Portal:Ireland

Ireland national football team was the national association football team that represented Ireland from 1882 until 1950. The team was organised by the Irish Football Association, formed in 1880 in Belfast to organise football throughout the island of Ireland. Together with England, Scotland and Wales, they competed regularly in the British Home Championship. In 1914 Ireland were British Champions and in 1950 they played in the qualifying rounds of the World Cup.

After 1921 the right of the IFA to field an all-Ireland team was challenged by the rival Dublin - based Football Association of Ireland when it began organising its own national team. In subsequent years there were in effect two Ireland teams. Both the IFA and FAI claimed jurisdiction over the whole of Ireland and selected players from the whole island. The situation remained unresolved until 1950 when both teams entered the qualifying rounds of the 1950 FIFA World Cup - the first time the two teams had competed in the same competition. As a result several players found themselves playing for two national teams in the same competition. FIFA intervened and decreed that for future World Cups, the IFA team would compete as Northern Ireland, while the FAI team would be officially known as the Republic of Ireland. Read more...

Patrick Alan Bartholomew Ahern AKA (Bertie) (born 12 September 1951) is an Irish politician who has been the tenth Taoiseach of Ireland since 26 June 1997. He is head of a rainbow coalition government led by his Fianna Fáil party that includes the Green Party and the Progressive Democrats, with the support of independent TDs.

Ahern has been a Teachta Dála (TD) since 1977 and he represents the constituency of Dublin Central. He served in the governments of Charles Haughey and Albert Reynolds as Minister for Labour (1987–1991) and Minister for Finance (1991–1994). He also served briefly as Tánaiste after the break-up of Albert Reynolds' coalition government. In 1994 he was elected sixth leader of Fianna Fáil.

Ahern is currently involved in an enquiry into large payments made to him in the mid-1990s. This issue has seen him called before the Mahon Tribunal. As a result, in an address delivered to the media outside government buildings on the 2 April 2008, while highlighting the successes of his leadership, he announced his intention to resign the office of Taoiseach (and as leader of Fianna Fáil) on 6 May 2008. Read more...

Dublin city skyline

Dublin is the capital and largest city of Ireland. Situated on Dublin Bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, and is bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, part of the Wicklow Mountains range. Dublin is the largest city by population on the island of Ireland; at the 2022 census, the city council area had a population of 592,713, while the city including suburbs had a population of 1,263,219, County Dublin had a population of 1,501,500. Various definitions of a metropolitan Greater Dublin Area exist.

A settlement was established in the area by the Gaels during or before the 7th century, followed by the Vikings. As the Kingdom of Dublin grew, it became Ireland's principal settlement by the 12th century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. The city expanded rapidly from the 17th century and was briefly the second largest in the British Empire and sixth largest in Western Europe after the Acts of Union in 1800. Following independence in 1922, Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State, renamed Ireland in 1937. As of 2018, the city was listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) as a global city, with a ranking of "Alpha minus", which placed it among the top thirty cities in the world. (Full article...)

• ...that Newfoundland, in eastern Canada, has a unique dialect of Irish, closely resembling the Irish spoken during the 16th to 17th centuries and called Newfoundland Irish?
• ...that in 1631 the entire population of the village of Baltimore, County Cork was kidnapped by Algerian pirates in what became known as the Sack of Baltimore?
• ...that the modern game of croquet was invented in Ireland in the 1830s?
• ...that the Guinness company once produced a Marmite-like yeast extract spread called Guinness Yeast Extract?