The history of Ireland is one that stretches over a vast amount of time. The first settled inhabitants of Ireland were groups of hunters and fishers who traveled across the water from Scotland into northeastern Ireland during the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) era. They were followed, two and a half thousand years later, by the Neolithic (New Stone Age) settlers. In approximately 700 BC the Gaels began arriving in Ireland, having spread across the rest of Western Europe. In total, the island of Ireland contained around a hundred small kingdoms. The small kingdoms were arranged into five bigger groupings, which form the basis of Ireland's modern provinces: Ulaid (Ulster), Midhe ( Meath), Laigin ( Leisters), Muma (Munster) and Connacht. Ireland was the location for a golden age of Christianity and monasticism. The religion of the Irish was Druidism; this was of Celtic origin, but blended with much earlier paganism. Celtic, too, was the earliest form of writing, the Ogam, based on the Latin alphabet, but serving for little more than funeral inscriptions on upright stones or short writings on wooden staves(Curtis, 2002). One of the leading figures in the Christian mission in Ireland was St Patrick. Patrick had first been brought to Ireland as a slave. After escaping, he had traveled to Gaul where he was consecrated as a bishop (Cronin, 2001).
             Northern Ireland has been classified as an "an ethnic frontier society" in which relationships are structurally antagonistic.(2) Thus, the border delineating the Northern Ireland state as part of the United Kingdom evokes opposing attitudes to its legitimacy from the Unionist-Protestant and Nationalist-Catholic population, the former looking to Britain and the latter to the Republic of Ireland for support. (Smyth, 2001, p. 155)
             Isaac Butt, a young man of unionism and Protestant Ascendancy believed that Home Rule would save Ireland from the excesses of democracy, the terrors of radicalis...