User:Grimhelm/Irish people

This page is about the Irish as an ethnic group and nation. For information on Ireland's population, see Demographics of the Republic of Ireland and Demographics of Northern Ireland.

"Irishman" redirects here. For pages titled "The Irishman", see The Irishman. For "The Irish People" newspapers, see The Irish People.

Irish people
Muintir na hÉireann

Total population
c. 70–80 million worldwide
Regions with significant populations
Republic of Ireland   4,581,269 (2011) Northern Ireland   1,810,863 (2011)
United States	40,000,000+
United Kingdom*	14,000,000
Australia	7,000,000
Canada	4,544,870
Argentina	1,000,000
Mexico	600,000
New Zealand	600,000
France	15,000
Languages
Irish, English (Hiberno-English dialects), Scots (Ulster Scots dialects), Shelta
Religion
Mainly Christianity (majority Roman Catholicism; minority Protestantism, especially Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, Methodism) see also: Religion in Ireland
Related ethnic groups
Irish Travellers, Gaels, Anglo-Irish, Bretons, Cornish, English, Icelanders, Manx, Norse, Scots, Ulster Scots, Welsh
* Around 800,000 people born in Ireland reside in Great Britain, with around 14,000,000 people claiming Irish ancestry.

The Irish (Irish: Muintir na hÉireann or Na hÉireannaigh) are a nation and ethnic group native to the island of Ireland, who share a common Irish ancestry, identity and culture. Ireland has been inhabited for about 12,500 years. For most of Ireland's recorded history, the Irish have been primarily a Gaelic people. From the 9th century, small numbers of Vikings settled in Ireland, becoming the Norse-Gaels. Anglo-Normans conquered and settled parts of Ireland in the 12th century, while England's more extensive conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries brought many English and Lowland Scots people to parts of the island, especially the north. Today, Ireland is made up of the Republic of Ireland (an independent state) and the smaller Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). The people of Northern Ireland hold various national identities including British, Irish, Northern Irish or some combination thereof.

The Irish have their own customs, language, music, dance, sports, cuisine and mythology. Although the Irish language (Gaeilge) has historically been the main language of the Irish people in the past, today most Irish people speak English as their first language. Historically, the Irish nation was made up of kin groups or clans, and the Irish also had their own religion, legal tradition, alphabet, script and style of dress.

There have been many notable Irish people throughout history. After the introduction of Christianity to Ireland, Irish missionaries and scholars exerted great influence on Western Europe, and the Irish came to be seen as a nation of "saints and scholars". These have included individuals considered the fathers of Europe (Columbanus of Luxeuil), chemistry (Robert Boyle), seismology (Robert Mallet), scholastic philosophy (John Scotus Eriugena), economics (Richard Cantillon), and human rights investigations (Roger Casement), as well as eleven Nobel Prize Laureates. Famous Irish writers include Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, Flann O'Brien and Seamus Heaney, while noted Irish philosophers include Peter of Ireland, William Molyneux, George Berkeley and Edmund Burke. Celebrated Irish explorers include Brendan the Navigator, James of Ireland, Sir Robert McClure, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean. Notable Irish women include pirate-queen Grace O'Malley, suffragists and revolutionaries Constance Markievicz, Kathleen Clarke and Maud Gonne, writers Peig Sayers and Lady Augusta Gregory, Nobel Laureates Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Olympians Sonia O'Sullivan, Michelle Smith and Katie Taylor, and former presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese.

The population of Ireland is about 6.3 million, but it is estimated that 50 to 80 million people around the world have Irish ancestry, making the Irish diaspora one of the largest of any nation. Historically, emigration from Ireland has been chiefly the result of conflict, famine and economic pressures. People of Irish descent are found mainly in English-speaking countries, especially Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. There are also significant numbers in Argentina, Mexico and New Zealand. The United States has the most people of Irish descent (including more than half of its presidents), while in Australia those of Irish descent represent a higher percentage of the population than in any other country outside Ireland. By some accounts, the first European child born in North America had Irish ancestry on both sides. The Irish people have also held important and longstanding historical and cultural ties with the Celtic and Nordic nations, especially with the peoples of Scotland and Iceland, and many Icelanders in particular have Irish and Scottish Gaelic forebears.

Names

Ethnonym

Further information: Names of the Irish state § Historical names

The Irish people have historically been known by a variety of names, including Scoti and Hibernenses in Latin, and Gaels (Irish language: Gaeil) in Irish and English. This last term, derived from the Welsh gwyddel "raiders", was eventually adopted by the Irish for themselves. However, as a term it is on a par with Viking, as it describes an activity (raiding, piracy) and its proponents, not their actual ethnic affiliations. In ancient times, the island of Ireland itself was known by a number of different names, including Banba, Fódla, Ériu by the islanders, Iouerne and Hiverne to the Greeks, and Hibernia to the Romans. The terms Irish and Ireland are probably derived from the goddess Ériu.

A variety of historical ethnic groups have inhabited the island, including the Airgialla, Fir Ol nEchmacht, Delbhna, Fir Bolg, Érainn, Eóganachta, Mairtine, Conmaicne, Soghain, and Ulaid. In the cases of the Conmaicne, Delbhna, and perhaps Érainn, it can be demonstrated that the tribe took their name from their chief deity, or in the case of the Ciannachta, Eóganachta, and possibly the Soghain, a deified ancestor. This practice is paralleled by the Anglo-Saxon dynasties' claims of descent from Woden, via his sons Wecta, Baeldaeg, Casere and Wihtlaeg.

The Scottish people take their name from the medieval Latin term for the Irish people (Scoti), which in the Middle Ages referred to the Gaelic inhabitants of both Scotia Major (Ireland) and Scotia Minor (Scotland). Later Irish mythology, Scottish mythology, and pseudohistory explained the origin of the name "Scotland" taking its name from Scota, the name given to two different mythological daughters of two different Egyptian Pharaohs from whom the Gaels traced their ancestry. This allegedly explained the name Scoti, applied by the Romans to Irish raiders, and later to the Irish invaders of Argyll and Caledonia which became known as Scotland.

Surnames

Main article: Irish name

Further information: Celtic onomastics

The Irish surname Mac Amhlaoibh (McAuliffe) written in traditional Gaelic type

The Irish were among the first people in Europe to use surnames as we know them today. It is very common for people of Gaelic origin to have names beginning with "Ó" or "O'" (from the Old Irish "Ua", which means "grandson", or "descendant" of a named person) or "Mac" or "Mc" (from the Irish for "son"). Customarily, a son has the same surname as his father, whereas a daughter's surname replaces "Ó" with "Ní" (reduced from "Iníon Uí", "daughter of the grandson of") and "Mac" with "Nic" (reduced from "Iníon Mhic", "daughter of the son of"). Thus, the daughter of a man named Ó Maolagáin has the surname Ní Mhaolagáin and the daughter of a man named Mac Gearailt has the surname Nic Gearailt. If a woman marries, her surname traditionally becomes that of her husband, replacing "Ó" or "Mac" with "Uí" or "Mhic" respectively (reduced from "Bean Uí/Mhic", "wife of descendant/son of"). When anglicised, the surname element in all cases can remain "O'" or "Mac", regardless of gender.

Names that begin with "Ó"/"O'" include Ó Cheallaigh (O'Kelly), Ó Chonaill (O'Connell), Ó Súilleabháin (O'Sullivan), and Ó Tuathail (O'Toole). Names that begin with "Mac" or "Mc" include Mac Cárthaigh (MacCarthy), Mac Diarmada (MacDermott), Mac Domhnaill (MacDonnell), and Mac Mathghamhna (MacMahon), Mag Uidhir (Maguire). "Mac" is commonly anglicised "Mc", but neither is mutually exclusive: for example, both "MacCarthy" and "McCarthy" are used. Names of "Ó" or "Mac" form are traditionally distributed throughout the Gaelic world, including Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. While both "Mac" and "Ó'" prefixes are Irish in origin, "Mac" is more common in Scotland and in Ulster than in the rest of Ireland; furthermore, "Ó" is far less common in Scotland than it is in Ireland.

Other anglicised Irish surnames subsume previously distinct Gaelic families. For example, the surname "MacLoughlin" subsumes the previously distinct families of the Mac Diarmada, Mac Lochlainn, Mac Loughlin, Ó Maol Seachlainn, Ó Maol Seachnaill, and Ó Conchobhair families. The full surname usually indicated which family was in question, something that has been diminished with the loss of prefixes such as "Ó" and "Mac". Different branches of a family with the same surname sometimes used distinguishing epithets, which sometimes became surnames in their own right. For example, the Kavanagh surname is an anglicisation of the epithet "Caomhánach" first adopted by Domhnall Caomhánach of the Uí Ceinnselaig (Kinsella) family; both the Kinsella and Kavanagh surnames remain in use among descendants of the respective branches. Similarly, the chief of the clan Ó Cearnaigh (Kearney) was referred to as "An Sionnach" (Fox), which his descendants use to this day.

Not all Irish surnames are Gaelic in origin. Some ultimately derive from Norse personal names, including Cotter, Mac Suibhne (Sweeney), Mac Amhlaoibh (McAuliffe) and Mac Raghnaill (Reynolds). More common are those Irish surname elements which derive from the Normans, descendants of the Vikings who had settled in Normandy and thoroughly adopted the French language and culture, before later settling in Ireland. The surname element "Fitz" is an old Norman French variant of the Old French word "fils", meaning "son". With the exception of the Gaelic-Irish Fitzpatrick (Mac Giolla Phádraig) surname, all names that begin with Fitz are descended from the initial Norman settlers. Notable examples include FitzGerald (Mac Gearailt), Fitzsimons (Mac Síomóin/Mac an Ridire) and FitzHenry (Mac Anraí). A small number of Irish families of Gaelic origin came to use a Norman form of their original surname—so that "Mac Giolla Phádraig" became "Fitzpatrick"—or assimilated to the point of favouring Hiberno-Norman forms. Another common Irish surname element of Norman Irish origin is the habitational prefix "de", meaning "of" and originally signifying prestige and land ownership. Examples include de Búrca (Burke), de Brún, de Barra (Barry), de Stac (Stack), de Tiúit, de Faoite (White), de Londras (Landers), de Paor (Power). The surname Bhreathnach (Walsh) was routinely given to settlers of Welsh origin, who had come during and after the Norman invasion. The Joyce, Griffin and Griffith (Gruffydd) families are also of Welsh origin.

Origins

See also: History of Ireland

Ancient and medieval antecedents

Prehistoric ancestors

Main articles: Prehistoric Ireland and Protohistory of Ireland

Carrowmore tomb, c. 3000 BC

During the past 12,500 years of inhabitation, Ireland has witnessed some different peoples arrive on its shores. The ancient peoples of Ireland—such as the creators of the Céide Fields and Newgrange—are almost unknown. Neither their languages nor the terms they used to describe themselves have survived. As late as the middle centuries of the 1st millennium the inhabitants of Ireland did not appear to have a collective name for themselves.

Gaelic and legendary origins

Main articles: Gaelic Ireland and Gaels

See also: History of Ireland (400–800), History of Ireland (800–1169), and History of Ireland (1169–1536)

Irish Gaels in a 16th-century painting

The earliest historical people in Ireland of whom anything is known with certainty are the Gaels, a Celtic people associated with the Goidelic languages and the ultimate progenitors of the modern languages of Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. At the start of historical records, this people encompassed the island of Ireland and the kingdom of Dál Riata in western Scotland, eventually expanding to include the Scottish kingdom of Alba and the Isle of Man as well.

In the Middle Ages, the Gaels held various legends about their origins. One such legend held that the Gaels were descended from the Scythians of the Pontic steppe, apparently based on the similarity of the Latin names of the Irish (Scoti) and Scythians (Scythae). A related legend states that the Gaels were further descended from one Míl Espáine (Latin: Miles Hispaniae, "Soldier of Hispania"), whose sons supposedly conquered Ireland from the legendary Tuatha Dé Danann after their arrival some time between 1498 and 1029 BC. The character is almost certainly a mere personification of a supposed migration by a group or groups from the Iberian Peninsula to Ireland. Over the course of several centuries, medieval Irish historians, genealogists and poets formulated the genealogical doctrine that all the Gaelic Irish were descendants of Míl, thus assimilating both ruling dynasties and subject populations into a common genealogical scheme "that provided a racial and cultural homogeneity for all prominent pre-Norman and non-Viking peoples of Ireland." This doctrine was adapted during the 10th and 11th centuries and incorporated into the compendium Lebor Gabála Érenn, on the basis of which the Gaelic Irish were popularly known as "Milesians" as late as the 19th century.

Originally a pagan people, the introduction of Christianity to the Gaels is associated with Saint Patrick in the 5th century and subsequently brought a reorganisation of Gaelic society, with its pre-existing traditions of law and literature, along Christian lines. Nonetheless, the Gaelic vernacular language remained an important language alongside Latin in both the monastic schools of the Church and the secular bardic schools. As a clan-based society, genealogy was all-important. Gaelic Ireland was divided into as many as 90-150 kingdoms or lordships, whose rulership was open to members of a noble kinship group which claimed descent from a previous ruler. Members of more powerful dynasties such as the Uí Néill (O'Neill), Uí Conchobhair (O'Connor), and Uí Briain (O'Brien) competed for overkingship of multiple kingdoms, of individual provinces, or even for the largely symbolic high kingship of the entire island. Similarly, the various branches of Irish learning—including law, poetry, history and genealogy, and medicine—were associated with hereditary learned families. Irish medical families included the Uí hÍceadha (Hickey) in Munster and the Uí Caiside (Cassidy) and Uí Siadhail (Shields) in Ulster. Poetic families included the Uí Dálaigh (Daly) and the MacCraith (MacGrath). Learning was not exclusive to the hereditary families, however; one such example is Cathal Mac Manus, the 15th-century diocesan priest who wrote the Annals of Ulster. Other learned families included the Mic Aodhagáin and Clann Fhir Bhisigh. This latter family produced Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, the 17th-century genealogist and compiler of Leabhar na nGenealach.

During the Middle Ages and later, the seas of the North Channel united rather than divided the Gaelic peoples of Ireland and Scotland. The Irish and Scottish peoples had close political and cultural ties extending back to the early medieval kingdom of Dál Riata, which straddled western Scotland and northeastern Ireland on either side of the channel. Common descent and identity among the Gaelic dynasties of Ireland and of the kingdom of Scotland were considered strong enough that they were later invoked as a basis for the Bruce campaign in Ireland in 1315-18, which attempted to establish the Scottish king Robert Bruce's brother Edward Bruce as king of Ireland, with support from Irish princes such as Domhnall Ua Néill of Tír Eógain. It was only after the serious political pressures of the later 16th century that the Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scots began to display more clearly distinct identities, while still retaining important cultural ties.

Gaelic society was remarkably durable and adaptive, and was able in the Middle Ages to absorb and assimilate successive waves of Norse, Scottish, and Anglo-Norman settlement, while also changing internally and adapting to external influences. The dominance of the Gaelic Irish in medieval Ireland was most noticeably challenged by the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, which brought new waves of settlers. A Gaelic Irish resurgence began in the mid-14th century: English royal control shrank to a palisaded area inclusive of the medieval counties of Louth, Meath, Dublin and Kildare, known as the Pale, while outside this, many Norman lords adopted Gaelic culture and became culturally Gaelicised. The English government tried to prevent this through legislation such as the Statutes of Kilkenny, which forbade English settlers from adopting Gaelic culture, but the results of this effort are largely considered to have been a failure. Gaelic language and culture contracted in aftermath of the Tudor and Cromwellian conquests of Ireland, the Plantations of Ireland, and the Irish Famine, but saw a renewed importance with the Gaelic Revival, cultural nationalism, and the wider Celtic romanticism and Pan-Celticism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Historically, from the start of the Christian period to the present, the Gaelic Irish and those assimilated to Gaelic language and culture have been predominantly, though not exclusively, of the Roman Catholic religion; the Church of Ireland Protestants Nelly O'Brien, Sam Maguire and Douglas Hyde, the Bulgarian Orthodox Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony, and the Jewish Ellen Cuffe have been notable counter-examples. Today, the Irish language and Gaelic tradition persist most strongly in the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland.

Norse and Scottish

Main articles: Norse-Gaels and Scottish people

See also: Early Scandinavian Dublin, Kingdom of the Isles, and History of Ireland (800–1169)

The approximate area of the Dál Riata (shaded)

The influx of Viking raiders and traders in the 9th and 10th centuries resulted in the founding of many of Ireland's most important towns, which later rose into important kingdoms, including Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford. The Norse founded a number of important kingdoms which dominated much of the Irish and Scottish Sea regions from the 9th to 12th centuries and which were sometimes dynastically linked with those in Ireland, including the Kingdom of the Isles (which included the Hebrides and the Isle of Man), the Lordship of Galloway, and the Kingdom of York. The most powerful Norse-Gaelic dynasty were the Uí Ímair or House of Ivar.

Once settled, the Norse assimilated into Gaelic society, language, and religion, forming a hybrid Norse-Gael people in Ireland and in Scotland that mixed Gaelic and Norse ancestry and culture. In Ireland, this people were traditionally known as the "foreigner Gaels" (Old Irish: Gall-Goídil; Irish: Gall-Ghaeil; Scottish Gaelic: Gall-Ghàidheil). The Norse-Gaels typically referred to themselves as Ostmen, "the men from the east" (i.e. Scandinavia). This is the term which was used for them by the English in Ireland from the 12th and the 14th centuries, who regarded them as a separate group from the English and Irish. Notable Irish families with Norse-Gael origins include the Broderick, Cotter and MacIvor families.

Over time, the Norse-Gaels became increasingly Gaelicised and disappeared as a distinct group. However, they left a lasting influence especially in the Isle of Man and Outer Hebrides, whose people were to be important later in Irish history. These islands continued to be ruled into the 15th century by the Norse-Gael Lords of the Isles, Clan Donald, who in the later Middle Ages held lands in both of what is now Ireland and Scotland on either side of the North Channel. The elite Scottish mercenary warriors known as gallowglass (gallóglaigh) emerged from these Norse–Gaelic clans and became an important part of Irish warfare. The late Middle Ages saw the settlement in Ireland of these Scottish gallowglass families, mainly in the north, though also as far south as Desmond. Among these were important families such as the MacSweeneys, settled by the O'Donnells in north Donegal, and the MacCabes. In 1569, the powerful Irish earl of Tyrone, Turlough Luineach O'Neill (The O'Neill), married the Scottish Agnes Campbell, daughter of Colin Campbell of Argyll and widow of James MacDonald of Dunnyveg. Her dowry consisted of 1,000 gallowglass. The Scottish Clan Donald split into separate branches in the 16th century, with the Scoto-Irish prince Somhairle Buidhe Mac Domhnaill establishing the Irish branch MacDonnell of Antrim and similarly marrying into the powerful Ó Néill earls of Tyrone. Due to similarities of language and culture, these families were assimilated once settled in Ireland.

Old English

Main article: Normans in Ireland

See also: Norman invasion of Ireland, Lordship of Ireland, and History of Ireland (1169–1536)

The Irish were influenced by the Brittonic and Anglo-Saxon peoples of neighbouring Britain, notably by the Romano-British missionary Patrick and by later clerics from the Welsh, Breton, and Anglo-Saxon churches who came to study in Ireland. The collective presence of English people in early medieval Ireland included the foundation of English monasteries at Rath Melsigi in County Carlow and Maigh Eo na Sacsan in County Mayo in the 7th century, the raid into the kingdom of Brega by Ecgfrith of Northumbria in 684, and the arrival of political refugees from the House of Wessex in the aftermath of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. These, however, did not leave lasting settlements in Ireland.

A new phase of settlement began with the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169. The arrival of the Anglo-Normans brought also the Welsh, Flemish, Anglo-Saxons, and Bretons, speaking such languages as Norman-French, Middle Welsh or Breton, Old or Middle English, and Old Frisian. The collective term for these settlers is contested. Traditionally scholars have referred to the "Norman" or "Anglo-Norman" conquest, though others have favoured the term "Cambro-Norman" as many of the conquerors came from Wales. Contemporary accounts however refer to the group collectively as "English". Most of these were assimilated into Irish culture and polity by the 15th century, with the exception of some of the walled towns and the Pale areas. These Palesmen developed their own identity as "middle nation", neither fully English nor Gaelic. A distinction later emerged between these Catholic "Old English" settlers and the Protestant "New English" settlers of the 16th century, largely on the grounds of religion.

These Geraldines! These Geraldines! -not long our air they breathed;
Not long they fed on venison, in Irish water seethed;
Not often had their children been by Irish mothers nursed;
when from their full and genial hearts an Irish feeling burst!
The English monarch strove in vain, by law, and force, and bribe,
To win from Irish thoughts and ways this "more than Irish" tribe;
For still they clung to fosterage, to breitheamh, cloak and bard:
What king dare say to Geraldine, "Your Irish wife discard"?

Thomas Davis, The Geraldines (1844)

The Anglo-Norman invasion led to the creation of a distinct Norman Irish community and brought a number of important "Old English" families to Ireland. Of these, the most important were the Geraldines (the FitzGerald dynasty), whose various branches ruled as earls of Kildare and of Desmond and assimilated into Gaelic Irish culture to the point that they were considered "more Irish than the Irish themselves". This feature was later commemorated in the 1844 poem The Geraldines by the Young Ireland leader Thomas Davis, himself of mixed Welsh and Irish Gaelic parentage. Other important families with Norman-derived surnames include the Butlers, Burkes, Roches and Powers, although these are more prevalent in the provinces of Leinster and Munster, where there was a larger Norman presence. Other modern Irish surnames relate the ethnic backgrounds rather than family lineages of the Norman settlers. For example, surnames such as Walsh and Breathnach attest to the settlement of Brittonic-speaking ancestors (from Wales, Cornwall, and Cumbria), while the name Fleming attests to ancestry in Flanders.

One notable Irish ethnic group introduced by the invasion were the Yola people, descendants of the Norman invaders in the baronies of Forth and Bargy in County Wexford. Until the 19th century, they spoke a unique variety of English known as the Yola language, similar to the Dorset dialects of South West England but containing many loanwords from Irish, Norman-French, Old Norse, and Old Frisian.

Early Modern settlers

See also: Plantations of Ireland, History of Ireland (1536–1691), and History of Ireland (1691–1800)

The 16th and 17th centuries brought new waves of settlement from Britain in the Plantations of Ireland: the Laois-Offaly Plantation, the Munster Plantation, and the Ulster Plantation. The extent and character of these plantations varied. The Laois-Offaly Plantation under the Catholic monarchs Queen Mary and Philip II was intended to introduce Catholic English colonists in the Irish Midlands adjacent to the Pale. The Munster Plantation under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth introduced Protestant English settlers to the southern province of Munster. The heaviest settlement however came in the northern province of Ulster during the reign of James VI of Scotland (James I of England), which led to the settlement of Protestant English and particularly Scottish colonists in large numbers. Important minority communities of Huguenots, Jews and Quakers also became established from Britain and Europe later in the early modern period.

New English and Ulster Scots

Main articles: Anglo-Irish people, Ulster-Scots people, and Protestant Ascendancy

See also: Ulster Scots dialects

Robert Boyle (left), Anglo-Irish scientist and father of chemistry, whose family obtained land in the plantations; and Anglo-Irish society hostess Maria Gunning (right).

The plantations and confiscations led to the creation of an Anglo-Irish community made up of members of the Church of Ireland who dominated the professional and landed class in Ireland from the 17th century until the early 20th century. In the course of the 17th century, this Anglo-Irish landed class replaced the Gaelic Irish and Old English aristocracies as the ruling class in Ireland, creating a Protestant Ascendancy. They were also referred to as "New English", to distinguish them from the "Old English" who descended from the medieval Hiberno-Norman settlers. A separate group among the new settlers were the Ulster Scots people, who settled predominantly in the north but were largely excluded from the Anglo-Irish ruling class for being Presbyterian. A sizeable proportion of these Ulster Scots migrated to British America where their descendants are sometimes known as Scotch-Irish, while others remained in Ulster to constitute an important community within the people of Northern Ireland.

Members of the Anglo-Irish ruling class commonly identified themselves as Irish, while retaining English habits in politics, commerce, and culture. They participated in the popular English sports of the day, particularly racing and fox hunting, and intermarried with the ruling classes in Great Britain. Many of the more successful of them spent much of their careers either in Great Britain or in some part of the British Empire. Anglo-Irishmen such as Edmund Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Henry Grattan, Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, George Canning, Lord Macartney, Thomas Spring Rice, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Edward Carson played major roles in British politics, while Downing Street was named after Sir George Downing. Many constructed large country houses or "Big Houses", which became symbolic of the class' dominance in Irish society although later an increasing liability for their owners in the 20th century. This class produced notable society hostesses such as Maria and Elizabeth Gunning.

Prominent Anglo-Irish poets, writers, and playwrights include Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, George Darley, Lucy Knox, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, Cecil Day-Lewis, Bernard Shaw, Lady Gregory, Samuel Beckett, Giles Cooper, C. S. Lewis, Lord Longford, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor and William Allingham. Prolific composers included Michael William Balfe, John Field, George Alexander Osborne, Thomas Roseingrave, Charles Villiers Stanford, John Andrew Stevenson, Robert Prescott Stewart, William Vincent Wallace, and Charles Wood. In the visual arts, sculptor John Henry Foley, art dealer Hugh Lane, artists Daniel Maclise, William Orpen and Jack Yeats, ballerina Dame Ninette de Valois, and architect Eileen Gray were famous outside Ireland.

In the 19th century, the Anglo-Irish numbered among some of the most prominent mathematical and physical scientists, including William Rowan Hamilton, George Stokes, John Tyndall, George Johnstone Stoney, Thomas Romney Robinson, Edward Sabine, Thomas Andrews, Lord Rosse, George Salmon, and George FitzGerald. In the 20th century, scientists John Joly and Ernest Walton were Anglo-Irish, as was the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. Medical experts included William Wilde, Robert Graves, Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw, William Stokes, Robert Collis, John Lumsden and William Babington.

Huguenots

See also: Huguenots and Edict of Nantes

Irish hydrographer Francis Beaufort and Taoiseach Seán Lemass were both of French Huguenot descent.

Following the French crown's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, many Huguenots settled in Ireland in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, encouraged by an act of parliament for Protestants' settling in Ireland. Huguenot regiments fought for William of Orange in the Williamite War in Ireland, for which they were rewarded with land grants and titles, many settling in Dublin. The most successful and enduring communities were those formed in Dublin and Portarlington, while significant Huguenot settlements were also established in Cork, Lisburn, Waterford and Youghal. Smaller settlements, which included Killeshandra in County Cavan, contributed to the expansion of flax cultivation and the growth of the Irish linen industry. Numerous signs of Huguenot presence can still be seen with names still in use, and with areas of the main towns and cities named after the people who settled there, including the Huguenot District, Huguenot cemetery, and French Church Street in Cork, and the Huguenot cemetery and D'Olier Street in Dublin.

A number of Huguenots served as mayors in Cork, Dublin, Waterford and Youghal in the 17th and 18th centuries. Notable Huguenot descendants in Ireland have included astronomers James Hamilton and William Frederick Archdall Ellison, United Irishman Wolfe Tone, naval officer and hydrographer Francis Beaufort, Gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu, geologist and antiquary George Victor Du Noyer, pan-Celticist Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe, Taoiseach Seán Lemass, and Nobel Laureate playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett.

Quakers

Main article: Quakers in Ireland

Irish botanical artist Lydia Shackleton and polar explorer Ernest Shackleton were both of Quaker descent.

The first recorded meeting for worship of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Ireland was in 1654 at the home of William Edmundson in Lurgan, Co. Armagh. The Quakers founded the town of Mountmellick, Co. Laois, in 1657 led by William Edmundson. Ballitore, Co. Kildare, was planned in 1685 as a Quaker town. Abraham Shackleton (ancestor of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton) founded an important Quaker school there in 1726, which also educated many non-Quakers.

The Quakers were known for entrepreneurship, with Quaker families such as the Malcomsons, Goodbodys, Bewleys, Pims, Lambs, Jacobs, Edmundsons, Perrys and Bells historically involved in milling, textiles, shipping, imports and exports, food and tobacco production, brewing, iron production and railways industries. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, converted to Quakerism while dealing with his father's estates in Cork. The Quakers were also known for setting up relief measures in their localities during the Irish Famine. Quaker-founded hospitals include the Cork Street Fever Hospital, Dublin, and the Royal Hospital, Donnybrook. There is a Quaker graveyard in Rosenallis, Co. Laois, and there were additionally burial grounds on Cork Street in Dublin and on York Street off St. Stephen's Green, now the site of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Notable Irish of Quaker descent have included naturalist John Rutty, diarist Mary Leadbeater, botanical artist Lydia Shackleton, early photographer Jane Shackleton, suffragist Anna Haslam, physiologist Joseph Barcroft, Celtic scholar and linguist Osborn Bergin, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, Supreme Court justice James Creed Meredith, architect Florence Fulton Hobson, and diplomat Denis Halliday.

Jewish

Main articles: History of the Jews in Ireland and List of Irish Jews

The earliest reference to the Jews in Ireland is to a deputation to the king of Munster, Toirdelbach Ua Briain, in 1079. A Jewish community appears to have been resident in or near Dublin some time between 1232 and the 1290 Edict of Expulsion of Jews from England, though the effect of this expulsion on Ireland is unclear. The second period of permanent Jewish settlement in Ireland came in the aftermath of the 1497 expulsion of the Jews from Portugal, as a result of which some of these Sephardic Jews settled on Ireland's south coast. In the 16th century, members of this community held the mayoralty in the important port of Youghal, among them William Annyas and three-time mayor Francis Annyas. Ireland's first synagogue was founded in 1660 near Dublin Castle and Ireland's oldest Jewish cemetery, Ballybough Cemetery, was established near the Jewish community of Fairview, Dublin in 1718.

Jews were excepted from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783 but these exceptions were abolished in 1846. The cause of the Emancipation of the Jews in the United Kingdom was closely related to the cause of Catholic Emancipation in Ireland. Daniel O'Connell, the Irish Catholic Emancipation leader, also supported similar efforts for Jews. O'Connell said: "Ireland has claims on your ancient race, it is the only country that I know of unsullied by any one act of persecution of the Jews". Conversely, many Jews helped organise and gave generously towards the relief of the Irish Famine.

Jewish wedding at the Waterford Courthouse, early September 1901.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw an increase in Jewish immigration to Ireland, from England, Germany, and the Russian Empire. In 1871, the Jewish population of Ireland was 258. By 1901, there were an estimated 3,771 Jews in Ireland, over half of them (2,200) residing in Dublin; by 1904, the total Jewish population had reached an estimated 4,800. Others entered Northern Ireland during World War II through the Kindertransport in 1939 or the Republic of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The Jewish population peaked at around 5,500 in the 1940s, but has since declined to about 2,500 in 2016, mainly due to assimilation and emigration. The Irish Jewish population saw a large drop in numbers in 1948 after the establishment of Israel, to which a large percentage of Irish Jews moved out of ideological and religious convictions. There are currently three synagogues on the island of Ireland: three in Dublin and one in Belfast. There were formerly synagogues serving notable Jewish communities in Cork, Waterford, and Limerick, though the community in Limerick declined in the aftermath of the Limerick boycott of 1904.

Members of the Irish Jewish community have been prominent in business, academic, political and sporting circles. Many Irish Jews supported the Irish Republican Army and the First Dail during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, including Michael Noyk, Robert Briscoe and Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog ("the Sinn Féin Rabbi"), later first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel. The Irish Constitution of 1937 specifically gave constitutional protection to Jews, until the removal of references to specific religious groups with the Fifth Amendment in 1973. Since independence, notable politicians have included Irish-language advocate Ellen Cuffe, Lord Mayor of Cork Gerald Goldberg, and Justice Minister Alan Shatter. Notable sportsmen have included rugby union player Bethel Solomons, Lithuanian-born soccer player and cricketer Louis Bookman, cricketer Louis Collins Jacobson, multiple-time Irish chess champion Philip Baker, and boxers Sydney Curland, Freddie Rosenfield, Gerry Kostick, Frank and Henry Isaacson, and Zerrick Woolfson. The Jewish soccer team Dublin Maccabi played in the Dublin Amateur Leagues until 1995.

Modern migration

Main article: Demographics of the Republic of Ireland

See also: Polish minority in the Republic of Ireland, South Asian people in Ireland, Black people in Ireland, Lithuanians in Ireland, Americans in Ireland, Filipinos in Ireland, Chinese people in Ireland, and Turks in Ireland

Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott was of mixed Irish and Guyanese descent.

Until the final decade of the 20th century, the dominant migration pattern in Ireland after the Great Famine was one of emigration rather than immigration. Nonetheless, important minorities have become represented among Irish people in this time, in particular from the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Important figures in Ireland with ancestral or birth ties to the United States have included the 19th-century Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell, the third and fourth presidents of Ireland, Éamon de Valera and Erskine Hamilton Childers, the writers Frank McCourt and John Montague, and comedian Des Bishop. Notable black people in Ireland have included Thin Lizzy vocalist Phil Lynott, singer Samantha Mumba, and Irish rugby union player Simon Zebo. Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is of Irish and Indian heritage.

With growing prosperity since the last decade of the 20th century, Ireland became a destination for immigrants. Since the European Union expanded to include Poland in 2004, Polish people have made up the largest number of immigrants (over 150,000) from Central Europe. There has also been significant immigration from Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Latvia. The Republic of Ireland in particular has seen large-scale immigration, with 420,000 foreign nationals as of 2006, about 10% of the population. A quarter of births (24 percent) in 2009 were to mothers born outside Ireland. Chinese and Nigerians, along with people from other African countries, have accounted for a large proportion of the non–European Union migrants to Ireland. Additionally, over 13,000 Brazilians reside in Ireland, with most located in the town of Gort, County Galway.

Up to 50,000 eastern and central European migrant workers left Ireland in response to the Irish financial crisis. In November 2013, Eurostat reported that the republic had the largest net emigration rate of any member state, at 7.6 emigrants per 1,000 population. However, it has the youngest population of any European Union member state and its population size is predicted to grow for many decades, in contrast with the declining population predicted for most European countries. A report published in 2008 predicted that the population would reach 6.7 million by 2060. The Republic has also been experiencing a baby boom, with increasing birth rates and overall fertility rates. Despite this, the total fertility rate is still below replacement depending on when the measurement is taken. The Irish fertility rate is still the highest of any European country. This increase is significantly fuelled by non-Irish immigration – in 2009, a quarter of all children born in the Republic were born to mothers who had immigrated from other countries.

Genetics

See also: Genetic history of Europe, Y-DNA haplogroups in populations of Europe, and Genetic history of the British Isles

Genetic research shows a strong similarity between the Y chromosome haplotypes of Irish men with Goidelic surnames, and males from the area of Spain and Portugal, especially Galicia, Asturias, and Cantabria (and perhaps former Basque country). The incidence of the R1b-M269 haplogroup is 70% or more in Ireland, Cumbria and Cornwall in England, the Northern region in Portugal (Douro Litoral, Minho and Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro), northern Spain (Galicia, Asturias, León, Cantabria and Basque Country), western France (Gascony, Saintonge, Poitou, and Brittany), and Wales and Scotland in Britain. R1b-M269's incidence declines gradually with distance from these areas but it is still common across the central areas of Europe. R1b-M269 is the most frequent haplogroup in Germany and in the Low Countries, and is common in southern Scandinavia and in northern and central Italy. However, this haplogroup is now believed to have originated over 12,000 years more recently than previously thought, at only 5,000 years ago. According to 2009 studies by Bramanti et al. and Malmström et al. on mtDNA, related western European populations appear to be largely from the neolithic and not paleolithic era, as previously thought. There was discontinuity between mesolithic central Europe and modern European populations mainly due to an extremely high frequency of haplogroup U (particularly U5) types in mesolithic central European sites. The existence of an especially strong genetic association between the Irish and the Basques was first challenged in 2005, and in 2007 scientists began looking at the possibility of a more recent Mesolithic- or even Neolithic-era entrance of R1b into Europe. A new study published in 2010 by Balaresque et al. implies either a Mesolithic- or Neolithic- (not Paleolithic-) era entrance of R1b into Europe. However, all these genetic studies agree that the Irish and Basque (along with the Welsh) have the highest frequencies of Haplogroup R1b. Since 2015, major studies on whole genome sequencing have now shown that haplogroup R1b in western Europe, most common in traditionally Celtic-speaking areas of Atlantic Europe like Ireland, largely expanded in massive migrations from the Yamnaya culture in the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the Bronze Age, along with the carriers of Indo-European languages like proto-Celtic. Unlike previous studies, large sections of autosomal DNA were analyzed in addition to paternal Y-DNA markers. They detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic or Mesolithic Europeans, and which would have been introduced into Europe with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as the Indo-European languages. This genetic component, labelled as "Yamnaya" in the studies, then mixed to varying degrees with earlier Mesolithic hunter-gatherer and/or Neolithic farmer populations already existing in western Europe. A more recent whole genome analysis of Neolithic and Bronze Age skeletal remains from Ireland suggested that the original Neolithic farming population was most similar to present-day Sardinians, and the three Bronze Age remains had a large genetic component from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Modern Irish are the population most genetically similar to the Bronze Age remains, followed by Scottish and Welsh, and share more DNA with the three Bronze Age men from Rathlin Island than with the earlier Ballynahatty Neolithic woman.

A 2017 genetic study done on the Irish shows that there is fine-scale population structure between different regional populations of the island, with the largest difference between native 'Gaelic' Irish populations and those of Northern Ireland known to have recent, partial British ancestry. They were also found to have most similarity to two main ancestral sources: a 'French' component (mostly northwestern French) which reached highest levels in the Irish and other Celtic populations (Welsh, Highland Scots and Cornish) and showing a possible link to the Bretons; and a 'West Norwegian' component related to the Viking era.

Culture

Arts

Main articles: List of Irish artists and List of Irish musicians

See also: Music of Ireland and Irish dance

Irish folk band The Dubliners

The early history of Irish visual art is generally considered to begin with early carvings found at sites such as Newgrange and is traced through Bronze Age artefacts, particularly ornamental gold objects, and the Celtic brooches and illuminated manuscripts of the "Insular" Early Medieval period. During the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, a strong indigenous tradition of painting emerged, including such figures as John Butler Yeats, William Orpen, Jack Yeats and Louis le Brocquy. It was Jack Yeats who holds the distinction of being Ireland's first Olympic medalist in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State, winning a silver medal for his painting at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.

The Irish tradition of folk music and dance is also widely known. The most important Irish musician historically was Ireland's national composer, the 18th-century blind harpist Turlough O'Carolan. Both folk music and dance were later redefined in the 1950s. In the middle years of the 20th century, as Irish society was attempting to modernise, traditional Irish music fell out of favour to some extent, especially in urban areas. Young people at this time tended to look to Britain and, particularly, the United States as models of progress and jazz and rock and roll became extremely popular. During the 1960s, and inspired by the American folk music movement, there was a revival of interest in the Irish tradition. This revival was inspired by groups like The Dubliners, the Clancy Brothers and Sweeney's Men and individuals like Seán Ó Riada. Before long, groups and musicians like Horslips, Van Morrison and even Thin Lizzy were incorporating elements of traditional music into a rock idiom to form a unique new sound. During the 1970s and 1980s, the distinction between traditional and rock musicians became blurred, with many individuals regularly crossing over between these styles of playing as a matter of course. This trend can be seen more recently in the work of bands like U2, Snow Patrol, The Cranberries, The Undertones and The Corrs.

Exploration

Irish people made important contributions to seafaring, geography and exploration during both the Middle Ages and the modern era, with particularly celebrated Irish explorers including Saint Brendan the Navigator, Robert McClure, Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean.

The legendary seafarer Brendan the Navigator, the Arctic explorer Sir Robert McClure, and the Antarctic explorer Tom Crean are among the most celebrated Irish explorers.

The legendary 6th-century Christian monk and seafarer Brendan the Navigator is credited with the exploration of the North Atlantic, with some suggesting that he may have been the first European to reach Greenland or North America and that accounts of his voyage later served as inspiration for Christopher Columbus. More concretely, Irish people expanded throughout the North Atlantic through the eremetical papar, who may have reached the Faroes and may have been the first to reach Iceland, and later through the Norse-Gaels of the 9th and 10th centuries. Early Irish exploration and world geography was recorded by the 8th-century Irish geographer Dicuil and became a key source for medieval Europeans. In the 14th century, the Irish Franciscan friars Symon Semeonis and James of Ireland were noted for their journeys as far as Egypt, Sumatra and China.

In the modern era, Irish people were involved in the exploration of the Americas. Exploration of South America was undertaken by the Catholic priest and missionary Thomas Field, who in the 16th century explored Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay; by Joseph Barclay Pentland, who surveyed much of the Bolivian Andes; by the amateur archaeologist Thomas Gann, who explored the ruins of the Maya civilization; and more recently by the naturalist Cynthia Longfield, who surveyed dragon-flies in Brazil. The exploration of Western Canada was undertaken by Irishmen such as John Palliser, leader of the Palliser expedition; Richard Mayne, explorer of British Columbia; Ross Cox, who gave his name to Mount Ross Cox; and John Work, an official of the Hudson's Bay Company and head of one of the founding families in Victoria. Explorers of the modern United States included Isaac Weld, a topographical writer and artist; Thomas Coulter, known for his botanical research in Mexico, Arizona and Alta California; Richard D. Cotter, a member of the first California Geological Survey; and Nellie Cashman, a noted nurse and gold prospector in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Nellie Cashman was an important explorer during the Klondike Gold Rush.

The 19th and 20th centuries brought several important generations of Irish Royal Navy officers and polar explorers. Irish Arctic explorers included Francis Crozier, second-in-command during the ill-fated Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage; Alexander Armstrong and Robert McClure, both of whom searched for the lost Franklin expedition, and the latter of whom in 1854 traversed the Northwest Passage by boat and sledge and became the first to circumnavigate the Americas; Francis McClintock, who confirmed the Franklin expedition's failure; and Edward Sabine, the 30th president of the Royal Society. Early Irish Antarctic explorers included Edward Bransfield, known for the sighting of the Trinity Peninsula, and again Francis Crozier, then second-in-command of the Ross expedition. Irish explorers were most notably represented in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, of whom the most famous are Ernest Shackleton, a principal figure of the period who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic, and Tom Crean, a member of three major expeditions to Antarctica including Robert Falcon Scott's 1911–13 Terra Nova Expedition. Other Irish polar explorers include Robert Forde and Patrick Keohane, also members of the Terra Nova Expedition, Henry Chichester Hart, a naturalist who accompanied George Strong Nares' British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76, and Timothy McCarthy, a Polar Medal recipient for his service in the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–16. The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean and Beaufort Island in the Antarctic Ocean were both named for the Irish hydrographer of the Royal Navy Francis Beaufort, who directed the Arctic Council during its search for the Franklin expedition and also helped found the Royal Geographical Society. Later mycological exploration of Canada and the Arctic was conducted by Douglas Barton Osborne Savile.

Irish explorers of Africa include James Hingston Tuckey, Daniel Houghton, Thomas Joseph Hutchinson and Thomas Heazle Parke, the first Irishman to cross Africa. Explorers of Australia include Anthony O'Grady Lefroy, George Fletcher Moore and Robert O'Hara Burke, while Peter Dillon explored Oceania. Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Palestine and the Persian Gulf were surveyed by Francis Beaufort, Henry Chichester Hart, Henry Blosse Lynch, Thomas Kerr Lynch and Christopher Costigan.

Contemporary Irish explorers include Dermot Somers, Pat Falvey, Mike O'Shea, Mark Pollock and Jeremy Curl.

Literature

Main article: List of Irish writers

See also: Irish literature, Irish poetry, Irish fiction, Irish theatre, Irish mythology, and Modern literature in Irish

W. B. Yeats, Nobel Laureate in Literature (1923), whose poetry and plays in English drew on the Gaelic literary tradition.

Jonathan Swift, one of the foremost prose satirists in the English language

For a comparatively small population of about 6 million people, Ireland has made an enormous contribution to literature, which is one of the best known achievements of the Irish people. Irish literature encompasses the Irish and English languages, but has also included important writers in Latin, French and other languages in the past.

In the Middle Ages, Gaelic Ireland produced an abundance of literature in both Hiberno-Latin and Irish from about the 6th century onwards, so that more vernacular literature survives from Ireland than from anywhere else in Europe before about 1000. Early Hiberno-Latin writers are notably represented by the poets St. Columba and Sedulius Scottus, the epistolographer St. Columbanus, the biographers Muirchú, Tírechán, and St. Adamnan of Iona, and the grammarian Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, as well as the highly learned "Hisperic Latin" writers whose work culminated in the verse Hisperica Famina. In the later Middle Ages, Latin served notably as a lingua franca held in common between the Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman peoples of Ireland through the uniting influence of the Catholic Church. In the early modern period, Gaelic, Old English, Catholic and Protestant writers alike wrote in Neo-Latin as part of a wider European "republic of letters". Notable Irish writers of Latin between the 16th and 17th centuries include Muiris Ó Fithcheallaigh, Richard Stanihurst, Dermot O’Meara, James Ussher, John Colgan and Philip O'Sullivan Beare.

Vernacular literature in Gaelic Ireland included poetry and complex bodies of saga literature extending from the earliest times into the early modern era, such as those grouped by modern scholars in the Mythological Cycle, the Ulster Cycle, the Finn Cycle, and the King's Cycle. In the early 20th century, the folklorist and storyteller Seumas MacManus wrote that "such beautiful fictions of such beautiful ideals, by themselves presume and prove beautiful-souled people, capable of appreciating lofty ideals". These stories, originally in Old, Middle, or Early Modern Irish, formed a key inspiration for later Irish playwrights and poets of the Celtic and Irish Literary Revival writing in English, such as the Nobel Laureate poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and the dramatist and folklorist Lady Gregory.

The Vikings had a limited impact on Irish literature, although reflection on the political impact of the Vikings can be seen in medieval sagas such as the mythological Cath Maige Tuired and the historical epic Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib. Once Gaelicised however, both the Norse-Gaels and the Hiberno-Normans became notable patrons of Irish bardic poetry. The Hiberno-Norman contribution to Gaelic literature included the growth of the Finn Cycle and the introduction of French forms of verse to Irish bardic poetry. The 17th-century Gaelic historian Geoffrey Keating was of precisely such Hiberno-Norman, "Old English" descent. Much later however, the plantations upset the Gaelic order and learned classes, and the bardic system went into decline. Among the last of the true bardic poets were Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig and Dáibhí Ó Bruadair. The Irish poets of the late 17th and 18th centuries moved toward more modern dialects. Among the most prominent of this period were Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta, Peadar Ó Doirnín, Art Mac Cumhaigh, Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, and Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill.

Modern literature in Irish continued into the 19th and 20th centuries through the work of writers such as the educationalist and revolutionary Pádraig Pearse, the modernist fiction-writer Pádraic Ó Conaire, and the novelists Seosamh Mac Grianna, Séamus Ó Grianna and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Inhabitants of the remote Irish-speaking areas of the south-west, notably Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Peig Sayers and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, all produced celebrated autobiographies in Irish. Important poets included Máirtín Ó Direáin, Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Seán Ó Ríordáin. The Northern Irish writer Flann O'Brien and the writer Michael Hartnett wrote in both Irish and English. Caitlín Maude and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill may be seen as representatives of a new generation of poets, conscious of tradition but modernist in outlook.

The Irish people have also contributed to literature in the English language to a significant extent and from a very early date. The second earliest poem in the monumental The Oxford Book of English Verse is an anonymous Middle English poem of c. 1300 written by a Hiberno-Norman, The Irish Dancer (also known as Ich am of Irlaunde or I am of Ireland). The Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser was a member of the Anglo-Irish community, married to the Boyle family who ruled in Cork, and his sister's descendants remained prominent landowners in Cork for centuries. Later writers in the Anglo-Irish community included the 18th-century novelists Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and Oliver Goldsmith. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the writers Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and C.S. Lewis, as well as Ireland's four Nobel laureates in literature, W. B. Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Séamus Heaney (1995). Other notable 20th-century writers have included the playwrights Brendan Behan and Brian Friel, the poets Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley, and the Irish short story writers Frank O'Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, and William Trevor.

Irish people have also made contributions to corpuses of literature in languages other than Latin, Irish and English. Some time in the early 13th century, a Hiberno-Norman poet in Ireland composed the verse chronicle The Song of Dermot and the Earl in the Anglo-Norman language. Geoffrey of Waterford also produced important works of Anglo-Norman literature. Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett wrote in both English and French.

Notable writers with Irish ancestry in the wider diaspora have included the Brontë family (including Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë, all daughters of the Irish curate Patrick Brontë), Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, L. Frank Baum, Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Graves.

Philosophy

John Scotus Eriugena, one of the most influential philosophers of medieval Europe; George Berkeley, a key philosopher of the Enlightenment; and Iris Murdoch, a prominent analytic philosopher and virtue ethicist of the 20th century.

The history of Irish philosophers begins early with the Christian monks and scholars of the Middle Ages, such as the rationalist Augustinus Hibernicus, the scholar Clement of Ireland, and the neoplatonist John Scotus Eriugena. One of the most important philosophers of medieval Europe, Eriugena was an outstandingly original philosopher and the earliest founder of scholasticism, the dominant school of medieval philosophy.

Later internationally-significant medieval and early modern scholastic philosophers born in Ireland included Thomas Aquinas' teacher Peter of Ireland, Thomas of Ireland, Richard FitzRalph, Muiris Ó Fithcheallaigh, Aodh Mac Cathmhaoil, Luke Wadding, John Punch (responsible for the reformulation of Occam's Razor into its classic form), and Micheál Ó Mordha. The medieval Scottish Franciscan philosopher Duns Scotus was widely regarded as Irish during the early modern period and inspired generations of Irish Franciscan philosophers, who played an especially crucial role in the international revival, development, and dissemination of Scotism in the 17th and 18th centuries. Other medieval scholastics important within Ireland included Gille of Limerick, William of Drogheda, Geoffrey of Waterford, and Malachy of Limerick.

The early modern period saw key problems in natural philosophy posed by William Molyneux and Robert Boyle, along with enormously influential philosophers of the Enlightenment era George Berkeley, John Toland and Francis Hutcheson. On the continent, Irish philosophers such as Micheál Ó Mordha, Roger O'Moloy, William O'Kelly, and Bernard Connor were key figures on either side of the early modern debates between Aristotelianism and Cartesianism. Irish political philosophers are most notably represented by the Irish-French entrepreneur Richard Cantillon, considered the father of economics; by the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern British conservatism; and by William Thompson, an early critic of capitalism whose work influenced Karl Marx. Prominent Irish-born female philosophers have included the 20th-century analytic philosophers and virtue ethicists Iris Murdoch and G. E. M. Anscombe.

The close relationship between philosophy and theology has meant that many Irish philosophers have been linked with institutional religion, in particular the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland. The philosophers George Berkeley and Charles Graves were both Church of Ireland bishops, the moral philosopher Thomas Kingsmill Abbott was an Anglican minister, while the philosopher A. A. Luce was the son of an Anglican minister. The Northern Irish analytic philosopher William J. Abraham is a United Methodist pastor. Noted Catholic priest-philosophers from the last century include Jesuits Thomas A. Finlay and philosopher of science Patrick Aidan Heelan, Dominican analytic philosopher and Thomist Herbert McCabe, neo-scholastics Peter Coffey, Arthur Little, Thomas Crowley, James Desmond Bastable, Colmán Ó hUallacháin, Feichín O'Doherty, and James McEvoy, and moral philosopher Matthew O'Donnell. Current non-clerical Irish philosophers of religion include William Desmond, Richard Kearney, Peter Rollins and Brendan Sweetman.

Contemporary philosophers include George Edward Hughes, Philip McShane, Dermot Moran, Philip Pettit, Kieran Egan, George Casey, William Lyons, Kevin Mulligan, Maria Baghramian, and Mark Dooley. Important Irish historians of philosophy include William Archer Butler, John J. O'Meara, Desmond Clarke, Terence Irwin and Helena Sheehan.

Politics

Main article: List of Irish politicians

See also: Politics in Ireland, Politics of the Republic of Ireland, and Politics of Northern Ireland

Father of modern conservativism Edmund Burke, Catholic Empancipator Daniel O'Connell, and revolutionary Constance Markievicz, first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament and first female cabinet minister in Europe.

Political affiliation among Irish people has traditionally broken along longstanding "tribal" lines, with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil (the successors of the political split within the antecedent Sinn Féin Party, over the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922) being the two historically dominant parties in Ireland. This continuing division between two centre-right parties is often attributed to the "civil war politics" of voters continuing to support the party their family supported during the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, though the roots of the split can be traced back earlier to the division between the respectively constitutionalist and Gaelic nationalist strands of Irish politics which were important in the 19th century. More recent research suggests that the roots of tribal political loyalties among Irish people may go back even further. One study has suggested that Fine Gael TDs are more likely to come from Norman or Old English families while Fianna Fáil TDs tend to come from Gaelic backgrounds, suggesting that the underlying political division may date back to social divisions first established from the 12th century.

Irish people have made notable contributions to political theory and political life on both a national and international level. Edmund Burke made notable contributions to political theory, while Daniel O'Connell was responsible for the formation of one of the first modern political parties in Europe, and Constance Markievicz became the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament and first female cabinet minister in Europe. Constitutional politicians were notably represented by Henry Grattan, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Arthur Griffith, while socialist revolutionaries were represented by James Connolly and Jim Larkin, and Gaelic nationalists were represented by Pádraig Pearse, Terence MacSwiney, and Éamon de Valera. Prominent political activists and politicians on the international stage have included Roger Casement, considered the father of modern human rights investigations, Seán Lester, Secretary-General of the League of Nations, and Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Science and mathematics

Father of seismology Robert Mallet, mathematical physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), and 1951 Nobel Laureate physicist Ernest Walton, the first man to split the atom, are among the most prominent scientists born in Ireland.

There have been notable Irish scientists, naturalists, and mathematicians from around the 6th century to the present day. These include the fathers of chemistry Robert Boyle, seismology Robert Mallet, and economics Richard Cantillon, mathematical physicists William Rowan Hamilton, George Johnstone Stoney, and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), and Nobel Laureates Ernest Walton (1951) and William C. Campbell (2015). In many cases, Irish scientists took advantage of opportunities outside of Ireland, on account of which they are not always immediately recognised as being Irish.

The history of Irish scientists begins with the Christian monks and scholars of the Middle Ages, such as the computists Mo Sinu moccu Min, Columbanus, and Cummian, the rationalist and empirical observer Augustinus Hibernicus, the anonymous author of the Liber de ordine creaturaram ("The Book on the Ordering of Creation"), and the astronomers Vergilius of Salzburg, Dungal of Bobbio, and Giolla Íosa Mac Fir Bisigh. Early Irish mathematicians dominated the field of computistics, the principal field of medieval European science before the 11th century, while early Irish empiricists and engineers made important early contributions to theories of geology, coastal erosion, and tidal activity, and to hydrology and tidal engineering. The work of medieval Irish scientists later served as the foundation for the integration of Arabic science into European science, with its revolutionary shift from non-empirical to empirical science, so much so that 7th-century Ireland has been called "the cradle of medieval science".

Early modern Irish forerunners of modern science include father of chemistry Robert Boyle and natural philosophers Ruaidhrí Ó Flaithbheartaigh, William Molyneux and Richard Helsham. In the 19th century, the Irish were accomplished as inventors and makers of scientific instruments, such that Irish astronomer William Parsons built the largest telescope of the century. Irish inventors included Beaufort scale-creator Francis Beaufort, induction coil-inventor Nicholas Callan, submarine-inventor John Philip Holland, steam turbine-inventor Charles Parsons, and tractor-inventor Harry Ferguson. Samuel Yeates and Thomas and Howard Grubb were prominent makers of surveying and astronomical instruments.

Irish physicists made notable contributions to atomic theory, among them George Stoney, William Thomson and Joseph Larmor, and atom-splitter Ernest Walton. Important contributions to the theory of relativity were made by George FitzGerald, Arthur W. Conway, and John Lighton Synge, and to quantum physics and quantum technology by John Stewart Bell, Jonathan Dowling, and J. C. Séamus Davis. Irish astrophysicists Alexander Anderson and Jocelyn Bell Burnell were respectively the first to propose the existence of black holes and to discover radio pulsars. Other notable Irish physicists include atmospheric physicist John Tyndall, experimental physicist Frederick Thomas Trouton, pioneer radiologists Thomas Ranken Lyle and Joseph Patrick Slattery, and radiotherapist John Joly.

In addition to Robert Mallet, John Tyndall, and John Joly, noted Irish geologists have included Richard Chenevix, William Henry Fitton, Richard Griffith, James McAdam, Michael Tuomey, Patrick Ganly, William King, George Victor Du Noyer, Samuel Haughton, Maxwell Henry Close, Edward Hull, Henry Benedict Medlicott, George Henry Kinahan, Charles Aemilius Oldham, Arthur Beavor Wynne, Frederick Richard Mallet, Valentine Ball, Edward Hardman, John Joly, George Barnett, Hartley T. Ferrar, George Martin Lees, J. C. Coleman, John S. Jackson, and John Feehan, and paleontologists Theobald Jones, Frederick McCoy, Robert Bell, Veronica Burns, Valerie Hall, Derek Briggs, Eamon N. Doyle, and Gareth J. Dyke. Irish atmospheric scientists have included John James Nolan, Patrick Joseph Nolan, and Gerard Jennings. Irish hydrographers have included Francis Beaufort and Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville. Irish meteorologists and climatologists have included Richard Kirwan, Henry Hennessy, Robert Henry Scott, Brendan McWilliams, Gerald Fleming, and Peter Lynch. Irish life scientists include bioinformatician Desmond G. Higgins, botanists Patrick Browne, Matilda Cullen Knowles, Máirin de Valéra, and Maura Scannell, zoologists Jane Stephens and Carmel Humphries, and medical scientists Jones Quain, Thomas Heazle Parke, and Fergus O'Rourke.

Notable Irish mathematicians include William Rowan Hamilton, inventor of quaternions and Hamiltonian mechanics, George Stokes, contributor of the Navier–Stokes equations, and cryptologists Richard J. Hayes, Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, and Gordon Foster. Other notable Irish mathematicians of the 18th and 19th centuries include James Thomson, Robert Murphy, James MacCullagh, Charles Graves, Matthew O'Brien, Michael Roberts, Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, William S. Burnside, Andrew James Campbell Allen, Robert Russell, Henry Gordon Dawson, Matthew Wyatt Joseph Fry, William McFadden Orr, Henry Charles McWeeney, and James Cullen, while mathematicians of the last century include Charles Henry Rowe, TS Broderick, Carew Arthur Meredith, Samuel James Patterson, and Paul McNicholas. Irish female mathematicians and astronomers included Agnes Mary Clerke, Sophie Bryant, Alicia Boole Stott, Alice Everett, Annie S. D. Maunder, Edith Anne Stoney, Cathleen Synge Morawetz, and Sarah Flannery, while Sheila Tinney, Muriel Kennett Wales, Barbara Gertrude Yates, and Siobhán Vernon are variously regarded as the first Irish women to receive doctorates in mathematics.

Historic links between the Christian churches and education in Ireland mean that the Irish people have also contributed notable priest-scientists, including mathematicians Cornelius Denvir and Pádraig de Brún, physicists William Hales, Daniel William Cahill, James B. Kavanagh, James Robert McConnell, Ernan McMullin, Tom Burke, and Patrick Aidan Heelan, electrical scientists Nicholas Callan, James William MacGauley, and Gerald Molloy, seismologist and astronomer Edward Pigot, astronomers James Hamilton and William Frederick Archdall Ellison, and paleoarchaeologist John MacEnery.

Irish scientists not born in Ireland, but permanently settled or naturalised there, have included English-born mathematician George Boole, Danish-born astronomer John Louis Emil Dreyer, Austrian-born physicist Erwin Schrödinger, Hungarian-born physicist Cornelius Lanczos, Welsh-born physicist John T. Lewis, Georgian-born mathematician Samson Shatashvili, and Somali-born mathematician Abdusalam Abubakar. Scientists of Irish descent within the wider diaspora have included Nobel Laureates Charles H. Townes and John O'Keefe.

Sport

Main article: Sport in Ireland

Sport plays an important role for Irish people. The many sports played and followed in Ireland include association football, Gaelic games (including Gaelic football, hurling and camogie), horse racing, show jumping, greyhound racing, basketball, fishing, handball, motorsport, boxing, tennis, hockey, golf, rowing, cricket, and rugby union.

Notable Irish Olympians include John Boland, Sonia O'Sullivan, Michelle Smith, Katie Taylor, and Gary and Paul O'Donovan.

Identity

See also: Demographics of the Republic of Ireland and Demographics of Northern Ireland

Irish identity consists of a complex and overlapping series of identities among the different communities that make up the island of Ireland and its diaspora.

National identity

Columbanus, the earliest articulator of Irish and of European identity, as depicted in Brugnato Cathedral

The earliest expressions of Irish identity begin with the early Christian missionaries, Saint Patrick and Saint Columbanus. The Roman foreigner Patrick was the earliest writer in classical antiquity to write positively of "the Irish" and of their suitability for inclusion among the worldwide community of Christianity, and Patrick himself is today celebrated by Irish people of both the Catholic and Protestant religious traditions as the national patron saint. The 6th-century Columbanus was the first Irish writer to refer to himself as Irish. One historian has stated that Columbanus had a "very strong sense of Irish identity... He's the first person to write about Irish identity, he's the first Irish person that we have a body of literary work from, so even on that point of view he's very important in terms of Irish identity."

The Middle Ages saw a sharp distinction and at times animosity between Gaelic Irish identity and Hiberno-Norman or Anglo-Irish identity, respectively forming "two nations". The community of Norman descent used numerous epithets to describe themselves during the Middle Ages, such as "Englishmen born in Ireland" or "English-Irish", with the term "Old English" emerging as a result of the political cess crisis of the 1580s and the perceived need to distinguish themselves from the "New English" officials and settlers who had more recently arrived from Elizabethan England.

The emergence of a common Irish identity which included both the Irish-speaking Gaelic communities and English-speaking communities of Ireland can be traced to the political and religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries, which saw a realignment of religion rather than language as increasingly the principal mark of identity shared by both Gaelic and Old English communities in Ireland, as distinguished from the New English settlers who brought Protestantism to Ireland as part of the Reformation and Tudor conquest. Many of the Old English in Ireland were dispossessed and excluded from positions of wealth and power within the new Protestant Ascendancy, largely due to their continued adherence to Catholicism. As a result, those loyal to Catholicism attempted to replace the distinction between "Norman" and "Gaelic Irish" under the new denominator of Irish Catholic. These groups fought in common cause during the Tudor conquest and the Irish Confederate Wars, and Irish national identity for those individuals came to be identified with Catholicism.

The Anglo-Irish community which made up the Protestant Ascendancy meanwhile maintained an independent Irish identity which identified with Protestantism rather than Catholicism. The United Irishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries, inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, attempted to form an Irish identity that was largely defined by adherence to non-sectarian, republican values. Other 19th century nationalists appealed to the Irish people's perceived status as a Celtic nation, based on the common affinities of the Celtic languages which were first identified and demonstrated in the 18th century, and which later led to the development of modern "Celtic" identity through the Celtic Revival and Pan-Celticism of the 19th and 20th centuries. This was notably true of the Protestant Irish nationalist and Young Irelander Thomas Davis, who identified the Irish as a Celtic nation made up of descendants of the Gaelic Irish, Scottish Gaels, and Celtic Welsh, promoted the Irish language as the "national language", and was open to the assimilation of the "Germanic minority" in Ireland (of Norman and Anglo-Saxon origin) if they had a "willingness to be part of the Irish Nation".

A St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin

Nonetheless, the political and cultural developments of the 19th and 20th centuries saw the mutually divergent development of Irish nationalism – linked largely with the Irish language, Catholicism, and an independent Irish state in the form of the Republic of Ireland – and of Irish unionism – linked with the English language, Protestantism, and the British state in Northern Ireland. Exceptions to these generalisations exist: there are Protestant nationalists and there are Catholic unionists. Nonetheless, the effects of the Partition of Ireland in the 1920s and of the Troubles in the 1960s meant that these respectively "Irish" and "British" identities in Ireland, which had in many cases overlapped previously, came to be seen as mutually exclusive for much of the 20th century. Irish identity continues to evolve in the 21st century, particularly in relation to religion, Northern Ireland, Europe, and the wider diaspora.

Local and provincial identity

Irish people on the island of Ireland have a strong sense of local or provincial identity, overlapping and in some contexts superseding national Irish identity. This is particularly strong through supporters of the Gaelic Athletic Association and Association football, which are organised on a county basis, and of Rugby Union, which is organised on a provincial basis. In Munster, for example, Munster Rugby fans are noted for the slogan "Irish by birth, Munster by the grace of God". In the south, local identity is particularly strong among people in the "rebel county" of Cork, formerly the centre of the briefly independent Munster Republic and now affectionately known as "the real capital" (as distinct from Dublin) or the "People's Republic of Cork".

Religious identity

Main articles: Religion in the Republic of Ireland and Religion in Northern Ireland

Corpus Christi procession in Tipperary in 1963

In the Republic of Ireland, as of 2011, 3,861,335 people or about 84.16% of the population are Roman Catholic. In Northern Ireland about 41.6% of the population are Protestant (19.1% Presbyterian, 13.7% Church of Ireland, 3.0% Methodist, 5.8% Other Christian) whilst approximately 40.8% are Catholic as of 2011.

The importance of religious identity in the Republic of Ireland can be illustrated by the 31st International Eucharistic Congress in 1932 and Pope John Paul II's Mass in Phoenix Park in 1979, each of which saw attendance by about a third of the total population of the Republic. The idea of faith has affected the question of Irish identity even in relatively recent times, apparently more so for Catholics and Irish-Americans. The complexities of Irish identity have been observed by English Catholic commentator Joseph Pearce:

What defines an Irishman? His faith, his place of birth? What of the Irish-Americans? Are they Irish? Who is more Irish, a Catholic Irishman such as James Joyce who is trying to escape from his Catholicism and from his Irishness, or a Protestant Irishman like Oscar Wilde who is eventually becoming Catholic? Who is more Irish... someone like C.S. Lewis, an Ulster Protestant, who is walking towards it, even though he never ultimately crosses the threshold?

Today the majority of Irish people in the Republic of Ireland identify as Catholic, although church attendance has significantly dropped in recent decades. In Northern Ireland, where almost 50% of the population is Protestant, there has also been a decline in attendances.

Northern Irish identity

Main article: People of Northern Ireland

Northern Irish republicans at the funeral procession of Martin McGuinness, and Northern Irish unionists taking part in an Orange walk

After the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed which led to the formation of the semi-independent Irish Free State (now the independent Republic of Ireland) which consisted of 26 counties in the south and Donegal in the North-West. The remaining six counties in the northeast remained in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. It is predominately religion, historical, and political differences that divide the two communities of (nationalism and unionism).

In Northern Ireland, national identity is complex and diverse. In the early 20th century, most Ulster Protestants and Catholics saw themselves as Irish, although Protestants tended to have a much stronger sense of Britishness. With the onset of the Home Rule Crisis and events that followed, Protestants gradually began to abandon Irish identity, as Irishness and Britishness became more and more to be seen as mutually exclusive. In 1968, just before the onset of the Troubles, 39% of Protestants described themselves as British and 20% described themselves as Irish, while 32% chose an Ulster identity. By 1978, following the worst years of the conflict, there had been a large shift in identity among Protestants, with the majority (67%) now calling themselves British and only 8% calling themselves Irish. This shift has not been reversed. Meanwhile, the majority of Catholics have continued to see themselves as Irish.

From 1989, 'Northern Irish' began to be included as an identity choice in surveys, and its popularity has grown since then. Some organizations have promoted 'Northern Irish' identity as a way of overcoming sectarian division. In a 1998 survey of students, this was one of the main reasons they gave for choosing that identity, along with a desire to appear 'neutral'. However, surveys show that 'Northern Irish' identity tends to have different meanings for Catholics and Protestants. Surveys also show that those choosing 'Northern Irish' regard their national identity as less important than those choosing British and Irish.

Four polls taken between 1989 and 1994 revealed that when asked to state their national identity, over 79% of Northern Irish Protestants replied "British" or "Ulster" with 3% or less replying "Irish", while over 60% of Northern Irish Catholics replied "Irish" with 13% or less replying "British" or "Ulster". A survey in 1999 showed that 72% of Northern Irish Protestants considered themselves "British" and 2% "Irish", with 68% of Northern Irish Catholics considering themselves "Irish" and 9% "British". The survey also revealed that 78% of Protestants and 48% of all respondents felt "Strongly British", while 77% of Catholics and 35% of all respondents felt "Strongly Irish". 51% of Protestants and 33% of all respondents felt "Not at all Irish", while 62% of Catholics and 28% of all respondents felt "Not at all British".

Diaspora identity

See also: Plastic Paddy and More Irish than the Irish themselves

Montreal hosts one of the largest and longest-running St. Patrick's Day parades in North America.

Many members of the Irish diaspora maintain a strong sense of Irish self-identity, to the point that Saint Patrick's Day is today celebrated in more countries than any other national festival and the diaspora is sometimes described even as "more Irish than the Irish themselves". Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland formally recognises and embraces the Irish identity of the diaspora, stating that "the Irish Nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage."

Nonetheless, Irish diaspora identity is sufficiently distinct from the identity of the people of the island of Ireland that the latter sometimes question its authenticity. Since the 1980s, the term "Plastic Paddy" has been sometimes used in a typically derogatory fashion toward the second-generation Irish in Britain, those who identify as Irish Americans, or those who celebrate "Irishness" on Saint Patrick's Day, accusing them of having little actual connection to Irish culture. The Scottish journalist Alex Massie observed this phenomenon in a 2007 article in the National Review:

When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian Brigadoon was a sham, a mockery, a Shamrockery of real Ireland and a remarkable exhibition of plastic paddyness. But at least it was confined to the Irish abroad and those foreigners desperate to find some trace of green in their blood.

European identity

The Irish Christian missionaries of the early Middle Ages were "aware of the cultural unity of Europe", and it was the 6th-century Columbanus who is regarded as "one of the fathers of Europe". Another Irish saint, Aidan of Lindisfarne, has been proposed as a possible patron saint of the United Kingdom, while Saints Kilian and Vergilius became the patron saints of Würzburg in Germany and Salzburg in Austria, respectively.

The Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom joined the European Community in 1973, and Irish citizens became additionally Citizens of the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty signed in 1992. This brought a further question for the future of Irish identity; whether Ireland was "closer to Boston than to Berlin". The Irish Tánaiste Mary Harney observed this complexity in 2000: "History and geography have placed Ireland in a very special location between America and Europe... As Irish people our relationships with the United States and the European Union are complex. Geographically we are closer to Berlin than Boston. Spiritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin." Harney's remarks referred in part to the perception of cultural and political ties with the Irish diaspora in the United States as being of stronger historical and continuing importance to the Irish people than the cultural, political and legal ties with the European Union.

Nonetheless, European identity as a strongly overlapping component of Irish identity has grown in the wake of the Celtic Tiger and the UK withdrawal from the European Union.

Diaspora

Main article: Irish diaspora

The Irish diaspora consists of Irish emigrants and their descendants. Colonisation, trade, missionary activity, and the pressures of foreign invasion, political unrest, religious conflict, and economic hardship on the island of Ireland have all contributed to this diaspora at different times in its history. In the Middle Ages, there were important diaspora communities of Irish people in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Iceland. Today the diaspora is largest in anglophone countries such as the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and nations of the Caribbean such as Jamaica and Barbados. These countries all have large minorities of Irish descent, who in addition form the core of the Catholic Church in those countries. Additionally, there are sizable minorities in continental Europe and in Latin America.

Today the diaspora is believed to contain an estimated 80 million people. The size of the diaspora, more than thirteen times that of the island of Ireland itself, makes the diaspora an important constituent of the Irish people, and one whose members and achievements have been of major international significance. It is in part through the diaspora that the Irish are known internationally.

Medieval diaspora

See also: Kingdom of Dyfed, Dál Riata, Hiberno-Scottish mission, and Norse-Gaels

Gaelic Irish soldiers in the Low Countries, from Albrecht Dürer (1521)

The earliest known phases of Irish settlement outside of Ireland were in early medieval Wales, Scotland and the Isles, all of which came under Gaelic Irish influence from around the 4th and 5th centuries. Irish people spread further afield, throughout Britain and the European continent, as part of the early Christian missions of the 6th and 7th centuries. Irish missionaries such as Columba of Iona and Aidan of Lindisfarne spread Christianity through Pictish Scotland, northern Britain and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Other Irish missionaries, such as Columbanus, Kilian of Würzburg and Vergilius of Salzburg, were active on the continent from the 6th century onwards, establishing important monasteries and Irish religious communities in what is now France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Among the most important of these foundations are Iona Abbey in Scotland, Annegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaines in France, Bobbio in Italy, and St. Gall and Reichenau abbey in Switzerland. The 11th-13th centuries saw the foundation of an influential congregation of monasteries in Germany exclusively for Irish monks known as Schottenklöster, of which many were founded from the celebrated Scots Monastery of St. James in Regensburg. The medieval diaspora included a considerable presence of Irish scholars at the Frankish court, where they were renowned for their learning. Among the most important of these intellectuals were the poet Sedulius Scotus, the geographer Dicuil, and the philosopher Eriugena, head of the imperial palace school of Aachen under the Frankish Emperor Charles the Bald. Numerous kings and clerics travelled on the continent on pilgrimage or other business: the Irish king Donnchad mac Briain died in Rome, the Norse-Gael prince Lǫgmaðr Guðrøðarson is believed to have died in Jerusalem, while the archbishops Malachy of Armagh and Laurence of Dublin died at Clairvaux and Eu respectively.

Irish people expanded throughout the North Atlantic both through the eremetical papar and later through the Norse-Gaels of the 9th and 10th centuries. This latter people were active as seafarers, traders, raiders and mercenaries which brought them across the Irish Sea world and beyond, while Norse-Gael dynasties such as the Uí Ímair ruled domains which extended outside of Ireland, encompassing the kingdoms of Northumbria, Man and the Isles. Irish slaves taken overseas also inter-married with the Scandinavians. This was especially pronounced in Iceland, where Gaels formed as much as 30-40% of the founding population and contributed an important part of the ancestry, culture and literature of the Icelandic people. This influence can be seen in the medieval Icelandic sagas. The Saga of Erik the Red, which narrates the Norse discovery and settlement of Vinland in Newfoundland, suggests that the first child born to a European couple in North America held Irish descent on both sides.

The High and Late Middle Ages brought a diaspora of both the Gaelic Irish and the Hiberno-Norman communities. Members of the Hiberno-Norman aristocracy, such as the family of William Marshal and Isabel de Clare, and later the FitzGerald dynasty, remained closely tied to Britain and to the Plantagenet and later Tudor realm by politics and marriage. Lower down the social hierarchy, the Irish people were active as traders on the European continent, and could be found in the major port towns of England, France and Spain. From the 12th century, before the Norman conquest of Ireland, there is incidental documentary evidence of Irish trade with the English ports of Bristol, Chester, York, Exeter, Gloucester and Cambridge. By the 15th and 16th centuries, the merchants of Ireland's independent corporate cities (Wexford, Ross, Waterford, Dungarvan, Youghal, Cork, Kinsale, Dingle, Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Carrickfergus) had strong links with the French ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle and with the ports of northern Spain.

Modern diaspora

Reformation and religious diaspora

See also: Irish Colleges

Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire, founder of the Irish College at Leuven, and Cardinal Paul Cullen, responsible for the creation of an international Irish Catholic hierarchy.

The Reformation in Ireland, the collapse of the Gaelic political order and the introduction of the Penal Laws in the wake of the Tudor conquests led to the partial exodus of the Catholic noble, clerical and scholarly communities from Ireland, many of whom became involved in the Counter-Reformation in Ireland and on the continent. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, some 34 Irish Colleges were founded on continental Europe in countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, as centres of education for Irish Catholic clergy and lay people. Notable among these were the colleges at Douai, Leuven, Lille, Lisbon, Paris, Prague, Salamanca and Rome. Continental Irish scholars such as Mícheál Ó Cléirigh and Aodh Buidhe Mac an Bhaird were instrumental in the copying and preservation of Irish historical documents from destruction during this period.

Over the course of the early modern period and into the late modern period, Irish priests and laymen were also active as Christian missionaries in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania, where they often came to form a foundation of the ecclesiastical hierarchies of those countries. The Jesuit priest Thomas Field, for example, arrived in Brazil in late 1577 and was further active in what is now Argentina and Paraguay. In North America, the Irish American prelate John Carroll served as first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop in the United States. Various Irish missionary efforts were conducted in the 19th and 20th centuries through the Maynooth Mission to India, the Irish Loreto Sisters, the Holy Ghost Fathers, the Society of African Missions, and the Missionary Society of St. Columban. By 1964, there were more than 6,000 Irish Catholic missionaries abroad, associated with schools, hospitals and churches.

The creation of an international Irish Catholic hierarchy was largely the work of Cardinal Paul Cullen, archbishop of Armagh and Dublin; eighteen of his protégés were appointed bishops in Australia. At the First Vatican Council in 1869, there were seventy bishops of Irish birth and 150 bishops of Irish descent, while Irish religious orders such as the Sisters of Mercy became international institutions tied to their mother communities in Ireland. The Irish church abroad became a political power, with prelates such as Patrick Francis Moran in Sydney and James Gibbons in Baltimore favouring the development of trade unions and the moderate left, while others such as Michael Corrigan in New York favoured the political right. In Ireland, this diaspora church "gave the Irish a pride in their international spiritual empire, an influence comparable to that of the British Empire of the world and the flesh", and "did much to sustain the Irish at home through the darker years of the early and middle twentieth century."

Military diaspora

Main articles: Irish military diaspora and Flight of the Wild Geese

See also: Irish regiments in French service

Absolution of the Munster Fusiliers by their chaplain Father Francis Gleeson

Between 1585 and 1818, over half a million Irish departed Ireland to serve in the wars on the European continent and beyond, in a constant emigration romantically styled the "Flight of the Wild Geese". The origins of this diaspora included the Flight of the Earls at the end of the Nine Years' War and of other Catholic Irish soldiers and their families following the Cromwellian conquest and Williamite War in Ireland. The Irish formed brigades in the armies of Spain, France, Austria, Russia, Sweden and Poland, leading to the creation of large Irish communities, most notably in Spain, France and Germany. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1732: "I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think, above all other nations." In the words of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and perhaps the most celebrated representative of the Irish military diaspora, "Ireland was an inexhaustible nursery for the finest soldiers".

Irish recruitment for continental armies declined sharply after it was made illegal by the British government in Ireland in 1745. Replacements accordingly were drawn increasingly from the descendants of Irish soldiers who had settled in France or Spain, from non-Irish foreign recruits, or from natives of the recruiting countries. The last of the Irish regiments in Spain and France were finally dissolved at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. Meanwhile, in the late 18th century, the Penal Laws were gradually relaxed and in the 1790s the laws prohibiting Catholics bearing arms were abolished. Thereafter, the British began recruiting Irish regiments such as the Prince of Wales's Leinster Regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Irish Guards, the Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers and the Royal Munster Fusiliers. With the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, five of the above regiments were disbanded, with most of the remainder undergoing a series of amalgamations between 1968 and 2006. The United Kingdom still retains three Irish-named regiments: the Irish Guards, the Royal Irish Regiment, and the London Irish Rifles.

Colonisation and transplantation

Main articles: Irish Caribbean, Irish immigration to Barbados, Irish immigration to Saint Kitts and Nevis, Irish people in Jamaica, and Montserrat

See also: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Irish indentured servants, Irish slaves myth, and Redleg

Like the movement of other European people to the Americas, Irish migration to the Caribbean and British North America had complex causes. The upheavals of the late 16th and early 17th centuries drove many Irish people to seek a better life, or survival, elsewhere. Like their English and Scottish counterparts, Irish people were active participants in the "rush for American colonies" during the early 17th century. Most travelled to the New World as indentured servants, but others were merchants and landholders who were key players in a variety of different trade and settlement enterprises.

Some of the first Irish people to travel to the New World did so as members of the Spanish garrison in Florida during the 1560s, and small numbers of Irish colonists were involved in efforts to establish colonies in the Amazon, Newfoundland, and Virginia between 1604 and the 1630s. Significant numbers of Irish labourers began traveling to colonies such as Virginia, the Leeward Islands, and Barbados in the 1620s. Between 1627 and 1660, labourers from Ireland and Britain crossed the Atlantic in large numbers, with as many as 60-65% of 17th-century migrants being indentured servants. By 1640, large numbers of Irish settlers were present in the West Indies, making up more than half the population of the region by some estimates. Most were indentured labourers, small farmers, or artisans. The type of labour being used in American colonies shifted dramatically after 1642, as the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Irish Confederate Wars, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms led to growing numbers of prisoners of war, political prisoners, felons, and other "undesirables" were sent to labour in the colonies against their will. The practice took place on a much larger scale during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, under whom many prisoners were forcibly sent to the Caribbean, particularly to Barbados. Many Irish people were also transported to the island of Montserrat, to work as indentured servants, exiled prisoners or slaves. Unlike African chattel slaves, the majority of Irish labourers who were sent to Montserrat did so by personal choice although they were tricked into doing so by the promise of payment and land of which they did not receive. Afro-Caribbean people descended from Irish settlers in the Caribbean, especially those on Barbados and Montserrat, are sometimes referred to as "Black Irish". The people concerned often have Irish surnames, speak a form of Caribbean English influenced by the Irish vernacular and, in some cases, sing Irish songs. To this day, Montserrat celebrates St. Patrick's Day as a public holiday to commemorate the event.

The Famine

Main article: Great Irish Famine

Henry Doyle's engraving The Emigrants' Farewell, from Mary Frances Cusack's Illustrated History of Ireland, 1868

The single largest migration of Irish in the modern era was a result of the Great Famine (Irish: An Górta Mór), which led to the deaths or emigration of millions of Irish people. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Ireland experienced a major population boom as a result of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. In the 50-year period 1790-1840, the population of the island doubled from 4 million to 8 million. At its peak, Ireland's population density was similar to that of England and continental Europe. This changed dramatically with the famine, which occurred as a result of the infection with Blight of the extremely impoverished Irish population's staple food, the potato, at a time when the British ruling elite appropriated the surplus of other crops and livestock to feed Britain's armies abroad. The famine lasted from 1845-1849, with the worst year in 1847 known as Black '47. British relief was minimal. In the area covering the present day Republic, the population reached about 6.5 million in the mid-1840s; a decade later, it was down to 5 million.

Irish people emigrated to escape the famine, journeying predominantly to cities on the East Coast of the United States such as Boston and New York, to Liverpool in England, and to other territories of the British Empire such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Emigrants travelled on vessels known as "coffin ships" due to their high mortality rates from disease or starvation. A million are thought to have emigrated to Liverpool alone as a result of the famine. The Great Famine left a lasting legacy in the memory of the diaspora and was a major factor in its support for Irish nationalism and independence in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Main article: Demographics of the Republic of Ireland

Despite a high birth-rate, the population of Ireland continued a slow decline due to high emigration well into the 20th century, with the Republic recording a low of 2.8 million in the 1961 census. During the 1960s, the population started to grow once more, although slowly as emigration was still common. Only with the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s did immigration begin to far outweigh emigration. Many former Irish emigrants returned home, and the Republic became an attractive destination for immigrants from elsewhere. Since the post-2008 Irish economic downturn, however, the island has once again been experiencing net emigration.

Notable communities

Main article: List of expatriate Irish populations

Great Britain

Main article: Irish community in Britain

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and writer Oscar Wilde, notable Irish-born members of the diaspora in Britain.

Due to their proximity, there has been a continuous movement of people between the islands of Ireland and Great Britain from the earliest phases of recorded history, and roughly 14 million (a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom) may have some Irish ancestry. In modern times, the most significant exodus of Irish people to Britain came in the 19th century, largely in the wake of the Great Famine of the 1840s. The Irish were traditionally involved in the building trade and transport, particularly as dockers and as navvies who helped build the British canal, road and rail networks in the 19th century. Other Irishmen were involved in the British armed forces and subsequently settled in Britain. A further wave of emigration to England also took place between the 1930s and 1960s as a result of the poor economic conditions which followed the establishment of the Irish Free State. This was further driven by the severe labour shortage in Britain during the mid-20th century, with the construction sector and domestic labour depending largely on Irish immigrants. Irish communities became most established in expanding cities and towns such as London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Luton. Scotland experienced a significant amount of Irish immigration, particularly in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Coatbridge. These communities historically maintained a strong sense of identity with the Roman Catholic Church and with Irish-founded sports clubs, such as the Celtic, Hibernian, and Dundee United football clubs and the London Irish rugby union club.

Notable members of the Irish community in Britain have historically included politicians such as Edmund Burke and the Duke of Wellington, the writers Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Patrick Brontë, Oliver Goldsmith and Oscar Wilde, and actors such as Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis and Graham Norton. In the 20th and 21st centuries, former Prime Ministers James Callaghan, John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron have been among those with Irish ancestry.

Today, it is estimated that as many as 6 million people living in the United Kingdom (around 10% of the UK population) have at least one Irish grandparent. St. Patrick's Day is now a national celebration. The character of the Irish community in Britain has changed significantly since the mid-20th century. The 2001 Census showed that Irish people are more likely to be employed in managerial or professional occupations than those classed as "White British".

Spain and Latin America

Main articles: Irish Argentine, Irish Brazilian, Irish Chilean, and Irish Mexicans

Leopoldo O'Donnell, 1st Duke of Tetuán and Prime Minister of Spain, and Chilean independence leader Bernardo O'Higgins.

In early modern Spain, legislation recognised the medieval origin myth which claimed that the Gaelic Irish had originated in the north of Spain. Thus, from the 16th till the 19th centuries, people born in Ireland were automatically considered natural subjects of the King of Spain with the rights and privileges of Spanish citizenship, without having to swear an oath of naturalisation. Political ties between Catholic Spain and the Catholic Gaelic order in Ireland during the Nine Years War and the Flight of the Earls contributed to the creation of an important Irish community in Spain and the wider Spanish Empire, so that people of Irish descent feature strongly in Latin America, especially in Argentina but with important minorities also in Mexico, Brazil and Chile. In Spain, the most notable Irish figure was the general and statesman Leopoldo O'Donnell, 1st Duke of Tetuán and Prime Minister of Spain on several occasions, whose descendants, the hereditary Dukes of Tetuán, retain leadership of the O'Donnell dynasty. Although some Irish retained their surnames intact such as the Chilean liberator Bernardo O'Higgins, others were assimilated into the Spanish vernacular. The last name "O'Brien", for example, became "Obregón", as notably borne by former president of Mexico Álvaro Obregón.

It is believed that as many as 30,000 Irish people emigrated to Argentina between the 1830s and the 1890s. This was encouraged by the clergy, as they considered a Catholic country preferable to a Protestant United States. This flow of emigrants dropped sharply when assisted passage to Australia was introduced at which point the Argentine government responded with their own scheme and wrote to Irish bishops, seeking their support. However, there was little or no planning for the arrival of a large number of immigrants, no housing, no food. Many died, others made their way to the United States and other destinations, some returned to Ireland, a few remained and prospered. Thomas Croke Archbishop of Cashel, said: "I most solemnly conjure my poorer countrymen, as they value their happiness hereafter, never to set foot on the Argentine Republic however tempted to do so they may be by offers of a passage or an assurance of comfortable homes." Some famous Argentines of Irish descent include Che Guevara, former president Edelmiro Julián Farrell, and admiral William Brown.

In the mid-19th century, large numbers of Irish immigrants were conscripted into Irish regiments of the United States Army at the time of the Mexican–American War. The vast majority of the 4,811 Irish-born soldiers served in the U.S. Army, but some defected to the Mexican Army, primarily to escape mistreatment by Anglo-Protestant officers and the strong anti-Catholic discrimination in America. These were the San Patricios, or Saint Patrick's Battalion—a group of Irish led by Galway-born John O'Riley, with some German, Scottish and American Catholics. They fought until their surrender at the decisive Battle of Churubusco, and were executed outside Mexico City by the American government on 13 September 1847. The battalion is commemorated in Mexico each year on 12 September.

North America

Main articles: Irish American, Irish Canadian, Irish Mexicans, Irish Quebecers, and Scots-Irish American

See also: List of Americans of Irish descent and List of Irish Canadians

Irish Americans and Irish Canadians, % of population by state or province.

The Irish diaspora remains arguably most prominently established in the United States and Canada. People of Irish descent are the second largest self-reported ethnic group in the United States, after German Americans. About 33 million Americans (10.1% of the total population) self-identified as being of Irish ancestry in the 2017 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2006 Canadian census revealed that the Irish were the fourth largest ethnic group, after English, French and Scottish Canadians, with 4,354,000 Canadians (15% of the country's total population) with full or partial Irish descent. Canada is notable as the site of the only officially Irish-speaking area outside of Ireland, the Permanent North American Gaeltacht.

Irish Americans have historically been most numerous in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, New England, and the Delaware Valley. In Canada, Irish Canadians are most numerous in Ontario, but are most common in the Maritimes, in particular in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador. In Quebec, Irish Quebecers constitute the second largest ethnic group in the province after French Canadians.

Irish people have been prominent in American and Canadian history. Nine of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence were of Irish origin, including the sole Catholic signatory, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. At least twenty-five presidents of the United States have some Irish ancestral origins, including George Washington. Since John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, every American President (with the exceptions of Gerald Ford and Donald Trump) has had some Irish ancestry. In addition, Irish-American James Hoban was the designer of the White House, while Wexford-born Commodore John Barry was the father of the United States Navy. Henry Ford, the American industrialist and business magnate, was half Anglo-Irish; his father William Ford was born in Cork to a family originally from Somerset, England. Notable Irish Canadians include Father of Confederation Thomas D'Arcy McGee, prime ministers John Sparrow David Thompson, Louis St. Laurent, Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin, and ambassador Kevin Vickers

Australia and New Zealand

Main articles: Irish Australian and Irish New Zealanders

People with Irish ancestry as a percentage of the population in Australia (2011).

During the 18th and 19th centuries, 300,000 free emigrants and 45,000 convicts left Ireland to settle in Australia. The Irish diaspora also reached New Zealand, drawn in some cases by the Otago Gold Rush, with many settling in Auckland, Canterbury and the West Coast. Today, Australians of Irish descent are one of the largest self-reported ethnic groups in Australia, after English and Australian. In the 2006 Census, 1,803,741 residents identified themselves as having Irish ancestry either alone or in combination with another ancestry. However this figure does not include Australians with an Irish background who chose to nominate themselves as "Australian" or other ancestries. The Australian embassy in Dublin states that up to 30% of the population claim some degree of Irish ancestry. There are roughly 600,000 New Zealanders of Irish ancestry, whose culture has mixed with other New Zealand European cultures to form modern-day culture of New Zealand.

Asia and Africa

Main articles: Irish Indians, Irish people in Japan, and Irish Russians

See also: White Africans of European ancestry

Robert Hart, responsible for the reform and modernisation of taxation in Qing-dynasty China

Irish people have travelled to Asia since the Middle Ages, during which period the most famous journeys were those of the Irish Franciscans Symon Semeonis and James of Ireland as far as Egypt, Sumatra and China. In modern times, the most famous Irishman in China was the influential Qing imperial official and moderniser Robert Hart, who headed China's Imperial Maritime Custom Service from 1863-1911. People of Irish descent in Hong Kong have included administrators J. J. Francis and G. S. Kennedy-Skipton, physician William Hartigan, and athletes Sean Tse and Siobhan Haughey, while Irish historian Francis John Byrne was born in Shanghai. From 1920 to 1954, hundreds of Irish men and women served as Roman Catholic missionaries in East Asia, including China, the Philippines, Korea, Burma and Japan, notably through the Missionary Society of St. Columban. Among these are the Columban Martyrs, killed by Japanese, North Korean or Chinese Communist forces during the 1920s-1950s. The Irish band The Chieftains visited China in 1985 shortly after the establishment of diplomatic relations, and became the first Western group to play on the Great Wall of China.

The first recorded Irishman in Japan was Robert Janson from Waterford, seized off the coast of Kyushu in 1704 during Japan's period of isolation and brought to Dejima Island. Irish people have been present in Japan in greater numbers since the Bakumatsu and Meiji eras, which saw the arrival of mechanical engineer and naval architect Charles Dickinson West, civil architect Thomas Waters, newspaper-owner and Japanese-language lexicographer Francis Brinkley, collector of Japanese legends and ghost stories Lafcadio Hearn, and military bandmaster John William Fenton, known as the earliest promoter of Kimigayo as the national anthem of Japan and today considered "the father of band music in Japan". More recent Irish people in Japan have included the footballers Robert Cullen, Colin Killoran, Niall Killoran and Naoise Ó Baoill, the singer Sowelu and the artist Shane Berkery.

Irish people have been present in the Indian subcontinent as traders or soldiers since the days of the East India Company, though the majority of these came from the Protestant Ascendancy. Prominent among them were the generals Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington and later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and his brother Richard Wellesley, Governor-General of India and a great-great-great grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II. The Irish Protestant Celtic and Sanskrit scholar Whitley Stokes served in the civil administration in British India and was responsible for drafting much of the legal codes of civil and criminal procedure. Later in the Victorian period, many thinkers, philosophers and Irish nationalists from the Roman Catholic majority too made it to India, prominent among the nationalists being the theosophist Annie Besant. Other notable figures of Irish descent and Indian or Pakistani birth include the actresses Vivien Leigh and Amala Akkineni, the comedian Spike Milligan, the physicist Denis Weaire, the West Bengal politician Derek O'Brien and the Vice-Marshall of the Pakistan Air Force, Michael John O'Brian. Indian intellectuals such as Jawaharlal Nehru and V. V. Giri were inspired by Irish nationalists when they studied in the United Kingdom, and the Indian revolutionary group known as the Bengal Volunteers took this name in emulation of the Irish Volunteers.

In Africa, Irish communities can be found in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley and Johannesburg, with smaller communities in Pretoria, Barberton, Durban and East London. A third of the Cape's governors were Irish, as were many of the judges and politicians. Both the Cape Colony and the Colony of Natal had Irish prime ministers: Sir Thomas Upington and Sir Albert Hime. Irish Cape Governors included Lord Macartney, Lord Caledon and Sir John Francis Cradock.

Anti-Irish sentiment

Main article: Anti-Irish sentiment

See also: Stage Irish and Plastic Paddy

1882 illustration from Puck depicting Irish immigrants as troublemakers, as compared with those of other nationalities

The Irish people have experienced considerable anti-Irish sentiment, racism, and ethnic or religious discrimination during their history. Between the 5th century and the 12th century, medieval views of Ireland and the Irish people were almost uniformly positive. The promotion of negative views and stereotypes of the Irish can largely be traced to Gerald of Wales, a partisan agent and propagandist of the English conquest in Ireland who cast the Irish as lazy, backward and semi-pagan barbarians. By the 14th century, there were reports of members of the Norman community in Ireland who publicly claimed that it was "no more sin to kill an Irishman than to kill a dog."

Modern anti-Irish sentiment was linked with anti-Catholicism, with Protestant American "Nativist" discrimination against Irish Catholics, and with Victorian biological racism which claimed that the Irish people were an "inferior race". It particularly targetted members of the diaspora, and job advertisements bearing the terms "No Irish need apply" appeared in Britain and the United States from the 1860s onwards. Stereotypes and language clichés of the Irish were promoted in Britain and the United States through the tropes of Stage Irish caricature. In the 20th century, anti-Irish sentiment in Britain and Northern Ireland was exacerbated by the Troubles. Notable 19th-century stereotypes of the Irish as violent or alcoholic, along with other stereotypes related to the Irish Famine or to the minority Irish Traveller community, persist today.

Historically, the Irish experience of ethnic and religious discrimination and political and legal repression led to the Irish people's identification with other repressed or marginalised groups, particularly among those of more nationalist outlook: notably with the Jewish people in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the Civil Rights Movement of African Americans in the 1960s (which served as a key inspiration for the contemporary civil rights movement in Northern Ireland), and with the causes of the Palestinians in more recent times.

Related ethnic groups

Irish Travellers

Main article: Irish Travellers

See also: Itinerant groups in Europe, Romani people, Romanichal, and Scottish Gypsy and Traveller groups

Irish Travellers in 1946

Irish Travellers (Irish: an lucht siúil, meaning 'the walking people') are a distinct, traditionally itinerant ethnic group indigenous to Ireland, whose members maintain a set of traditions. Although predominantly English-speaking, many also speak Shelta. They mostly live in Ireland as well as in large communities in the United Kingdom. Traveller rights groups have long pushed for ethnic status from the Irish government, finally succeeding in 2017. As of 2016, there are 32,302 Travellers within Ireland, with estimates of those living in Great Britain at about 15,000 as part of a total estimation of over 300,000 Romani and other Traveller groups in the UK.

The origin of the group is obscure, with competing theories suggesting variously that they are Romani, Gaelic or pre-Gaelic in origin. Present genetic evidence indicates that they are genetically Irish. In 2011, researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons and the University of Edinburgh provided evidence that Irish Travellers are a distinct Irish ethnic minority, who have been distinct from the settled Irish community for at least 1000 years; the report claimed that they are as distinct from the settled community as Icelanders are from Norwegians. However, this apparent distance may be the effect of genetic drift within a small homogeneous population and may therefore exaggerate the distance between the two populations. An earlier genetic analysis of Irish Travellers found evidence to support Irish ancestry, several distinct sub-populations, and the distinctiveness of the midland counties due to Viking influence. In 2017, a further genetic study using profiles of Irish Travellers, European Roma, settled Irish, British and European or worldwide individuals confirmed ancestral origin within the general Irish population, estimating a time of divergence between the settled population and Travellers set at a minimum of eight generations ago, giving an approximate date in the 1650s. This date coincides well with the final destruction of Gaelic society following the 1641 Rebellion and during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in which Cromwell's forces devastated the country.

Irish Travellers are not an entirely homogeneous group, instead reflecting some of the variation also seen in the settled population. Four distinct genetic clusters were identified in the 2017 study, and these match social groupings within the community.

Black Irish

"Black Irish" redirects here. For Irish people of black African descent, see Black people in Ireland.

Black Irish is an ambiguous term sometimes used (mainly outside Ireland) as a reference to a dark-haired phenotype appearing in people of Irish origin. However, dark hair in people of Irish descent is common, although darker skin complexions appear less frequently. One popular speculation suggests the Black Irish are descendants of survivors of the Spanish Armada, despite research discrediting such claims. Filmmaker Bob Quinn, in the documentary series Atlantean, hypothesises the existence of an ancient sea-trading route linking North Africa and Iberia to regions such as Connemara. With this hypothesis, Quinn explains phenotypical similarities between the "Atlantean Irish" and the populations of Iberia and the Berbers. Quinn's Atlantean thesis has not been accepted by the Irish academic establishment, who have criticised it is as non-scholarly and lacking hard evidence to back his theories.

See also

• Ethnic groups in Europe
• List of Ireland-related topics
• List of Irish people

References

• Aldous, Richard (2007). Great Irish Speeches. London: Quercus Publishing PLC. ISBN 978-1-84724-195-5.
• Davies, Norman (1996). Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-820171-7.
• Ellis, Steven G. (1985). Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community, and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603. Great Britain: Longman. ISBN 978-0-582-49341-4.
• MacManus, Seamus (1921). The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland. Ireland: The Irish Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-517-06408-5. Retrieved 17 March 2013.
• McLaughlin, Mark G. (1980). The Wild Geese: The Irish Brigades of France and Spain. Christopher Warner, illustrator. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 978-0-85045-358-4.
• Nicholls, Kenneth W. (1972). Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages. Gill and Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-7171-0561-8.
• Oppenheimer, Stephen (2006). The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 978-0-7867-1890-0.
• Sykes, Bryan (2006). Blood of the Isles: Exploring the Genetic Roots of Our Tribal History. DNA, Fossil. ISBN 978-0-593-05652-3.
• Toman, Rolf (2007). The Art of Gothic: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting. photography by Achim Bednorz. Tandem Verlag GmbH. ISBN 978-3-8331-4676-3.
• Various (2001). Smiley, Jane (ed.). The Sagas of Icelanders. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-100003-9.

External links

• Blood of the Irish—Documentary about Irish genetic history
• Irish ancestors on Ireland.com
• Irish Names at Library Ireland

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• Irish people
• Gaels
• Ethnic groups in Ireland

Miscellaneous unsorted

Names that begin with "O'" include Ó Bánion (O'Banion), Ó Briain (O'Brien), Ó Cheallaigh (O'Kelly), Ó Conchobhair (O'Connor, O'Conor), Ó Chonaill (O'Connell), O'Coiligh (Cox), Ó Cuilinn (Cullen), Ó Domhnaill (O'Donnell), Ó hAnnracháin, (Hanrahan), Ó Máille (O'Malley), Ó Mathghamhna (O'Mahony), Ó Néill (O'Neill), Ó Sé (O'Shea), Ó Súilleabháin (O'Sullivan), and Ó Tuathail (O'Toole).

In both cases the following name undergoes lenition. However, if the second part of the surname begins with the letter C or G, it is not lenited after Nic.

The proper surname for a woman in Irish uses the feminine prefix nic (meaning daughter) in place of mac. Thus a boy may be called Mac Domhnaill whereas his sister would be called Nic Dhomhnaill or Ní Dhomhnaill – the insertion of 'h' follows the female prefix in the case of most consonants (bar H, L, N, R, & T).

Similar surnames to those of the Irish people are found among the Scottish people for many reasons, including the shared Gaelic heritage and later migrations to Scotland between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries.

There are a number of Irish surnames derived from Norse personal names, including Mac Suibhne (Sweeney) from "Swein" and McAuliffe from "Olaf". The name Cotter derives from the Norse personal name "Ottir". The name Reynolds is an Anglicization of the Irish Mac Raghnaill, itself originating from the Norse names Randal or Reginald. Though these names were of Viking derivation, some of the families who bear them appear to have had Gaelic origins.

The Greek mythographer Euhemerus originated the concept of Euhemerism, which treats mythological accounts as a reflection of actual historical events shaped by retelling and traditional mores. In the 12th century, Icelandic bard and historian Snorri Sturluson proposed that the Norse gods were originally historical war leaders and kings, who later became cult figures, eventually set into society as gods. This view is in agreement with Irish historians such as T. F. O'Rahilly and Francis John Byrne; the early chapters of their respective books, Early Irish history and mythology (reprinted 2004) and Irish Kings and High-Kings (3rd revised edition, 2001), deal in depth with the origins and status of many Irish ancestral deities.

Other Latin names for people from Ireland in Classic and Mediaeval sources include Attacotti.

One Roman historian records that the Irish people were divided into "sixteen different nations" or tribes. Traditional histories assert that the Romans never attempted to conquer Ireland, although it may have been considered. The Irish were not, however, cut off from Europe; they frequently raided the Roman territories, and also maintained trade links.

The Milesian legend is demonstrated in the works of Eochaidh Ua Floinn (936–1004), Flann Mainistrech (died 25 November 1056), Tanaide (died c. 1075) and Gilla Cómáin mac Gilla Samthainde (fl. 1072). Many of their compositions were incorporated into the compendium Lebor Gabála Érenn. This tradition was enhanced and embedded in the tradition by successive historians such as Dubsúilech Ó Maolconaire (died 1270), Seán Mór Ó Dubhagáin (d. 1372), Giolla Íosa Mór Mac Fir Bhisigh (fl. 1390–1418); Pilip Ballach Ó Duibhgeannáin (fl. 1579–1590) and Flann Mac Aodhagáin (alive 1640). The first Irish historian who questioned the reliability of such accounts was Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (d. 1671).

The introduction of Christianity to the Irish people during the 5th century brought a radical change to the Irish people's foreign relations. The only military raid abroad recorded after that century is a presumed invasion of Wales, which according to a Welsh manuscript may have taken place around the 7th century. In the words of Seumas MacManus:

If we compare the history of Ireland in the 6th century, after Christianity was received, with that of the 4th century, before the coming of Christianity, the wonderful change and contrast is probably more striking than any other such change in any other nation known to history.

Following the conversion of the Irish to Christianity, Irish secular laws and social institutions remained in place.

Among the most famous people of ancient Irish history are the High Kings of Ireland, such as Cormac mac Airt and Niall of the Nine Hostages, and the semi-legendary Fianna. The 20th-century writer Seumas MacManus wrote that even if the Fianna and the Fenian Cycle were purely fictional, it would still be representative of the character of the Irish people:

...such beautiful fictions of such beautiful ideals, by themselves presume and prove beautiful-souled people, capable of appreciating lofty ideals.

Ireland 'was justly styled a "Nation of Annalists"'.

Irish physicians, such as the O'Briens in Munster or the MacCailim Mor in the Western Isles, were renowned in the courts of England, Spain, Portugal and the Low Countries.

With Latin, the early Irish scholars "show almost a like familiarity that they do with their own Gaelic". There is evidence also that Hebrew and Greek were studied, the latter probably being taught at Iona.

"The knowledge of Greek", says Professor Sandys in his History of Classical Scholarship, "which had almost vanished in the west was so widely dispersed in the schools of Ireland that if anyone knew Greek it was assumed he must have come from that country."'

The Gaelic Irish were distinguished from the English (who only used their own language or French) in that they only used Latin abroad—a language "spoken by all educated people throughout Gaeldom".

An English report of 1515 states that the Irish people were divided into over sixty Gaelic lordships and thirty Anglo-Irish lordships. The English term for these lordships was "nation" or "country". The Irish term "oireacht" referred to both the territory and the people ruled by the lord. Literally, it meant an "assembly", where the Brehons would hold their courts upon hills to arbitrate the matters of the lordship. Indeed, the Tudor lawyer John Davies described the Irish people with respect to their laws:

There is no people under the sun that doth love equal and indifferent (impartial) justice better than the Irish, or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof, although it be against themselves, as they may have the protection and benefit of the law upon which just cause they do desire it.

Another English commentator records that the assemblies were attended by "all the scum of the country"—the labouring population as well as the landowners. While the distinction between "free" and "unfree" elements of the Irish people was unreal in legal terms, it was a social and economic reality. Social mobility was usually downwards, due to social and economic pressures. The ruling clan's "expansion from the top downwards" was constantly displacing commoners and forcing them into the margins of society.

Many Gaelic Irish were displaced during the 17th century plantations. Nonetheless, only in Ulster did the plantations of mostly Scottish prove long-lived; the other three provinces (Connacht, Leinster, and Munster) remained heavily Gaelic Irish. Eventually, the Anglo-Irish and Protestant populations of those three provinces decreased drastically as a result of the political developments in the early 20th century in Ireland, as well as the Catholic Church's Ne Temere decree for mixed marriages, which obliged the non-Catholic partner to have the children raised as Catholics.

Remove author dates: Among the last of the true bardic poets were Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig (c. 1580–1652) and Dáibhí Ó Bruadair (1625–1698). Modern literature in Irish continued into the 19th and 20th centuries through the work of writers such as the educationalist and revolutionary Pádraig Pearse (1879–1916), the modernist fiction-writer Pádraic Ó Conaire (1881–1928), and the novelists Seosamh Mac Grianna (1900–1990), Séamus Ó Grianna (1889–1969) and Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970). Inhabitants of the remote Irish-speaking areas of the south-west, notably Tomás Ó Criomhthain (1858–1937), Peig Sayers (1873–1958) and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (1904–1950), all produced celebrated autobiographies in Irish. Important poets included Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910–1988), Máire Mhac an tSaoi (b. 1922) and Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916–1977). The Northern Irish writer Flann O'Brien (1911–66) and the writer Michael Hartnett (1941–1999) wrote in both Irish and English. Caitlín Maude (1941–1982) and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (b. 1952) may be seen as representatives of a new generation of poets, conscious of tradition but modernist in outlook.

Ogham inscriptions show that Old Irish was spoken in the Kingdom of Dyfed in West Wales in the 5th century. The Isle of Man and the Manx people came under important Gaelic influence at this time, and the modern Manx language is descended from Old Irish. Scholars have traditionally held that the Goidelic language and Gaelic culture were first brought to Scotland by settlers from Ireland, who founded the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata on Scotland's west coast. The precise nature and extent of these early migrations however is disputed. Dál Riata merged with the territory of the neighbouring Picts to form the Kingdom of Alba, and Goidelic language and Gaelic culture became dominant there. The country came to be called Scotland, after the Roman name for the Gaels: Scoti. Members such as Sitric Cáech and Amlaíb Cuarán ruled as kings of both Dublin and York.

Irishmen also travelled eastward with the Christianisation of the Germanic and Slavic peoples. Thus, the first bishop of Mecklenburg, John Scotus, was a Gael of either Irish or Scottish birth; while the German Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, Albert Suerbeer, was later appointed first Archbishop of Riga and papal legate to Russia.

Lǫgmaðr Guðrøðarson, the eldest son of Guðrøðr Crovan, King of Dublin and the Isles, and King of the Isles.

Two consecutive archbishops of Dublin following the Norman conquest of Ireland, the Gaelic Lorcán Ua Tuathail and the English-born John Comyn, spent time in effective exile in Normandy.

Fulco of Ireland was credited with leading four thousand Irish soldiers to France to serve Charlemagne.

These, together with the Irish communities at Erfurt and Ratisbon, formed the famous congregation of the German Schottenklöster which was erected by Pope Innocent III in 1215.

The chief protagonist of Njáls saga, Njáll Þorgeirsson, bears a variation of the Irish name Neil. The Icelandic Laxdœla saga describes a society in which "even slaves are highborn, descended from the kings of Ireland." Eirik the Red's Saga, which narrates the Norse discovery of Vinland in what may now be Newfoundland, suggests that the first child born to a European couple in North America held Irish descent on both sides: from the Hiberno-Norse queen of Dublin, Aud the Deep-minded, and a Gaelic slave brought to Iceland.

According to the writer Seumas MacManus, the explorer Christopher Columbus visited Ireland to gather information about the lands to the west, a number of Irish names are recorded on Columbus' crew roster preserved in the archives of Madrid and it was an Irishman named Patrick Maguire who was the first to set foot in the Americas in 1492; however, according to Morison and Miss Gould, who made a detailed study of the crew list of 1492, no Irish or English sailors were involved in the voyage.

In 1612, Irish settlers established a colony in Tauregue, at the mouth of the Amazon river, where English, Dutch, and French settlements were also established. Many of the colonists traded in tobacco, dyes, and hardwoods. A second group of Irish settlers arrived in 1620.

In the early years of the English Civil War, a French traveller remarked that the Irish "are better soldiers abroad than at home".

The Anglo-Irish were also represented among the senior officers of the British Army by men such as Field Marshal Earl Roberts, first honorary Colonel of the Irish Guards regiment, who spent most of his career in British India; Field Marshal Viscount Gough, who served under Wellington, himself a Wellesley born in Dublin to the Earl of Mornington, head of a prominent Anglo-Irish family in Dublin; and in the 20th century Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord Alexander of Tunis, General Sir John Winthrop Hackett, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson and Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley. Others were prominent officials and administrators in the British Empire, such as: Frederick Matthew Darley, the Chief Justice of New South Wales; Henry Arthur Blake, Antony MacDonnell and Gavan Duffy. Some were involved in finding better ways of managing it, heading the Donoughmore Commission or the Moyne Commission.

For over 150 years, Huguenots were allowed to hold their services in Lady Chapel in St. Patrick's Cathedral. A Huguenot cemetery is located in the centre of Dublin, off St. Stephen's Green. Prior to its establishment, Huguenots used the Cabbage Garden near the Cathedral. Another is located off French Church street in Cork. A French church in Portarlington dates back to 1696, and was built to serve the significant new Huguenot community in the town. At the time, they constituted the majority of the townspeople.

Irish Catholics continued to receive an education in secret "hedgeschools", in spite of the Penal laws. A knowledge of Latin was common among the poor Irish mountaineers in the 17th century, who spoke it on special occasions, while cattle were bought and sold in Greek in the mountain market-places of Kerry.

Many of the Irish labourers who crossed the Atlantic from the 1620s did so by choice. However, convict labour had been used in English colonies since the early 1600s, with the forceful transportation of "undesirables" from Ireland to the West Indies beginning under Charles I. The type of labour being used in American colonies shifted dramatically after 1642, as the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Irish Confederate Wars, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms led to a reduction in the number of voluntary migrants, while growing numbers of prisoners of war, political prisoners, felons, and other "undesirables" were sent to labour in the colonies against their will. The practice took place on a much larger scale during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, under whom many prisoners were forcibly sent to the Caribbean, particularly to Barbados. After the Siege of Drogheda, for example, Cromwell ordered most of the Irish military prisoners who surrendered to be shipped to Barbados. In 1654, the governors of several Irish counties were ordered to arrest "all wanderers, men and women, and such other Irish within their precincts as should not prove they had such a settled course of industry as yielded them a means of their own to maintain them, all such children as were in hospitals or workhouses, all prisoners, men and women, to be transported to the West Indies."

Ireland's Holocaust mural on the Ballymurphy Road, Belfast. "An Gorta Mór, Britain's genocide by starvation, Ireland's holocaust 1845–1849, over 1,500,000 deaths".

The English government produced little aid, only sending raw corn known as 'Peel's Brimstone' to Ireland. It was known by this name after the British PM at the time and the fact that native Irish weren't aware on how to cook corn. This led to little or no improvement. The British government set up workhouses which were disease ridden (with cholera, TB and others) but they also failed as little food was available and many died on arrival as they were overworked. Some English political figures at the time saw the famine as a purge from God to exterminate the majority of the native Irish population.

The Great famine is one of the biggest events in Irish history and is ingrained in the identity on the nation to this day. It was a major in factor in Irish Nationalism and Ireland's fight for Independence during subsequent rebellions. As many Irish people felt a stronger need to regain Independence from English rule. There are many statues and memorials in Dublin, New York and other cities in memory of the famine. The fields of Athenry is a famous song about the great famine and is often sung at national team sporting events in memory and homage to those affected by the famine.

Many records show the majority of emigrants to Australia were in fact prisoners sent to assist in the construction of English colonies there. A substantial proportion of these committed crimes in hopes of being extradited to Australia, favouring it to the persecution and hardships they endured in their homeland.

Our blossom is red as the life's blood we shed
For Liberty's cause against alien laws
When Lochiel and O'Neill and Llewellyn drew steel
For Alba and Erin and Cambria's weal

The flower of the free, the heather, the heather
The Bretons and Scots and Irish together
The Manx and the Welsh and Cornish forever
Six nations are we all Celtic and free!

—Alfred Perceval Graves, Song of the Celts.

The 19th century saw the identification of Irish nationalism with that of Celtic nationalism. Thomas Davis, a prominent Protestant Irish nationalist who founded the Young Ireland movement, identified the Irish as a Celtic nation. He estimated that ethnically, 5/6ths of the nation were either of Gaelic Irish-origin, descended from returned Scottish Gaels (including much of the Ulster Scots) and some Celtic Welsh (such as his own ancestors and those carrying surnames such as Walsh and Griffiths). As part of this he was a staunch supporter of the Irish language as the "national language". In regards to the Germanic minority in Ireland (of Norman and Anglo-Saxon origin) he believed that they could be assimilated into Irishness if they had a "willingness to be part of the Irish Nation".

Conversely, some Irish people would have at least some degree of English or Scottish ancestry. Irish of partial English background are most common in the Dublin area, descended from settlers in the English Pale, along with a large but undetermined number of English Catholic recusants who moved there to escape compulsory attendance at the Church of England. Scottish origin is especially common among Irish Catholics in Ulster, and are mainly of gallowglass Scottish Highlander origin. The Irish surname "Walsh" was routinely given to settlers of Welsh origin.

Religion has been a matter of concern over the last century for the followers of nationalist ideologists such as DP Moran.

When the 31st International Eucharistic Congress was held in Dublin in 1932 to celebrate the 1,500th anniversary of the traditional date of Saint Patrick's arrival, Ireland was then home to 3,171,697 Catholics, about a third of whom attended the Congress. The Congress' special theme at that time was "the Faith of the Irish". The massive crowds were repeated at Pope John Paul II's Mass in Phoenix Park in 1979, which saw a third of the population of the Republic.

In 1995, President Mary Robinson reached out to the "70 million people worldwide who can claim Irish descent".

Many famous and influential figures have claimed Irish ancestry such as Che Guevara, Walt Disney, Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali and Marshal of France Patrice de MacMahon, Duke of Magenta, the second President of the Third Republic. There are people of Irish descent all over South America, such as the Peruvian photographer Mario Testino.