The history of Ireland

Ireland's history begins with hunter-gatherers who arrived after the last Ice Age and with the farmers who raised some of Europe's oldest monumental tombs. A Gaelic, Christian society of many small kingdoms flourished in the early Middle Ages, survived the Viking raids, and was then drawn into conflict with England after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. Over the following centuries English and later British rule was extended across the island through conquest, confiscation and settlement, culminating in the union with Great Britain in 1801 and the catastrophe of the Great Famine. A long struggle for self-government ended in 1922 with independence for twenty-six counties, while six counties in the north remained in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The independent state, a republic since 1949, has since moved from poverty and emigration to prosperity within the European Union.

The earliest firm evidence for people in Ireland comes from after the last glaciation. A bear bone with cut marks from County Clare suggests a human presence around 10,500 BCE, and by about 8000 BCE Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were living at sites such as Mount Sandel in County Derry, fishing, gathering hazelnuts and hunting wild boar. Farming arrived around 4000 BCE, probably brought by settlers from Britain and the Continent as part of the Neolithic Revolution. At the Céide Fields in County Mayo, stone walls of an extensive field system survive beneath the bog.

Neolithic communities built more than a thousand megalithic tombs. The greatest is Newgrange in the Boyne valley, built around 3200 BCE, whose passage is lit by the rising sun at the winter solstice. Metalworking began around 2500 BCE, and Bronze Age Ireland became known for its copper mines and its fine goldwork, including crescent-shaped collars called lunulae.

During the Iron Age, from about 600 BCE, Ireland came to share the art and language of the wider Celtic world, though how this happened, whether by migration or by gradual cultural change, is debated. By the early centuries CE the island was Gaelic-speaking and divided among many small kingdoms, grouped into provinces under over-kings. Ceremonial centres such as Tara, Emain Macha and Dún Ailinne were sites of royal inauguration. Society was organised by kinship and rank, with a learned class of poets, judges and druids, and was governed by the customary Brehon law. The Roman Empire never invaded Ireland, though there was trade with Roman Britain and Irish raiders attacked its coasts. The Irish also settled in western Britain, and from the fifth century the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata extended into what became Scotland. Inscriptions in Ogham, an alphabet of notches, survive on hundreds of standing stones.

Christianity arrived in the fifth century. Pope Celestine sent Palladius as bishop to the Irish Christians in 431, and Saint Patrick, a Briton who had been enslaved in Ireland as a youth, later returned as a missionary, according to tradition from 432. By the sixth century the Church was organised around great monasteries such as Clonmacnoise, Kildare and Armagh, which were centres of learning when much of western Europe was in turmoil. Irish monks such as Columba, who founded Iona in 563, and Columbanus, who founded monasteries in Gaul and Italy, carried Christianity and scholarship to Britain and the Continent. Ireland's monks produced illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, made around 800, and metalwork such as the Ardagh Chalice.

The Viking Age reached Ireland in 795 with raids on island monasteries. From the 840s the Norse built fortified ports, the first towns in Ireland, including Dublin in 841, Wexford, Waterford and Limerick. Over time the Norse became traders and allies as well as enemies, and intermarried with the Irish. The most powerful Irish kings competed to be recognised as high king. Brian Boru of Munster made himself overlord of most of the island, and in 1014 his army defeated an alliance of Leinster and the Dublin Norse at Clontarf, though Brian himself was killed. In the twelfth century church reformers reorganised the Irish Church into dioceses on the continental model.

In 1166 the deposed king of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada, sought help from Henry II of England. Anglo-Norman knights landed in 1169, and Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, captured Waterford and Dublin in 1170 and married Diarmait's daughter. Henry II came to Ireland himself in 1171 to assert his authority, and the Lordship of Ireland was established under the English crown of the Kingdom of England. Norman lords built castles and towns and introduced English law over much of the east and south.

The colony's reach was limited. In 1315 Edward Bruce, brother of Robert the Bruce of Scotland, invaded and was proclaimed king of Ireland before his defeat and death in 1318. The Black Death hit the towns hard in 1348 and 1349. Many Norman families adopted the Irish language and customs, which the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 tried in vain to prohibit. By the fifteenth century direct royal control had shrunk to the Pale around Dublin, and great Anglo-Irish lords such as the Earls of Kildare governed in practice.

Henry VIII crushed a Kildare rebellion in 1534 and in 1541 had himself proclaimed King of Ireland. His break with Rome began a long effort to impose the Protestant Reformation, which most of the Irish, both Gaelic and Old English, rejected. Under Elizabeth I a series of rebellions was suppressed with great violence, including the Desmond rebellions in Munster, followed by famine. In the Nine Years' War from 1594 to 1603 the Ulster lords Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell fought the English crown, but their Spanish-backed army was defeated at Kinsale in 1601. In 1607 the defeated earls left for the Continent, the Flight of the Earls, and the crown confiscated their lands.

From 1609 the Plantation of Ulster settled tens of thousands of English and Scottish Protestants on confiscated land, creating the communities whose descendants still form a majority in parts of Northern Ireland. In 1641 Catholic Irish rose in rebellion, and thousands of Protestant settlers were killed or driven out. The rising grew into a decade of war tied to the English Civil War. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell landed with a parliamentary army, and his troops massacred the garrisons and many townspeople of Drogheda and Wexford. The reconquest that followed, with famine and plague, cost a large part of the population, and most land still owned by Catholics was confiscated and given to soldiers and investors.

After the Glorious Revolution in England, the Catholic James II made his stand in Ireland. He was defeated by William III at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and the war ended with the Treaty of Limerick in 1691.

The eighteenth century was dominated by a Protestant landowning elite known as the Ascendancy. Penal laws barred Catholics, the great majority of the population, from parliament, the professions, buying land and bearing arms, and Presbyterians also faced discrimination. Dublin grew into one of the largest cities in Europe, with fine Georgian squares, and the Irish Parliament won greater legislative independence in 1782. Influenced by the American Revolution and the French Revolution, the Society of United Irishmen, led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, sought a republic uniting Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters. Their rebellion in 1798, with a small French landing in support, was crushed with perhaps 10,000 or more killed.

The Act of Union of 1800 abolished the Irish Parliament, and from 1 January 1801 Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, governed from London. Daniel O'Connell's mass movement won Catholic Emancipation in 1829, allowing Catholics to sit in parliament, but his campaign to repeal the Union failed.

By the 1840s the population had grown to about 8.5 million, and a large rural poor depended almost entirely on the potato. In 1845 potato blight struck, and the crop failed repeatedly in the following years. In the Great Famine, which lasted until about 1852, around a million people died of starvation and disease and more than a million emigrated, many to North America and Britain. Government relief was inadequate, food continued to be exported, and landlords evicted many thousands of tenants, leaving a lasting bitterness towards British rule. Emigration continued for generations, and by 1900 the population had fallen to around 4.5 million.

The Fenians, a secret revolutionary brotherhood, staged a failed rising in 1867. In the Land War from 1879, Michael Davitt's Land League and the parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell campaigned for tenants' rights, and land acts over the following decades transferred much of the land to the farmers who worked it. Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party pressed for Home Rule, a parliament in Dublin within the United Kingdom, but bills failed in 1886 and 1893. Alongside politics came a cultural revival, with the Gaelic League promoting the Irish language and writers such as W. B. Yeats.

A third Home Rule bill passed in 1914, but Ulster unionists, who had signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912 and formed the armed Ulster Volunteers, threatened to resist it, and its implementation was suspended for the First World War. On Easter Monday 1916 a small force of republicans seized buildings in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The Easter Rising was put down within a week, but the execution of its leaders turned public opinion. In the 1918 general election Sinn Féin won most Irish seats, and in January 1919 its members met in Dublin as Dáil Éireann and declared independence. The War of Independence, fought between the Irish Republican Army and British forces including the Black and Tans, lasted until a truce in July 1921.

The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 divided the island, and in 1921 Northern Ireland was created from six of Ulster's nine counties, with a Protestant and unionist majority and its own parliament. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, negotiated by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, created the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, which came into being on 6 December 1922. The treaty split the nationalist movement, and a civil war from 1922 to 1923 between pro-treaty and anti-treaty forces killed Collins and left deep divisions that shaped Irish party politics for the rest of the century.

Éamon de Valera, who had led the anti-treaty side, founded Fianna Fáil in 1926 and came to power in 1932. He dismantled the treaty's ties with Britain, fought an economic war with London over land annuities, and introduced a new constitution in 1937 that renamed the state Éire, or Ireland, and claimed the whole island. Ireland remained neutral in the Second World War, a period known there as the Emergency, despite criticism from Winston Churchill, while tens of thousands of Irish people served in the British forces. In 1949 the Republic of Ireland Act took effect and the state left the Commonwealth.

The 1950s were marked by stagnation and heavy emigration. From 1958 governments under Seán Lemass opened the economy to foreign investment and trade, free secondary education came in 1967, and Ireland joined the European Economic Community, together with the United Kingdom, in 1973.

In Northern Ireland, Catholics faced discrimination in housing, jobs and voting, and the civil rights campaign of the late 1960s met a violent response. From 1969 the conflict known as the Troubles set republican paramilitaries, above all the Provisional IRA, against loyalist paramilitaries and the British security forces. On Bloody Sunday in 1972 British soldiers shot dead thirteen civil rights marchers in Derry, and another man died later of his wounds. More than 3,500 people were killed before the conflict wound down. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 gave Dublin a consultative role, and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, approved in referendums on both sides of the border, created a power-sharing government in Belfast. The Republic dropped its constitutional claim to the North, which would join a united Ireland only if a majority there agreed.

From the mid-1990s low corporate taxes, EU membership and an educated workforce brought rapid growth, the Celtic Tiger, and Ireland became a country of immigration. Society changed quickly: divorce was legalised after a referendum in 1995, and reports from 2009 onwards exposed decades of abuse in Catholic institutions and its cover-up. A property bubble burst in 2008, and in 2010 the government accepted an EU and IMF bailout, leaving the programme in 2013. In 2015 Ireland became the first country to approve same-sex marriage by popular vote, and in 2018 a referendum removed the constitutional ban on abortion. The United Kingdom's decision to leave the EU in 2016 made the Irish border a central issue in the Brexit negotiations.

The 2020 election produced a near three-way split between Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and Fine Gael, and the two parties descended from the civil war divide governed together for the first time, with Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar taking turns as Taoiseach, followed in 2024 by Simon Harris. After the general election of November 2024, Martin returned as Taoiseach in January 2025 at the head of another Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael coalition. Catherine Connolly became the tenth President of Ireland in November 2025.