https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=WHr9GRgRw_M
1. Ireland first human settlement:

It´s first human settlement was around 6000 BC

2. Periods of invasion:

Gaels - Sometime between about 600 and 150 BC, Celtic peoples from western
Europe, who came to be known as Gaels, invaded Ireland and subdued the previous
inhabitants. The basic units of Gaelic society were the tuatha, or petty kingdoms, of
which perhaps 150 existed in Ireland. The tuatha remained independent of one
another, but they shared a common language, the Gaelic language, and a class of
men called brehons, who were learned in customary law and helped to preserve
throughout Ireland a remarkably uniform but archaic social system. One reason for
the unique nature of Irish society was that the Romans, who transformed the Celtic
societies of Britain and other societies on the Continent with their armies, roads,
administrative system, and towns, never tried to conquer Ireland.

Vikings - The Celts formed a huge part in Irelands developing society and played a
major role in our culture. They remained unchallenged until the late 8th century,
with the arrival of the Vikings from Scandinavia who began to raid Ireland as well as
most of mainland Europe. While other parts of Europe around this time were
responding to such outside foreign pressures throughout developing their own
systems of feudalism, the Gaelic society in Ireland did not lend itself to such
development.

3. Anglo-Normans conquest:

The unity that had been in place in Irish society under Brian Boru during the Viking
invasions, had however disappeared by the time Ireland faced its next challenge that
of the Normans from England in the 12th century which had long term influence on
Ireland. This challenge came from the highly effective feudal monarchy the
Normans, founded in England by William I (William the Conqueror) after his invasion
of that country in 1066 from Normandy in France.

5. Irishmen united:

Hoping to recover their lands and political dominance in Ireland, Catholics took the
side of the Catholic king James II in England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 and thus
shared in his defeat by William III at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The Irish
Protestant elite consolidated its victory over what was left of a Catholic elite by
enacting a number of Penal Laws designed to exclude the latter from property and
power. Protestants had not, however, won for their parliament the powers that the
landed elite of England had won for theirs in the Glorious Revolution. Furthermore,
 British trade policies discriminated against Ireland, and many of the Scottish
Presbyterians in Ulster began to emigrate to America, where their descendants
became known as the "Scotch-Irish." In 1782 a "Patriot" party led by Henry Grattan
and backed by an army of Protestant volunteers persuaded the British government
to amend Poynings's Law to give the Irish Parliament legislative independence,
including the right to establish Ireland's own tariff policy.

The reforms of 1782 did not extend far enough in a democratic direction to satisfy
such intellectuals as Wolfe Tone and many of the Presbyterian merchants and
farmers of the north, who were prompted by the French Revolution to form the
Society of United Irishmen. The United Irishmen allied themselves with the Catholic
"Defender" cells that had recently originated out of sectarian conflict in County
Armagh and spread throughout the south. A rebellion in 1798 was quickly put down,
but it convinced the British government to end Ireland's separate political
institutions. Members of the Irish Parliament were cajoled and bribed into passing
the Act of Union (1800), which provided for a single Parliament for the British Isles.
Catholics, who had been granted the right to vote in 1793, were encouraged to
believe that the united Parliament would grant them the right to hold parliamentary
seats. Not until 1829, however, when faced by a menacing agitation for Catholic
Emancipation led by Daniel O'Connell, did Parliament grant this right.

6. The Great Famine:

One of the most tragic and profoundly devastating events in Ireland’s history was
the Great Famine in the mid 19 century. Also referred to as "The Great Hunger", the
Great Famine lasted between 1845 and 1849 was arguably the single greatest
disaster that affected the Irish history creating a seismic change in the population
and culture. The famine was caused by the potato blight (fungus) that was
inadvertently brought over initially from North America to mainland Europe and had
eventually made its way to Ireland during the summer of 1845. It was not unusual to
have crops that failed and people thought that it was just an isolated event.

7. Home Rule (World War 1):

Another change for the positive in Irish history came with the movement to gain
Home Rule. Under Parnell's leadership an Irish nationalist party was born demanding
home rule, a separate Irish parliament within the Union- and land reform, was able
to win every parliamentary seat having a Catholic majority.

The agricultural depression of the late 1870s interrupted the rise in prosperity, and
the resulting agrarian discontent was harnessed to emerging nationalist aspirations
by Charles Stewart Parnell. Under Parnell's leadership an Irish nationalist party,
demanding home rule - a separate Irish parliament within the Union--and land
 reform, was able to win every parliamentary seat having a Catholic majority. This
solid bloc of votes gave Parnell and his successor, John Redmond, powerful leverage
in British politics whenever neither British party had a clear majority in the House of
Commons.
By exploiting such a situation in 1910-14, the Irish party finally forced the enactment
of a Home Rule Bill--but it also evoked the Ulster Covenant, by which northern
Protestants vowed to resist home rule by force. Paramilitary forces were being
organized by both sides, and civil war seemed imminent when World War I
intervened. Home rule was enacted in 1914 but suspended until the end of the war,
when it was understood that Ulster would receive some special treatment.

8. 20th Century Ireland:

After finally getting its Independence in 1922, the newly independent state of
Ireland composed of the southern 26 of Ireland's 32 counties in the following 26
years would had three different names each which reflect the stages by which the
goals of the defeated anti-treaty side were actually attained during the generation
after the civil war, with the republic of Ireland its present name being decided in
1948.

9. Northern Ireland:

Whereas the Republic of Ireland was born out of a nationalist demand, Northern
Ireland arose out of a defensive reaction on the part of a people who never quite
became nationalists of any sort. Not being nationalists, Ulster Protestants had no
vision of a national fulfillment in which all conflicts would be resolved; on the
contrary, they assumed that conflict was inevitable and that constant vigilance was
required on the part of the Orangemen and the "Special Constabulary" into which
their paramilitary force of 1912-14 had been transformed. This assumption that their
state would always be rejected by their "enemies" dissuaded the Unionist
governments elected by the Protestant majority from 1921 to the 1970s from even
trying to win the allegiance of the Catholics.

Members of that minority, however, were convinced by nationalist ideology that

sooner or later Irish unity would be attained; they refused to face the fact that
partition was a reality that would not go away. Thus in the North the assumptions of
both Catholics and Protestants tended to inhibit reconciliation.
Nevertheless, several factors more conducive to rapprochement were at work in the
decades after World War II. The decline of Northern Ireland's traditional industries
(shipbuilding, linen, agriculture) turned the government's attention to industrial
development
4. The English Civil War:

The most determined resistance to reconquest came from the Gaelic chieftains of
Ulster (the northeastern quarter of the island), led by Hugh O'Neill, 2d earl of
Tyrone, at the end of Elizabeth's reign. In suppressing their rebellion between 1595
and 1603, English forces devastated the Ulster countryside. Once these chieftains
had submitted, however, King James I of England was willing to let them live on their
ancestral lands as English-style nobles but not as petty kings within the old Gaelic
social system. Dissatisfied with their new roles, the chieftains took ship to the
Continent in 1607. This "flight of the earls" gave the English crown a pretext to
confiscate their vast lands and sponsor scattered settlements of British Protestants
throughout west and central Ulster (the Ulster Plantation). The crown's actions
indirectly encouraged the much heavier unsponsored migration of Scots to the
coastal counties of Down and Antrim. These settlements account for the existence in
present-day Ulster of numerous Protestants--many them Scottish Presbyterians--of
all social classes.
Elsewhere in 'modern' Ireland, Protestantism has been confined to a small
propertied elite, many of whose members were the beneficiaries of further
confiscations a generation after the Ulster Plantation. The pretext for these new
confiscations was the rebellion of the Gaelic Irish in Ulster against the British settlers
in 1641. Indeed, this rebellion triggered the English Civil War, which put an end to
King Charles I's attempt to create an absolutist state (represented in Ireland by the
policies of his lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford). When the
Puritan party defeated Charles, their leader, Oliver Cromwell, quickly imposed (1649-
50) English authority on Ireland. Cromwell repaid his soldiers and investors in the
war effort with land confiscated largely from the Anglo-Irish Catholics of the Irish
midlands who had joined the rebellion hesitantly and only to defend themselves
against Puritan policies.