha, known as the Five Fifths (Cuíg Cuígí), occurred about the beginning of the Christian era. These were Ulster (Ulaidh), Meath (Midhe), Leinster (Laighin), Munster (Mumhain), and Connaught (Connacht). (see also Index: Meath, Kingdom of, Leinster, kingdom of) Surrounding a king was an aristocracy ( airi aicme, the upper class), whose land and property rights were clearly defined by law and whose main wealth was in cattle. Greater landowners were supported by céilí, or clients. These and other grades of society, minutely classified and described by legal writers, tilled the soil and tended the cattle. Individual families were the real units of society and exercised collectively powers of ownership over their farms and territory. At law the family (fine) did not merely act corporatively but was, by one of the oldest customs, held responsible for the observance of the law by its kindred, serfs, and slaves.

Rural economy and living conditions

There were no urban centres, and the economic basis of society was cattle rearing and agriculture. The principal crops were wheat, barley, oats, flax, and hay. The land was tilled with plows drawn by oxen. Sheep appear to have been bred principally for their wool, and the only animal reared specifically for slaughter was the pig. Fishing, hunting, fowling, and trapping provided additional food. Transport of goods over land was by packhorse, for wheeled vehicles appear to have been few. Sea transport was by currach, a wicker-framed boat covered with hides; the normal freshwater craft was the dugout.

The dwellings of the time were built by the post-and-wattle technique, and some, at least, were situated within the protected sites archaeologists call ring forts. Excavations have shown that some of these may have existed even in the Bronze Age and that they remained a normal place of habitation until medieval times. Advantage was also taken of the relative security of islands in rivers or lakes as dwelling places; and artificial islands, called crannogs, were also extensively made.

The Irish laws point to a large development of rural industry in the period in which they were first written down, shortly before the Norse invasions beginning at the end of the 8th century. They deal minutely not only with the management of land and animal rearing but also with innumerable further details of husbandry, including milling, dyeing, dairying, malting, meat curing, and spinning and weaving. Wool was spun with a wooden spindle weighted with a whorl of bone or stone, and it was woven on a loom. The outer garment worn by both men and women was a large woolen cloak (brat), fastened on the shoulder or breast with a pin or brooch. The inner garment was a long linen tunic (léine) girded at the waist with a belt. Shoes of rawhide or tanned leather were worn, at least by the upper classes and the higher professional ranks. A large amount of metalwork reveals the adaptation by Irish craftsmen of many techniques originating in Britain or on the Continent. An instinct for design, added to the skillful use of these techniques, enabled them to produce many superb objects, of which the Tara brooch, dating from about the mid-8th century, is an outstanding example. The chief musical instrument of the period was the harp.

Early political history

The documentary history of Ireland begins only in the 7th century, which saw the production in both Latin and Irish of sufficiently rich and numerous records of all sorts. For events before that time, historians must rely on literary sources such as the sagas, many of whose characters may represent only poetic imagination and in which the social or political circumstances portrayed reflect the fantasies of their authors rather than historical reality. Nevertheless, the traditions seem to indicate, during the early centuries AD, a process of political cohesion in Ireland through which the tuatha ultimately became grouped into the Five Fifths. Among these, Ulster seems at first to have been dominant; but, by the time of Niall of the Nine Hostages (d. early 5th century), hegemony had passed to his midland kingdom of Meath, which was then temporarily associated with Connaught. In the 6th century, descendants of Niall, ruling at Tara in northern Leinster, were claiming to be overkings of three provinces, Ulster, Connaught, and Meath. Later they claimed to be kings of all of Ireland, although their power rarely extended over Munster or the greater part of Leinster. Two branches of Niall's descendants, the Cenél nEogain, of the northern Ui Néill, and the Clan Cholmáin, of the southern Uí Néill, alternated as kings of Ireland from 734 to 1002, a fact that suggests a formal arrangement between the two septs. Inevitably, claims to a high kingship came to be contested by the rulers of Munster, who, from their capital at Cashel, had gradually increased their strength, depriving Connaught of the region that later became County Clare. But not until the reign of Brian Boru in the 11th century was Munster sufficiently strong to secure a real high kingship over all of Ireland.

Irish raids and migrations

From about the mid-3rd century Latin writings make frequent reference to raiding expeditions carried out by the Irish, who were now given the new name Scoti rather than the older one Hiberni. Native Irish traditions also suggest that such attacks took place. In the second half of the 4th century, when Roman power in Britain was beginning to crumble seriously, the raids became incessant, and settlements were made along the west coast of Britain and extensively in Wales and Scotland. From the early 5th century the rulers of Dalriada in northern Antrim extended their power over the Irish already settled in Argyll and the neighbouring islands. Ultimately the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada became separated from the Irish; in the 9th century, when it overcame the Picts, it gave its name, Scotland, to the whole area.

Early Christianity

Conversion

Little is known of the first impact of Christianity on Ireland. Traditions in the south and southeast refer to early saints who allegedly preceded St. Patrick, and their missions may well have come through trading relations with the Roman Empire. The earliest firm date is AD 431, when St. Germanus, bishop of Auxerre in Gaul, proposed, with the approval of Pope Celestine I, to send a certain Palladius to "the Scots believing in Christ." Subsequent missionary history in Ireland is dominated by the figure of St. Patrick, whose 7th-century biographers, Tirechán and Muirchú, credited him with converting all the Irish to Christianity and won for him the status of national apostle.

A 9th-century record, the Book of Armagh, includes a work by Patrick himself, the Confessio ("Confession," a reply to charges made by British ecclesiastics), in which he describes his life at a Roman villa in Britain, his capture by Irish raiders, and his seven years of slavery in Ireland. Recovering his freedom, he was educated and ordained into the priesthood and eventually managed to be sent as a missionary to Ireland. He concentrated on the north and west of the country, achieving remarkable success; he did not himself claim to have converted all of Ireland. Confusion exists regarding the chronology of Patrick's life, and it is seriously contended that tradition came to merge the experience of two men, the continental Palladius and the Patrick of the Confessio. No sufficient evidence supports the traditional date (432) for the beginning of Patrick's mission; of the rival dates (461/462 and 492/493) given for his death in annals and biographies, the latter is now preferred.

Irish monasticism

Although monks and monasteries were to be found in Ireland at the time of Patrick, their place was then altogether secondary. But in the course of the 6th and 7th centuries a comprehensive monastic system developed in Ireland, partly through the influence of Celtic monasteries in Britain, such as Candida Casa at Whithorn in Galloway and Llangarvan in Wales. Early attempts to organize the Irish church on the usual Roman system--by which each bishop and his clergy exercised exclusive jurisdiction within a diocese--seem to have given way to one in which groups of Christian settlements were loosely linked together, usually under the auspices of some one or other of the great saints. Careful study of the lives of the early saints reveals the manner in which their reputations developed in proportion to the power of the political dynasties that became connected with them.

By the end of the 6th century, enthusiasm for Christianity was leading Irishmen to devote themselves to a most austere existence as monks, as hermits, and as missionaries to pagan tribes in Scotland and the north of England and in a great area of west-central Europe, particularly between the Rhine, Loire, and Rhône rivers. St. Columba's foundation (c. 563) of the monastery of Iona off the northwest Scottish coast provided the best-known base for the Celtic Christianization of Scotland; and its offshoot, Lindisfarne, lying off the coast of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, was responsible for the conversion of that area. Of the continental missionaries, the best known is St. Columban (c. 543-615), whose monastic foundations at Luxeuil near Annegray in the Vosges and at Bobbio in northern Italy became important centres of learning. Columban, however, by his individualism and austere puritanism, came into conflict not only with the Merovingian rulers of Gaul but also with the local ecclesiastical administration; his limitations exemplify those of the Irish monastic system as a whole and explain why, in the end, it was supplanted by the ordinary administrative system of the church.

Learning and art

Both at home and abroad the saints were succeeded by scholars, whose work in sacred and classical studies and particularly in elaborating an Irish Christian mythology and literature was to have profound effects on the Irish language and was to be a major factor in its survival. The Irish monasteries became notable centres of learning; in Ireland itself those of Clonmacnoise (in County Offaly) and Clonard (in County Meath) were among the most famous. Christianity had brought to Ireland the Latin tongue and command of the Latin authors; not only Church Fathers but also classical writers were read and studied. Irish scribes produced manuscripts written in the clear hand known as Insular; this usage spread from Ireland to Anglo-Saxon England and to Irish monasteries on the Continent. Initial letters in the manuscripts were illuminated, usually with intricate ribbon and zoomorphic designs. The most famous of the Irish manuscripts is the Book of Kells, a copy of the four Gospels probably dating from the late 8th to the early 9th century. The earliest surviving illuminated manuscript, the Book of Durrow, was probably made about a century earlier.

The adoption of Christianity made it necessary to relate the chronology of Irish tradition, history, and genealogies to the events recorded in the Bible. The Book of Invasions (Leabhar Gabhála), in which Irish history was linked with events in the Old Testament, was a notable example of this process. In this way Latin civilization in Ireland became linked to the Gaelic; and the association became closer under the impact of the Viking wars. Gradually the Latin products of the Christian schools became replaced by Irish works; Latin lives of the saints, for example, are almost always earlier in date than those written in Irish. Recurring bouts of puritanism and reforming movements in the church tended to remove secular literature from monastic control; ultimately there developed a class of professional families who were its custodians from the 12th to the 17th century. The medieval secular writers, employing a degenerate form of Old Irish usually known as Middle Irish, were responsible for a large proportion of Irish literary achievement; their historical works, the annals, and the great genealogies, supplemented by the law collections, have enabled historians to reconstruct early Irish social history.

The Norse invasions and their aftermath

The first appearance of the Norsemen on the Irish coast is recorded in 795. Thereafter the Norsemen made frequent plundering raids, sometimes far inland. They seized and fortified two ports, Annagassan and Dublin, in 838; and in the 840s they undertook a series of large-scale invasions in the north of the country. These invaders were driven out by Aed Finnliath, high king from 862 to 879, but meanwhile the Norse rulers of Dublin were reaching the zenith of their power. They took Waterford in 914 and Limerick in 920. Gradually, without quite abandoning piracy, the Vikings became traders in close association with the Irish, and their commercial towns became a new element in the life of the country. The decline of Norse power in the south began when they lost Limerick in 968 and was finally effected when the Scandinavian allies of the king of Dublin were defeated by High King Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

Although the Battle of Clontarf removed the prospect of Norse domination, it brought a period of political unsettlement. High kings ruled in Ireland but almost always "with opposition," meaning that they were not acknowledged by a minority of provincial kings. The Viking invasions had, in fact, shown the strength and the weakness of the Irish position. The fact that power had been preserved at a local level in Ireland enabled a maximum of resistance to be made; and, although the invaders established maritime strongholds, they never achieved any domination comparable to their control of eastern England or northwestern France. After Clontarf they remained largely in control of Ireland's commerce but came increasingly under the influence of neighbouring Irish kings.

In the 11th and 12th centuries the ecclesiastical reform movement of western Europe was extended into Ireland. And, as the kings of Munster and Connaught, Leinster and Ulster struggled each to secure the dominant position that had once been held by Brian Boru, they came to realize the value to them of alliance with the forces of church reform. Thus, with the aid of provincial rulers, the reformers were able to set up in Ireland a system of dioceses whose boundaries were coterminous with those of the chief petty kingdoms. At the head of this hierarchy was established the archbishopric of Armagh, in association with the province of Ulster dominated by the royal family of Uí Néill. But the victory of the reformers was not complete, for the parochial system was not introduced until after the Anglo-Norman invasion. Moreover, the reformers sought to influence Irish conduct as well as church organization. The enormities of Irish moral behaviour were colourfully described by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his life of his contemporary St. Malachy, the reforming bishop who introduced the Cistercian monks into Ireland. The reforming popes Adrian IV and Alexander III encouraged Henry II's invasion of Ireland, believing that it would further church reform in that country. In a remarkable account of the conquest, Gerald of Wales provided a lurid description of the archaic Irish civilization that the invaders encountered. The recognition of Henry II as lord of Ireland and the linking of the church to a foreign administration terminated the independence of Gaelic Ireland and reduced the country to a position of subordination for centuries to come.

First Centuries of English Rule (C. 1166-C. 1600)

The Anglo-Norman invasion

Before the arrival of Henry II in Ireland (October 1171), Anglo-Norman adventurers--including Richard de Clare, earl of Pembroke, subsequently known as Strongbow, invited by Dermot MacMurrough, a king of Leinster who had been expelled by the high king, Rory O'Connor (Roderic)--had conquered a substantial part of eastern Ireland, including the kingdom of Leinster, the towns of Waterford, Wexford, and Dublin, and part of the kingdom of Meath. Partly to avert any chance of Ireland's becoming a rival Norman state, Henry took action to impose his rule there. He granted Leinster to de Clare and Meath to Hugh de Lacy, who had gone to Ireland in the king's army; but he kept the chief towns in his own hands, exacted forms of submission from the Irish kings, and secured from a church synod recognition of his overlordship. During subsequent years the Anglo-Norman sphere in Ireland was extended; and, while all the Irish kings, except in the northwest, agreed to recognize his supremacy, Henry was obliged to acquiesce in the establishment of new Norman lordships in Ulster under John de Courci and in Munster under de Cogan, de Braose, and others. By the Treaty of Windsor (1175), O'Connor, the high king, accepted Henry as his overlord and restricted his own style to that of king of Connaught. But he was permitted to exercise some vague authority over the other Irish kings and was charged with collecting from them tribute to be paid to Henry. This arrangement was unsuccessful, for thereafter O'Connor encountered opposition even in his own province, and he was ultimately obliged to abdicate.

King John, who visited Ireland in 1210, established there a civil government independent of the feudal lords, and during the 13th century it became more fully organized. An Irish exchequer had been set up in 1200, and a chancery followed in 1232. The country was divided into counties for administrative purposes, English law was introduced, and serious attempts were made to reduce the feudal liberties of the Anglo-Norman baronage. (Counties were civil administration districts, whereas liberties were lands held in the personal control of aristocratic families and the church.) Parliament started in Ireland, as in England; in 1297 the peers and prelates were joined by representatives of counties, and in 1300 the towns also sent members. But these represented the Anglo-Irish only; the native Irish, to some extent resurgent in Ulster under the O'Neills and O'Donnells and in southwest Munster under the MacCarthys, were aloof and unrepresented.

The 14th and 15th centuries

A brief threat to English control of Ireland, made by Edward Bruce, brother of King Robert I of Scotland, ended when Bruce was killed in battle at Faughart near Dundalk (1318). English control was reasserted and strengthened by the creation of three new Anglo-Irish earldoms: that of Kildare, given to the head of the Leinster Fitzgeralds; that of Desmond, given to the head of the Munster Fitzgeralds; and that of Ormonde, given to the head of the Butlers, who held lands around Tipperary. But the increased power and lands of the Anglo-Irish brought about an inevitable reaction; and during the remainder of the 14th century there was a remarkable revival of Irish political power, which was matched by a flowering of Irish language, law, and civilization. The Gaels recovered large parts of Ulster, the midlands, Connaught, and Leinster, while the Anglo-Irish became increasingly Irish, marrying Irish women and often adopting Gaelic customs.

The English government, which in any case, because of its aim to curtail feudal privileges, was always to some extent opposed by the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, made an effort to restore control but achieved little more than a definition of the status quo. Edward III's son, Lionel, duke of Clarence, as viceroy from 1361 to 1367, passed in the Irish Parliament the Statute of Kilkenny (1366), which listed the "obedient" (English-controlled) lands as Louth, Meath, Trim, Dublin, Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny, Wexford, Waterford, and Tipperary. Intermarriage or alliances with the Irish were forbidden. The independent Irish outside the Pale (the area of English control) were regarded as enemies and were assumed to possess their lands only by usurpation. In practice they were feared, and their attacks were often bought off by almost regular payments. Visits by King Richard II in 1394-95 and 1399 achieved nothing. During the first half of the 15th century Ireland was, in effect, ruled by the three great earls--of Desmond, Ormonde, and Kildare--who combined to dominate the Dublin government. Desmond had sway in Counties Limerick, Cork, Kerry, and Waterford; Ormonde in Tipperary and Kilkenny; and Kildare in Leinster. Although both the Gaels and the Anglo-Irish had supported the Yorkist side in the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist king Edward IV found them no less easy to subjugate than had his Lancastrian predecessors. Succeeding (1468) in bringing about the attainder and execution for treason of Thomas, earl of Desmond, he was nevertheless obliged to yield to aristocratic power in Ireland. The earls of Kildare, who thereafter bore the title of lord deputy (for the English princes who were lords lieutenant), were in effect the actual rulers of Ireland until well into the 16th century.

The Kildare ascendancy

The substitution (1485) of Tudor for Yorkist rule in England had no apparent effect in Ireland, where the ascendancy of the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare, established when Thomas, 7th earl, was created lord deputy in 1471, had passed (1477) to his son Garret Mór (Great Gerald). The fiction of the king's power was preserved by appointing an absentee lieutenant, for whom Kildare acted as deputy; in practice, any real power was exercised largely through dynastic alliances with the chief Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords. Opposition to Kildare was negligible so long as the king was unable to maintain a permanent power to which his opponents might turn; an attempt to displace him was made when Kildare gave support (1487) to Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the English throne. After the advent of a more dangerous pretender, Perkin Warbeck, it was decided (1494) to remove Kildare and rule through an Englishman, Sir Edward Poynings. Poynings subdued Kildare, but he could not reconquer the northern Gaelic Irish. At Drogheda (1494-95) he induced a Parliament to pass an act that came to be known as "Poynings' Law"; it subjected the meetings and legislative drafts of the Irish Parliament to the control of the English king and council. But Poynings' administrative expenses were too great, and Henry VII decided in 1496 to restore Kildare.

On Kildare's death (1513) the deputyship passed to his son Garret Óg (Young Gerald), 9th earl of Kildare, who continued, though less impressively, to dominate the country. But James, 10th earl of Desmond, intrigued with the emperor Charles V; and Henry VIII became convinced that Kildare had lost the power to keep Ireland neutral. Therefore, when the divorce (1533) of Catherine of Aragon made the danger of imperial intervention particularly acute, the king summoned Kildare to England (1534). There were thereafter no Irish-born viceroys for more than a century.

The Reformation period

Rumours that Kildare had been executed precipitated the rebellion of Kildare's son, Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly, called Silken Thomas. The rebellion facilitated the transition to the new system. Silken Thomas had opposed Henry VIII's breach with Rome; his execution (1537) caused a revival of the power of the Butlers of Ormonde; Piers Butler, earl of Ossory, helped to secure the enactment of the royal (instead of papal) ecclesiastical supremacy by the Dublin Parliament of 1536-37. As a further step in shedding papal authority, in 1541 a complaisant Parliament recognized Henry VIII as king of Ireland (his predecessors had held the title of Lord of Ireland). Confiscation of monastic property, as well as the lands of the rebels, met most of the costs of the expanded administration. This loss of land inevitably drove the religious orders and the Anglo-Irish into the arms of the Gaelic Irish, thus weakening the old ethnic rivalries of medieval Ireland.

Sir Anthony St. Leger, lord deputy in 1540-48 and again in 1550-56, then began a conciliatory policy by which outstanding lords were persuaded, in order to gain new titles and grants of lands, to renounce the pope and recognize the king's ecclesiastical supremacy. This policy, however, required a steady series of efficient governors and disciplined administrators; in fact, neither in Tudor nor in Stuart times did the English succeed in converting elective chiefs into hereditary nobles holding offices delegated by the crown. Moreover, even those who had recently submitted were often condemned for religious conservatism and deprived of their lands. St. Leger's personal success was all the more remarkable because the first Jesuit mission to Ireland arrived in the north in 1542.

Under Edward VI (1547-53) the Dublin authorities carried out a forward policy in religion as well as in politics, but Protestantism got no support except from English officials. The official restoration of Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary (1553-58) revealed the strength of resentment in Ireland against Protestantism. As in England, the papal jurisdiction was restored, but otherwise the Tudor regulations of authority were observed. The pope was induced to recognize the conversion of the Tudor Irish lordship into a kingdom. Finally, Mary gave statutory approval for the plantation, or resettlement of Irish lands by Englishmen, of Leix, Offaly, and other Irish lordships of the central plain. Her viceroy was Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, lord deputy (1556-59), who was soon, as lord lieutenant (1559-66) for Elizabeth I, to restore the state's authority over the church.

Ireland under Elizabeth I

The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, enforcing the Anglican church settlement, were passed in Ireland in 1560, but fear of driving the inhabitants of the Pale into alliance with the Gaelic Irish (and perhaps with the Spanish) made the government lenient in enforcing the terms of the acts. Political affairs continued to preoccupy the administrators, so that the new Protestant church was unequipped to resist the forces of the Counter-Reformation. This was inevitable in an Ireland only superficially conformed to royal obedience; but the seriousness of the situation was shown by the three great rebellions of the reign, those of Shane O'Neill (1559), of the Fitzgeralds of Desmond (1568-83), and of O'Neill (Tyrone) and O'Donnell (1594-1603).

The Shane O'Neill rebellion

The first of these rebellions, that of Shane O'Neill, fully exposed the weakness and later the folly of the government. O'Neill's father, Conn the Lame (Conn Bacach), who as the "O'Neill" was head of a whole network of clans, had been made earl of Tyrone in 1541, the succession rights of his illegitimate son Feardorchadh (Matthew) being recognized. Shane, younger but the eldest legitimate son, was nevertheless elected O'Neill on his father's death (1559), and soon afterward Feardorchadh was killed. O'Neill then took the field against the Dublin government, demanding recognition according to the laws of primogeniture, and he insisted that neither of Feardorchadh's sons, Brian and Hugh, had claims to the earldom. Elizabeth invited O'Neill to London to negotiate, but the opportunity for a statesmanlike settlement was lost. O'Neill was to be "captain of Tyrone" and was encouraged to expel from Antrim the MacDonnell (MacDonald or MacConnell) migrants from Scotland. Returning to Ireland in May 1562, O'Neill routed the MacDonnells, as well as the loyal O'Donnells of the northwest, and attempted to secure support from Scotland and France. Eventually the government was saved from a serious situation only through the defeat of O'Neill by the O'Donnells and his murder in 1567 by the MacDonnells.

The lands of the O'Neills and even of loyal Gaelic lords were declared forfeit in 1569, and, in a wave of enthusiasm for colonization, various questionable adventurers were permitted to attempt substantial plantations in Munster, Leinster, and Ulster. The folly of this policy was seen when the government, despite its having declared the position of "O'Neill" extinguished, yet allowed the O'Neills to elect Shane's cousin, Turloch Luineach, as their chief. Butlers and Munster Fitzgeralds also combined forcibly to resist the plantations. The only gleam of statesmanship shown in these years by Henry Sidney, lord deputy (1565-71, 1575-78), was that he managed to avoid a major combination against the government's religious policy. The Butlers were induced to submit, the planters were given only limited support, and a head-on collision with Turloch Luineach was averted. When the Ulster plantation plans could not be carried out against Irish resistance, the queen wisely decided that they should be dropped. The pardon of the Butlers pacified Leinster, and, although in Munster the earl of Desmond's cousin James Fitzgerald, called "Fitzmaurice," attempted to make the war one of religion, he, too, was eventually pardoned. (see also Butler family)

The Desmond rebellion

Despite his pardon, Fitzmaurice in 1575 fled to the Continent, returning to Ireland in 1579 with papal approval for a Roman Catholic crusade against Queen Elizabeth. Although neither France nor Spain supported it and Fitzmaurice was surprised and killed in August 1579, the government was extremely apprehensive. Gerald Fitzgerald, 14th earl of Desmond, then assumed direction of the enterprise. As a military commander he was wholly deficient, and his mediocrity may well have kept outstanding figures in the north and west out of the movement. The rebels were defeated, and in November 1580 a force of Italians and Spaniards was massacred at Dún an Óir ("Golden Fort"), Smerwick Harbour, County Kerry.

The end of the Desmond rebellion gave the government the opportunity to confiscate more than 300,000 acres (100,000 hectares) in Munster and initiate more stringent proceedings against Roman Catholics. But the plantation was not a success. A more statesmanlike attitude was displayed in regard to Connaught land titles. When Sir John Perrot was lord deputy (1584-88), a number of agreements were made with individual landowners and chieftains, by which their titles were officially recognized in return for fixed regular payments. This was a step in the process of converting a great part of the country to English tenures. Perrot was less successful in handling the 1585-86 Parliament, in which the government's anti-Catholic program was defeated by the opposition.

The Tyrone rebellion

The origins of the third rebellion, the O'Neill (Tyrone) war, remain in doubt. Both Hugh Roe O'Donnell and Hugh, younger son of Feardorchadh O'Neill, for whom the earldom of Tyrone had been revived in 1585 and who had had himself elected O'Neill on Turloch Luineach's death in 1595, certainly resented the extension of the royal administration, but the religious issue was probably more important. For a generation, exiled Roman Catholics had been trained as missionaries in the continental colleges of the Counter-Reformation, and the majority of those who returned to Ireland concluded that Catholicism could survive there only if Elizabeth were defeated. The outbreak of hostilities in Ulster in 1594 was at first confined to the northwest, where O'Donnell and Maguire, lord of Fermanagh, tried to drive out the English troops. The intervention of Hugh O'Neill was expected, if not inevitable. His participation with his brother-in-law O'Donnell proved decisive in the north and west, and the English were defeated both in Ulster and in Connaught. A more intimidating combination thus threatened Dublin than even in Shane O'Neill's time. Even in the Pale, arbitrary exactions and exclusion from offices won Hugh much sympathy, and it was said that he knew of Dublin Castle decisions before they were known in the city. Resentful of O'Neill's alleged ingratitude, Elizabeth became impatient of negotiations with him and finally sent Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, to Ireland (1599) to subdue him. But Essex lost his reputation by his inglorious progress through the country and by the speed with which he returned to England after a private conversation with O'Neill. Before Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, arrived (1600) to replace Essex, the Irish leaders had gained the qualified support of Pope Clement VIII and of King Philip III of Spain. But Philip could afford to send only a minimal force to aid the Irish rebels. Its leader, Juan del Aguila, occupied Kinsale and was besieged (1601) by Mountjoy. O'Neill marched south to relieve Aguila, but a rash attempt to surprise the English lines by night proved disastrous (Dec. 24, 1601); the Irish were defeated and the Spaniards surrounded. O'Neill held out in Ulster for more than a year but finally submitted a few days after the queen's death (March 1603).

Viewed generally, Elizabeth's Irish policy had the distinction of having reduced the country to obedience for the first time since the invasion of Henry II. But the cost was a serious one. The loyalty of the Irish was perennially strained over the religious issue, so that further rebellion was almost inevitable and virtually predictable in 1640 when the English government was embarrassed by the Second Bishops' War with Scotland. Economically, the towns and the countryside were needlessly exploited by the new administrators and planters, while the queen's expenditure was substantially increased. Commitments in Ireland were at least partly responsible for the poverty of the crown, which was to become a serious factor in precipitating its 17th-century conflict with Parliament.

Modern Ireland Under British Rule

The English plantation of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The 17th century

James I (1603-25)

James VI of Scotland, who also became King James I of England and Ireland in 1603, might have pursued an Irish policy more enlightened than that of Elizabeth, who had been committed to war against the papacy and against Spain. He did make peace with Spain, but his policy of guarded religious toleration was nullified by the intransigence of the established Anglican church and of the papacy. Unfortunately, James allowed Irish policy to be dominated by the interests of the English governing class and also sought to provide in Ireland opportunities for his countrymen. He thereby virtually continued Elizabethan policy, and as a result the steady exodus of Irish soldiers and churchmen to Roman Catholic countries on the Continent was unabated. On a short-term basis, their absence contributed to peace; but their influence abroad made the Irish question an international one. In Ireland the overwhelming majority of the Gaelic Irish and of the old Anglo-Irish remained detached from government in attitude as well as in way of life.

As soon as James's policy became clear, the earls of Tyrone and of Tyrconnel and other Ulster Gaelic lords joined the flight from Ireland. Their departure opened the way for the plantation of Ulster by a new landowning class, which included Scots as well as Englishmen. This proved the most successful British settlement made in Ireland, mainly because British tenantry and labourers were introduced as well as landlords. The newcomers were mainly from the Scottish Lowlands, and at first the English feared them almost more than they feared the Irish. In an attempt to counter their influence, the city of London was involved in the Ulster plantation, its name being combined with that of the historic ecclesiastical settlement of Derry to provide the name of a plantation. The Presbyterianism of the Scottish immigrants was successfully kept at bay until the time of the English Civil Wars; the Anglican bishoprics in Ireland were well endowed and powerful, and it was not until 1643 that the first presbytery was established in Belfast.

In the Parliament of 1613-15, summoned to ratify the Ulster plantation, a small Protestant majority was achieved because many new boroughs had been created in the newly planted areas. But government was concerned more with the appearance than the reality of consent, and no Parliament was called again until 1633. In the last years of James's reign, pressure from his Spanish and French allies caused him to concede toleration to the Roman Catholics; and from 1618 a Catholic hierarchy was in residence in Ireland.

Charles I (1625-49) and the Commonwealth (1649-60)

Charles I conceived the idea of raising armies and money in Ireland in return for religious concessions, known as "the Graces," by which Roman Catholics were allowed to engage in various public activities. But this policy was abandoned by Thomas Wentworth, later earl of Strafford, lord deputy from 1633 to 1640. He set himself to break the power of the great and of trade monopolists, both Irish and English, including the London city companies. He induced the Catholic members of the Irish House of Commons to join in voting large subsidies in the hope of obtaining further concessions but then abolished most of the existing Graces. He thus seriously weakened the loyalty to the crown of the old landowning classes; and later all his enemies in Ireland joined with those in England in bringing about his execution (1641). His Irish Army was disbanded, and control of the Irish government passed to Puritan lords justices.

A general rising of the Irish in Ulster was almost inevitable. It took place in October 1641, and thousands of colonists were murdered or fled. A Roman Catholic confederacy was formed at Kilkenny in 1642, but it did not succeed in welding together the various groups of which it was composed. During the period of the English Civil Wars there were Irish confederate armies in Ulster and in Leinster; English parliamentary armies operated in the north and south; and Dublin was held by James, duke of Ormonde, commanding an army of Protestant royalists. Negotiations for peace between Ormonde and the confederates were difficult and protracted; and in 1646, when it was clear that Charles I's cause was lost, Ormonde surrendered Dublin to a parliamentary commander. The confederates in isolation could offer little resistance (1649-50) to Oliver Cromwell. By 1652 all Irish resistance was over.

During the Commonwealth and Protectorate, authority in Ireland was exercised by parliamentary commissioners and chief governors. A union of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, effected in 1653, resulted in Irish representatives attending Parliaments held in London in 1654, 1656, and 1659. By an Act of Settlement, Ireland, regarded as conquered territory, was parceled out among soldiers and creditors of the Commonwealth, and only those Irish landowners able to prove their constant support of the Parliamentary cause escaped having their estates confiscated. Of these, those who were Roman Catholics were still obliged to exchange land owned to the northeast or south of the River Shannon for land in Connaught. Catholics and Anglicans were forbidden to practice their religion, but the campaign against Irish Catholicism was not successful. After the Restoration (1660) Charles II personally favoured complete religious toleration, but the forces of militant Protestantism sometimes proved too strong for him. The Commonwealth parliamentary union was, after 1660, treated as null and void.

The Restoration period and the Jacobite war

Most significant of the events of the Restoration was the second Act of Settlement (1662), which enabled Protestant loyalists to recover their estates. The Act of Explanation (1665) obliged the Cromwellian settlers to surrender one-third of their grants, providing a reserve of land from which Roman Catholics were partially compensated for losses under the Commonwealth. This satisfied neither group. Catholics were prevented from residing in towns, and local power, in both borough and county, became appropriated to the Protestant interest. But Protestantism itself became permanently split; as in England, the Presbyterians refused to conform to Episcopalian order and practice and, in association with the Presbyterians of Scotland, organized as a separate church.

Under James II, advantage was taken of the king's Roman Catholicism to reverse the tendencies of the preceding reign. After his flight from England to France (1688), James crossed to Ireland, where, in a Parliament, the Acts of Settlement and Explanation were repealed and provision was made for the restoration of expropriated Catholics. When William III landed in Ireland to oppose James, the country divided denominationally, but the real issue was not religion but the land. After his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne (1690), James fled to France, but his Catholic supporters continued in arms until defeated at Aughrim and obliged to surrender (1691) at Limerick. There, however, they secured either the right to go overseas or, if they accepted William's regime, immunity from discriminatory laws. But civil articles to secure toleration for the Catholics were not ratified, thus enabling later Irish leaders to denounce the "broken treaty" of Limerick. Immediately after Limerick, the Protestant position was secured by acts of the English Parliament declaring illegal the acts of King James's Parliament in Ireland and restricting to Protestants membership of future Irish Parliaments. The sale of the lands forfeited by James and some of his supporters further reduced the Catholic landownership in the country; by 1703 it was less than 10 percent. On this foundation was established the Protestant Ascendancy.

The 18th century

The Protestant Ascendancy was a supremacy of that proportion of the population, about one-tenth, which alone belonged to the established Protestant Episcopalian church. They celebrated their position as a ruling class by annual recollections of their victories over their hated popish enemies. Not only the Catholic majority but also the Presbyterians and other Nonconformists, whose combined numbers exceeded those of the church establishment, were excluded from full political rights, notably by the Test Act of 1704, which made tenure of office dependent on willingness to receive communion according to the Protestant Episcopalian (Church of Ireland) rite. Owing to their banishment from public life, the history of the Roman Catholic Irish in the 18th century is concerned almost exclusively with the activities of exiled soldiers and priests, many of whom distinguished themselves in the service of continental monarchs. Details of the lives of the unrecorded Roman Catholic majority in rural Ireland can be glimpsed only from ephemeral literature in English and from the Gaelic poetry of the four provinces.

The Protestant Ascendancy of 18th-century Ireland began in subordination to that of England but ended in asserting its independence. In the 1690s commercial jealousy compelled the Irish Parliament to destroy the Irish woolen export trade, and in 1720 the Declaratory Act affirmed the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland and transferred to the British House of Lords the powers of a supreme court in Irish law cases. By the end of the first quarter of the 18th century, resentment at this subordination had grown sufficiently to enable the celebrated pamphleteer Jonathan Swift to whip up a storm of protest over the affair of " Wood's halfpence." William Wood, an English manufacturer, had been authorized to mint coins for Ireland; the outcry against alleged exploitation of the lesser country by arbitrary creation of a monopoly became so violent that it could be terminated only by withdrawing the concession from Wood.

Nevertheless, it was another 30 years before a similar protest was made. In 1751 a group of patriots organized themselves to defeat government resolutions in the Irish Parliament appropriating a financial surplus as the English administrators rather than the Irish legislators saw fit. Although in 1768 the Irish Parliament was made more sensitive to public opinion by provision for fresh elections every eight years instead of merely at the beginning of a new reign, it remained sufficiently controlled by government to pass sympathetic resolutions on the revolt of the American colonies.

The American Revolution greatly influenced Irish politics, not least because it removed government troops from Ireland, and the Protestant Irish volunteer corps, spontaneously formed to defend the country against possible French attack, exercised a coercive influence for reform. A patriotic opposition led by Henry Flood and Henry Grattan began an agitation that led in 1782 to the repeal of the Declaratory Act of 1720 and to an amendment of Poynings' Law to give legislative initiative to the Irish Parliament. In this period many of the disabilities suffered by Roman Catholics in Ireland were abolished, and in 1793 the British government, seeking to win Catholic loyalty on the outbreak of war against Revolutionary France, gave them the franchise and admission to most civil offices. The government further attempted to conciliate Catholic opinion in 1795 by founding the seminary of Maynooth to provide education for the Catholic clergy. But the Protestant Ascendancy had become concerned about its position and resisted efforts to make the Irish Parliament more representative. The outbreak of the French Revolution had effected a temporary alliance between an intellectual elite among the Presbyterians and leading middle-class Catholics; these, under the inspiration of Wolfe Tone, founded societies of United Irishmen, a series of radical political clubs. After the outbreak of war, the societies, reinforced by agrarian malcontents, were driven underground. In despair they sought the military support of Revolutionary France, which between 1796 and 1798 dispatched a series of abortive naval expeditions to Ireland. The United Irishmen were preparing for rebellion; it broke out in May 1798 but was widespread only in Ulster and in Wexford in the south. Although the rebellion was unsuccessful, it brought the Irish question forcibly to the attention of the British cabinet, and the prime minister, William Pitt, planned and carried through an amalgamation of the British and Irish Parliaments, merging the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom. Despite substantial opposition in the Irish Parliament, the measure passed into law, taking effect on Jan. 1, 1801. To Grattan and his supporters the Union seemed the end of the Irish nation; the last protest of the United Irishmen was made in Robert Emmet's abortive rebellion of 1803.

Social, economic, and cultural life in the 17th and 18th centuries

Although the late 16th century was marked by the destruction of Gaelic civilization in the upper levels of society, it was preserved for more than the next two centuries among the ordinary people of the northwest, west, and southwest, who continued to speak Irish and who maintained a way of life remote from that of the new landlord class.

The 17th-century confiscations made Ireland a land of great estates and, except for Dublin, of small towns decaying under the impact of British restrictions on trade. Except on the Ulster plantations, the tenantry was relatively poor in comparison with that of England and employed inferior agricultural methods. Over large parts of the east and south, tillage farming had given way to pasturage. In the north of Ireland, a somewhat similar tendency, creating a decline in the demand for labour, led in the early 18th century to the migration of substantial numbers of Ulster Scots to North America. In Ulster there gradually emerged a tenantry who compelled their landlords to maintain them in their farms against the claims and bids of Roman Catholic competitors now once again legally entitled to hold land. This purpose immensely strengthened the Orange Order (popularly called the Orangemen), founded in 1795 in defense of the Protestant Ascendancy. Increasingly it linked the Protestant gentry and farmers, while excluding Catholics from breaking into this privileged ring. Tillage farming was maintained in Ulster more extensively than in the south and west, where there developed on the poorer lands a system of subdivision apparently necessitated by population increase. Apart from folklore and literary sources, little is known of the lives of the ordinary people; and even of the gentry the evidence, apart from estate records, is rarely extensive.

Little need be said of the culture of the Anglo-Irish in the same period, as it followed so closely the traditions of Britain and, very occasionally, those of the rest of Europe. Gradually during the 18th century, the new landowning class developed some appreciation of the visual arts. But the really original achievement of the period was in literature, particularly in drama, where the rhetorical gifts of the people secured an audience. In this period there was a strong connection between rhetoric and the arts, as between oratory, themes of social decay, and the consoling power of language and form. Such works as Oliver Goldsmith's Deserted Village and Traveller, Edmund Burke's speeches, and the speeches and plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan are manifestations of a rhetorical tradition central to Irish feelings.

The percentage of land, by county, owned by Roman Catholics in 1641, 1688, and 1703. The average percentage for all of Ireland is indicated after the year identifying each map.

The 19th and early 20th centuries

The Act of Union provided that Ireland would have in the United Kingdom about one-fifth of the representation of Great Britain, with 100 members in the House of Commons. The union of the churches of England and Ireland as the established denominations of their respective countries was also effected, and the preeminent position in Ireland of Protestant Episcopalianism was further secured by the continuation of the British Test Act, which virtually excluded Nonconformists (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) from Parliament and from membership in municipal corporations. Not until 1828-29 did the repeal of the Test Act and the concession of Catholic emancipation provide political equality for most purposes. It was also provided in the Union that there should be free trade between the two countries and that Irish merchandise would be admitted to British colonies on the same terms as British merchandise.

Population changes from 1841 to 1851 as a result of the Great Potato Famine.

But these advantages were not enough to offset the disastrous effect on Ireland of exposure to the full impact of Britain's industrial revolution. Within half a century agricultural produce dropped in value and estate rentals declined, while the rural population increased substantially. When the potato, the staple food of rural Ireland, rotted in the ground through the onset of blight in the mid-1840s, roughly a million people died of starvation and fever in the Great Potato Famine that ensued, and even more fled abroad. Moreover, emigration continued after the famine had ended in 1850. By 1911, Ireland's population was less than half of what it had been before the famine.

Political discontent

At first, and perhaps for more than one-third of the 19th century, the auguries of success for the Union were favourable. After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815), political discontent increased but became concentrated, so far as the Roman Catholics were concerned, on securing their emancipation. Until this was achieved there had not clearly emerged any notable difference in outlook between the Catholics and Presbyterians; but the dramatic manner in which the Catholic Daniel O'Connell was elected to a Parliamentary seat for County Clare (1828), subsequently sweeping the emancipation movement into victory, provoked a panic among timid Protestants and led to an alliance between the Presbyterians and their old oppressors, the Protestant Episcopalians. After emancipation, the middle-class Catholics and Protestants drifted apart, the latter increasingly clinging to the Union, the former more slowly but at last decisively coming to seek its repeal.

O'Connell's adherence to the cause of repeal did not prevent him from participating actively in British politics. Lord Melbourne, the Whig prime minister, by a bargain known as the Lichfield House Compact (1835), secured O'Connell's support in return for a promise of "justice for Ireland." But meanwhile the Tories, led by Sir Robert Peel, exercised through their control of the House of Lords an effective restriction on promised social and economic reforms for Ireland, and, when Peel returned to power in the early 1840s, O'Connell, despairing of further concessions, began a massive campaign outside Parliament for repeal of the Union, notably by organizing large popular demonstrations. A climax was reached in October 1843 when troops and artillery were called out to suppress the mass meeting arranged at Clontarf outside Dublin. O'Connell's method of popular agitation within the law proved unavailing, however, and his influence thereafter rapidly declined.

Associated with O'Connell's repeal agitation was the Young Ireland movement, a group connected with a repeal weekly newspaper, The Nation, and led by its editor Charles Gavan Duffy, its chief contributor Thomas Osborne Davis, and its special land correspondent John Blake Dillon. But they became increasingly restless at O'Connell's cautious policy after Clontarf and in 1848 became involved in an abortive rising. Its failure, and the deportation or escape from Ireland of most of the Young Ireland leaders, destroyed the repeal movement.

For about 20 years after the Great Potato Famine, political agitation was subdued, while emigration continued to reduce the population every year. The landowners had also suffered severely from inability to collect rents, and there was a wholesale transfer of estates to new owners. Evictions were widespread, and cottages were demolished at once by the landlords to prevent other impoverished tenants from occupying them. The flow of emigrants to the United States was encouraged by invitations from Irish people already there. And in England, also, the new industrial cities and shipping centres attracted large settlements of poor migrants from Ireland.

The rise of Fenianism

Among the exiles both in the United States and in England, the Fenian movement spread widely. A secret revolutionary society named for the Fianna, the Irish armed force in legendary times, it aimed at securing Ireland's political freedom by exploiting every opportunity to injure English interests.

In Ireland, Fenian ideals were propagated in the newspaper The Irish People; and in 1865 four Fenian leaders, Charles Kickham, John O'Leary, Thomas Clarke Luby, and Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa were sentenced to long-term imprisonment for treasonable writing in it. During the next two years, plans gradually developed for a projected nationwide rising, financed largely by funds collected in the United States. It took place in March 1867 but was easily crushed and its leaders imprisoned. The prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, at last recognizing the necessity for drastic Irish reforms, disestablished the Protestant Church of Ireland in 1869 and in 1870 introduced the first Irish Land Act, which conceded the principles of secure tenure and compensation for improvements made to property. He may also have been concerned at the cleavage between English and Irish public opinion caused by the execution at Manchester of William P. Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O'Brien for involvement in a Fenian prisoner-rescue operation that resulted in the shooting of a British police sergeant. To most English people the "Manchester murderers" richly deserved their fate; to most Irish people they were the "Manchester martyrs," celebrated in ballad and legend.

The Home Rule movement and the Land League.

Soon afterward, in 1870, a constitutional movement, the Home Government Association (Home Rule League), was founded by Isaac Butt, a prominent Unionist lawyer interested in land reform. In the election of 1874 it returned about 60 members to Parliament. The movement was tolerated rather than encouraged by the various groups of Irish nationalists, and it was not fully supported by the Roman Catholic clergy until the 1880s.

A return of bad harvests in 1879 brought new fears of famine, and Michael Davitt founded the Irish Land League, seeking to achieve for tenants security of tenure, fair rents, and freedom to sell property. A formidable agrarian agitation developed when Davitt was joined by Charles Stewart Parnell, a young landowner and member of Parliament in the Home Rule Party, which soon elected him as its leader in place of Butt. Parnell undertook a tour of North America to raise funds for the Land League; there he was influenced by two Irish Americans, John Devoy, a leading member of Clan na Gael, an effective American Fenian organization, and Pat Ford, whose New York paper The Irish World preached militant republicanism and hatred of England. At Westminster Parnell adopted a policy of persistent obstruction, which compelled attention to Irish needs by bringing parliamentary business to a standstill. Gladstone was forced to introduce his Land Act of 1881, conceding fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale of the tenant's interest.

Parnell's success was not achieved without serious difficulties, including the ultimate proscription of the Land League by the government and the imprisonment of its leaders. As a result, Parnell used his parliamentary party, then increased to 86, to defeat and thus dismiss from office Gladstone's Liberal government, already unpopular in England as a result of its failure to relieve the British forces under Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, Sudan, in 1884. For a while Conservatives and Liberals both negotiated with Parnell, but ultimately Gladstone became converted to Home Rule, introducing a bill to bring it into effect after he returned to office in 1886. The bill, however, was defeated by a combination of Conservative Unionists influenced by Irish Orangemen and splinter groups from the Liberal Party. There followed 20 years during which Irish Nationalist ambitions seemed frustrated, partly because Conservative-Unionists were mainly in power and partly because bitter internal rivalries discredited the Irish Nationalist Party after Parnell's involvement (1889) in a divorce suit. Meanwhile, Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill (1893) was rejected in the House of Lords. Only in 1900 was a Parnellite, John Redmond, able to reunite the Nationalists. In the last years of the century, partly in reaction to political frustrations, a cultural nationalist movement developed, led by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill. Through the Gaelic League much was done to revive interest in the speaking and study of Irish. These cultural movements were reinforced by others, such as that of the Sinn Féin ("We Ourselves") movement led by Arthur Griffith, who preached a doctrine of political self-help. It subsequently emerged that a Fenian organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, had revived and was secretly recruiting membership through various cultural societies and through the Gaelic Athletic Association, founded to promote specifically Irish sports.

At the close of the century the Conservatives initiated a policy designed to "kill Home Rule by kindness" by introducing constructive reforms in Ireland. Their most important achievement in this field was the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903. This, by providing generous inducements to landlords to sell their estates, effected by government mediation the transfer of landownership to the occupying tenants.

The 20th-century crisis

After the great Liberal victory of 1906, Redmond decided to force the Liberals to revive Home Rule, and, when David Lloyd George's radical budget provoked a collision with the House of Lords in 1909, he seized his opportunity. He agreed to support the campaign of the prime minister, H.H. Asquith, against the Lords in return for the promise of a Home Rule bill. The reduction of the power of the Lords by the 1911 Parliament Act seemed to promise success for the third Home Rule bill, introduced in 1912. But in the meantime the Irish Unionists, under their colourful leader Sir Edward Carson, had mounted an effective countermovement, backed by most of the British Unionists. Thousands of Ulstermen signed the Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule (1912), and Carson announced that a provisional government would be formed there. At first planning to reject Home Rule for all of Ireland, the Unionists gradually fell back on a demand for Ulster to be excluded from its scope. Redmond's claim that there was "no Ulster question," implying that even among the Ulster members of Parliament there was a majority for Home Rule, hardened the Protestant and Unionist resistance in the areas around Belfast. Down, Antrim, Armagh, and Derry all contained Unionist majorities; Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan had strong Home Rule majorities; and Tyrone and Fermanagh had small Home Rule majorities. The Ulster Volunteer Force was organized and boasted of active sympathy among army officers; their boasts became formidable when all the officers in the cavalry brigade at the Curragh suddenly announced (March 1914) that they would resign if ordered to move into Ulster. Meanwhile, a nationalist force, the Irish Volunteers, had been launched in Dublin in November 1913 to counter the Ulster Volunteers. Both forces gathered arms, and Ireland was on the verge of civil war when World War I broke out. Assured of Redmond's support in recruiting for the army, Asquith enacted Home Rule but followed this with a Suspensory Act, delaying implementation until the return of peace.

Meanwhile in Ireland the revolutionary element gained support from those alienated by Redmond's pro-British attitude. Before the end of 1914 the Irish Republican Brotherhood had made full plans for a revolutionary outbreak. Sir Roger Casement went to Germany to solicit help, but he obtained only obsolete arms and was himself arrested on his return to Ireland on April 21, 1916. When the rising took place three days later, on Easter Monday, only about 1,000 of the small force available were actually engaged. A provisional Republican government was proclaimed. The General Post Office and other parts of Dublin were seized; street fighting continued for about a week until Patrick Pearse and other Republican leaders were forced to surrender. Their subsequent execution aroused Irish public opinion and led to the defeat and virtual extinction of Redmond's constitutional party at Westminster in the general election of December 1918. Their successful opponents, calling themselves Sinn Féin but supporting the Republican program announced in 1916, were led by Eamon de Valera, a surviving leader of the Easter Rising. Again the Republicans set up their provisional government, elected by the Irish members of Parliament at a meeting in Dublin called Dáil Éireann, the "Irish Assembly." This provided an alternative administration when British government was rapidly breaking down except in the northeastern counties. Simultaneously, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was organized to resist British administration and to secure recognition for the Republican government. Its members soon engaged in widespread ambushes and attacks on barracks, while the government retaliated with ruthless reprisals. A large proportion of the Irish police resigned and were replaced by English recruits, known from their temporary uniforms as the Black and Tans.

In this condition of virtual civil war, the Irish population in the south became alienated from British rule, and the London government was forced, partly under American influence, to pass the Government of Ireland Act (1920). By this measure Ireland was divided into two self-governing areas, Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. Both were to enjoy, within the United Kingdom, limited powers of self-government. After a general election in Ireland, King George V opened the Parliament of Northern Ireland in Belfast (1921) and in his speech appealed for an end to fratricidal strife. The king's initiative forced the British prime minister Lloyd George to open negotiations with de Valera, but for some time progress proved impossible because neither side would admit the other's legality. Ultimately, on Dec. 6, 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on behalf of Great Britain by David Lloyd George and leading members of his cabinet and on behalf of Ireland by Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and other members of the Republican cabinet.

Independent Ireland to 1959

Establishment of the Irish Free State

The Anglo-Irish Treaty provided that Ireland should in future have the "same constitutional status in the community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa with a parliament having powers to make laws for the peace, order and good government of Ireland and an Executive responsible to that parliament." The new dominion was to be known as the Irish Free State. This peace agreement, ratified by the British Parliament, became operative when it had also been passed (January 1922) by a meeting of the Dáil. The new state comprised only 26 of the 32 counties; the northeastern area, known as Northern Ireland, remained part of the United Kingdom.

But the terms of the treaty had been accepted by the Irish signatories only because Lloyd George had threatened war on Ireland if they were rejected. Particularly obnoxious were a prescribed oath of allegiance to the British crown and the provisions allowing Northern Ireland to remain outside the new state. De Valera and the Republicans immediately repudiated the treaty, and, after its passage in the Dáil, de Valera resigned the presidency. Michael Collins, chairman of the provisional government set up according to the terms of the treaty, and Arthur Griffith, the new president, desired an immediate general election to obtain a verdict on the treaty; in the deteriorating conditions Collins eventually made with de Valera an agreement known as the Pact (May 20, 1922), in which it was settled that government and Republican candidates would not oppose each other and that de Valera would consider resuming office. But the Pact naturally could not bind other parties, and at the election (June 16) Republicans were ousted in favour of members of a labour party and a farmers' party and by independents, thus reducing the antitreaty vote to a small minority. Before the Dáil could meet, civil war had broken out between the government and the extremist Republicans, who were allegedly accessories to the assassination (June 22) in London of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson soon after his acceptance of the position of military adviser to the government of Northern Ireland. The Republicans in Dublin had occupied the Four Courts (central courts of justice) in April and in late June. Under pressure from Britain, which also provided military equipment, Collins ordered them to retire. Serious fighting ensued for a week, until the Courts were blown up, and Rory O'Connor, the Dublin Republican leader, surrendered. Meanwhile, de Valera, who had escaped to the southwest, was openly supporting the Republicans. Griffith and Collins decided that no further compromise was possible, and military operations were begun. The strain had weighed so heavily on Griffith that he died suddenly on August 12, and Collins, inspecting the military operations, was killed in an ambush on August 22.

The provisional government had thus lost two of its most prominent leaders, and surviving ministers could not appear openly without armed protection. Moreover, there was urgency in that, by the terms of the treaty, the newly elected Dáil was required to frame its constitution before Dec. 6, 1922. It met on September 9, elected as the new president William Thomas Cosgrave, and, in the absence of the Republican deputies, quickly passed the clauses of the constitution defining the relations of the Free State with the British crown and outlining arrangements for imperial defense. Timothy Michael Healy, a veteran follower of Parnell who had later supported Sinn Féin, was then appointed governor-general, and Cosgrave became president of the executive council. The new constitution was also ratified at Westminster.

The Cosgrave ministries

Both before and after the ratification of the constitution, the government resorted to strong measures to quell disorder and violence. Its decision to execute those found in unauthorized possession of firearms embittered Irish politics for years afterward. Numerous Republican insurgents were also imprisoned, and 77 were executed. Although Republican opposition was at first more bitter than ever, it eventually became less well organized, and by May 1923, on de Valera's recommendation, armed resistance ended.

At the end of August 1923 the fourth Dáil was elected, on a basis of adult suffrage for men and women. De Valera retained his personal following, and his party won 44 seats out of 128. Cosgrave's party won less than half the total number of seats, but, as the Republicans refused to sit in the new Dáil, he had a majority among those who did attend. The absence of any effective opposition party greatly strengthened the power of the new government, and in the following years it displayed great energy. Despite initial economic difficulties, it pursued an efficient farming policy and carried through important hydroelectric projects. Government was increasingly centralized, with the elimination of various corrupt borough corporations; Kevin O'Higgins, as minister for justice, carried through many judicial reforms, and an efficient civil service was organized.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 had provided that, if Northern Ireland did not enter the Free State, a boundary commission must establish the frontier between the two countries. Two of the six excluded counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh, contained clear, though small, Nationalist majorities, and the southern portions of both Down and Armagh had for years returned Nationalist members. Despite Northern Ireland's reluctance, the Boundary Commission was established and sat in secret session during 1925. But it only recommended minor changes, which all three governments rejected as less satisfactory than maintaining the status quo.

In the general election of June 1927, Cosgrave's support in the Dáil was further reduced, but he nevertheless formed a new ministry, in which O'Higgins became vice president of the Executive Council. O'Higgins' assassination on July 10 suddenly revived old feuds, and Cosgrave passed a Public Safety Act, declaring all revolutionary societies treasonable. He forced the Republicans to acknowledge allegiance to the crown before being seated in the Dáil, though de Valera decried the oath as an "empty political formula." Shortly thereafter the Republicans, allied with the Labour Party and the National League, almost defeated Cosgrave, who thereupon dissolved the Dáil. In new elections, Cosgrave won 61 seats as compared with Fianna Fáil's 57 and again formed a ministry. In the economic depression of the early 1930s, unemployment and general discontent with the government led to its defeat in February 1932. Fianna Fáil won enough seats for de Valera, with Labour Party support, to be able to form a new government.

De Valera's governments (1932-48) and the establishment of Éire

De Valera entered office with a policy of encouraging industry and improving the social services. He abolished the oath of allegiance to the crown and also stopped payment to Britain of interest on the capital advanced under the Land Acts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This refusal led to a tariff war with Britain. The country endorsed his policies in January 1933 by returning him to the Dáil with 77 seats and the support of the Labour Party.

De Valera invoked the Public Safety Act against the Blueshirts, a quasi-fascist body organized (by Cosgrave's militant supporters) allegedly to protect Treatyites from Republican extremists at public meetings. The government's relations with the radical Republicans also deteriorated, and many were arrested and imprisoned in the mid-1930s.

De Valera introduced proposals for a new constitution in 1937. The power of the crown was ended, and the office of governor-general was replaced by that of a president elected by national suffrage. The first president was Douglas Hyde, a Celtic scholar who had been associated with the Gaelic revival since 1890. The new constitution did not proclaim an independent republic, but it replaced the title of the Irish Free State with the word Éire (Ireland). The new constitution was ratified by a plebiscite at the 1937 general election (in which de Valera was again victorious) and became operative on Dec. 29, 1937.

An agreement in April 1938 ended British occupation of three naval bases that had been left in British hands by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The dispute over the land-purchase annuities was settled, and the economic warfare was abated.

At the outbreak of World War II, de Valera renewed his statement, made in 1938, that Ireland would not become a base for attacks on Great Britain. Under the Emergency Powers Act of 1939, hundreds of IRA members were interned without trial, and six were executed between 1940 and 1944. His government, reelected in 1943 and 1944, remained strictly neutral, despite German air raids on Dublin in 1941 and, after the United States entered the war in December 1941, pressure from U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Republic of Ireland

In the general election of 1948, Fianna Fáil won 68 of the 147 seats in the Dáil, but de Valera refused to enter a coalition. John A. Costello emerged as the leader of a bloc composed of his own party, Fine Gael, and several smaller groups. Out of office, de Valera toured the world advocating the unification and independence of Ireland. Fearful of de Valera's prestige, Costello introduced in the Dáil the Republic of Ireland Act, which ended the fiction of Commonwealth membership that had been maintained since 1937. The act took effect in April 1949. Britain recognized the status of Ireland but declared that cession of the six counties could not occur without consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland. Economic difficulties and a controversy between the ministry and the Roman Catholic hierarchy over the Public Health Act weakened Costello's government, and, after the general election of 1951, de Valera again became prime minister. His ministry aroused sufficient discontent for Costello to be returned to power in 1954, but economic troubles enabled Fianna Fáil to win a majority in 1957. This was to be de Valera's last administration. He retired as prime minister in 1959 and was elected to the presidency, serving until 1973.

Ireland Since 1959

Economic and political developments

Sean Lemass, prime minister from 1959 to 1966, initiated measures to stimulate Ireland's seriously stagnating economy. Under the First Programme for Economic Expansion (1958-63), economic protection was dismantled and foreign investment was encouraged; a growth rate that was planned to reach 2 percent actually reached 4 percent. This prosperity brought profound social and cultural changes to what had been one of the poorest and most backward countries in Europe. Emigration substantially declined, consumer spending increased, and religious social teaching was challenged and often set aside by newly affluent Irish men and women.

Ireland, like Britain, suffered setbacks in attempting to join the European Economic Community, but both nations formally entered that organization on Jan. 1, 1973. In elections held later that year, the Fianna Fáil government of Jack Lynch (prime minister from 1966) was defeated by a Fine Gael-Labour coalition led by Liam Cosgrave. The worldwide oil crisis and recession of 1974-75 forced the imposition of deflationary economic policies, a wealth tax, and attempts to tax farmers' incomes. Jack Lynch returned to power in 1977, and the Fianna Fáil proposed an ambitious economic policy based on tax cuts and the creation of new enterprises by foreign borrowing.

Despite a brief boom, serious problems became evident in the Irish economy by 1980. These included declining agricultural prices, rising imports and rising prices for imported oil, only a small increase in output, and a rapidly growing population, nearly half of which was under 25 years of age. Foreign borrowing had increased, while unemployment and inflation rose steeply.

The early 1980s proved politically volatile for the Irish republic. In the general election of 1981 no clear majority resulted, and Garret FitzGerald of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition took power, ousting Charles Haughey, who had succeeded Jack Lynch as Fianna Fáil prime minister in 1979. The major issues of the campaign were economic policy, including the imposition of a wealth tax, and the removal of a constitutional ban on divorce. The budget of the coalition government was defeated in January 1982, and another general election in February returned Fianna Fáil and Haughey to power. The life of this government, too, proved short and uneasy. In the face of a budget deficit equal to 7 percent of the gross national product, a program of severe public spending cuts was introduced. The government was defeated on a no-confidence vote in November and another general election--the third in 18 months--followed. This time a Fine Gael-Labour coalition under the leadership of FitzGerald secured an overall majority of the vote.

By the mid-1980s the economy showed faint signs of improvement. Inflation was at its lowest level in nearly two decades, helped by lower oil prices. The budget deficit and high level of unemployment, however, continued to pose considerable problems. Emigration, a barometer of Irish economic health, again began to increase in the mid-1980s. The prolonged recession had once again brought to the surface doubts and anxieties about the future of the Irish state and its real independence.

In February 1987 Fianna Fáil returned to power under Charles Haughey but without an overall majority. The new Progressive Democrat Party, formed in 1985 by men and women who had split from Fianna Fáil, made a strong showing. Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA--following a decision in November 1986 to drop its abstentionist policy and contest future Dáil elections--stood on a socialist and pro-IRA platform but failed to win a seat. Shortly after the election the former prime minister Garret FitzGerald resigned as leader of Fine Gael and was succeeded by Alan Dukes.

The new government embarked on a program of comprehensive public spending cuts. This secured the support of Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats, but opinion within the Labour Party, traditionally committed to high public expenditure programs, was more critical. The austerity measures were successful, and by the early 1990s the country's economic position had improved considerably. Inflation was low, budget deficits were reduced, and the annual growth rate was averaging more than 5 percent. Unemployment, however, remained high.

In the 1990 presidential election, Mary Robinson was elected the republic's first woman president. The election of a candidate with socialist and feminist sympathies was regarded as a watershed in Irish political life, reflecting the changes taking place in Irish society. Charles Haughey was replaced in 1992 as leader of Fianna Fáil by Albert Reynolds, who also became prime minister. A Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition came to power after the 1992 general election but collapsed two years later. Another coalition, consisting of members of the Fine Gael, Labour, and Democratic Left parties, then took office, with Fine Gael leader John Bruton as prime minister. The Bruton government lasted until the general election of June 1997, after which Fianna Fáil formed a new coalition with party leader Bertie Ahern as prime minister.

In May 1987, following a Supreme Court decision, a constitutional referendum ratified the Single European Act and therefore served to confirm Ireland's participation in the European Community (EC; since 1993 the European Union [EU]). The act legislated for the harmonization of social and fiscal measures taken within the EC and was a forerunner of the 1991 Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) that paved the way for the establishment of the EU. Irish voters approved the Maastricht Treaty by a large majority in a referendum held in 1992.

Social changes

The close relationship between the Irish republic and the Roman Catholic church was highlighted by the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, the first visit there of a reigning pontiff. The relationship was to be tested in the 1980s, however, as attempts were made to alter Irish law in its relation to Roman Catholic doctrine. In 1983, after a campaign from Catholic pressure groups, a referendum was held to approve a draft constitutional amendment reinforcing the republic's existing ban on abortion. After a divisive campaign, less than 55 percent of the electorate participated in the referendum, and only 36 percent of the total electorate voted in favour of the amendment, which nonetheless was enough for approval.

In 1985 the Roman Catholic church strenuously, but futilely, opposed the government's liberalization of legislation concerning contraception. Church-state relations were tested again the following year by a referendum to remove the constitutional ban against divorce. The government, which favoured removal of the ban, was defeated by 39 percent of the electorate. There were further strains on church-state relations in the 1990s. A second referendum on abortion was passed in 1992, which relaxed some of the legal restrictions on obtaining one. The Catholic church in Ireland was rocked by a series of scandals, which did much to damage its reputation. Another referendum to lift the ban on divorce was held in 1995--this one passing but only by a small majority--and went into effect in 1997.

Relations with Northern Ireland

During the late 1950s and early 1960s the Irish government was forced to deal with IRA attacks on British army posts along the Ulster border. An attempt to ease cross-border tensions was made in 1965, when Ireland's prime minister, Sean Lemass, and Northern Ireland's prime minister, Terence O'Neill, exchanged visits. In 1970 the republic's Prime Minister Lynch dismissed two cabinet ministers following an attempt to import arms for use in Northern Ireland.

The Irish government was increasingly preoccupied by the situation in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. In 1973 Prime Minister Cosgrave participated in talks with Edward Heath, prime minister of Britain, and representatives of Northern Ireland, resulting in the Sunningdale Agreement. This accord recognized that the North's relationship with Britain could not be changed without agreement of a majority of the population in the North, and it provided for the establishment of a Council of Ireland composed of members from both the Dáil and the Northern Ireland assembly. The agreement collapsed the next year.

Although the republic was little affected by the violence in Ulster, there were a number of serious terrorist incidents. The murder of the British ambassador in Dublin in 1976 led to a state of emergency and the unpopular measure of strengthening emergency powers legislation.

In 1981 Prime Minister FitzGerald launched a constitutional crusade to make the reunification of Ireland more attractive to Ulster Unionists. At the end of the year, the Irish and British governments set up an Anglo-Irish intergovernmental council to discuss matters of common concern, especially security. The report of the New Ireland Forum--a discussion group that included representatives of the political parties in Ireland and Northern Ireland--in 1984 set out three possible frameworks for political development in Ireland: those of a unitary state, a federal state, and joint sovereignty. Fianna Fáil preferred a unitary state, while Fine Gael and Labour preferred the federal solution. In November 1985 at Hillsborough in Northern Ireland, Ireland and Britain again agreed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland, and an intergovernmental conference was established to deal with political, security, and legal relations between the two parts of the island.

Despite Fianna Fáil's initial criticism of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, while in power the Haughey government maintained support for the agreement. Contacts between the Irish and British governments continued after February 1987 within the formal structure of the intergovernmental conference. Fears that the violence in Northern Ireland would spill into the republic as a consequence of closer Anglo-Irish cooperation in the wake of the agreement proved unfounded.

In 1993 the Irish and British governments signed a joint peace initiative (the Downing Street Declaration), in which they pledged to seek mutually agreeable political structures in Northern Ireland and between the two islands. The following year the IRA declared a cease-fire, and for the next 18 months there was considerable optimism that a new period of political cooperation between north and south had been inaugurated. The cease-fire collapsed in 1996, however, and the IRA resumed its bombing campaign.

Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica

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