Religious and political conflict : the story of Northern Ireland

Abstract EN

Ireland has had a long history of bloody conflicts as a result of invasions and internal divisions.

The first major Irish inhabitants were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who came after 8,000 BC following the end of the ‘ice age’.

At around 6,000 BC they began to develop agriculture including pottery, stone tools and wooden houses.

They also developed megalithic communal tombs many of them astronomically aligned and which remain today, most notably the tombs at Newgrange in Co Meath which were build around 3,200 BC, making them older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and Stonehenge in England.

There followed the Bronze Age from around 2,000 BC and the Iron Age from 600 BC.

Over the next five hundred years a gradual infiltration of Celtic speaking people occurred, resulting in the establishment of Gaelic culture and Christianity by the fifth century AD