Ireland is not a British isle

0. Intro

While the term “British Isles” has always annoyed me when applied to Ireland, at time of writing it seems particularly important to clarify that Ireland is not a British isle.

It’s early August 2024 and there have been race riots all over Britain.

Online, there’s a significant uptick in people (often from the US) talking about “the British Isles”. About how the rioting is meant to protect things like “the indigenous people of the British Isles” or “British culture and the people of the British Isles”. And they mean to include Ireland.

Hence, a sense of urgency in clarifying that Ireland is not a British isle. Maybe it was, for a while. It isn’t any more.

Ireland is Irish. Ireland is not a British isle.

In any case, applying the term “the British Isles” to Ireland is not a neutral geographical description at any time. Certainly not at a time like this. But also not ever. It is a political term, a heavily loaded political term, and massively disrespectful to Ireland and Irish people. Basically, calling Ireland a British isle is rude and ignorant.

Right…one thing at a time.

1. It has not been in continuous use for millennia and it is NOT a geographical term

Yes, I know you keep hearing it has. It’s not true.

Some Greek voyagers (a fair bit BC) named what they thought was to the northwest of the European mainland something like the Pretanic Isles. (This became Britanniae later, in Latin). The origin of “Pretanic” is debated. It could be various things.

There is general agreement that it referred to something originally from the island then called Albion and later called Britain (and then called Great Britain MUCH later). The term wasn’t made with any real reference to Ireland (Hivernia or Hibernia) at the time. The Greeks were interested in Cornish tin and not much else. They took a word that meant something on Britain/Albion and just extended it. Neither they nor anyone else in the Mediterranean knew or cared about Ireland. 

The idea of “the Pretanic Isles” was also never common in either Britain or Ireland. Remember, Britain and Ireland spoke mutually incomprehensible languages at the time (P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, if you want to know). So whatever Irish and British people were calling Britain and Ireland at the time, it wasn’t anything that the Greeks were using.

Then, a fair while afterwards, the Romans conquered much of Britain.

They did not use the term British Isles. Pliny tells us about how the Greeks used to call Britain Albion and how they called all the other islands “Britanniae”, and then went on to describe Ireland.

The Romans called Britain Britain (not Albion any more) and they called Ireland variants of Hibernia. The Iberian peninsula was Hispaniae, France and Belgium (mostly) was Gallia, etc. Lots of things had names then that they don’t have any more. Things change.

Rather than trying to find references you’ll believe, just believe this.

After that, the term was not used any more for a long time.

The Roman presence in Britain waxed and waned until finally fading out in the 5th century. St. Patrick came to Ireland and brought Christianity and writing in the 5th century, at about the time that the Angles and Saxons were moving to England. Ireland became a haven of literacy in Northwestern Europe and someone later decided to call it the island “of Saints and Scholars”. Very nice

But, between the Angles and Saxons and Romans coming and going, it all got very complicated for a while. The Vikings added to the chaos. The Scottii (from the North of Ireland) invaded parts of what was not yet called Scotland and the Picts faded from history.

Centuries went by.

There was drama in Ireland with the Vikings and Brian Boru in 1014, and then somewhat later even more drama in England with the Normans and King Harold. 1066 and all that.

Normans came to Ireland in the late 1100s and there was various sorts of unpleasantness around that. The power of the Normans ebbed and flowed, while the Normans (in both Britain and Ireland and all over the place) started to gradually integrate as local Irish and British lords. The Normans started speaking English in England and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves” in Ireland. The 1500s eventually rolled around.

Many centuries had passed and all this time, Britain and Ireland were not called the British Isles.

Again, don’t believe me.

But then when did it happen?

2. The Tudors did it

As the 1500s got started, Ireland was run by two main and by then only slightly competing forces….the old Irish and the Norman-Irish.

While most of the various Norman Lords in Ireland owed their allegiance to the King of England (that’s a story in itself), and some of the old Irish Lords did, the ties were fading and Ireland was troublesome.

So, in the early 1500s, the Tudors (originally Welsh, remember, it’s important later) set about conquering Ireland properly. Much of Ireland was not even vaguely under English rule when the Tudors set about their project. Even where there was nominal rule, control was was dubious. Long standing Anglo-Irish (Norman-Irish, perhaps) families like the Fitzgeralds rebelled. English control in Ireland was not solid.

Some beloved figures like Henry VIII were involved, even if that’s not him in the picture. Known for his tolerant and forgiving nature, Henry cracked down on rebellion and resistance in Ireland and succeeded in converting what had been the “Lordship of Ireland” to being “The Kingdom of Ireland” in 1542. But things were getting complicated again.

Control, though better, still wasn’t great. Religion started to become an additional factor. Henry did his whole Church of England thing and divorced his wife. The Spanish were trying to rule the world and make everyone Catholic. (they’d just recently kicked out the last Moors and were busy expelling or forcibly converting all the Spanish Jews, so they were BIG into making everyone Catholic). The reformation had kicked off and the Counter-Reformation was underway.

In the middle of all this, the Tudors were still trying to conquer Ireland properly. It didn’t always go well. Ireland was heavily wooded and England wasn’t the all-powerful British Empire yet.

Meantime, the Tudors were also trying to kick off the idea of Britain as a thing. They were orginally Welsh, so had a slighly different view of the world. Scotland was even more complicated and dear Henry was also interested in conquering Scotland, though only through the “Rough Wooing” you might hear about. The whole religious fuss was making things increasingly tense and some unifying ideas felt needed and also potentially powerful. Plus, while the Portugese and Spanish were busy carving up the world, the English were trying to force a way into this discussion too

It’s now that we get to the origin of “The British Isles”. There was also “The British Empire” and “The British Ocean”, though only one of those additional terms ended up in common use. Ireland, in any case, the main focus of it all. As you can see however, lack of ambition wasn’t a problem. Ideas of conquering Iceland were mooted. The fishing grounds off Canada were well known and worth a fortune. North East and North West passages to Asia were being sought. The first English colonies on American soil were getting going.

At some stage in the 1570s, a Tudor propagandist named John Dee was coming up with great marketing. The terms above are his. “The British Isles” in particular.

It was a great idea, to give him credit. An idea which could claim ancient origin (the Greeks, remember), even if it hadn’t been in use since then. An overarching identity to unite Scots, English, Welsh and Irish under the rule of one King. Or, at least as far as the English, Welsh and Irish were concerned, one Queen.

After Henry VIII died, there had been a flurry of nastiness over religion, some more heads chopped off, and Elizabeth I of England had ended up on the throne in 1558. A Queen for the key period rather than a King. But the same plan, more or less. And now also an actually Protestant Queen rather than merely a frustrated King looking to bypass Church rules so he could have an heir.

Anyway…back to Ireland.

The attempted conquest of Ireland still wasn’t going that well for England and the Tudors, and by now it was Elizabeth rather than Henry.

The Irish Lords (particularly in Ulster) kept trying to get Spain interested. The Irish needed guns and money and support in general. They were busy using both the religious angle and with the idea that Ireland could be a backdoor for Spain to use to invade England.

The Spanish were interested in maybe marrying in to power in England or maybe invading. They weren’t sure so they tried both at various times. Elizabeth turned out not to be the marrying kind and going in through the front door hadn’t worked out too well. The Armada and all that.

Ireland, they thought, might be a nice way around the back. And the Irish Lords were still fighting. By the end of the 1500s much of Ireland was under Irish control. Were things on the up? Maybe, but England hadn’t given up and an extra push might make the difference.

Then the Irish and Spanish made a monumental mess of it at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 and that was kinda the end of that. All of a sudden it was over. The Irish were in disarray and the Spanish were losing interest in expensive misadventures.

English control of Ireland was total within in a few years and the term “The British Isles” had stepped onto the stage.

3. Irish as a subset of British

The following centuries were pretty grim for Ireland. Essentially, the Irish and the Catholic Irish in particular picked the wrong horse every single time over the next few hundred years.

First they backed the Stuarts over Cromwell. Cromwell is often ranked as the greatest Englishman ever. He’s generally despised in Ireland so you can imagine that hadn’t been a good choice. That was the mid-1600s.

Then they backed the Stuarts over William of Orange in the late 1600s. That ended with events like the Battle of the Boyne and the Treaty of Limerick. They’re so complicated I’m not even going to start. But again, most of Ireland made a bad choice.

However, from then on, the English and then — once we get past 1707 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain - the British project was to crush any trace of the old Irish culture and to make Ireland British.

Add to that, most of the Irish were Catholics and the level of oppression is perhaps best described by Orwell.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever

Irish nobility continued to flee to France and Spain (Hennessy cognac, for instance) and the oppression continued. The Penal Laws were introduced to keep the Catholics down and the Irish people descended in large part into a peasantry and poverty that is hard to even imagine today.

There were spasms in the late 1700s and early 1800s but they didn’t add up to much. The French briefly invaded Ireland but they didn’t last long either.

The last trace of Irish political independence — which was mostly nominal anyway — was eliminated with the Acts of Union that came into force in 1801 and The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was created.

Ireland was British. Irish culture was repressed if not entirely crushed. Ireland was, indeed, arguably a British Isle. Irish had essentially become a subset of British.

Though still not quite. Even at that moment it was “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”. Ireland still got a mention. Perhaps no more than a figleaf to cover the rape, but still something.

And during the 1600s and 1700s and into the 1800s, the term “The British Isles” was indeed in common use and essentially accurate use.

4. But then…the Famine and independence

If anything, the 1800s were worse in Ireland than the 1600s or the 1700s. Hard to forsee, but ultimately true.

The Famine is a grim story. It wasn’t a deliberate act, but the UK government did as little as it could. While the same kind of potato harvest failures meant people went hungry in Britain and across Europe, millions of Irish people died and millions more emigrated. Awful awful awful.

It should, surely, have been the end of the end of the end of any idea of Ireland. But it wasn’t. For whatever reason, it wasn’t.

In the decades afterwards, the idea of Ireland revived again. There were land wars. There was the Irish cultural revival. There was a renewed campaign for Home Rule for Ireland. Somehow the idea of Ireland as Ireland persisted. The idea of Ireland as a thing of its own persisted. I have no idea why, but it did.

All the while, British representations of the Irish could hardly have been more negative.

That revival and the revived desire for self-rule was repeatedly frustrated, particularly by the House of Lords in London. There was increased agitation and concern by Irish protestants about Home Rule. That’s all a sad and complicated story.

Still, Ireland and Irishness revived. Irish sports revived. Irish literature exploded. The idea of Ireland itself revived.

Then we got into the early 1900s and, sadly, instead of a transition to peaceful democratic autonomy within the UK or within the British Empire and with or without an eventual transition to being a Republic, the world got WWI and Ireland had the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, independence itself, and the apparently compulsory post-independence Civil War. None of it was pleasant. None of it should have been necessary.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ended in flames and death and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Nothern Ireland began.

And Ireland began again.

5. A new start?

The new Irish state started first as the “Free State”, within the British Empire. Then as the Republic of Ireland. But as Ireland, either way. With a very high level of autonomy, increasing gradually — both politically and economically.

Even Northern Ireland operated as its own thing. No-one in Britain cared that Northern Ireland ran as a rather unpleasant little sectarian statelet. Northern Ireland was pretty purely Irish, in its own nasty way.

And without a significant Protestant population in the Free State/Republic, Ireland spent a few decades trying to become a rather repressive Catholic-dominated economic backwater. And then the Troubles came on top of it all, which really didn’t help. Monstrous behaviour all around from various terrorist groups and often badly-behaved security forces. And cack-handed politicians doing the wrong thing again and again.

But these bad times too, they passed.

It’s hard to place when but — having had a limping start in the 1960s before the Troubles— at some stage in the early 1990s the idea of Ireland as just a normal country got into people’s heads.

Ireland shook off the chip on its shoulder. Irishness didn’t have to include “and it’s not British/English”. There had always been Irishness but now it was more confident and relaxed. Whether coincidental or not — and indeed no matter which direction the causality went - the gradual and then final end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland mattered too.

Ireland was reborn. And now really not as a subset of Britain and Britishness, but as its own thing.

(we can talk about Ireland and the EEC/EU another day)

6. Might Ireland have stayed British?

Here’s a thought.

The United Kingdom failed as a political project because instead of incorporating and accomodating Irishness, it tried to crush Irishness and failed.

The UK kinda still exists with Northern Ireland but it’s essentially back to being The Kingdom of Great Britain. Not the UK, not really. It’s Great Britain plus “Oh yeah. Northern Ireland. Yeah. I forgot about them.”

The UK’s Olympic team has “Great Britain” on their shirts. The America’s Cup team and many others are “Team GB”. The ISO country codes for the UK are GB and GBR. Northern Ireland is an irrelevance. A pain in the neck for Great Britain and not much more, really.

It’s all an interesting quandry for a country formally called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland but which can still really only think of itself as British.

But it might have thrived. A union of Britian and Ireland makes sense in a lot of ways. Two islands off northwest Europe, facing the ocean? It could make sense.

But it failed because it wasn’t a union. It was a takeover. It was a conquest. And the conquest was persistently and repeatedly resisted. Resisted in many ways beyond all logic and sense, but people are funny like that.

It failed BECAUSE it tried to make Irish a subordinate subset of British. It failed because instead of making John Dee’s original propaganda idea of “The British Isles” a union of equals or at least partners, it tried to make the British Isles in a manner more akin to that ascribed to an ancient Briton…”They make a desert and call it peace”.

It failed because it allowed the famine. It failed because instead of allowing Home Rule and peaceful alliance, it insisted on refusal. It failed because it executed the leaders of 1916, alienating a population that had until then opposed the leaders of 1916. It failed because it underestimated the Irish led by Collins and de Valera and the rest.

It failed because instead of absorbing Ireland happily into a new union, it kept trying to crush Ireland completely and in failing to crush Ireland completely it failed itself .It failed because it could not understand that, somehow, people in Ireland refused to consider Irish as a subset of British. Perhaps that was the ultimate failure, one of understanding.

The UK didn’t have to fail, but it did.

It is, of course, still true that most British people know next to nothing about Ireland. Odd, given the central role of Ireland in their history. They know about Agincourt, they know about Trafalgar, but not about the Irish War of Independence or about — for instance — the burning of Cork or the first Bloody Sunday. Seriously….many British people don’t know any of it happened in what was supposedly the same country. Supposedly their country.

Personally I think that an independent Ireland is a better idea, but it’s still possible to see how a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland could have been cool. But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.

There were other paths that could have been taken, but they weren’t taken. So now Ireland, since 1922, is no longer in the UK, bar a handful of counties in the Northeast.

And in the last several decades Ireland has moved away from being economically and culturally dependent on Britain to being its own thing.

For sure, Ireland is a subset of Europe and a subset of the world, but it’s no longer a subset of Britain or of Britishness.

Ireland is no longer British. Nope.

7. Ireland is not a British Isle because…

All the above is historically interesting but the argument could be made that it’s also entirely irrelevant. Even if Ireland had been a happy British isle for centuries, things change.

Today, Ireland is not a British isle. The term “The British Isles” can’t be separated from its political implications. And yes — especially since the term is actually a political term from the beginning.

Names change too, no matter how they started. History is complicated and the results of history change what we call the geographical features around us. The islands haven’t moved in relation to each other, but the relationships between the islands have shifted all over. And the names of things reflect the relationships between them and to the rest of the world.

Today, Ukraine is not part of the Russian Empire. It was for a long time. Much of Ukraine was Polish for a long time. At one time the Russian steppe stretched from Hungary to China. The steppe is still there, but Ukraine is not on the Russian steppe any more. It’s the Eurasian Steppe now, unless you’re talking specifically about the part of the steppe that’s actually Russian. Things change.

The North Sea used to be called the Germanic Ocean. Ceylon is Sri Lanka. Burma is Myanmar. Bombay is Mumbai. And so on.

Things change.

New Zealand may someday change its name to something in Maori. And if it did, you couldn’t reasonably stand in Australia and go “But we’re used to calling it New Zealand so we’re going to keep calling it New Zealand and screw anyone in New Zealand who doesn’t like it.”

(And hopefully nobody would be trying to claim that the term New Zealand was a purely geographical description. Calling something a river or a mountain — that’s purely geographical. The name of the river or mountain? That’s political.)

Things change. Ireland is no longer a subset of Britain and its relationships with the rest of the world are no longer dominated by being part of something British.

So even if the name “Pretanic” had actually applied to Britain and Ireland (it didn’t); even if the Romans had kept calling Britain Albion (they didn’t); even if the world had called the islands the Britanniae through the middle ages (it didn’t); even if the Tudors and subsequent English and British rulers had behaved less brutally (they didn’t); even if Ireland hadn’t become independent until 1992…..it doesn’t matter. Things change.

Ireland is not a British isle. Even if it was, it’s not any more. Things change.

So, even apart from the Faragist loons, remember this.

Ireland is not a British isle.

So please don’t call Ireland part of the British Isles.

If you like the phrase “The British Isles” then have the courtesy to add “and Ireland”. Or keep it simple and go for “Britain and Ireland” or “Ireland and Britain”.

And if, like many people, you keep insisting that it’s a neutral geographical term, you’re just wrong. Or maybe you understand that it is a political term and you’re this guy, happily and selfconfidently ignorant that things have changed.

Either way, please stop. It’s not nice. Don’t do it.

Thank you.

p.s. From sad experience, many people who are particularly attached to the term seem to think that anyone objecting to it is a mad Irish republican who spent decades trying to murder innocent civilians. No. Not me. Wrong tree. But bark if you like. I quite like Britain and British people (Scots and English anyway…not sure I know anyone Welsh)

p.p.s. You might try and fail to find much of this on Wikipedia. The British Isles article on Wikipedia is controlled by a small and determined group of Empire men like the guy above. They don’t want you to know, for instance, that the term wasn’t even in the OED until 1971. They don’t want you to know any of it. Wikipedia, sadly, is not politically neutral and its editorial controls are very weak.