Ireland historical timeline

Origins

The passage tombs in the Boyne Valley were built around 3200 BC — older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids — and at Newgrange the entrance is aligned so that the rising sun reaches the back chamber on the winter solstice. Ireland was Celtic-speaking and, alone in western Europe, was never conquered by Rome. Christianity arrived in the fifth century, and the monasteries that followed preserved and copied learning while the continent was losing it, then sent missionaries back across it.

Turning points

Norse raiders founded Dublin, Waterford and Cork as trading towns. The Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 began eight centuries of English involvement, tightened by the Tudor conquest, the plantation of Ulster, Cromwell’s campaign and the Penal Laws. Then came the catastrophe: the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 killed around a million people and drove a million more abroad, and emigration continued for a century afterwards — Ireland is one of the few countries on earth whose population today is still below its 1841 level. The Easter Rising of 1916 led to a war of independence and the 1921 treaty that partitioned the island, then to civil war. A republic was declared in 1949, the Troubles in Northern Ireland ran from 1968 until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and membership of the European Community from 1973 reoriented the economy away from Britain.

Influential people

Patrick, a Romano-British teenager taken as a slave who came back as a missionary. Brian Boru, high king. Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell in constitutional politics; Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera in the revolutionary generation. And an implausible literary record for an island of this size: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney all won the Nobel Prize, and Joyce, who did not, rewrote the novel.

Cultural evolution

Irish is the first official language of the state and the everyday language of only a small minority, concentrated in the Gaeltacht areas of the west — a gap that generations of policy have not closed. Traditional music survives as a participatory session rather than a performance. Gaelic football and hurling are organised by parish and county and played by amateurs in front of very large crowds. And the Catholic Church, which effectively ran the schools and hospitals into the 1980s, lost its authority quickly after the abuse revelations: the same country voted for divorce in 1995, same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018.

Present-day significance

Ireland is one of the most open economies in the European Union and the European base for much of American technology and pharmaceuticals, which inflates its headline output well beyond what people actually earn. For the first time in its history it takes in more people than it sends out. Housing is the dominant domestic issue, and Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trading arrangements the dominant constitutional one.