* 1979 – A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb kills British World War II admiral Louis Mountbatten and three others while they are boating on holiday in Sligo, Republic of Ireland.

* 1994 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army declares a ceasefire.

* 1916 – Easter Rising: The Irish Republican Brotherhood led by nationalists Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, and Joseph Plunkett starts a rebellion in Ireland.

Although established to target the Irish Republican Army, the Black and Tans became notorious through their numerous attacks on the Irish civilian population.

In the same month the Irish Republican Army began the Irish War of Independence, a guerrilla campaign against British rule ; in 1919 this consisted of attacks on the Royal Irish Constabulary ( RIC ).

One of the most famous Irish Republican songs is Dominic Behan's " Come out Ye Black and Tans ".

He and 13 others resigned, actively changing sides in the conflict with many joining or assisting the Irish Republican Army.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army's ( IRA ) campaign against the partition of Ireland had begun in the two years prior to Bloody Sunday, but public perceptions of the day boosted the status of, and recruitment into, the organisation enormously.

In the following twenty years, the Provisional Irish Republican Army and other smaller republican groups such as the Irish National Liberation Army ( INLA ) mounted an armed campaign against the British, by which they meant the RUC, the British Army, the Ulster Defence Regiment ( UDR ) of the British Army ( and, according to their critics, the Protestant and unionist establishment ).

In the past Fidel Castro has expressed support for the Irish Republican cause of a United Ireland.

The Cuban government supported and still supports the Republican cause, but opposed the attacks which took place on civilian targets by Sinn Féin's military ally, the Provisional Irish Republican Army and of course attacks on civilians by their loyalist enemies such as the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association.

The Continuity Irish Republican Army, otherwise known as the Continuity IRA ( CIRA ) and styling itself as Óglaigh na hÉireann, is an Irish republican paramilitary organisation that aims to bring about a united Ireland.

The CIRA considers itself a direct continuation of the Irish Republican Army ( the army of the unilaterally-declared 1919 – 1922 Irish Republic ) that fought in the Irish War of Independence ; as such, its supporters regard it as the national army of a 32 county Irish Republic.

In a 1986 statement, he rejected " the legitimacy of an Army Council styling itself the Council of the Irish Republican Army which lends support to any person or organisation styling itself as Sinn Féin and prepared to enter the partition parliament of Leinster House.

" In 1987, Maguire described the " Continuity Executive " as the " lawful Executive of the Irish Republican Army.

* 1868 – Thomas D ' Arcy McGee, one of the Canadian Fathers of Confederation is assassinated by the Irish, in one of the few Canadian political assassinations, and the only one of a federal politician.

The Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League and the cultural revival under W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, together with the new political thinking of Arthur Griffith expressed in his newspaper Sinn Féin and the organisations the National Council and the Sinn Féin League led to the identification of Irish people with the concept of a Gaelic nation and culture, completely independent of Britain.

Fine Gael ( – meaning " Family " or " Tribe of the Irish ") is a centre-right to centrist political party in the Republic of Ireland.

Fine Gael is generally considered to be more on the political right in comparison to its more centrist rival, Fianna Fáil, but Fine Gael has never governed Ireland without the Labour Party, a social-democratic party on the centre-left of Irish politics.

In spite of this perceived opposition to Fine Gael from the left of the Irish political spectrum, the party, due to Dáil arithmetic, has never entered into national government without the backing of the Labour Party.

In a policy document entitled New Politics, deputy Hogan has suggested creating a country with " a smaller, more dynamic and more responsive political system ," reducing the size of the Dáil by 20, changing the way the Dáil works, and in a controversial move, abolishing the Irish senate, Seanad Éireann.

Fianna Fáil – The Republican Party, more commonly known as Fianna Fáil () is a centrist to centre-right Irish republican and conservative political party in Ireland, founded on 23 March 1926.

As well as slogans, Northern Irish political graffiti include large wall paintings, referred to as murals.

According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Le Fanu, together with his predecessor Maturin and his successor Stoker, form a sub-genre of Irish Gothic, whose stories, featuring castles set in a barren landscape, with a cast of remote aristocrats dominating an atavistic peasantry, represent in allegorical form the political plight of colonial Ireland subjected to the Protestant Ascendancy

Following years of political and military agitation for ' Home Rule ' for Ireland, the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 established the Irish Free State ( now the Republic of Ireland ) as a separate state, leaving Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom.

It is prominent in Welsh, Breton, Irish, Scottish and other Celtic cultures within traditional or folk music and as a social and political symbol.

As with their experience in the U. S., the Irish have maintained a strong political presence in the UK, most especially in local government and at the national level.

During the Counter-Reformation, Irish religious and political links with Europe became stronger.

' Religion remained the major cause of differentiation in all Irish diaspora communities and had the greatest impact on identity, followed by the nature and difficulty of socio-economic conditions faced in each new country and the strength of continued social and political links of Irish immigrants and their descendants with the old country.

The political violence that broke out across Ireland in 1919, and which continued on and off until 1923, had its origins in Irish nationalist demands for Home Rule within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and unionist resistance to those demands.

The political, military and financial costs of remaining in Ireland were higher than the British government was prepared to pay and this in a sense forced them into negotiations with the Irish political leaders.

Many left political activity altogether, but a minority continued to insist that the new Irish Free State, created by the " illegitimate " Treaty, was an illegitimate state.

Many of Tenniel's political cartoons expressed strong hostility to Irish Nationalism, with Fenians and Land leagues depicted as monstrous, ape-like brutes, while " Hibernia "— the personification of Ireland — was depicted as a beautiful, helpless young girl threatened by these " monsters " and turning for protection to " her elder sister ", the powerful armoured Britannia.

* 1994 – The Irish Government announces the end of a 15-year broadcasting ban on the IRA and its political arm Sinn Féin.

Throughout the 2000s Loach continued to intersperse wider political dramas such as Bread and Roses ( which focused on the Los Angeles janitors strike ) and Route Irish ( set in the Iraq occupation ) with smaller examinations of personal relationships.

The sweeping political dramas ( Land and Freedom, Bread and Roses, The Wind that Shakes the Barley ) examine wider political forces in the context of relationships between family members ( Bread and Roses, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Carla's Song ), comrades in struggle ( Land and Freedom ) or close friends ( Route Irish ).

It happened at the St. Patrick's Day party, a big affair for a regiment which had gone into battle for over three-quarters of a century to the strains of an Irish march.

The party split over the issue of Irish Home Rule, but returned to power in 1906 through a landslide victory.

In the years after Grey's retirement the party was led first by Lord Melbourne, a fairly traditional Whig, and then by Lord John Russell, the son of a Duke but a crusading radical, and Lord Palmerston, a renegade Irish Tory and essentially a conservative, although capable of radical gestures.

In the 1885 general election this party won the balance of power in the House of Commons, and demanded Irish Home Rule as the price of support for a continued Gladstone ministry.

In the past Dublin city was regarded as a stronghold for Fianna Fáil, however following the Irish local elections, 2004 the party was eclipsed by the centre-left Labour Party.

In December 1918, republicans ( then represented by the Sinn Féin party ) won 73 Irish seats out of 105 in the 1918 General Election to the British Parliament, on a policy of abstentionism and Irish independence.

Supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party also felt the rebellion was a betrayal of their party.

Fine Gael's Simon Coveney launched what the party termed a radical re-organisation of the Irish Semi-State Company sector.

Fine Gael is seen as being a constitutional party, with members and public representatives always showing considerable deference to the institutional organs of the Irish state.

Under Enda Kenny, the party has questioned Irish neutrality, with Kenny claiming that " the truth is, Ireland is not neutral.

At 2009 European Parliament election held on the same day as the Local elections, which saw a reduction in the number seats from 13 to 12 for Ireland, the party won four seats, retaining the largest number of seats of an Irish party in the European Parliament.

It was the largest party in Dáil Éireann at every general election from the 1932 general election until the 2011 general election, when it suffered the worst defeat of a sitting government in the history of the Irish state, a loss described as " historic " in its proportions, where it saw its electoral support base diminished by 75 %, as a reaction to the intervention, and in the running of the Irish economy, of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank in November 2010.

The Irish, a significant group in three of the swing states, did appear inclined to support Blaine until one of his supporters, Samuel D. Burchard, gave a speech denouncing the Democrats as the party of " Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion ".

Henry Nourse, a shipowner at the Cape, brought out a small party of Irish settlers in 1818.

A small Irish nationalist party, Sinn Féin, was widely, but wrongly, credited with orchestrating the Easter Rising even though its leader Arthur Griffith advocated only Irish self-government under a dual monarchy.

Green Party candidates have been elected to all levels of representation ; local, Dáil and European Parliament, and in 2007 the party gained its first representation in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Northern Ireland party having become a region of the Irish party in the previous year.