April 23, 1014 – Brian Boru Secures High Kingship at Clontarf

In the first millennium, the island of Ireland was a complex patchwork of rival kingdoms. Among the most powerful were Munster in the southwest, Leinster in the east, and the lands of the Ui Neill in the north. Vikings added their own influence to the lot with settlements at Limerick, Cork, and Dublin, their largest. Even though the Irish kingdoms constantly attempted to raid and outmaneuver one another with alliances and counter-alliances, there was a titular High King that held the highest authority in Ireland. In AD 980, Mael Sechnaill, King of Meath (the most southerly Ui Neill) maintained a delicate balance as High King, securing his place by halting the growth of Viking power in the Battle of Tara.

In 1002, the balance shifted when Mael Sechnaill's kinfolk in the north began to support the growing strength of Brian Boru, king of Munster. Mael Sechnaill was amicable with Brian Boru, seeing him as an ally and rival more than an enemy since they had both worked to defeat uprisings in Leinster under Mael Morda and the Viking ruler of the Kingdom of Dublin, Sigtrygg Silkbeard. Morda's mother Glormfaith, former wife of Sechnaill, was mother of Sigtrygg and later became the wife of Brian Boru until their divorce in the early second millennium.

Although Brian Boru had worked for a decade to secure his rule, an uprising broke out under Flaithbertach, king of the more northern Ui Neill who had been first in the line of succession to Sechnaill. Brian Boru swiftly put down the rebels, but it gave a chance for Morda and Sigtrygg to rebel themselves; the annals say Glormfaith’s sense of vengeance drove much of the political energy behind the rebellion. In 1013, Brian Boru and his allies invaded Leinster while the rebels’ unsuccessful raids took place on Meath and along the southern coast. That winter, Sigtrygg called up international support from Vikings at Orkney and Man, collecting a massive force at Dublin.

When spring came and campaign season began, the two armies met at Clontarf, west of Dublin, at dawn on Good Friday. Brian Boru prayed while his armies ravaged the landscape and put it to the torch. The action drew out the Viking-Leinster army, the hardened foreign mercenaries on the front lines followed by the Dubliners and the Irish. Brian's son Murchad and his fifteen-year-old grandson Toirdelbach led his Irish armies while the aged king continued to pray in his tent. His prayers were interrupted when Brodir, a Viking warrior from the Isle of Mann, attacked.

Yet Brian Boru proved quick, especially for a septuagenarian, and ran Brodir through. He determined to march out to the battlefield, which was soaked with the blood of slain thousands. The Vikings had superior mail armor, but it proved useless when the Irish drove them into the sea that evening. Brian Boru’s late charge relieved his son Murchad, who legendarily killed fifty men with each of his duel-wielded swords. As the battle ended, Brian Boru kept his grandson from pursuing the Vikings foolhardily into the high tide, where hundreds drowned.

With his authority secured, Brian Boru determined that he could continue to rule only through his son and grandson. He spent his final years tutoring them and establishing centralized training grounds for national armies. As Murchad and Toirdelbach came to the Irish kingship, they found fast allies against the common enemy Vikings with the Normans, who recently conquered England. Soon after 1100, Irish princess Blathmin married Stephen to become the queen consort of England, the first of many Irish rulers over the neighboring English.

The unified Irish were among the first to follow Norman knights to the Crusades. Over the next decades, the campaigns would ultimately fail despite the combined forces of Christendom, but the returning crusaders brought spices and technology that caused a hunger for more trade. Medieval Ireland had built a sophisticated system of investment and shipwrights to transport their warriors to the Middle East, and these were turned to an Irish merchant navy.

After being driven out of the Mediterranean by Italian fleets, the Irish turned south toward the African coast, battling the growing Portuguese Empire. The few Irish trading posts there were given up after the discovery of a new world across the Atlantic, where the Irish kingdom became wealthy through colonies in more temperate areas, capitalizing on the fur trade. After centuries of wealth, those colonies, too, would declare their independence, and Ireland would settle into its famously neutral role with an economy kept separate from the European Zone.

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In reality, Brian Boru was killed at Clontarf, as were his heir Murchad and Murchad's son, Toirdelbach. While the battle secured Irish authority over the island and severely weakened Viking power, an entire would-be dynasty over Ireland was wiped out. Mael Schnaill returned to the High Kingship, which would soon fall again to squabbles and constant upheaval. In 1169, the Normans from England invaded, breaking Irish kingship. It would be the first of many English waves of conquest over the Ireland, which would not win its independence until 1922.

May 24, 1796 – Irish Rebels Take Dublin

For centuries, the English maintained rule in Ireland. The two had been joined politically after the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 and 1171 under Henry II with permission of Pope Adrian IV (the only English Pope in Catholic history) to aid Dermot MacMurrough in retaking his lost throne in Leinster. Henry made further conquests in Dublin and created the Lordship of Ireland, making much of the island vassal states with relative independence. Henry VIII, as part of his Protestantizing of England, was named King of Ireland to assure his political dominance over the vast Catholic majority. When Ireland supported the Catholic James II against the incoming Protestant Mary and her husband, William of Orange, and lost the Williamite War in 1691, rule became systematized through the Ascendancy, the Protestant minority who controlled the Church of Ireland.

New ideas of liberty came to Ireland in the Enlightenment just as they had America and France. These ideas came later, as thousands of Irish were quick to join the Volunteers against the Americans in the 1770s, and, in the 1780s, most were pleased with the gradual freedoms won by politician Henry Grattan such overturning Poyning's Law that forced approval from London and granting Catholics of property voting rights (though they would not be able to hold office). By the 1790s, however, the Irish were ready for a rebellion to win their freedom.

In 1791, the Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast by liberal-minded Protestants who sought togetherness through Irish nationalism and an end to religious divisiveness. The success of the revolution in France excited the Irish in Ulster to find unity, which was a stark difference to the typical thinking that inspired sectarian warfare such as that between the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders. Loyalists fanned the flames of violence between them and contributed to founding the Orange Order as another society to counterbalance the efforts of the United Irishmen. When it became obvious that the goal of universal suffrage was not to be found politically, the United Irishmen looked for help in 1794 from revolutionary France, who dispatched an army of 14,000 soldiers in 1796 that never landed due to inclement weather and poor leadership. Uprising continued in Ireland without them, and the British reacted with violent measures such as execution, arson, torture, and pitchcapping. Martial law spread over much of the island, and loyalist spies among the rebels led to the capture of much of the Irish leadership.

On the night of May 23, the British military received late notice of an Irish march on Dublin. Samuel Neilson and Lord Edward FitzGerald, two of the remaining Irish leadership, decided to capitalize on the unrest born from martial law. British soldiers marched en masse to capture rebel meeting places, but they found them already held by the Irish. In furious firefights throughout the city's alleys and squares, the cunning and local knowledge of the rebels won out over superior British firepower. The city fell along with hundreds of British dead and thousands captured. Rebels intercepted mail-carriages, which was the secret signal to alert their allies in the surrounding counties.

While the British stopped a similar uprising at Carlow, the rebellion won out at Tara Hill and spread to the north, where it turned into guerrilla warfare among those seeking independence and those loyalists and Catholics who had come to distrust revolution after the French's capture of Rome three months before. Wexford (where the Normans had come into Ireland some 600 years before) became the center of Irish success, and the rest of the island became embroiled in war. In September, France finally made good on its promise of support, sending thousands of troops by sea into County Mayo on the northwest, giving all but Ulster to the revolution. The British, now wary of French intervention, began a blockade of the island, and a second expedition in October was intercepted. While the French were scattered, a few made it to shore, including Theobald Wolfe Tone, one of the original leaders of the United Irishmen who had been in exile since 1793 after the first discovery of communications with the French.

Wolfe soared through the ranks of the Irish with great promises, using to his advantage his theatrical leanings and firsthand knowledge of the French Revolution as well as interviews with General Napoleon (who himself did not much believe in the success of an Irish movement). Among some of his first actions were to remove the strength the Anglican Church, and then to weaken the Catholic church, placing as much property and money into government hands loyal to him. Wolfe dispatched Robert Emmet to the newly crowned Emperor Napoleon for additional aid, which was supplied, though the British redoubled their efforts to find a foothold among loyalists frustrated with Wolfe's rule. Napoleon was dubbed the greater enemy, however, and the fighting in Ireland grew into a stalemate until 1812 with Allied success in the Peninsular War and Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia.

After forced abdication in France, the British turned on Ireland, where Wolfe was hastily overthrown. The chaos continued until the newly made Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, an Irishman, was made military governor. While he was very popular in London because of his war service, he became immensely popular in Ireland after championing reforms, particularly Catholic Emancipation. With a better balance of political rule, reinforced by groundbreaking social services instituted during the Great Famine of the 1840s. Wellington's liberal nature, applauded by the Tories, would prove too much for British sensibilities, hamstringing his chances of a prime ministership.

Since its turbulent, short-lived republic, Ireland has been a key member of the British Commonwealth. It aided greatly in many of the Empire's international concerns including both world wars, although a renewed independence movement out of the Lost Generation in the 1920s that came mainly as social reforms and literary marvels.

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In reality, the capture of Dublin was foiled. While gains were made in Wexford over the summer of 1798, Britain put down the rebellion, albeit with substantial violence. Ireland would go through further rebellions in 1803, 1848, 1867, and 1913 until finally winning its independence in 1921. Ulster remained with the United Kingdom and would be the site of additional violence through the 1990s.

July 29, 1848 – Irish Rebellion Gains Momentum into Revolution

1848 was a year of revolt all around Europe. France's King Louis-Philippe had fallen to the Second Republic, Germans overthrew many of their local lords, and even the stalwart Austrians gained a constitution to balance the power of an absolute monarch. In Ireland, times were especially hard. The Potato Blight, beginning in 1845, had caused famine to last for years. The British government did very little to aid them, and now was the time for them to aid themselves.

Under the Union Act of 1800, Ireland had been joined with Britain into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Since its passing by Parliament, there had been men working against it in Ireland known as the Repeal Association. The political movement remained marginal before stepping up to fame as the Young Ireland movement in 1839. Along with new powers granted to the Catholics in the 1832, the movement gained force all over the country. A splinter group, the Irish Confederation, began the push for all-out independence and a wholly Irish parliament.

After the success of the French revolution in February, the Irish began to make their moves. While leader William Smith O'Brien hoped for a bloodless revolution, the government was more fearful and suspended habeas corpus on July 22. O'Brien and his followers decided to act to oppose this force of politics. Battles erupted around County Tipperary, culminating on July 29 in the village of Ballingarry.

O'Brien and other Young Irelanders had fortified The Commons and awaited the approach of police and military troops. A group of 46 under Sub-Inspector Trant had been spotted, and the rebels pursued them into a two-story farmhouse where the police set up defense and took the family hostage. O'Brien approached the house and explained to the police that if they were to surrender their arms, they would be allowed to return home as fellow Irishmen. After a long moment of thought, Trant surrendered.

A few hours later, a band of one hundred more police under Sub-Inspector Cox appeared, being met by the surrendering police as well as a crowd of hundreds of pike-wielding, jubilant rebels. In shock, these police surrendered, too. All through the night, word spread of the victory, and O'Brien worked to harangue his people to never give up the fight for independence.

On July 30, the British army approached the fortified Young Irelanders. The commanders were slow to assault such a massive, poorly armed but publicly acclaimed band, but at last the battle ensued. Tactically, the battle became a draw, and the army retreated for the night. O'Brien, however, called the battle a great victory and spread word of the success of the revolution in more-than-literal terms. All over Ireland through August, revolts would begin, and the British landowners and Loyalists would be chased from the island. On August 23, O'Brien and his followers of men, women, and children would take Dublin and call for elections to an Irish Parliament. O'Brien was named Prime Minister, a position he would hold for fifteen years until his death in 1864.

In September, while the Royal Family retired to Balmoral in Scotland, Prince Albert would come to Ireland with a massive force of British troops. He suggested an armistice, to which O'Brien agreed, and the two would begin to mastermind a fair treaty that would grant Ireland its own parliament, but still keep the emerald isle as part of the British Empire. Seeing the forces willing to fight to maintain conquest, O'Brien agreed. The Act of Irish Parliament passed narrowly in 1849, with many Loyalists crying out against it. With renewed Irish loyalty, however, the empire would blossom.

Loyalists and English would gradually leave Ireland while the Catholic Irish stayed and worked to improve their country with O'Brien's reforms over the rest of the nineteenth century. Industry, especially manufacturing, grew with economic incentives from the Irish Parliament and a workforce of millions (many scholars predict these men may have emigrated to America). The Irish would be instrumental troops in World War I as well as the counter-invasion of the Continent against Hitler's soldiers in 1941, leading to the downfall of Germany in early 1944.

Moreover, the Irish Parliament would give Britain a model for treatment of its colonies and creating productive home-rule. Fending off the Communist incursions of the 1950s and '60s, the British Empire would continue to dominate the world along with its ally and former colony, the United States of America. With the fall of their competitor the Soviet Union in 1992, Britain would lead the world into its next millennium as an empire upon which the sun would never set.

Ireland, meanwhile, would be a land of marginal success. Its industrial heyday was long over, with crime and unemployment rampant, though the 1990s would cause a renewed surge of economics in technology as the Silicon Isle of Europe.


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In reality, someone (thought to be a policeman, though it is not known who) shot at O'Brien at the Ballingarry farmhouse. A gun battle would begin lasting hours, which the vindictive rebels would win. When Cox and his men appeared, the bloodthirsty rebels would spring upon them and slaughter dozens despite their begs of mercy.

As the army arrived the next day, there seemed no more want of battle, and the Irish would give up their weapons. O'Brien and other leaders would be arrested and sentenced to hanging, drawing, and quartering as traitors. Petitions with upwards of 80,000 signatures would appear against them, and HM's government would commute the sentences to exile in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).

Ireland would not gain independence until 1927, still under the crown, and its republic would not appear until 1949.