Ireland is an important bird habitat. The long coastline and position at the northwest corner of the Eurasian landmass attract countless seabirds. Little Skellig Island off the Kerry coast is home to some 70,000 gannets – one of the largest colonies in the world. Puffins also breed here and at other sites along the Atlantic coast including the Cliffs of Mohr.
History
Ireland’s history has been turbulent right up until the recent past. For many centuries, the island was ruled by England, later Great Britain, and much of Ireland’s more recent history has been consumed by tensions relating to that colonial legacy.
The island of Ireland is divided into two political units. All but a few kilometres of the routes in this book are in the sovereign country of Ireland – the term Republic of Ireland (RoI) is sometimes used to distinguish this state from the totality of the geographical island, also called Ireland. The remainder of the island is taken up by Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The political division of the island reflects a complex and at times violent history with periods of tension continuing through to the present day.
Early times
Christianity is thought to have come to Ireland in the fifth century, or even earlier. By tradition this was at the hand of St Patrick who landed in 432. In what was a relatively stable land, Christian scholarship and ministry flourished as the rest of Europe descended into chaos with the fall of the Roman Empire. Irish monks then contributed greatly to the spread of Christianity throughout Britain and the rest of Europe with, for example, Columbanus establishing monasteries in France and Bobbio in Italy, where he died in 615.
Ross Errilly Friary has a well-preserved cloister (Route 3, Stage 8)
From the late eighth century onwards Irish settlements and monasteries became targets of Viking coastal raiders. The Vikings established permanent bases in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick which went on to become the first significant towns in Ireland.
Politically, Ireland had been ruled, since prehistoric times, as a series of regional kingdoms with, occasionally, one king emerging as more powerful than his rivals and claiming suzerainty. Ireland’s first High King, Brian Boru, was crowned in 1002. He is credited with bringing stability to the island, supressing the Viking threat and restoring some of the damage inflicted on the monasteries during the preceding century.
English invasion and religious division
The Anglo Norman invasion of 1169 began a process of the slow seizure of power from the traditional Gaelic rulers of Ireland. But the Gaelic political and social order that had flourished since prehistoric times persisted into the 17th century in much of Ireland.
English interest in Ireland waxed and waned periodically after the initial invasion, before reawakening in earnest during the 16th century. The first of the British rulers to claim the title of King of Ireland was King Henry VIII of England in 1541. Much of the conflict in Britain and Europe over the following two centuries stemmed from Henry’s decision to split the church in England away from the Catholic church, alongside the wider ructions of the Reformation. It became Ireland’s destiny to be proxy battleground for wider disputes between England and other European powers.
In 1594 a full-on Irish rebellion against English rule broke out. What is now called the Nine Years’ War ended in 1603 following the defeat of the Irish, and an invading Spanish force, by the English at Kinsale. In 1607 the Ulster chieftains sailed out of Lough Swilly on the Donegal coast and into exile in France. This ‘Flight of the Earls’ marks the end of the power of the traditional Irish dynasties on the island.
English-backed Protestant settlement of Ireland soon began in earnest. This, together with authoritarian attempts to impose the Reformation, set in place a religious divide that grew wider with the enacting of laws that discriminated against Catholics – who tended to be native Irish – and cemented the power of a ruling Protestant gentry. A period of open warfare, and a brief flowering of Catholic power, came to a brutal end in 1649 at the hand of England’s Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. More than a quarter of the island was then handed to Cromwell’s followers. The century ended in more tumult as the conflict between the deposed Catholic King of England James II and his Protestant successor William of Orange was fought out in Ireland. James was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 foreshadowing another century of oppression of Catholics.
The United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 – inspired by revolutions in North America and France – tried to unite Catholics and Protestants behind the cause of Irish freedom. But it prompted a backlash from Britain, not least because it was supported by a small-scale French invasion of Ireland. In the aftermath, the Irish Parliament was dissolved and Ireland was absorbed into the new Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, governed from Westminster.
During the 19th century, the tide began to turn against anti-Catholic oppression. Daniel ‘the Liberator’ O’Connell was elected to the Westminster parliament in 1828 as the member for County Clare but, initially, the Catholic Kerry-born barrister was not allowed to take his seat. The law was changed, not least because of fears of a Catholic uprising, and O’Connell took his place in parliament in 1830.
Derrynane House is the ancestral home of Daniel ‘the Liberator’ O’Connell (Route 5, Stage 6)
The Great Famine
Before the Great Famine of 1845-52 Ireland was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. The tenant farmers eked out an impoverished existence on land owned by a largely absent aristocracy. There was widespread dependency on potatoes as a subsistence crop, and when blight struck in 1845 the British government was disastrously slow to respond to the unfolding crisis. The ensuing famine saw some one million deaths with a further million emigrating, mostly to the United States, although estimates vary widely.
THE GREAT FAMINE
The potato fungal disease Phytophthora infestaris first struck in Ireland in 1845. There had already been warnings that there was an over-dependence on potatoes but it was when the blight returned in 1846 that the full horror of the Great Famine began to unfold. The disease did not appear in 1847, although by this stage there was a lack of seed potatoes and the crop was low. The blight then returned in 1848 and 1849, and had run its course by 1850. Contemporary political ideas put faith in markets to deal with shortages and private charities and landlords to deal with the immediate crisis. It was not until 1847 that the British government changed tack and began actively feeding the population – but by then Ireland was already the scene of harrowing starvation and disease was rampant. Estimates of the total number of deaths vary, but they amounted to at least a million. Some of the accounts recorded at the Skibbereen Heritage Centre (Route 6, Stage 4) are truly shocking, but it is in the silence of the Abbeystrowry famine graveyard, where 8000–10,000 unidentified people are buried, that the true scale of the tragedy can start to be comprehended.
The Famine was a watershed in Irish history and has become a rallying point for Irish nationalists and totemic of English exploitation and suppression in Ireland. The following years saw some small victories in improving land rights but a Bill that would have returned an Irish parliament to Dublin was continually blocked by the upper chamber of the British parliament, the House of Lords. An awakening of Irish culture was also underway with, for example, the Gaelic League founded in 1893 to promote the everyday use of the Irish language.
The Easter Rising and beyond
The prospect,