Integrated schools try to balance the proportion of pupils from each 'community' they admit, aiming for at least 40% Catholic and at least 40% non-Catholic Christian (i.e. Patsy McGarry, Orthodox Christians of all shades now have a significant presence in Ireland. [150] The biggest of the Protestant/other Christian denominations were the Presbyterian Church (16.6%), the Church of Ireland (11.5%) and the Methodist Church (2.3%). A petrol bomb which was thrown at a police van (left) is pictured burning out in Rossville Street, Derry, Northern Ireland, October 1968. A longtime contributor to HowStuffWorks, Dave has also been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. The vast majority of Northern Ireland has a temperate maritime climate, (Cfb in the Kppen climate classification) rather wetter in the west than the east, although cloud cover is very common across the region. The Ireland Act 1949 gave the first legal guarantee that the region would not cease to be part of the United Kingdom without the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland's new police force was the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which succeeded the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). [137] Today, only 8% of Northern Ireland is woodland, and most of this is non-native conifer plantations.[138]. Some of the heirs to Ireland's violent traditions refused to give up their inheritance. The 45%/48% figure has been widely shared by media outlets: BBC, Belfast Telegraph [ 1] [ 2 ], Irish Times, iNews. At the Commonwealth Games and some other sporting events, the Northern Ireland team uses the Ulster Banner as its flagnotwithstanding its lack of official statusand the Londonderry Air (usually set to lyrics as Danny Boy), which also has no official status, as its national anthem. [13] This has been noted as a problem by several writers on Northern Ireland, with no generally recommended solution. And while it is the Protestant-majority part of Ireland, at the time of the division, about a third of the Northern Irish were Catholic. Many unionists, however, remained skeptical. The position in UK nationality law is that most of those born in Northern Ireland are UK nationals, whether or not they so choose. The police charged the protestors and simultaneously cut off their retreat. Protestant). [13][110] The BBC style guide is to refer to Northern Ireland as a province, and use of the term is common in literature and newspaper reports on Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. [68], The Nationalist Party was the main political party in opposition to the UUP governments. Students often misunderstand this; they think of Northern Ireland as the Protestant-majority part of Ireland. It was corrected on January 20, 2022, to read British rule.We apologize for the error. In September 1912, more than 500,000 unionists signed the Ulster Covenant, pledging to oppose Home Rule by any means and to defy any Irish government. Northern Ireland is served by three airports Belfast International near Antrim, George Best Belfast City integrated into the railway network at Sydenham in East Belfast, and City of Derry in County Londonderry. One curious fact of the Northern Irish psyche that has been true for a long, long time, is that while they are intensely loyal to the crown and the union with Great Britain, theres also no love lost between the Northern Irish unionists and Great Britain: the Irish unionists always feel let down, always feel betrayed. [19] Today, the former generally see themselves as British and the latter generally see themselves as Irish, while a Northern Irish or Ulster identity is claimed by a significant minority from all backgrounds. The six counties of Northern Ireland are among the nine governed by the Ulster branch of the Irish Rugby Football Union, the governing body of rugby union in Ireland. There are substantial uplands in the Sperrin Mountains (an extension of the Caledonian mountain belt) with extensive gold deposits, granite Mourne Mountains and basalt Antrim Plateau, as well as smaller ranges in South Armagh and along the FermanaghTyrone border. Belfast was a key industrial city in the UK's war effort, producing ships, tanks, aircraft, and munitions. It sought to ensure Home Rule was implemented, and it smuggled its own weapons into Ireland a few months after the Ulster Volunteers. Today, the language is often associated with Irish nationalism (and thus with Catholics). [27] This unrest sparked the Troubles, a thirty-year conflict involving republican and loyalist paramilitaries and state forces, which claimed over 3,500 lives and injured 50,000 others. Brexit takes Northern Ireland out of the European Union and leaves the Republic of Ireland in the European Union, drawing a stark distinction and difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Even kerbstones in some areas are painted red-white-blue or green-white-orange, depending on whether local people express unionist/loyalist or nationalist/republican sympathies. [134] The lowest minimum temperature recorded was 18.7C (1.7F) at Castlederg, County Tyrone on 23 December 2010. [67] Almost all judges and magistrates were Protestant, many of them closely associated with the UUP. The Government of Ireland Act was designed to create two separate Home Rule territories, both of which would remain in the United Kingdoma Northern Ireland and a Southern Irelandthat would both be quasi-autonomous, self-governing entities of the United Kingdom. Some of them wore the white armbands of the B-Specials, an auxiliary police unit of the RUC. Both governments exclude some people born in Northern Ireland, in particular persons born without one parent who is a British or Irish citizen. The Troubles were seeded by centuries of conflict between predominantly Catholic Ireland and predominantly Protestant England. The exclusion of the three counties, which had nationalist majorities, ensured a unionist majority in Northern Irelandbut also a large nationalist minority. [92], In 2007, 36% of the population defined themselves as unionist, 24% as nationalist, and 40% defined themselves as neither. [152] At the 2011 census, 48% came from a Protestant background, 45% from a Catholic background, 0.9% from other religious backgrounds, and 5.6% from non-religious backgrounds. The state-owned Channel 4 and the privately owned Channel 5 also broadcast in Northern Ireland. Dave Roos is a freelance writer based in the United States and Mexico. Brexit has also activated a historic sense of betrayal on the part of the Northern Irish against Britain. On August 14, the overwhelmed prime minister of Northern Ireland called on the British government to send in troops to restore order. This became known as the Irish War of Independence. It established a devolved power-sharing government, the Northern Ireland Assembly, located on the Stormont Estate, which must consist of both unionist and nationalist parties. In all, 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland still go to separate faith schools. . The First World War led to bitter resentment against Irish republicanism in both Britain and Ulster and it made reconciliation between Irelands Catholic and Protestant communities impossible in the aftermath of the war. Since 1972, it has had no official status. Government and cultural organisations in Northern Ireland often use the word "Ulster" in their title; for example, the University of Ulster, the Ulster Museum, the Ulster Orchestra, and BBC Radio Ulster. The crowd started to move, but was barricaded by a line of police from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) brandishing batons. Northern Ireland shares both the culture of Ireland and the culture of the United Kingdom. "[195][196], The Irish Rugby Football Union and the Church of Ireland have used the Saint Patrick's Saltire or "Cross of StPatrick". The government of Northern Ireland cooperates with the government of the Republic of Ireland in several areas agreed under the terms of the Belfast Agreement. Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom with a population divided along ethno-religious lines between Protestant unionists who want to remain a part of the UK and Catholic. The Williamite victories of the siege of Derry (1689) and Battle of the Boyne (1690) are still celebrated by some Protestants in Northern Ireland. It is still used by some British army regiments. There has been a real move toward liberalization and secularization to align the Irish Republic with the rest of Europe, so they are no longer a kind of quasi-theocratic outlier, but instead a place that looks more like the rest of Europe, along with economic progress. So theres a fear that Brexit is going to strand Northern Irelandon the other side of a customs border in the Irish Sea. Key tourism attractions include the historic cities of Derry, Belfast, and Armagh and the many castles in Northern Ireland. The population at the time of the 2021 census was 1.9million, having grown 5% over the previous decade. Northern Ireland is bounded on the north and northeast by the North Channel, on the southeast by the Irish Sea, and on the south and west by Ireland. They were met with violent resistance by the Bogsiders, who hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. [149], At the 2021 census, 42.3% of the population identified as Roman Catholic, 37.3% as Protestant/other Christian, 1.3% as other religions, while 17.4% identified with no religion or did not state one. The third phase of main statistics results from Census 2021 are now available. It won the European Cup in 1999. With Iarnrd ireann (Irish Rail), Northern Ireland Railways co-operates in providing the joint Enterprise service between Dublin Connolly and Lanyon Place. [16] The Republic of Ireland also has a consultative role on non-devolved governmental matters through the British-Irish Governmental Conference (BIIG). [113], "Region" is used by several UK government agencies and the European Union. The use of the Irish language in Northern Ireland today is politically sensitive. They saw what was happening in the United States and how peaceful mass protests had drawn attention to the plight of Black Americans living under segregation and Jim Crow. The Irish Football Association (IFA) serves as the organising body for association football in Northern Ireland, with the Northern Ireland Football League (NIFL) responsible for the independent administration of the three divisions of national domestic football, as well as the Northern Ireland Football League Cup. [108] The absence of a distinct nation of Northern Ireland, separate within the island of Ireland, is also pointed out as being a problem with using the term[14][113][114] and is in contrast to England, Scotland, and Wales. The region that is now Northern Ireland was long inhabited by native Gaels who were Irish-speaking and predominantly Catholic. According to the 2021 Census, in 94.74% of households, all people aged 16 and above spoke English as their main language. In 1169, Ireland was invaded by a coalition of forces under the command of the English crown that quickly overran and occupied most of the island, beginning 800 years of foreign central authority. The UK's submission to the 2007 United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names defines the UK as being made up of two countries (England and Scotland), one principality (Wales) and one province (Northern Ireland). The population of Northern Ireland on census day, 21 March 2021, was 1,903,175. [220] All Northern Ireland viewers must obtain a UK TV licence to watch live television transmissions or use BBC iPlayer. The whole conflict that led to partition reduces fundamentally to the failure of the Reformation in Ireland and the fact that it threw up a confessional divide between the British generally: between the English, the Welsh, the Scotsand the Irish, who remained largely Catholic. [172] The dialect of English spoken in Northern Ireland shows influence from the lowland Scots language. Ulster has always been, in some ways, culturally distinct from the rest of Ireland, even before the Protestant Reformation. [56] Conflict continued intermittently for two years, mostly in Belfast, which saw "savage and unprecedented" communal violence between Protestants and Catholics, including rioting, gun battles, and bombings. The Northern Ireland Office is led by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who sits in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom. A man walks past a Marian mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Feb. 20, 2013. In Northern Ireland, Protestants in favor of the monarchy had been in the majority for centuries. October 5, 1968 was when the Troubles began, argues Smyth, and those TV images are etched in the peoples memory.. Before Brexit, I would have said, yes. There was a kind of momentum and there seemed to be a will for reunification. The event known as the Flight of the Earlswhen Gaelic lords of Ulster fled in 1607left the region open and vulnerable to English and Scottish settlement. During the 19th century, legal reforms known as the Catholic emancipation continued to remove discrimination against Catholics, and progressive programs enabled tenant farmers to buy land from landlords. The first election using these districts took place on 22 May 2014, electing councillors who sat in shadow form until 1 April 2015. [100][101] The website of the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency also refers to Northern Ireland as being a province[102] as does the website of the Office of Public Sector Information[103] and other agencies within Northern Ireland. 1824, completed 1846. [217], In 2007, after the closure of UCW (Ulster Championship Wrestling) which was a wrestling promotion, PWU formed, standing for Pro Wrestling Ulster. Northern Ireland is made up of six of the nine counties of the traditional Irish region of Ulster. Theres been an unfortunate sort of heroic regard for the gunman-martyr throughout Irish history in the 20th century, certainly throughout the Northern Ireland conflict from the 1960s to the late 1990s: the rebel revolutionary who either dies, or is martyred at the hands of the state, or is executed. [182], Ulster Scots comprises varieties of the Scots language spoken in Northern Ireland. Recent successes for Northern Ireland teams include Armagh's 2002 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship win and Tyrone GAA's wins in 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2021. [80] As early as 1969, armed campaigns of paramilitary groups began, including the Provisional IRA campaign of 19691997 which was aimed at the end of British rule in Northern Ireland and the creation of a United Ireland, and the Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1966 in response to the perceived erosion of both the British character and unionist domination of Northern Ireland. Of the 90Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs), 37 are unionists and 35 are nationalists (the remaining 18 are classified as "other").[97]. Religious bigotry had been a feature of life in all of Ireland for centuries, and it remained just as strong by the 1960s. The march was banned by the Northern Ireland government, but protestors defied the order and gathered on October 5 with signs reading One man, one vote! and Smash sectarianism!. There are too many such areas to list here, so the best bet is to behave courteously everywhere you go. [69], The UUP governments, and some UUP-dominated local authorities, discriminated against the Catholic and Irish nationalist minority; especially over gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, the allocation of public housing, public sector employment, and policing, showing "a consistent and irrefutable pattern of deliberate discrimination against Catholics". Some may notice a correlation between areas with a large proportion of Catholics, and areas of marginal agricultural land including uplands. [31] Its economy has grown significantly since the late 1990s. However, following 'partition' in 1922, the modern-day island of Ireland is split into two entities: the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The highest maximum temperature recorded was 31.4C (88.5F), registered in July 2021 at Armagh Observatory's weather station. Northern Ireland is sometimes referred to as Ulster, although it includes only six of the nine counties which made up that historic Irish province. Access is also available to satellite and cable services. It can arouse irritation, particularly among nationalists, for whom the title province is properly reserved for the traditional province of Ulster, of which Northern Ireland comprises six out of nine counties. [30], The economy of Northern Ireland was the most industrialised in Ireland at the time of partition, but soon began to decline, a decline exacerbated by the political and social turmoil of the Troubles. Since 1987 public houses have been allowed to open on Sundays, despite some opposition. The make-up of the Northern Ireland Assembly reflects the appeals of the various parties within the population. Foreign flags are also found, such as the Palestinian flags in some nationalist areas and Israeli flags in some unionist areas. As a result of the Agreement, the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland was amended.
