Ireland Is an Island in the North

Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, located to the northwest of continental Europe: the CIA helpfully notes that its size is roughly comparable to the American state of West Virginia. Ireland lies directly to the west of England: the two islands are separated by the Irish Sea.

Ireland has a long history, and was known to the ancient Romans as "Hibernia" although the Romans did not colonize Ireland as they did with England. Tradition marks Ireland's conversion to Christianity by Saint Patrick during the Roman period. Shortly thereafter, the first of a series of invasions occurred -- first by the Danes, then by the English starting in the 12th century.

English policy toward Ireland would eventually turn the island into an English colony, effectively, and the Act of Union by the British Parliament in 1800 officially made Ireland part of the United Kingdom. But the lack of any organized response by the British government to the Irish potato famine in the mid-19th century heightened popular discontent among the Irish people, and led to resistance to British rule. This would give rise to roughly a century of intermittent violence, both before and after the British withdrawal from all but the northernmost counties on the island, which to this day remain part of the United Kingdom.

Ireland is a member country of the European Union, having joined in 1973.

1. SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT IN IRELAND

Ireland remained a largely agrarian country well into the twentieth century, but after independence the Irish educational system became remarkably successful. The CIA acknowledges a 99% literacy rate in Ireland, and notes that the Irish Republic spends 4.9% of its GDP on education: this is a smaller percentage than either the U.S.A. Or the U.K., but larger than either Australia or Canada.

Ireland has produced its share of scientists -- the nuclear scientist Ernest Walton was born in Ireland and won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics, while a professor at Trinity College, Dublin (Reville, 2011). The Irish educational system, combined with Ireland's cordial relationship with America, led to substantial business presence in scientific and technology sectors (designed to take advantage of the lower overall wages in Ireland). The pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer built a 2001 facility in Ringsakiddy outside Cork, which produces the active chemical ingredients in its erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. Pfizer now has seven facilities in Ireland. (Lynch 2010, p129). The software giant McAFee moved its locations to the same region outside Cork in 2005, and expanded operations there in 2009 (Lynch 2010, p216). And microprocessor manufacturer Intel also maintains a substantial presence in Ireland (Lynch 2010, pp53-5).

2. AIDS IN IRELAND

The 2009 UN AIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic gives 6900 as the approximate number of people in Ireland living with HIV or AIDS, of whom 2000 are women, meaning that the rate of affection is over twice as high for men. The infected population is a scant .2% of the population, and the UN offers no statistics for infected children.

Irish response to the AIDS epidemic has been complicated by Ireland's religious history. Conflict between Ireland and the U.K. was frequently expressed in terms of a religious sectarian conflict, because the overwhelming majority of Ireland's population is Roman Catholic -- the CIA records that 87.4% of the Irish population is Catholic, which is a decline from earlier percentages. Indeed, the Constitution of the Irish Republic announces its official allegiance to the Roman Catholic church with its opening words, "in the name of the Most Holy Trinity" and the government only recently lifted bans on divorce, contraception, and abortion for any reason whatsoever (Lynch 2010, pp18-22). The Roman Catholic Church's entrenched resistance to condom use and its official disapprobation of any kind of sexual expression save for the purposes of procreation within wedlock made sex a notoriously difficult topic to address publicly in Ireland. Yet Irish culture itself has been taking a long turn away from Catholicism, largely due to the mishandling of sex abuse scandals involving the Catholic priesthood (Lynch 2010, p85-6). This overall shift in public discussion of sexual issues in Ireland has made it substantially easier to discuss and manage the AIDS epidemic than it was during the epidemic's onset in the early 1980s, when the church's hold over Irish sexuality was more secure. But in his 2000 review of a book on the changing sexual mores entitled Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, the Irish gay novelist Colm Toibin recorded a contemporary newspaper poll in the Republic of Ireland in which "22.5% of those surveyed would debar or deport from Ireland" all persons with AIDS -- Toibin indicates that to a certain extent, the old prejudices are still active, but he notes that a larger 43.1% of those surveyed would debar or deport paramilitary members of the Provisional IRA or the IRA's political arm, the Sinn Fein Party (Toibin 2001 p.260).

3. IRISH CULTURE

The arts and literature in Ireland are thriving. Ireland encourages artistic creation with a special "Artists Exemption" in the income tax, by which writers, composers, and other artists are not taxed from earnings from the sale of their work. The country boasts four Nobel laureates in literature from the twentieth century: the poets W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, and the dramatists George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. One irony, however, is that all four of these spent most of their lives and careers outside Ireland, working in London (Yeats, Shaw), Paris (Beckett), or the U.S.A. (Heaney). (George Bernard Shaw also remains the only person besides former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar in Hollywood.) But the most famous Irish writer of the 20th century did not receive the Nobel Prize: this is James Joyce, who also worked as an exile in Switzerland and France, publishing his monumental novel Ulysses in 1922, shortly after the establishment of the Irish Free State. Joyce's work was deemed a major artistic triumph by the literary and artistic world, but was initially considered obscene and was banned from import or sale into the United States.

The Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney probably remains Ireland's most famous living writer, and his work is marked by a willingness to engage with the violence that marked Ireland's history in the 20th century and during Heaney's own lifetime. His book of poems entitled North is viewed as a profound meditation on the nature of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, in an attempt to measure, as Heaney puts it in the book, "the weight of each hooded victim / slashed and dumped" (Heaney 1977).

In popular culture, Ireland remains a vibrant and vital place. The rock band U2 remains one of the world's most popular music acts, and lead singer Bono has also come to occupy a place on the world's political stage, using the tragic history of Ireland's famine to call attention to famine and poverty in Africa and elsewhere: Bono has been repeatedly nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize (USA Today 2005). Other musical personalities from Ireland include Sinead O'Connor and Bob Geldof, who has been the co-organizer with Bono of a number of charitable enterprises, and was the force behind the original 1986 "Live Aid" concert in which the world's most famous musicians donated their talents to raise money for African famine relief. The tradition of Irish drama which produced Shaw and Beckett also produced such film stars as Colin Farrell and Liam Neeson.

4. THE IRISH ECONOMY

To use an Irish vernacular term, the Irish economy in 2011 is "completely banjaxed," or in serious distress -- having experienced an extraordinary economic boom in the 1990s, leading to a characterization of Ireland's economy as the "Celtic Tiger," bad investments over the past decade inflated the effects of the U.S. real estate bubble and the subsequent financial meltdown, affecting the Irish disproportionately (Lynch 2010, p 213). Unemployment is currently rising and future prospects look dim. The EU, concerned that the Irish financial collapse would jeopardize European economic prospects as a whole, forced Ireland to accept a financial bailout (Thomas, 2010).

Lynch notes that the Irish economy seems prone to cycles of boom and bust which exceed those of ordinary European or American stanards. He contextualizes the present economic state of Ireland as follows:

The global nature of the economic downturn was among the factors complicating the Irish recovery. Unlike in the 1980s, when Ireland could count on customers beyond its shores to pull it out of the ditch, this time things were tough all over. The world economy resumed growing in 2010, but the rebound was muted….future growth rates will be far more modest than the Irish were accustomed to during the long boom. By some estimates, in fact, it will take until sometime between 2021 and 2026 for Ireland to regain its 2007 level of output….Ireland is not going back to the misery of the 1980s, but neither can it return to the easy affluence of the Celtic Tiger….Neither was sustainable. Neither was real…For a sparsely populated island of 4.5 million people boasting few natural resources, Ireland has for generations enjoyed an unusually high global profile….Either way, Ireland got more attention than it might reasonably have deserved. (2010, pp 210-2).

Lynch's sober assessment is agreed upon by most other analysts.

5. THE ENVIRONMENT IN IRELAND

The EPA in its 2007-9 report on Ireland found that "measures need to be implemented in order for the water quality in Ireland's rivers to meet European targets," noting that 30% of the nation's rivers are polluted. But overall the EPA found the Ireland has a "generally good environmental quality," most likely due to the late advent of industrialization on the island ("New Measures Needed to Improve Water Quality in Ireland," 2011).

Ireland ratified the Kyoto protocol in December of 1997 and Environment Minister Dick Roche in 2006 notes that Ireland's emissions had peaked in 2001 and were declining to meet Kyoto standards, with 2004 emissions per unit GDP standing at less than half of what they had been in 1990 ("Ireland's Pathway to Kyoto Compliance," 2006, p. 3-7).

6. THE IRISH POPULATION

The CIA gives Ireland's population as approximately 4.6 million persons at present, and records an extremely sluggish population growth of 1.003%. The decline in Irish population growth is a marvel, considering the effect that Catholicism and the outlawing of contraception historically had on high birth rates in the country. The current low growth rate appears due to the cultural shift away from Catholicism noted earlier. Most commentators on Ireland link the previously high birthrate, and the present decline, to a series of socially conservative but unpopular measures imposed by both church and state on the Irish population. Lynch notes that in the late 1940s the archbishop of Dublin "barred the sale of vaginal tampons, fearing their implication for Irish virgins" (2010, p19). A 1982 plebiscite to determine whether to lift the ban on divorce in Ireland was defeated when "63% of voters reaffirmed the divorce prohibition" (Lynch 2010 p25). Toibin notes the statistics that reflect these changing social mores:

IN 1970 there were seven marriages per 1000 people: in 1994 this had fallen to 4.4. In 1970 there were twenty-one births per thousand people; by 1993, it had gone down to 13.9….The Church has lost the war against contraception and dicorce, and won the battle, at least for the moment, against abortion. But it still works its authority when it can. (Toibin 2001 p 257)

7. CONFLICT