Republic of Ireland

The capital and largest city is Dublin, which is located on the eastern side of the island.

Dublin is the capital and largest city of Ireland.

The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland.

The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom.

Located in the northeast of the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland shares a border to the south and west with the Republic of Ireland.

The legislature, the Oireachtas, consists of a lower house, Dáil Éireann, an upper house, Seanad Éireann, and an elected President (Uachtarán) who serves as the largely ceremonial head of state, but with some important powers and duties.

The president of Ireland (Uachtarán na hÉireann) is the head of state of Ireland and the supreme commander of the Irish Defence Forces.

Ireland (Éire ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (Poblacht na hÉireann), is a country in north-western Europe occupying 26 of 32 counties of the island of Ireland.

In the Republic of Ireland, some counties have been split resulting in the creation of new counties.

It had the status of Dominion until 1937 when a new constitution was adopted, in which the state was named "Ireland" and effectively became a republic, with an elected non-executive president as head of state.

The Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann, ) is the fundamental law of the Republic of Ireland.

It is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the Celtic Sea to the south, St George's Channel to the south-east, and the Irish Sea to the east.

The countries that are on its shoreline are, Scotland on the north, England on the east, Wales on the southeast, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on the west.

The state had no formal relations with Northern Ireland for most of the twentieth century, but during the 1980s and 1990s the British and Irish governments worked with the Northern Ireland parties towards a resolution to "the Troubles".

Although the Troubles primarily took place in Northern Ireland, at times the violence spilled over into parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe.

This was halted by an unprecedented financial crisis that began in 2008, in conjunction with the concurrent global economic crash.

The post-2008 Irish economic downturn in the Republic of Ireland, coincided with a series of banking scandals, followed the 1990s and 2000s Celtic Tiger period of rapid real economic growth fuelled by foreign direct investment, a subsequent property bubble which rendered the real economy uncompetitive, and an expansion in bank lending in the early 2000s.

It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the Republic of Ireland Act 1948.

22 of 1948) is an Act of the Oireachtas which declared that Ireland may be officially described as the Republic of Ireland, and vested in the President of Ireland the power to exercise the executive authority of the state in its external relations, on the advice of the Government of Ireland.

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Irish government and Northern Ireland Executive have co-operated on a number of policy areas under the North-South Ministerial Council created by the Agreement.

The agreement also created a number of institutions between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

It is a unitary, parliamentary republic.

Examples are Romania, Ireland and Norway.

In the late 19th and early 20th century unionism was particularly strong in parts of Ulster, where industrialisation was more common in contrast to the more agrarian rest of the island, and where the Protestant population was more prominent, with a majority in four counties.

It is made up of nine counties: six of these constitute Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom); the remaining three are in the Republic of Ireland.

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Irish government and Northern Ireland Executive have co-operated on a number of policy areas under the North-South Ministerial Council created by the Agreement.

The Council takes the form of meetings between ministers from both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and is responsible for twelve policy areas.

It is a unitary, parliamentary republic.

Since the London Declaration of 29 April 1949 (just weeks after Ireland declared itself a republic, and excluded itself from the Commonwealth) republics have been admitted as members of the Commonwealth of Nations.

It joined the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor of the European Union, in 1973.

In 1973, the Communities were enlarged to include Denmark (including Greenland, which later left the Communities in 1985, following a dispute over fishing rights), Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

However, the Unionist movement had been growing since 1886 among Irish Protestants after the introduction of the first home rule bill, fearing discrimination and loss of economic and social privileges if Irish Catholics achieved real political power.

In 1949, Ireland declared itself a Republic, called the Republic of Ireland, abolishing the last vestiges of royal power there and officially left the British Commonwealth.

Ireland remained neutral during World War II, a period it described as The Emergency.

The Emergency (Ré na Práinne / An Éigeandáil) was the state of emergency which existed in the state of Ireland during the Second World War.

From the Act of Union on 1 January 1801, until 6 December 1922, the island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Both acts remain in force, with amendments, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and have been repealed in the Republic of Ireland.

The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland also forms joint All-Island sporting bodies with the Republic of Ireland for most sports, including rugby union.

A referendum held in 1972 confirmed Ireland's entry, and it finally joined the EEC in 1973.

The Third Amendment of the Constitution Act 1972 is an amendment to the Constitution of Ireland that permitted the State to join the European Communities, which would later become the European Union, and provided that European Community law would take precedence over the constitution.

While Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution defined the national territory to be the whole island, they also confined the state's jurisdiction to the area that had been the Irish Free State.

As amended they grant the right to be "part of the Irish Nation" to all those people born on the island of Ireland; the articles also express a desire for the peaceful political unification of the island subject to the consent of the people of Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Ireland remained neutral during World War II, a period it described as The Emergency.

This period is known in the Republic of Ireland as "the Emergency", owing to the wording of the constitutional article employed to suspend normal government of the country.

This policy began in 1989–1992 by the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat government, and continued by the subsequent Fianna Fáil/Labour government and Fine Gael/Labour/Democratic Left government.

This gives Labour a cumulative total of nineteen years served as part of a government, the second-longest total of any party in the Republic of Ireland after Fianna Fáil.

This was firstly through widespread agrarian agitation via the Irish Land League, that won land reforms for tenants in the form of the Irish Land Acts, and secondly through its attempts to achieve Home Rule, via two unsuccessful bills which would have granted Ireland limited national autonomy.

Following the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the Anglo-Irish War, twenty-six of Ireland's thirty-two counties became, in December 1922, the Irish Free State, a dominion within the British Empire which later evolved into the present Republic of Ireland.