The Irish question is the long and painful relationship between Ireland and Britain, made up of conquest, colonisation, rebellions, famine, partition and finally reconciliation. For more than eight centuries it shaped the politics of both islands, and Northern Ireland's future remains its open chapter today.
Conquest and colonisation
In 1169 Anglo-Norman knights landed in Ireland at the invitation of a local king, and two years later Henry II of England proclaimed himself lord of the island. For centuries, however, English control remained limited to an area around Dublin, the Pale, while the Norman lords merged into Gaelic society. The turning point came with the Tudors: Henry VIII proclaimed himself King of Ireland in 1542, and after the Reformation religion became the fault line, because the Irish remained overwhelmingly Catholic. After the defeat of the great Gaelic lords of Ulster, in 1609 the Plantation of Ulster began, the colonisation of the north with English and Scottish Protestant settlers, the origin of the divide that still marks Northern Ireland. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell ferociously crushed the Catholic revolt, with the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, and confiscated much of the land. The victory of the Protestant William of Orange over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, still commemorated by unionists, opened a long period of rule by the Protestant elite, with Penal Laws excluding Catholics from land ownership, the professions and politics.
The Union and the Great Famine
After the United Irishmen's rising of 1798, inspired by the French Revolution, the Dublin Parliament was abolished and in 1801 Ireland joined the United Kingdom. In 1829 Daniel O'Connell won Catholic emancipation. But between 1845 and 1852 the Great Famine, caused by potato blight, the staple food of the rural poor, and worsened by the policies of the London government, which kept exporting food from the island, caused about a million deaths and drove another million and more to emigrate, mainly to the United States, Britain and Canada. Ireland has never regained its pre-Famine population.
Home Rule, rising and independence
In the second half of the 19th century the Home Rule movement, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, won the support of Prime Minister Gladstone, but the bills were defeated, and Ulster Protestants organised to resist, by force if necessary. When Home Rule was finally passed in 1914, the First World War suspended it. At Easter 1916 republicans proclaimed the Irish Republic in Dublin: the Easter Rising was crushed within a week, but the execution of its leaders transformed public opinion. In 1918 Sinn Féin won the election in Ireland and proclaimed an independent parliament, the Dáil; the War of Independence (1919-1921) followed between Michael Collins's IRA and the British forces.
In 1920 the London government divided the island in two, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 created the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of 26 counties, while six Ulster counties with a Protestant majority remained in the UK as Northern Ireland. The treaty split the nationalists and led to a short but bloody civil war (1922-1923). In 1937 the Free State adopted a new constitution under the name Éire, and in 1949 it became the Republic of Ireland, leaving the Commonwealth.
From partition to peace
Partition left a discriminated Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, and in the late 1960s conflict erupted again in the Troubles, thirty years of violence ended by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (see the history of Northern Ireland). Today relations between the UK and Ireland are close and friendly: in 2011 Queen Elizabeth II made a historic visit to Dublin, the first by a British monarch since independence. Brexit, however, reopened the border question, resolved by the Windsor Framework (see Brexit and Northern Ireland), and the debate on a future reunification of the island, provided for by the 1998 agreement if a majority so wishes, is livelier than ever.
See also Northern Ireland, Belfast and Liverpool, the city that took in hundreds of thousands of Famine refugees.