Ireland

Ireland is a country in Northwestern Europe that takes up 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. Its only land border is with Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and the state covers 70,273 km² (27,133 sq mi). Dublin is the capital; the constitution makes Irish the first official language and English the second, though English dominates daily use.

From the Act of Union of 1801 the whole island belonged to the United Kingdom. After the War of Independence the Anglo-Irish Treaty created the Irish Free State as a dominion in 1922. A constitution adopted in 1937 named the state Ireland, and a republic was formally declared in 1949. Membership of the European Communities came in 1973, and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 set up shared bodies with Northern Ireland.

Ireland is a parliamentary republic: the Dáil elects the Taoiseach, who heads the government, and an elected president acts as a largely ceremonial head of state. The country stays outside NATO under a policy of military neutrality and adopted the euro in 2002. A cut in corporation tax to 12.5% in 2003 drew American firms such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, and multinationals export medicines, medical devices and software. Irish companies include Ryanair and Kerry Group, while farms send cattle, beef and dairy products abroad.

Neolithic structures such as Brú na Bóinne and the Poulnabrone dolmen survive, and early Christian monks built a monastery on Skellig Michael. James Joyce set his novel Ulysses, published in 1922, in Dublin, and Yeats, Shaw and Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Guinness stout began at the St. James's Gate brewery of Arthur Guinness in Dublin. Gaelic football and hurling are run by the Gaelic Athletic Association, and Saint Patrick's Day on 17 March is the national day.