Original subtitles

Most people can point out the island of Ireland on a map, but far fewer can

explain why it is divided into two nations.

The Republic of Ireland covers most of the island, while the northeast portion

forms Northern Ireland, one of the four nations of the United Kingdom.

This division, and the 310-mile border between them, is the relatively recent

result of the partition of Ireland, which took place just over a century

ago, but the root causes of which had been many hundreds.

if not thousands of years in the making.

For much of its history, Ireland has been shaped by invasions, wars,

migration and division, the scars of which are still visible across the

island to this day.

But how did these events come to divide Ireland in the first place?

And what spurred the efforts in more recent times to set these differences

aside and move towards a period of peace and unity?

is the history of Ireland.

Long before recorded history, humans inhabited the island of Ireland.

Although they left some cultural legacy in the form of megalithic stone tombs,

little is known about these first people who came to call Ireland home.

Instead, it was the Iron Age Celts who would leave the deepest cultural imprint

upon the landscape when they arrived around the mid-first millennium BC.

bringing with them the Celtic language and the way of life that had spread

across much of Europe.

Over time, the Celts in Ireland formed their own distinct version of language

and culture, giving rise to Gaelic, which had come to dominate the island by

the turn of the millennium.

Gaelic Ireland was divided into numerous small kingdoms, or clans, each ruled by

local chieftains, who occasionally acknowledged a high king over the entire

island.

Gaelic society was made up of a patchwork of such territories, where

warfare among rival clans was common.

Laws were maintained by oral tradition, and a cast of poets and storytellers

preserved history and myth, which worshipped a polytheistic Celtic

religion and was guided by Druids.

Life in Ireland continued largely undisturbed in much the same way during

the early centuries AD.

It even managed to evade the clutches of the Roman Empire.

However, when the latter began to decline in the late 4th century, it left

behind a residual influence that remains visible in Ireland to this very day.

Across the Irish Sea, some within the former Roman territory of Britannia

continued to practice Christianity.

By the late 4th and early 5th centuries AD, Christianity had begun to make

inroads into Ireland, spread by a mixture of missionaries and slaves

captured by Irish raiders.

Figures such as St. Patrick began to convert the Irish from Celtic paganism

to Christianity, and within two centuries, the island was predominantly

Christian. But the new faith not only introduced a new concept of

spirituality, it also introduced literacy and learning.

Monasteries quickly sprang up across Ireland, with educated monks beginning

to record the island's historic oral traditions, as well as writing religious

scripture.

By the 6th century, The Irish church had become a beacon of learning in Europe,

with the monasteries themselves producing magnificent, illuminated

manuscripts like the Book of Kells, which blended Christian themes with

intricate Celtic art.

The Gaelic monks and monasteries of early medieval Ireland helped to

preserve classical knowledge through art, literature and law, with some even

travelling abroad to assist in the re-Christianisation of post-Roman

Europe, which was in the midst of sinking into the Dark Ages.

Nevertheless, Ireland's monastic riches soon began to draw the attention of

overseas raiders who wanted to seize this wealth for themselves.

Beginning around the year 795, Vikings from Scandinavia began attacking coastal

monasteries and settlements across Britain and Ireland, taking vast amounts

of treasure and slaves in the process.

These early raids soon developed into deeper incursions, and in the 9th and

10th centuries, the Vikings established permanent bases and trading ports, which

became Ireland's first true towns.

Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick were all founded by the Vikings

during this time, quickly transforming the physical and economic landscape of

the island.

Norse rulers carved out their own petty kingdoms, which connected Ireland to the

Viking trade routes that stretched across Europe and beyond to North

Africa, the Middle East.

and even North America.

Dublin in particular grew extensively in size and wealth during this period,

profiting immensely from its position as the largest Viking slave market in

Western Europe.

Yet the Vikings never conquered Ireland's interior.

The Gaelic chiefs and high kings retained control of most territory, and

over time, some of the Scandinavian settlers assimilated amongst them,

becoming known as Norse Gaels, who adopted the Irish language and culture.

as well as intermarrying locally.

The towns founded by the Vikings, however, remained in the hands of the

Norsemen, and were subject to frequent attacks by the Irish, who wished to

expel the foreigners from their land.

After many years of intermittent fighting, in 1014, the Irish High King,

Brian Baru, won a famed victory at the Battle of Clontarf against the Norse

-Irish alliance, after which point the power of the Vikings in Ireland began to

wane. In the subsequent decades, a period of economic growth descended

across Ireland, with its coastal towns remaining centres of trade and commerce.

Yet despite the breaking of Norse power, the country remained politically

fragmented. But it was only by the time of the 12th century that this disunity

was exploited and used to introduce another power dynamic that would become

an enduring and contentious aspect of Ireland's history.

In 1169, Anglo-Norman knights from Britain landed in Ireland.

upon the invitation of a local king, Dermot McMurrah, who was seeking

military aid to settle a dynastic feud.

These Normans, led by Richard the Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, seized

large parts of Leinster in the process.

However, their success alarmed King Henry II of England, who feared that

these Norman lords were establishing their own independent kingdom outside

his authority.

Consequently, in 1171, Henry himself landed with an English army and

nominally brought part of the country under English rule, later declaring his

son, Prince John, as the first Lord of Ireland.

Over the following decades, Norman barons continued to spread across the

eastern and southern parts of the country, building castles and carving

out lordships for themselves.

Their conquest, however, was never fully completed, although the Normans

dominated the area around Dublin known as the Pale.

as well as some other enclaves, the Gaelic chiefs retained control of the

majority of the island's territory, particularly in the north and west.

With the passage of time, the Norman power base gradually began to recede.

Isolated from England and surrounded by a predominantly Gaelic population, many

Norman lords assimilated, just as the Vikings had done before them, adopting

the Irish language, customs, and even marrying into Gaelic families.

In 1367, the English crown passed the Statute of Kilkenny to prevent

intermarriage and the use of the Irish language by the settlers, hoping to keep

them English.

These measures ultimately had limited effect, and by the 15th century, English

royal authority in Ireland had shrunk to the area of the pale, while the rest of

the island experienced a Gaelic resurgence.

Native Irish dynasties like the O'Neills in Ulster, and the O'Briens in Tormund

reasserted themselves, and even the old Norman earls operated as autonomous,

Gaelic-style lords.

With the dawn of the 16th century, the English crown, under the Tudor dynasty,

renewed its determination to control Ireland, this time far more

aggressively. The Tudor conquest began at the outset of the 1530s, with one of

the main catalysts being the Protestant Reformation.

King Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church was exported to Ireland,

but Irish elites, both Gaelic and Norman, fiercely resisted abandoning

Catholicism. In 1541, Henry VIII took the title King of Ireland for himself,

replacing the centuries-old lordship with a fully separate kingdom, though

still subservient to the English crown.

Tudor officials steadily extended English law and governance across

Ireland. offering Gaelic chieftains English titles and legal security if

they pledged loyalty.

Most, however, turned this offer down and put up a fierce resistance.

In Munster, the Fitzgerald lords rebelled on two occasions against

encroaching English authority, but their defeat led to the plantation of Munster,

with their lands being confiscated to settle Protestant English colonists.

Farther north, the most decisive conflict came towards the end of the

16th century, when Hugh O'Neill, the powerful Gaelic Earl of Tyrone,

initiated the Nine Years' War against English rule by rallying many Irish

lords in a final great attempt to preserve Gaelic Ireland.

O'Neil won major victories and even secured aid from Catholic Spain, but it

would ultimately be in vain, for in 1601 the English forces crushed the Irish and

their Spanish allies at the Battle of Kinsale.

O'Neil surrendered two years later and soon afterwards he and other Ulster

lords went into exile in Europe, an event known to history as the Flight of

the Earls in 1607.

Subsequently, the English Crown claimed authority over the entire island of

Ireland and brought about the collapse of the Old Gaelic Order.

With Ireland subdued, the early 17th century brought a massive project of

colonization, forever changing the island's demographics and land

ownership.

The Crown, now under King James I, launched the Plantation of Ulster in

1609. confiscating huge swathes of land and redistributing it to Protestant

settlers from Britain, especially Scottish Presbyterians and English

Anglicans.

Towns were rebuilt and renamed in English, with Derry rechristened as

Londonderry to honour its London investors.

By 1640, some 30,000 British colonists had been planted in Ulster alone,

turning it into a patchwork of English and Scottish land holdings amid the

remaining Irish.

Similar, though smaller plantations had taken place earlier in Leinster and

Munster, as well as later in Connacht, installing a loyal Protestant landowning

class, but also sowing deep resentment among the native Catholic Irish.

These simmering tensions finally exploded in the year 1641, when, amidst

the wider political fallout of the English Civil War, Ireland's Catholics

rebelled to reclaim their land and resist anti-Catholic policies.

The 1641 Irish Rebellion began in Ulster with attacks on Protestant settlers, and

the violence quickly spiralled into a broader sectarian conflict across the

entire island.

By 1649, the English Civil War had concluded with a parliamentary victory,

and the Puritan commander Oliver Cromwell turned his attention and army

to suppress the Catholic uprising across the Irish Sea.

In a notorious campaign lasting four years, his forces reconquered the

country, with merciless efficiency, with towns such as Drogheda and Wexford being

massacred. The war ended with catastrophic results for the remaining

Irish Catholic landowners, as vast estates were confiscated and distributed

to Cromwell's soldiers and supporters.

So much so, that by the 1650s, Irish Catholics, who had once owned most of

the land, now held only around 10% of it.

Further upheaval followed in the latter part of the 17th century.

after the monarchy was restored in 1660, and then a Catholic king, James II, came

to power in 1685.

After being overthrown just three years later, James attempted to use Ireland as

a base to regain his throne, with many Irish Catholics rising in support and

seizing much of the country.

They were, however, ultimately defeated by the army of the Protestant William of

Orange, who had recently become King William III of England at the Battle of

the Boyne in 1690.

and the Battle of Ockram in 1691.

In the aftermath, a harsh regime of penal laws were introduced, which

stripped Ireland's Catholic majority of their basic rights, meaning they could

no longer serve in Parliament, vote, hold public office, own firearms, or

even inherit land.

By 1700, the country was dominated by an Anglican Protestant minority, otherwise

known as the Protestant Ascendancy, which owned the great country estates

and controlled the government.

The dispossessed Irish Catholics, over three quarters of the population, were

relegated to tenant farming, and the Gaelic-Irish culture, now intertwined

with the persecuted Catholic religion, survived mostly among the rural poor.

Throughout the 18th century, political power resided with the minority Anglican

elite, concentrated in the Irish Parliament in Dublin.

Still, the 1700s were a relatively stable period, compared to the wartime

horrors that had defined much of the previous century.

Although Ireland experienced some economic growth, rural poverty persisted

and resentment simmered among disenfranchised groups.

In the latter decades of the century, the winds of change began to blow across

Ireland.

Inspired by the American and French revolutions, some Protestants began to

recognise the need for reform and, in 1782, led by politician Henry Grattan,

the Irish Parliament won a measure of legislative independence from Britain.

Meanwhile, a revolutionary republican movement had begun to grow among both

Protestant Presbyterians in Ulster and Catholics elsewhere within the country.

In 1791, radicals in Belfast formed the Society of United Irishmen, aiming

to unite all Irish people, across religions, for democratic reform and

move towards independence.

Their efforts culminated in the Rebellion of 1798, with the United

Irishmen, led by Theobald Wolftone, launching an uprising against British

rule and seeking to establish an Irish Republic.

The rebellion was brutally suppressed by British forces.

Tens of thousands died in the fighting, that raged particularly around Wexford

and Ulster.

Wolftone was captured and died in prison, becoming a martyr for Irish

nationalism.

The failure of 1798 nevertheless convinced the British government that

the Irish Parliament was unreliable and that Ireland must be directly ruled by

Britain to prevent any future rebellions.

The solution came in the form of the Act of Union.

Made effective on the 1st of January 1801, the Kingdom of Ireland was

abolished and merged with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great

Britain and Ireland.

The Parliament in Dublin ceased to exist.

with Irish politicians relocating to the British Parliament at Westminster

instead. Although seen by some as the loss of the last measure of autonomy,

the next century would show that the Union did not dampen Irish aspirations

for self-government.

In 1829, Irish lawyer and politician Daniel O'Connell achieved Catholic

emancipation, forcing the British to allow Catholics to sit in Parliament and

hold public office after decades of the odious penal laws were finally repealed.

However, much of the progress of the early 19th century would be severely

undone by an event that struck the entire island in the 1840s – the Great

Famine.

Ireland's population had swelled above 8 million people in the years leading up

to the outbreak, with most being landless labourers and tenant farmers,

who were deeply dependent upon the humble potato as their staple food.

In 1845, a fungal blight struck the potato crop, causing repeated harvest

failures over the next several years, which led to catastrophic famine.

The response of the British government was slow and failed to prevent what

little food there was in Ireland from being exported, even as the poor

starved. Between 1845 and 1849, approximately one million Irish people

died from starvation or famine-induced disease.

with another million fleeing the country as refugees.

By the time the famine ended around 1850, the island's population had

plummeted by a quarter or more.

The Great Famine effectively broke apart the remaining old Gaelic-speaking

society among Ireland's lower classes, with survivors emigrating by the

hundreds of thousands in the following decades, mostly to the United States,

Canada, Australia and Britain.

But the grief and anger over the British mishandling of the event only deepened

the desire for Irish self-governance in the years that followed.

A political movement for Home Rule, which entailed Ireland being governed by

the Irish but still remaining within the United Kingdom, gathered momentum in the

1880s and 1890s, but ultimately failed to gain enough support to pass as law in

the British Parliament.

It was not until 1914 that the Home Rule Act was finally passed.

granting Ireland a measure of autonomy, although this was suspended immediately

following the outbreak of the First World War.

Despite the political tensions between Ireland and Great Britain at the time,

over 200,000 Irish served in the British forces during the war, the vast majority

being volunteers.

However, in April 1916, a secret revolutionary group used the backdrop of

the ongoing war to launch a dramatic bid for outright Irish independence.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood led an insurrection in Dublin that became known

as the Easter Rising, with around 1,600 Irish volunteers seizing key locations

across the capital and proclaiming an Irish Republic.

After a week of intense fighting against vastly superior British forces, the

Rising was crushed and much of central Dublin lay in ruins.

Initially, many Irish people had not supported the risky rebellion.

But Britain's decision to execute the ringleaders, namely Patrick Pearce,

James Connolly and others, swung public sympathy towards the rebels' cause, and

ignited popular support for full Irish independence.

With the conclusion of the First World War in 1918, the British government held

an election in December of that year, with Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican

Party, winning a landslide victory across most of Ireland.

After reaffirming Ireland's declaration of independence, the Irish Republican

Army, IRA, was formed and began guerrilla warfare against the British

authorities. The ensuing Irish War of Independence pitted the IRA's hit-and

-run tactics against the Royal Irish Constabulary and British forces, with

violence spreading through ambushes, reprisals and assassinations.

By 1921, with international pressure mounting and the combatants exhausted, A

truce was called.

Negotiations in London produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December of that

year, which ended the war, but had a cost.

Ireland was to be partitioned.

Under the treaty, the bulk of the island, consisting of 26 counties, left

the United Kingdom to become the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of

the British Commonwealth, similar to Canada or Australia.

However, the six northeastern counties of Ulster which had a Protestant

Unionist majority, opted to remain as part of the United Kingdom, thus forming

Northern Ireland.

The partition of Ireland fundamentally redrew the political map of the island,

but also created many more problems for an already deeply divided people.

Northern Ireland's sizable Catholic minority felt abandoned by the treaty,

while in the Free State, the treaty's terms, especially the continued oath of

allegiance to the British Crown, bitterly divided Irish Republicans.

This led to the Irish Civil War breaking out in 1922 between pro-treaty forces

led by Michael Collins and anti-treaty forces led by Eamon de Valera.

The Civil War was ruthless and fratricidal.

Ultimately, the pro-treaty National Army prevailed and the Irish Free State

emerged intact, though Michael Collins himself was assassinated during the

conflict.

After the hostilities had ceased in 1923,

Ireland remained separated into two jurisdictions.

In the south, the Irish Free State began the work of nation-building after

centuries of colonial rule.

Though nominally a dominion of the British Commonwealth, it enjoyed full

internal self-government, and over the next decade, under leaders such as W.T.

Cosgrave and later Eamon de Valera, the Free State took steps to reduce

remaining ties to Britain.

In 1937, the Irish Constitution renamed the country simply as Ireland and

removed any mention of the British monarch, effectively asserting de facto

republic status.

The state would formally declare itself as the Republic of Ireland and leave the

Commonwealth in 1949.

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, the early decades were characterised by one

-party unionist rule and systemic discrimination against the Catholic

minority.

Northern Ireland's Protestant leaders saw themselves as loyal Britons and

enforced policies to maintain control.

Catholics often faced barriers in voting, acquiring housing and

employment.

Although Northern Ireland experienced some sectarian tensions in the early

years, by the 1960s, inspired by global civil rights movements, Northern

Ireland's Catholics began organising for equal rights.

These small protests, however, were met with hostility and heavy-handed

crackdowns by the predominantly Protestant police.

leading to riots and the beginning of the period known as the Troubles.

What followed was three decades of turmoil in Northern Ireland, as long

-simmering sectarian tensions boiled over.

In 1969, street violence between Catholic nationalists and Protestant

loyalists prompted the British government to deploy the British Army to

Northern Ireland to restore order.

However, many Catholic communities saw the army as heavy-handed occupiers,

especially after incidents like Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British

paratroopers killed 13 unarmed protesters in Derry.

By the early 1970s, the situation had escalated into a low-level war, with the

Provisional IRA on one side, claiming to fight for Northern Ireland's

reunification with the Republic, and on the other, loyalist paramilitaries, such

as the UVF and UDA, who were determined to defend the union with Britain.

alongside the British state's forces of the army and police.

Civilians often found themselves caught in the crossfire of bombings,

assassinations and riots, with no corner of Northern Ireland being untouched by

the violence.

Even mainland Britain and the Republic experienced sporadic IRA attacks.

Such was the scale and indiscriminatory nature of the hostilities.

It was only after years of war-weariness that diplomatic efforts finally began to

open new roads to resolve the troubles.

The IRA, under pressure and after secret negotiations, declared a ceasefire in

1994, which was matched by the loyalist paramilitaries.

Multi-party peace talks followed, chaired by international mediators,

which ultimately resulted in the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.

This affirmed that Northern Ireland's status would remain British until a

majority there chose otherwise, but also acknowledged the Irishness of the

Catholic minority.

by creating cross-border institutions with the Republic and allowing people in

Northern Ireland to hold Irish citizenship, British citizenship, or

both. Crucially, it set up a new power-sharing government in Belfast,

where unionist and nationalist parties would jointly govern, ensuring

representation for both communities.

As the 21st century began, the scars of conflict remained.

but the watershed moment of the Good Friday Agreement allowed for a new

period of Irish history to begin.

Northern Ireland benefited most from the peace, seeing increased investment and

tourism in what were once highly dangerous cities such as Belfast and

Derry. For the Republic of Ireland, peace coincided with a period of rapid

economic growth.

From the mid-1990s into the 2000s, Ireland's economy expanded at an

astounding rate, transitioning from one of Western Europe's poorest countries to

one of its richest.

Today, Ireland stands transformed from the poor, colonised and famine-ravaged

land of its past.

Although it remains divided into two separate states, the cooperation and

cohesion of the last few decades have undoubtedly brought the two closer

together, raising the possibility, which has long remained elusive throughout its

history, that perhaps one day there may be a united Ireland of Ireland.