An ice-bridged island whose woods fell below Europe’s average
Ireland is a North Atlantic island split geopolitically between the Republic of Ireland—about five-sixths of the land—and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. Low mountains ring a central plain; woodland now covers only about ten percent of the island versus a European average over thirty-three percent.
The North Channel, Irish Sea and St George’s Channel separate it from Great Britain. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth worldwide, and in 2022 held just over 7 million people: 5.1 million in the Republic and 1.9 million in Northern Ireland. Atlantic air keeps winters mild for the latitude and summers cool, with plenty of cloud and rain; forests covered much of it until the late Middle Ages, and most trees now stand in conifer plantations of foreign species.
Ireland and Éire both come from Old Irish Ériu, rooted in a Proto-Celtic word for fertile soil. Latin writers turned that into Ivernia, later bent toward Hibernia by hibernum, winter. Ptolemy first called it Mikra Brettania, Little Britain, then Iouernia, and counted 16 peoples across the island around 100 AD.
In the last glaciation, seas fell less than 50 metres, so ice rather than dry land joined it to Britain; that link was gone by 12,000 BC. A butchered reindeer bone from Castlepook Cave in Cork, dated in 2021 to 33,000 years ago, pushed evidence of humans back by 20,000 years. Mesolithic groups settled widely by about 8,000 BC. At Ferriter’s Cove in Kerry, cattle bones and a sheep tooth from about 4,350 BC are the oldest farming traces in Britain or Ireland, and Mayo’s Céide Fields, walled plots worked between 3,500 and 3,000 BC, may be the oldest field system anywhere. Beaker migrants later swept away most earlier ancestry, and 84 percent of Irish men carry the R1b marker.
Gaelic Ireland had formed by the first century AD, and Christianity spread from the fifth. Viking power ended at Clontarf on 23 April 1014. Anglo-Normans arrived in the twelfth century, Tudor conquest brought full English control, and the 1801 Acts of Union made Ireland part of the United Kingdom.
Source: Ireland
