History of Northern Ireland

History Of Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is today one of the four countries of the United Kingdom, (although it is also described by official sources as a province or a region) situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, having been created as a separate legal entity on 3 May 1921, under the Government of Ireland Act 1920. The new autonomous Northern Ireland was formed from six of the nine counties of Ulster: four counties with unionist majorities, and Fermanagh and Tyrone, two of the five Ulster counties which had nationalist majorities. In large part unionists, at least in the northeast, supported its creation while nationalists were opposed. Subsequently, on 6 December 1922, the whole island of Ireland became an independent dominion known as the Irish Free State but Northern Ireland immediately exercised its right to opt out of the new dominion.

Read more about History Of Northern Ireland:  Resistance To Home Rule, 1916 Rising and Aftermath, Partition, Early Years of Home Rule, 1925 To 1965, The Troubles, The Good Friday Agreement and Beyond

Famous quotes containing the words northern ireland, history of, history, northern and/or ireland:

    “... in Northern Ireland, if you don’t have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.”
    —Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)

    “The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
    —William James (1842–1910)

    “Sophocles long ago
    Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought
    Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
    Of human misery; we
    Find also in the sound a thought,
    Hearing it by this distant northern sea.”
    —Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

    “Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.
    I thirst for accusation. All that was sung.
    All that was said in Ireland is a lie
    Breed out of the contagion of the throng,
    Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.”
    —William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)