Six Ulster counties became a UK region in 1921
Northern Ireland, in the island’s northeast, is a UK country, province, or region depending on who speaks. The 2021 census counted 1,903,175 people across an open land border with the Republic of Ireland, and its six counties were carved out in 1921 because unionists outnumbered nationalists there.
The Government of Ireland Act 1920 and 1921 partition carved six northeastern counties into a devolved unionist-majority polity inside the United Kingdom. Early Troubles in Ulster (1920–1922) killed more than five hundred in Belfast’s communal fighting. At partition it was the most industrialised part of Ireland, though conflict later dragged the economy down before growth resumed from the late 1990s.
Gaelic kingdoms of Ulster preceded Anglo-Norman invasion from 1169. The Nine Years’ War ended in the 1607 Flight of the Earls; plantations and the 1641 rebellion remade demography. The 1641 rebellion began in Ulster as a push against anti-Catholic laws and the plantations, and it turned into an ethnic war between Irish Catholics and British Protestant settlers. Williamite victories at Derry and the Boyne still structure commemorative calendars. Penal Laws concentrated power in Anglican hands before later sectarian societies and the 1798 rising.
In the 1790s rival secret societies, Catholic Defenders on one side and Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys on the other, fought repeatedly around Armagh, climaxing at the Battle of the Diamond in 1795. The 1798 rising, by contrast, was led by the United Irishmen, a cross-community republican movement founded by Belfast Presbyterians, and it was crushed.
When the Liberal Party backed Home Rule, unionists led by Bonar Law and Edward Carson resisted, and in September 1912 more than half a million signed a pledge against it. Unionists were a minority across Ireland but a majority in Antrim, Down, Armagh and Londonderry, so they pressed for Ulster to be left out. After the 1916 Easter Rising most nationalists wanted full independence, and in 1919 Lloyd George set a committee to draft the settlement that became partition.
Source: Northern Ireland
