Top Highlights

• culture. Recent population statistics show just over 4.2 million citizens in the Republic of Ireland, while counting the numbers of Irish expatriates presents a much larger, more complex problem. Numbers range as high as 80 million Irish émigrés, a figure that suggests that Irishness exists as prominently metaphorically and spiritually as literally...
• Red Martyrdom: Red because the martyr sheds blood for faith’s sake—this is the conventional martyrdom by torture and death. • Green Martyrdom: Leaving the comforts of home to live in some isolated spot in the wilderness, studying Scriptures and communing with God. • White Martyrdom: Leaving Ireland to lead a monastic life in some foreign land, the ...
• Perhaps more than any other culture, Ireland lives with the fundamental tension between its past and its present, between tradition and change, in the foreground of its everyday existence.
• Mary Robinson became Ireland’s seventh president.
• But it was only about 9,000 years ago that anyone ventured to the Emerald Isle. Why was this? One word: ice.