Ireland (Irish: Éire) is the third-largest island in Europe. It lies in between the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea. It is composed of the Republic of Ireland (officially named Ireland), a state which covers five-sixths of the island (south, east, west and north-west), and Northern Ireland; part of the United Kingdom, which covers the northeastern sixth of the island.
The population of the island is approximately 5.9 million people (2006),
4.2 million in the Republic of Ireland (1.5 million in Greater Dublin) and
1.7 million in Northern Ireland (0.6 million in Greater Belfast)



Geography

A ring of coastal mountains surrounds low central plains. The highest peak is Carrauntuohill (Irish: Corrán Tuathail), which is 1041 m (3414 feet). The island is bisected by the River Shannon, at 259 km (161 mi) the longest river in Ireland or Britain. The island's lush vegetation, a product of its mild climate and frequent but soft rainfall, earns it the sobriquet "Emerald Isle". The island's area is 84,079 km² (32,477 mile²).

Ireland is divided into four provinces: Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster. These were further divided into 32 counties for administrative purposes. Six of the Ulster counties remain under British sovereignty as Northern Ireland following Ireland's partition in 1922 (the remaining 26 forming present-day Republic of Ireland); since the UK's 1974 reshuffle these county boundaries no longer exist in Northern Ireland for administrative purposes, although Fermanagh District Council is almost identical to the county. In the Republic, the county boundaries are still adhered to for local government, albeit with Tipperary and Dublin subdivided (some cities also have their own administrative regions). For election constituencies, some counties are merged or divided, but constitutionally the boundaries have to be observed. Across Ireland, the 32 counties are still used in sports and in some other cultural areas and retain a strong sense of local identity.

Ireland's least arable land lies in the south-western and western counties. These areas are largely spectacularly mountainous and rocky, with beautiful green vistas.


Culture
Literature and the arts:

For a comparatively small country, Ireland has made a disproportionately large contribution to world literature in all its branches, mainly in English. Poetry in Irish represents the oldest vernacular poetry in Europe with the earliest examples dating from the 6th century. In more recent times, Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Although not a Nobel Prize winner, James Joyce is widely considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. His 1922 novel Ulysses is sometimes cited as the greatest English-language novel of the 20th century and his life is celebrated annually on June 16th in Dublin as the Bloomsday celebrations.


History

The period before the coming of Christianity in Ireland is largely prehistoric. The island, which was mostly ice-covered and joined by land to Britain and Europe during the last ice age, has been inhabited for about 9,000 years. Stone age inhabitants arrived sometime after 8000 BC, with the culture progressing from Mesolithic to high Neolithic over the course of three or four millennia. This saw the appearance of huge stone monuments, many of them astronomically aligned. The Bronze Age, which began around 2500 BC, saw the production of elaborate gold and bronze ornaments and weapons. See the Early history of Ireland for a more complete account of this period of Irish history.

Iron Age
The Iron Age in Ireland is associated with people now known as Celts. (The 17th century discovery that the languages of Ireland and pre-Roman Britain were related to Gaulish, whose speakers referred to themselves as Celts, led to this name eventually being applied to the people of Ireland, although they would certainly not have identified themselves as Celts.) They are traditionally thought to have colonised Ireland in a series of waves between the 8th and 1st centuries BC, with the Gael, the last wave of Celts, conquering the island and dividing it into five or more kingdoms. Many scholars, however, now favour a view that emphasises cultural diffusion from overseas over significant colonisation.

The Romans referred to Ireland as Hibernia. Ptolemy in AD 100 records Ireland's geography and tribes. Native accounts are confined to Irish poetry, myth, and archaeology. The exact relationship between Rome and the tribes of Hibernia is unclear; the only references are a few Roman writings.

Early Christian era and Vikings (432-1014)
Tradition maintains that in AD 432, St. Patrick arrived on the island and, in the years that followed, worked to convert the Irish to Christianity. The druid tradition collapsed in the face of the spread of the new faith. Irish scholars excelled in the study of Latin learning and Christian theology in the monasteries that flourished, preserving Latin learning during the Early Middle Ages. The arts of manuscript illumination, metalworking, and sculpture flourished and produced such treasures as the Book of Kells, ornate jewellery, and the many carved stone crosses that dot the island. Sites dating to this period include clochans, ringforts and promontory forts. This golden age was interrupted in the 9th century by 200 years of intermittent warfare with waves of Viking raiders (mainly Vikings from Denmark and Norway) who plundered monasteries and towns. Eventually they settled in Ireland, and established many towns, including the modern day cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford. In 1014 a Norse or Norwegian earl or jarl of Orkney, Sigurd the Stout, made a bid to become high king of Ireland. He was defeated and killed in the battle of Clontarf. The established high king, Brian Boru, was killed in the same battle.

Anglo-Norman and English control (1172-1800)
In 1172, King Henry II of England gained Irish lands, and from the 13th century, English law began to be introduced. English rule was largely limited to the area around Dublin, known as the Pale, and Waterford, but this began to expand in the 16th century with the final collapse of the Gaelic social and political superstructure at the end of the 17th century, as a result of the English and Scottish Plantation of Ulster and other plantations in Leix ("King's County", modern day Laois) and Offaly ("Queen's County"). In an incident known as the Flight of the Earls, the leaders of Gaelic Ireland in Ulster fled to France and onwards to Rome in 1607. Having been defeated by Elizabethan forces in 1603, they found life under English suzerainty intolerable. The higher echelons of the clan left en masse to take titles in Catholic Europe, thus marking the end of the Gaelic aristocracy in Ireland. After the Protestant Reformation and the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Irish Catholics were barred from voting or attending the Irish Parliament.

Union with Britain (1801-1922)
In 1800 the Irish Parliament passed the Act of Union which, in 1801, merged the Kingdom of Ireland and the Kingdom of Great Britain to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The whole island of Ireland would remain within the United Kingdom, ruled directly by the UK Parliament in London. The 19th century saw considerable economic difficulties for Ireland, including the Great Famine of the 1840s in which at least 1 million Irish people died and over a million were forced to emigrate.

The late 19th and early 20th century saw a vigorous but unsuccessful campaign for Irish home rule, followed by the eclipse of moderate nationalism by militant separatism. In 1922, following the Anglo-Irish War, twenty-six counties of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom as the Irish Free State. The remaining six, in the north-east, remained within the Union as Northern Ireland. Secession for the rest of Ireland led directly to the Civil War, as militant nationalists split into two factions and turned against one another.


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