The first human settlements in Ireland, an island lying on the western fringe of Europe, were made relatively late in \TEuropean prehistory\t, around 6000 BC. EARLY GAELIC IRELAND Sometime between about 600 and 150 BC, Celtic peoples from western Europe, who came to be known as \TGaels\t, invaded Ireland and subdued the previous inhabitants. The basic units of Gaelic society were the tuatha, or petty kingdoms, of which perhaps 150 existed in Ireland. The tuatha remained independent of one another, but they shared a common language, Gaelic (see \TCeltic languages\t), and a class of men called brehons, who were learned in customary law and helped to preserve throughout Ireland a remarkably uniform but archaic social system. One reason for the unique nature of Irish society was that the Romans, who transformed the Celtic societies of Britain and other societies on the Continent with their armies, roads, administrative system, and towns, never tried to conquer Ireland. MEDIEVAL IRELAND Another consequence of Ireland's isolation from Romanized Europe was the development of a distinctive Celtic type of Christianity. Saint \TPatrick\t introduced mainstream Latin Christianity into the country in the 5th century AD, but the system of bishops with territorial dioceses, modeled on the Roman Empire's administrative system, did not take secure root in Ireland at this time. While the autonomous tuath remained the basic unit of Gaelic secular society, the autonomous monastery became the basic unit of Celtic Christianity. During the 6th and 7th centuries the Irish monasteries were great centers of learning, sending out such missionaries as saints \TColumba\t and \TColumban\t to the rest of Europe. What was for most of Europe the Dark Ages was for Ireland the golden age. Religious art, such as the Ardagh Chalice and the \TBook of Kells\t and other illuminated manuscripts, flourished alongside secular, even pagan, artistic achievements, such as the Tara Brooch and the great Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). The Viking Invasions In the late 8th century, \TVikings\t from Scandinavia began to raid Ireland. Other parts of Europe at about this time were responding to such pressures by developing the system of \Tfeudalism\t, but the Gaelic society did not lend itself to such development. It lacked the heritage of Roman law that provided the framework for feudal institutions elsewhere. Moreover, the elaborate kinship arrangements by which both property-holding and succession to leadership roles were regulated by brehon law may have impeded the exchange of land for military service, which is the fundamental bargain underlying the feudal system. Eventually, Gaelic society did manage to organize resistance: in 1014, Irish forces led by King \TBrian Boru\t decisively defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf. Brian's tenure (1002-14) of the honorific title "high king of Ireland" is sometimes misunderstood as the seed time of a national monarchy. Actually, the high king's power throughout much of Ireland was insubstantial. Without the infrastructure of feudalism even such a leader as Brian could not make the transition from symbolic kingship to effective monarchy that was beginning in other parts of Europe. Meanwhile, although Viking power was broken, the Vikings had left their mark upon the country by founding Ireland's first cities, including \TDublin\t, \TLimerick\t, and \TWaterford\t. The Anglo-Norman Conquest Even such unity as there had been under Brian had disappeared by the time Ireland faced its next challenge. This challenge came from the highly effective feudal monarchy that had been founded in England by \TWilliam I\t (William the Conqueror) after his invasion of that country in 1066 from Normandy in France. In 1171, William's descendant \THenry II\t took advantage of an earlier letter from Pope \TAdrian IV\t authorizing Henry to make himself overlord of Ireland in order to bring the Irish church more into line with Roman standards. Several Anglo-Norman barons, with their retainers, had already seized large parts of Ireland when Henry went to Ireland with an army to receive the formal submission of those barons and of most of the Irish kings. In those areas where the Anglo-Norman barons settled and drove out the native Gaelic aristocracy, they established a feudal system like that which their ancestors had brought from Normandy to England. The result, however, was not an effective centralized monarchy such as Norman feudalism had fostered in England. The English monarchy was usually distracted from Irish affairs by more pressing concerns such as the \THundred Years' War\t (1338-1453) and therefore did not effectively subordinate to royal authority even the Anglo-Norman colony. Thus, one may think of Ireland in the late Middle Ages as consisting of three concentric regions: (1) Dublin and its immediate hinterland (eventually called the \TPale\t), the only area in which the English government really exercised authority; (2) a broad arc of territories beyond the Pale, which were the quasi-independent fiefs of the great Anglo-Norman lords; and (3) a further arc of territories along the western coast of Ireland that retained Gaelic customs and remained completely outside English rule. The English colony in Ireland reached its greatest extent in the early 14th century, after which Gaelic society enjoyed considerable resurgence, partly by winning territories back from the colonists but mainly through the transformation of the Anglo-Normans into an "Anglo-Irish" aristocracy. As the Anglo-Normans intermarried with the Gaelic population and adopted the Gaelic language and customs, they gradually became "more Irish than the Irish." The Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) were an unsuccessful attempt to arrest this process and to define the area of English control. The Anglo-Norman conquest hastened reforms that brought the Irish church more into line with Roman standards. English legal practices and civil administration were introduced, and, although it served only the Anglo-Irish colony, an Irish parliament modeled on the English one was created in the late 13th century. Because of the colony's propensity to support the Yorkist side in the Wars of the \TRoses\t (1455-85), England's \THenry VII\t forced an Irish parliament of 1494-95 to adopt Poynings's Law, which gave the English Privy Council a veto over legislation proposed in future Irish parliaments. By the end of the Middle Ages it was clear that the Anglo-Norman conquest was a failure, and in the 16th century the English monarchs \THenry VIII\t, \TMary I\t, and \TElizabeth I\t made concerted efforts to reconquer Ireland by military expeditions and by the establishment (or plantation) of colonies of English settlers in Ireland. Henry's severance of the ties between the Church of England and the papacy, however (see \TReformation\t), complicated the reconquest. In Ireland, unlike England, there was virtually no indigenous sympathy with the Protestant reformers among either the Gaelic Irish or the Anglo-Irish. Thus the Church of Ireland was legally transformed into a Protestant church rejected by the overwhelming majority of the population. MODERN IRELAND The most determined resistance to reconquest came from the Gaelic chieftains of Ulster (the northeastern quarter of the island), led by Hugh O'Neill, 2d earl of \TTyrone\t, at the end of Elizabeth's reign. In suppressing their rebellion between 1595 and 1603, English forces devastated the Ulster countryside. Once these chieftains had submitted, however, King \TJames I\t of England was willing to let them live on their ancestral lands as English-style nobles, but not as petty kings within the old Gaelic social system. Dissatisfied with their new roles, the chieftains took ship to the Continent in 1607. This "flight of the earls" gave the English crown a pretext to confiscate their vast lands and sponsor scattered settlements of British Protestants throughout west and central Ulster (the Ulster Plantation). The crown's actions indirectly encouraged the much heavier unsponsored migration of Scots to the coastal counties of Down and Antrim. These settlements account for the existence in present-day Ulster of numerous Protestants (many of them Scottish Presbyterians) of all social classes. Elsewhere in modern Ireland, Protestantism has been confined to a small propertied elite, many of whose members were the beneficiaries of further confiscations a generation after the Ulster Plantation. The pretext for these new confiscations was the rebellion of the Gaelic Irish in Ulster against the British settlers in 1641. Indeed, this rebellion triggered the \TEnglish Civil War\t, which put an end to King \TCharles I\t's attempt to create an absolutist state (represented in Ireland by the policies of his lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of \TStrafford\t). When the Puritan party defeated Charles, their leader, Oliver \TCromwell\t, quickly imposed (1649-50) English authority on Ireland. Cromwell repaid his soldiers and investors in the war effort with land confiscated largely from the Anglo-Irish Catholics of the Irish midlands who had joined the rebellion hesitantly and only to defend themselves against Puritan policies. The Protestant Ascendancy Hoping to recover their lands and political dominance in Ireland, Catholics took the side of the Catholic king \TJames II\t in England's \TGlorious Revolution\t of 1688 and thus shared in his defeat by \TWilliam III\t at the Battle of the \TBoyne\t in 1690. The Irish Protestant elite consolidated its victory over what was left of a Catholic elite by enacting a number of Penal Laws designed to exclude the latter from property and power. Protestants had not, however, won for their parliament the powers that the landed elite of England had won for theirs in the Glorious Revolution. Furthermore, British trade policies discriminated against Ireland, and many of the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster began to emigrate to America, where their descendants became known as the "Scotch-Irish." In 1782 a "Patriot" party led by Henry \TGrattan\t and backed by an army of Protestant volunteers persuaded the British government to amend Poynings's Law to give the Irish Parliament legislative independence, including the right to establish Ireland's own tariff policy. The Revolutionary Era The reforms of 1782 did not extend far enough in a democratic direction to satisfy such intellectuals as Wolfe \Ttone\t and many of the Presbyterian merchants and farmers of the north, who were prompted by the French Revolution to form the Society of \TUnited Irishmen\t. The United Irishmen allied themselves with the Catholic "Defender" cells that had recently originated out of sectarian conflict in County Armagh and spread throughout the south. A rebellion in 1798 was quickly put down, but it convinced the British government to end Ireland's separate political institutions. Members of the Irish Parliament were cajoled and bribed into passing the Act of Union (1800), which provided for a single Parliament for the British Isles. Catholics, who had been granted the right to vote in 1793, were encouraged to believe that the united Parliament would grant them the right to hold parliamentary seats. Not until 1829, however, when faced by a menacing agitation for \TCatholic Emancipation\t led by Daniel O'CONNELL, did Parliament grant this right. The Growth of Irish Nationalism Ironically, as the state moved toward neutrality between the two religions during the 19th century, the sectarian division of Irish society was taking on new significance as a "nationality" difference. In the 1830s, when O'Connell started a new movement to repeal the Act of Union, he received practically no support from those northern Presbyterians whose fathers had been United Irishmen. Its growing prosperity as an outpost of industrializing Britain made the city of \TBelfast\t increasingly committed to the legislative union with Britain. Meanwhile, those parts of Ireland where most Catholics lived lagged badly behind Britain and northeast Ulster in economic development, as was dramatically demonstrated in the 1840s, when the failure of the potato crop for several successive years produced a devastating famine. Between 1841 and 1851, Ireland's population fell from 8.2 million to 6.6 million through starvation, disease, and emigration--especially to the United States. The famine arrested temporarily the growth of nationalism in the Catholic community--in 1848 a rebellion promoted by dissidents from O'Connell's movement ended in farce--but its long-term effect was to strengthen Irish nationalism. In rural Ireland the generation that came of age following the famine experienced modestly rising prosperity and a rapidly increasing awareness of the greater affluence enjoyed by British (and Ulster Protestant) beneficiaries of industrialization; these were conditions favorable to the emergence of a vigorous popular demand for national self-government. Such a demand was enthusiastically supported by the Irish emigrant community in the United States, some members of which had formed an arm of the secret revolutionary society of \TFenians\t. The Home-Rule Movement The agricultural depression of the late 1870s interrupted the rise in prosperity, and the resulting agrarian discontent was harnessed to emerging nationalist aspirations by Charles Stewart \TParnell\t. Under Parnell's leadership an Irish nationalist party, demanding home rule--a separate Irish parliament within the Union--and land reform, was able to win every parliamentary seat having a Catholic majority. This solid bloc of votes gave Parnell and his successor, John \TRedmond\t, powerful leverage in British politics whenever neither British party had a clear majority in the House of Commons. By exploiting such a situation in 1910-14, the Irish party finally forced the enactment of a \THome Rule Bill\t--but it also evoked the Ulster Covenant, by which northern Protestants vowed to resist home rule by force. Paramilitary forces were being organized by both sides, and civil war seemed imminent when World War I intervened. Home rule was enacted in 1914 but suspended until the end of the war, when it was understood that Ulster would receive some special treatment. From the 1890s, nationalism found expression in an \TIrish Literary Renaissance\t. The poet William Butler \TYeats\t, the playwrights Sean O'CASEY and John Millington \TSynge\t, and others turned their attention to uniquely Irish subjects and traditions. Writers, students, and Gaelic-language enthusiasts associated with this cultural revival tended to gravitate toward \TSinn Fein\t, a political movement founded by Arthur \TGriffith\t. The Division of Ireland Frustration arising from the postponement of home rule led to the 1916 \TEaster Rising\t in Dublin. Although a military failure, this rebellion brought a new generation of potential leadership to public attention. At the end of World War I, Sinn Fein candidates, who had pledged not to attend Parliament, won all but six of the Catholic seats away from the more moderate Irish party and set themselves up as a revolutionary parliament, Dail Eireann, in Dublin. While guerrilla warfare by the \TIrish Republican Army\t (IRA) and reprisals by crown forces were under way in Ireland, the British government attempted to produce an alternative to the Home Rule Act. This 1920 Government of Ireland Act set up separate parliaments for Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, although only the former ever functioned. Dail Eireann refused to accept the new legislation, and following a ceasefire in 1921 its representatives negotiated a treaty making the Irish Free State a self-governing dominion within the British \TCommonwealth of Nations\t and allowing the Northern Ireland Parliament to take the six northern counties out of the dominion. Because some members of the Dail and of the IRA felt honor-bound to accept nothing less than a republic "externally associated" with the Commonwealth, a civil war broke out between protreaty and antitreaty factions, led respectively by Michael \TCollins\t and Eamon \Tde Valera\t. The antitreaty faction was defeated. THE IRISH FREE STATE; EIRE; THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND The state composed of the southern 26 of Ireland's 32 counties has had three different names, which reflect the stages by which the goals of the defeated antitreaty side were actually attained during the generation after the civil war. The Irish Free State Under the 1922 constitution framed by the protreaty side, the first prime minister was William T. Cosgrave (1880-1965; see \TCosgrave\t family). De Valera's republican party refused to sit in the Dail because of the required oath of allegiance to the British crown. Despite the difficulties of governing a state whose very legitimacy was rejected by the major opposition party, the Cosgrave government managed to set up a well-functioning administration and to accomplish some modest reforms. In 1927, however, de Valera reconciled his conscience to taking the oath while denying that he was doing any such thing. After the 1932 election his \TFianna Fail\t party (with Labour party support) was able to form a government, and as prime minister until 1948, and again in 1951-54 and 1957-59, he consolidated his party's dominance over Cosgrave's party, \TFine Gael\t. Eire In 1937 a new constitution drafted by de Valera was adopted. The new state, Eire, was a republic in all but name, but it remained formally within the British Commonwealth. During World War II, de Valera followed a policy of neutrality, which was supported by the overwhelming majority of the southern population. The Republic of Ireland In 1948, John A. Costello (1891-1976), a Fine Gael leader who succeeded de Valera as prime minister in a coalition government, introduced legislation by which the South became a republic outside the Commonwealth. In the 1950s the republic began to turn away from constitutional struggles and toward a greater concern with economic development. The attempt to achieve economic self-sufficiency, which had been such a prominent feature of de Valera's policy in the 1930s, gradually gave way to policies of interdependence. Under Fianna Fail prime minister Sean Lemass (1899-1971; served 1959-66), the republic entered into a free-trade agreement with Britain. His successor, John \TLynch\t, led (1973) the country into the European Economic Community. Lynch was displaced by Fine Gael's Liam Cosgrave (William Cosgrave's son) in 1973. Fianna Fail returned to power from 1977 to 1981, led first by Lynch and, from 1979, by Charles J. \THaughey\t (b. 1925). Fine Gael leader Garret \TFitzGerald\t led a coalition government from 1982 to 1987, when Haughey again took over. After losses in the election of 1989, he formed a coalition with the Progressive Democrats. Feudalism had been the essential ingredient of state building that Ireland lacked in the Middle Ages; nationalism may be the essential prerequisite for successful state building in a democratic age. The nationalism that had been growing among Catholics for a century was a prime factor that enabled the South to overcome the bitterness of civil war and achieve stable democratic institutions. NORTHERN IRELAND Whereas the southern Irish state was born out of a positive nationalist demand, \TNorthern Ireland\t arose out of a negative defensive reaction on the part of a people who never quite became nationalists of any sort. This difference helps in understanding why Northern Ireland failed, whereas the South of Ireland succeeded, at the enterprise of state building. Not being nationalists, Ulster Protestants had no vision of a national fulfillment in which all conflicts would be resolved; on the contrary, they assumed that conflict was inevitable and that constant vigilance was required on the part of the \TOrangemen\t and the "Special Constabulary" into which their paramilitary force of 1912-14 had been transformed. This assumption that their state would always be rejected by their "enemies" dissuaded the Unionist governments elected by the Protestant majority from 1921 to the 1970s from even trying to win the allegiance of the Catholics. Members of that minority, however, were convinced by nationalist ideology that sooner or later Irish unity would be attained; they refused to face the fact that partition was a reality that would not go away. Thus in the North the assumptions of both Catholics and Protestants tended to inhibit reconciliation. Nevertheless, several factors more conducive to rapprochement were at work in the decades after World War II. The decline of Northern Ireland's traditional industries (shipbuilding, linen, agriculture) turned the government's attention to industrial development. Educated Protestants--notably Terence O'Neill (b. 1914), who served as prime minister (1963-69)--realized that better relations with the republic and with the North's Catholic minority were important to potential investors. O'Neill's overtures struck a responsive chord in the republic, which was coming to prefer prosperity and interdependence with its neighbors to austere self-sufficiency. The postwar growth of the British welfare state gave many northern Catholics a practical reason for accepting the British connection. Unfortunately for O'Neill, such acceptance was expressed not so much in votes for him as in demonstrations for "British rights" led by Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947) and others beginning in 1968. In turning their attention from "Irish unity" to "British rights," northern Catholics were making an important, if hesitant, step toward rapprochement. Not all northern Protestants were ready for rapprochement: a section of them, represented by the Rev. Ian \TPaisley\t, were unwilling to accept the premise that Catholics might ever cease to be enemies. O'Neill resigned in the face of attacks from these "loyalists" and was succeeded by James Chichester-Clark (b. 1923), who requested British troops to keep the peace between civil rights demonstrators and extremist Protestant mobs. Even with the backing of troops, the state was collapsing, and its inability to provide minimal protection for its Catholic citizens led to the recrudescence of the IRA first as a community defense force and then as an assailant of the crumbling state. The decision of Brian \TFaulkner\t, who became prime minister in 1971, to intern IRA suspects without trial led to increasing violence. The final dissolution of the Northern Irish state was recognized by the imposition of "direct rule" from London in March 1972. The crisis dragged on because no effective state replaced the rickety one that had collapsed in 1969-72. The governments of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland attempted in 1973 to create a new "power-sharing" government of Protestants and Catholics, but it had no chance of success because it was not allowed to exercise the security powers by which its Catholic members might have proved to the majority that they were not "enemies." In May 1974 the power-sharing government was brought down by a Protestant general strike. Nevertheless, lacking a true nationalism, the Protestant community has not taken the initiative to reerect a state on its own terms by a unilateral declaration of independence. In the 1980s, Northern Ireland remained under direct rule from London, beset by sectarian antagonisms and continuing violence. The killing of three IRA agents in Gibraltar by British security forces in 1988 was followed by an escalation of terrorism, including IRA attacks on British servicemen in Continental Europe as well as England and a rash of killings in Northern Ireland. \TDavid\t W. \TMiller\t Bibliography: Beckett, James C., The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603-1921 (1966); Curtis, Edmund, History of Ireland, 7th ed. (1964); de Paor, Maire and Liam, Early Christian Ireland (1958); Ellis, Steven, Tudor Ireland (1985); Foster. R.F., Modern Ireland (1989); Herity, Michael, Ireland in Prehistory (1977); Lydon, James, and MacCurtain, Margaret, eds., The Gill History of Ireland, 13 vols. (1972-75); Lyons, F. S. L., Ireland since the Famine (1971); Moody, T. W., and Martin, F. X., The Course of Irish History, rev. ed. (1984); Moody, T. W., Martin, F. X., and Byrne, F. J., eds., A New History of Ireland, 9 vols. (1976- ); O'Brien, Conor Cruise, The Shaping of Modern Ireland (1970) and States of Ireland (1972); Rumpf, E., and Hepburn, A. C., Nationalism and Socialism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (1977); Vaughan, W.E., ed., Ireland under the Union, vol. 1 (1989).