Britain's first colony
Ireland was, in a real sense, the laboratory of English colonialism. Conquered and planted with settlers from the sixteenth century, its Catholic majority was dispossessed of land and barred from power under the Penal Laws. The Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, when the potato crop failed and a million people died while food was exported under British rule, seared the national memory and scattered millions across the world, above all to America.
A war of independence produced the Irish Free State in 1922, at the price of a partition that left six northern counties in the United Kingdom and a legacy of violence, the Troubles, that lasted until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The republic that emerged was long conservative and Catholic, but in a remarkable turn legalised divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion by popular vote within a single generation.
A thin thread, honestly drawn
Ireland never had an empire, and to claim a deep colonial entanglement with Africa would be false. The real links are different. Irish Catholic missionaries fanned out across Africa in the twentieth century, especially into Nigeria, where Irish orders built schools and hospitals and where the Biafran war of the late 1960s stirred deep Irish sympathy and aid. That missionary network gave Ireland an unusually personal connection to parts of the continent, for good and ill.
Irish people also took part in the British empire as soldiers, administrators and settlers, so the picture is not one of innocence. But many Irish nationalists drew an explicit line between their own struggle and Africa's: figures in the anti-apartheid movement, and the Dunnes Stores workers who refused to handle South African goods in 1984, made Ireland a notable voice against apartheid. Today Ireland runs a respected overseas aid programme, hosts a growing African diaspora, and remains one of the few EU states never to have ruled an African country.
The Celtic Tiger and after
From the 1990s Ireland used low corporate taxes and EU membership to lure the world's technology and pharmaceutical giants, Google, Apple, Pfizer, becoming one of Europe's richest countries per head, though the wealth is unevenly felt and housing is in crisis. Neutral in military terms, it stayed out of NATO, and its diaspora of some 70 million people worldwide gives a country of five million an influence far beyond its size. Simon Harris became taoiseach in 2024.