Britain And Ireland

1169 . Anglo Normans invade Ireland

15-? . The Tudor reconquest of Ireland. Many killed and much land was laid waste

1607 . Flight of Ulster Earls precedes colonization of Ulster, the last province to be conquered. Protestant settlers come from Scotland. The native Irish are Catholic.

1641 . Rising of the Irish in Ulster against the settlers.

1649-50 . Cromwell suppresses the Irish with much bloodletting. 3,000 townspeople are killed in Dragheda and 2,000 in Wexford. He aims to remove all the native Irish to the far west.

1690 . William of Orange, a Dutch Protestant, defeats his father-in-law James the Catholic king of England, at the Battle of the Boyne. William becomes King of England.

1691 Onwards . Penal laws are passed in Ireland to dispossess Catholics of their land and deny them religious freedom, voting rights and access to education and government posts. Laws are also passed against dissenting Protestants. Ireland is owned and run by a small Protestant landowning caste who extract rent from the peasants in the form of foodstuffs and export it to England.

1798 . The United Irishmen rise in rebellion. They are led by Presbyterians who resent English political and economic control. The rising is savagely crushed. At least 30,000 die.

1800 . The Act of Union abolishes the Irish parliament; Irish MPs are bribed to cooperate.

1829 . Catholic Emancipation Bill passes allowing Catholics to be admitted to most government posts.

1845-49 The Great famine . Irish peasants are dependent on the potato - their grain and pigs go to the landlord for rent. Then the potato crop fails, they die of hunger or typhus. A million-and-a-half people die, and a further million emigrate.

1848 . The Young Ireland rising, a short lived affair. The leaders are deported to Australia.

1867 . The Fenian rising. The Fenians - the Irish Republican Brotherhood - combine Irish-American veterans of the American civil war with Irishmen serving in the British army to create a several-thousand-strong organization. The Irish fail.

1879 . The Land League is founded bringing together Fenians and constitutional nationalists in a mass struggle to win rights for tenants on the land.

1880s . Irish-American bombers carry out bombing campaign in England.

1884 . Voting rights are extended to most adult men in the UK. From the 1885 election onwards. Irish nationalists regularly win 80 or more of the 103 Irish parliamentary seats. From time to time they hold the balance of power at Westminster between the Liberals and the Tories. The Liberals are forced to placate them by pulling forward bills from 1886 onwards for Irish "Home Rule" or limited independence.

1912 . The third home rule bill is introduced. It is expected to become law in 1914.

1912-14 . The British Tories and Irish loyalists organize a campaign against Irish home rule. They raise a 100,000-strong paramilitary body, the Ulster Volunteer Force. They incite army officers to refuse to move against the UVF.

1914 . the Liberals yield to the pressure and promise that special arrangements will be made for northeast Ireland where loyalists (Protestants) are in a majority. Home rule plans are suspended during World War I.

Easter, 1916 . disillusioned nationalists who believe constitutional methods have failed, organize a rising in Dublin. It lasts a week before collapsing. The British authorities execute 15 of the leaders. Thousands are arrested. Irish public opinion rallies behind the rebels.

December, 1918 . In the general election, Sinn Fein - which stands for complete independence as opposed to the more limited home rule - wins 73 out of the 105 Irish parliamentary seats. The old Irish party wins seven.

1919 . Sinn Fein MPs refuse to go to Westminster. They declare an independent Irish Parlament, Dail Eireann.

1919 - July 1921 . Guerrilla war between the Irish Republican Army and British forces. The IRA controls much of the country.

July 1920 - June 1922 . Pogroms in Belfast leave 455 dead (267 Catholics and 185 Protestants). Over 2,000 are wounded.

December 1920 . The Government of Ireland Act partitions Ireland. The six northeastern counties acquire their own provincial parliament. Two thirds of the on-and-a-quarter million population are Protestants; they run the government and set up a statelet that discriminates against Catholics.

December, 1921 . Irish representatives sign a treaty with the British government under which Britain will withdraw from 26 of Ireland's 32 counties. The Irish are led to believe that the remaining six counties will soon rejoin the rest.

1922 - 1923 . Civil war in the South of Ireland between pro and anti-treatyites. The anti-treatyites object that the treaty has left Ireland still subservient to the British crown. The pro-treatyites win.

1921 - 72 . Northern Ireland (the six northeastern counties) is run as a province of the United Kingdom with its own government. In the 1960s, Catholic dissatisfaction with endemic repression and discrimination wells up into a civil rights movement, modeled on the black movement in the USA. In 1969 fighting between police and Catholics in Derry persuades the British government to send in troops. Loyalist pogroms against Catholics lead to the revival of the dormant IRA which soon clashes with the British army. In 1972 Britain prorogues the Northern Ireland government and direct rule from Westmister begins.