History of Ireland

Around 8000 BC hunting tribes moved from Britain and continental Europe to Ireland. Geologists suppose that in those days Ireland was a peninsula. Few archaeological signs remain of these people, but their ancestors were responsible for major Neolithic locations. After the arrival of Christian missionaries in the early to mid-5th century, Christianity followed the heathen beliefs by the year 600.
From around 800 Viking invasions threatened the monastic culture and the island's various regional dynasties for more than a century, however they proved strong enough to survive and assimilate the invaders. In 1169 the coming of Cambro-Norman armed forces under Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, marked the beginning of more than 800 years of direct Norman and, later, English participation in Ireland. The English crown did not begin getting full control of the island until after the English Reformation, when questions over the loyalty of Irish vassals arose between 1534 and 1691. This period was also marked by an official English policy of plantation, which led to the arrival of thousands of English and Scottish Protestant settlers. As the military and political defeat of Gaelic Ireland became clearer in the early seventeenth century, the role of religion as background for separation became more obvious. From now on, religion became a periodic issue in Irish history until now.
The elimination from power of the Catholic majority in the Irish parliament in 1613 was realised principally through the establishment of numerous new Protestant-dominated boroughs.
By the end of the seventeenth century all Catholics, representing some 85% of Ireland's population then, were banned from the Irish parliament. Political power rested entirely in the hands of a British-Anglican minority. The Catholic population suffered severe political and economic misery. In 1801, this colonial parliament was abolished and Ireland became an integral part of a new United Kingdom of Great Britain. Catholics were still banned from sitting in that new parliament until Catholic Emancipation was achieve in 1829, the principal condition of which was the removal of the permission for Catholics to own land.
In 1922, after the Irish War of Independence, the southern twenty-six counties of Ireland separated from the United Kingdom (UK) to become the independent Irish Free State and after 1948, the Republic of Ireland. The remaining six northeastern counties, known as Northern Ireland, remained part of the UK.
The history of Northern Ireland has been dominated by violent conflicts between Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists until 2005 when even the Irish Republican Army (IRA) gave up terrorizing their opponents. Still the IRA intends to separate Northern Ireland from Great Britain and to unite it with the Irish Free State.