The History of Ireland

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>Kick off in the mist where Celts etched ogham into standing stones fending off Romans who never bothered crossing the Irish Sea-until raiders from Norway axes-downed monasteries and muscled into a mud-flat town called Dublin. Brian Boru bloodied Clontarf to shove them back but the Normals slunk in next their longbows and mottes dotting the landscape like bad tattoos. Strongbow married a chieftain's daughter for Leinster kicking off centuries of earls lording over Gaelic clans while bards spun laments that outlasted the swords. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>It was a patchwork of pig Latin laws and pilgrim paths St. Patrick banishing snakes that weren't there brewing a brew of faith and feud that no fleet could rinse clean. Then the Tudors turned the screw: Elizabeth's armies scorched the Nine Years' War planting Protestant feet in Ulster's fertile dirt while recusant Catholics smoldered under penal codes that fined you for a rosary. The 1798 rising drowned in Wexford blood Union Jack stitched over the harp in '01 and absentee landlords bled the land dry till the Famine hit-a potato rot that shipped grain out while keening filled the roads west. A million gone to mass graves or Yankee docks another million clawing for air amid evictions that torched cabins like kindling. It forged the Fenians' dynamite dreams and Parnell's land-league knives slicing the empire one rent strike at a time. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>Twentieth-century thunder: Pearse's poets storming the Post Office Collins' treaty splitting the island like a bad divorce and civil war kin slaying kin over borders drawn in Downing Street ink. The Free State staggered through partition's poison neutral in the Blitz but broiling in the '60s when Derry's marches met batons and Ballymurphy's bullets. The Troubles chewed three decades from hunger strikes in the Maze to peace pipes on Good Friday leaving murals that weep and a republic that roared into the Celtic Tiger before the crash clawed it back.</span></p>