The island of Ireland comprises the Republic of Ireland, which is a sovereign country, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.
When Northern Ireland was formed in 1920, it was decided, partly because of where Catholic and Protestant populations lived, to only include six of the nine counties of Ulster within the new state. Thus, the remaining three counties eventually formed part of the Irish Free State.
Initially formed as a Dominion called the Irish Free State in 1922, the Republic of Ireland became a fully independent nation state following the passage of the Republic of Ireland Act in 1949. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom as a constituent country.
Ireland soon became a sovereign republic, and its former partner took on the official name of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain, therefore, is a geographic term referring to the island also known simply as Britain.
Summary. Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom on December 6, 1921, when representatives of the two states signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Independence 1919–1922
A war of independence followed that ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which partitioned Ireland between the Irish Free State, which gained dominion status within the British Empire, and a devolved administration in Northern Ireland, which remained part of the UK.
Geopolitically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially named Ireland), an independent state covering five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.
Ireland endured eight centuries of political and military intervention by its neighbor before finally gaining its independence. But Queen Elizabeth (and now King Charles III) remained head of state in the six counties that make up Northern Ireland, which is still part of the U.K.— and a point of friction for 70 years.
Éire (Irish: [ˈeːɾʲə] ( listen)) is Irish for "Ireland", the name of both an island in the North Atlantic and the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland which governs 84% of the island's landmass.
The post-ceasefire talks led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921. This ended British rule in most of Ireland and, after a ten-month transitional period overseen by a provisional government, the Irish Free State was created as a self-governing Dominion on 6 December 1922.
The island of Ireland comprises the Republic of Ireland, which is a sovereign country, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. The Republic of Ireland endured a hard-fought birth.
Ireland is split between the Republic of Ireland (predominantly Catholic) and Northern Ireland (predominantly Protestant).
Catholics by and large identified as Irish and sought the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish state. The great bulk of Protestants saw themselves as British and feared that they would lose their culture and privilege if Northern Ireland were subsumed by the republic.
A few decades later, the military defeat of Irish Catholic forces in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne allowed Britain to impose the Penal Laws on Ireland. They banned Catholics from public office and the legal profession, limited their opportunities for education and for practicing their religion.
The IRA's purpose was to use armed force to render British rule in Ireland ineffective and thus to assist in achieving the broader objective of an independent republic, which was pursued at the political level by Sinn Féin, the Irish nationalist party.
Queen Elizabeth was queen of England from 1558 to 1603. She wanted to have firm control of Ireland because she feared that her enemy, the Spanish and Catholic king, King Philip, would send forces to Ireland and would use them to attack England.
In April 1949, the Republic of Ireland stopped having a monarchy entirely, and left the Commonwealth of Nations. Since then, the only part of Ireland to have a monarchy is Northern Ireland (because it is part of the United Kingdom).
In 1948 the Taoiseach - the Irish prime minister - announced that Ireland was to be declared a republic. The UK Parliament then passed the Ireland Bill which acknowledged the 1949 declaration that Ireland had “ceased to be part…of His Majesty's dominions” and therefore a member of the Commonwealth.
The conflict began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Although the Troubles mostly took place in Northern Ireland, at times violence spilled over into parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe.
Education in Northern Ireland is heavily segregated. Most state schools in Northern Ireland are predominantly Protestant, while the majority of Catholic children attend schools maintained by the Catholic Church though largely funded by the state.
The government of Northern Ireland cooperates with the government of the Republic of Ireland in several areas under the terms of the Belfast Agreement. The Republic of Ireland also has a consultative role on non-devolved governmental matters through the British–Irish Governmental Conference (BIIG).
Scotland and Ireland are close neighbours, and it is no surprise that commercial ancestral Y-DNA testing and the resulting hundreds of Y-DNA Case Studies conducted at Scottish and Irish Origenes have revealed lots of shared ancestry among males with Scottish or Irish origins.
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom (although it is also described by official sources as a province or a region), situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It was created as a separate legal entity on 3 May 1921, under the Government of Ireland Act 1920.
With the establishment of the Irish Free State on 6 December 1922 by the terms of the treaty, Southern Ireland ceased to exist.