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Reading Comprehension / Non-fiction / Social Studies / History / Ireland © 2008-2010 abcteach.com

A BRIEF HISTORY OF IRELAND

Today, Ireland is a country with a bright future. In 2004, “Economist” magazine selected it as the best place in the world to live, and hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world have moved there in the last decade. But this was not always the case.Ireland has a long, often bloody and tragic history.

Ireland was first settled around the year 8000 BC, when hunter-gatherers came from Great Britain and Europe, possibly by land bridge. They lived by hunting and fishing for about four thousand years. Around 4000 BC they began to farm and the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle gradually died out.

The descendants of these people built burialmounds and impressive monuments such as Ireland’s most famous prehistoric site, New grange. New grange is a stone tomb dated to sometime before 3000 BC, older than the pyramids in Egypt.

Early Irish society was organized into a number of kingdoms with a rich culture, a learned upper class and craftsmen who, among other artifacts, created elaborate and beautiful metalwork with bronze, iron and gold.Irish society was pagan for thousands of years, but this changed in the early fifth century AD when Christian missionaries including the legendary St. Patrick arrived. Christianity replaced the old pagan religions by the year 600. These monks introduced the Roman alphabet to what had been largely an oral culture. They wrote down part of the rich collection of traditional stories, legends andmythology, which might have otherwise been lost.

Two centuries later, from the early ninth century AD, Vikings invaded Ireland. These attacks went on for over 100 years. At first they raided monasteries and villages. Eventually, they built settlements on the island, many of which grew into important towns. Irish cities founded by the Viking invaders include Limerick, Cork, Wexford and Dublin,the capital city of the Republic of Ireland. Irish society eventually assimilated the descendants of the Vikings.

The year 1169 saw another invasion that had severe consequences for the island. An invasion of Norman mercenaries marked the beginning of more than seven centuries of Norman and English rule in Ireland. The Norman/English control over Ireland was expanded until the beginning of the13th century, when the new rulers began to be assimilated into Irish society, like the Vikings had been before them.

The Reformation brought this time of relative peace to a brutal end. Beginning in 1534, military campaigns put down Irish chiefs who would not submit to the English king. People were massacred. A policy of “plantations” began: land was confiscated from Catholic Irishlandowners, and given to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. During the next century and a half, Catholic Ireland was conquered, and religion became a source of division and strife, a role it would have until recent times.

During the 18th century, many laws were passed that discriminated against Catholics. The native Gaelic language was banned in schools. By 1778, only five percent of theland was owned by Catholics. In 1801, the Irish Parliament was abolished and Ireland became part of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”. Catholics could not hold parliamentary office until 1829.
Poverty was widespread. For many Irish, potatoes were the most important food. In 1845, disaster struck: the potato blight. This disease destroyed much of the potato crop for the next fewyears. The cause of the blight was not immediately understood, and the English rulers did little to help the situation. About a million people died of starvation or disease. Another million emigrated to escape poverty and starvation. Because of the potato blight, the population of Ireland fell from more than eight million, in 1841, to about six million, in 1852. The population continued to decline...