[ Gaelic music plays ] ♪♪ -Ireland -- a small island on the edge of Europe between the old world and the new.

♪♪ -As an island nation, the sea is part of who we are.

The sea has allowed us to leave, and it also has allowed us to come back.

And that really is the history of the Irish.

♪♪ -Deep underground, a team of archaeologists are searching for evidence that could unlock the secrets of our earliest people.

♪♪ -So, here you can see a series of layers in the cave.

These are sediments in the cave system.

As you follow along my trowel here, there you can see a bone, possibly of a carnivore from the Ice Age period, embedded within that white material.

But we're obviously excited to think could we find DNA of early humans, whether that be homo sapiens or even earlier, even Neanderthals?

You know, we don't know.

So it's all up for grabs at the moment.

-Prehistory, in a sense, is vital to understanding the longer-term settlement of the island, because it is the first 8,000 years of settlement.

And everything that has happened since then was actually influenced by what went before.

-Who were the first settlers to arrive on these shores, these people from the deep past?

Archaeology tells us that there were hunter-gatherers who lived off the land fishing, foraging, and hunting small game.

♪♪ -The first people to settle in Ireland did so by boat.

Where exactly that boat came from and where exactly that boat landed?

That we can't say.

But they would have arrived by sea.

♪♪ -They lived here for 4,000 years before they disappeared into the mists of time and a new population reached these shores.

These new people were Ireland's first farmers.

-This is a remarkable phase of the human past, where cattle, sheep, goats, pigs are domesticated, barley, wheat are domesticated, along with other valuable food plants.

Now, that changes life utterly.

♪♪ -On the edge of the Atlantic, on the rugged north Mayo coast, lies Céide Fields, one of the largest and most important Neolithic field systems in the world.

♪♪ Underneath this vast area is a complete system of fields laid out by our first farmers and marked by stone walls.

They remained hidden for thousands of years by the bog which grew over them.

-I grew up a couple of hundred yards from here.

And my father, Patrick Caulfield, when he was cutting turf in the 1930s, he noticed lines of stones.

And he recognized that they had to be older than the bog, therefore very ancient.

There were dairy farmers who came here shortly after 4,000 BC.

In terms of world history, what we have here is an exceptionally early example of structuring the land into fields and controlled agriculture, if you like.

-"When he stripped off blanket bog, the soft-piled centuries fell open like a glib, a landscape fossilized, its stone-wall patternings repeated before our eyes in the stone walls of Mayo."

[ Cattle lowing ] ♪♪ -The island of Ireland from the get-go has a very strong relationship with dairy and dairy products.

♪♪ At least some of those cows were used for pulling heavy loads to move timber, to move manure around fields, for example, big stones, you know, to build megalithic monuments.

-These tombs and large stone monuments still remain -- an intractable and mysterious presence on the Irish landscape.

The most famous lies at the bend of the Boyne.

This is Newgrange -- older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids of Egypt.

-You have to remember, these people were farmers, predominantly.

But clearly, the level of precision and the level of kind of observation, almost hyper observation of the environment, I think this monument itself tells us how keenly people observed their environment and were in tune with the changing seasons and the differences in light.

-Newgrange was designed to mark the turning of the year through its alignment with the winter solstice.

♪♪ -This is the shortest day, but it means that everything after this day is getting longer and the light is coming back.

So it's an exciting time.

It's a happy time.

And I think that holds through the millennia.

♪♪ -The civilization that produced the enigmatic wonder of Newgrange would itself come to an end as, yet again, new peoples found their way to Irish shores.

♪♪ An excavation on Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast, led to the discovery of three Bronze Age skeletons.

One of them would shed new light on the people who had now arrived on these shores.

-Well, I suppose for me, archaeology, it's all about people.

I see a skeleton, but I'm always trying to look at what that person was like in life.

He's probably about 40 to 60, so he would have been a good age, you know, for a prehistoric person.

He would have been about 5'11" -- quite an impressive height.

And his genetics are similar to other contemporary people, and they seem to have been part of a wave of people from the what we call Pontic steppes over in Russia and Ukraine.

And they seem to have moved westwards, so it's really interesting that they got as far as Ireland.

♪♪ -New technologies, including analysis of ancient DNA, now allows to digitally reconstruct faces from the deep past with scientific accuracy.

-This is a world-renowned lab where they're undertaking a huge amount of scientific research in facial identification and reconstruction.

I'm really excited, 'cause, you know, I've obviously studied this individual's skeleton.

So I'm really curious now to see what the science tells us that he looked like.

♪♪ Oh, it looks fabulous.

♪♪ No wonder he looks incredible.

And, you know, it's what I would have imagined him, you know, as somebody of, you know, fairly high social standing in his community.

You know, he has that look about him.

Walking down the street in Rathlin Island, he would just look like one of the local people.

I mean, this man lived 4,000 years ago, and we know, as well, there's genetic continuity with people from Ireland and Scotland.

So, you know, we're looking at an ancestor.

♪♪ -Ireland in the Iron Age was a highly organized society based on a warrior aristocracy.

[ Elk lows ] The Irish were by now speaking a Celtic language, the precursor to Irish.

They had their own rituals and religious practices.

They had kings, queens, and druids.

♪♪ Royal sites commanded the landscape.

And at the center the Hill of Tara, seat of the high kings of Ireland.

♪♪ -The King of Tara was regarded as the King of the world.

And this was the center of the world, the axis mundi.

♪♪ -The royal sites occupy an important place in both history and mythology.

They were the inspiration for Ireland's most famous heroic tales.

-Navan, like many places across the island of Ireland, is an incredibly storied place.

It's the backdrop for a huge number of Ireland's most important and famous stories -- some of the earliest vernacular literature in Europe.

♪♪ -"Beautiful indeed was the youth, namely Cú Chulain mac Súaltaim.

In one hand, he held nine heads.

In the other, 10.

Those were the trophies of one night's fighting by Cú Chulain."

[ Crashing ] [ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -In the 1st Century BC, a new world power came to the fore -- ♪♪ the Roman Empire... ♪♪ ...which would stretch from Europe to North Africa.

♪♪ The Romans conquered Britain in 43 AD.

Ireland, however, was never invaded.

♪♪ -We do have accounts of Ireland written by Romans.

Probably one of the more famous accounts from the 1st Century AD is by the geographer Strabo, who gives us the first ethnographic account of the Irish.

It's not a very flattering one.

-"Concerning this island, I have nothing certain to report, except that the people living there are more savage than the Britons, being cannibals as well as gluttons."

-Strabo says that his information doesn't come from any reliable source, that it's all hearsay, and the people that he heard these rumors from have no direct experience with Ireland.

-As the Empire began to fail, the Irish, together with other barbarians as they were called, began to raid Roman Britain.

Many slaves were taken in these raids and brought back across the Irish Sea.

♪♪ One in particular would leave an indelible mark on the history of Ireland.

[ Soft music plays ] His name was Patrick.

♪♪ -[ Speaking Latin ] -"My name is Patrick.

So, I'm, first of all, a simple country person, a refugee and unlearned.

I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others.

They were pagans, and I hoped they might come to faith in Jesus Christ."

♪♪ -The Irish took to the new religion with fervor, with many of the kings and the learned classes becoming Christian.

Ireland itself was now an island famed for its monasteries and learning.

These shores attracted students from across Europe, with one English writer telling of boatloads of Englishmen going to Ireland to study.

-The amount of literature in Latin that is produced in this country or by Irish scholars who were taught in this country, is far in advance of all the other countries in Western Europe put together.

They're also learned in the native language, in Old Irish, for example.

And we have a massive amount of literature from the early period.

♪♪ -One particular characteristic of Irish monks of the period, which would lead to their presence far beyond their native shores, was their willingness to leave Ireland in an act of self-sacrifice for their faith.

[ Geese honking ] -One of the things that's invariably associated with the Irish is this idea of wandering, wanderlust -- Peregrinatio, as it's called in Latin.

and the Irish are the Peregrini -- the Scotti Peregrini, the wandering Irish.

-[ Speaking Old Irish ] -"There is a gray eye that backward looks and gazes.

Never will it see again Ireland's women, Ireland's men."

[ Soft music plays ] -These monks left their mark in some of the most inhospitable locations imaginable, the most famous the awe-inspiring jagged rock of Skellig Michael, seven miles off the southwest coast.

-The skelligs are such a phenomenon in geophysical terms I suppose.

They're just an amazing sight.

♪♪ So close to the elements, you know?

The next stop is heaven.

♪♪ -By the beginning of the 7th Century, during what some would call the Dark Ages, Europe was a continent ravaged by war and conflict after the final collapse of the Roman Empire.

[ Bells tolling ] Irish monks and scholars would bring their faith and their scholarship with them as they journeyed throughout Europe.

-We're in a rather remote, but very beautiful part of northern Italy.

We're in the magnificent village of Bobbio.

And it got its name and it got its fame from an Irishman who came here 1,500 years ago and died here, St.

Columbanus.

[ Dramatic music plays ] -We know of him in the same way almost as we know of St.

Patrick, because he has left some writings.

Very few, relatively speaking, but those that have survived are quite extraordinary.

-"The freedom of my country's customs, to put it so, has been part cause of my audacity.

For among us, it is not a man's station, but his principles that matter."

-The legacy of Columbanus would be long-lived.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe needed a new vision more than ever.

-We've just had two world wars.

Europe has been a killing field for millions.

And people are tearing their hair out, saying, "Is this always going to be the future?

Have we nothing else to offer each other except perpetual enmity and war?"

And for men from an intellectual tradition in Europe in which the story of Columbanus, the thinking, the talking of Columbanus is embedded, they put their heads together, and they say, "We've got to do something better than this."

They go back to the life of Columbanus.

These are the forefathers of what we call today the European Union.

-Irish monks and scribes would leave a lasting legacy in Europe.

Some of the most famous and most precious of early medieval manuscripts were created by these Irish saints and scholars.

♪♪ [ Mid-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ The earliest examples of Old Irish are to be found written in the margins of manuscripts preserved here.

They give us a remarkable insight into the humor and humanity of these Irish monks, toiling in their scriptoria, far away from home.

-And this is where you then see either interesting remarks about the terrible ink that they were using, the terrible shape that they were in after a long previous night of boozing, I suppose.

-In the margin of a manuscript on Latin grammar, we find an inscription that reads "Lart," meaning excessive drinking or hangover.

♪♪ The Irish monks did not confine themselves solely to the Gospel books for which they were renowned.

-The Irish were at the forefront of mathematics and astronomical art in the early Middle Ages, and many of their texts are still hidden in continental copies.

And we'll browse the libraries of Europe in search for those lost texts.

[ Monks chanting in Latin ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -This text -- this was written by an Irish scholar at around 700.

♪♪ And this is the oldest textbook on the reckoning of time, the founding text of a monastic discipline that was there throughout the Middle Ages, where the Irish were instrumental in creating this discipline and then from scratch designed a new landscape of knowledge.

-In Ireland, artistic production was also flourishing.

This golden age, as it became known, has left us artifacts of world renown.

[ Soft music plays ] ♪♪ This wealth would soon attract the attention of violent sea raiders from the north.

The Viking Age had begun.

♪♪ -[ Speaking Old Irish ] -"Bitter and wild is the wind tonight.

tossing the tresses of the sea to white.

On such a night as this I feel at ease.

Fierce Northmen only course the quiet seas."

♪♪ -The fear implicit in the monks' lines was well-placed.

The rich and famous monasteries were an easy target for Viking sea raiders.

♪♪ [ Blades clanging, men shouting ] -[ Speaking Old Irish ] -"Heathens invaded Bangor the great.

Down was plundered by the heathen.

Movilla with its oratories was burned by the heathens.

The plundering of Inis-Daimle by the heathens."

-By the middle of 837, the nature of the Viking raids had changed.

-They're raiding further inland.

They're using the riverways of the Boyne and the Shannon to travel to other Irish religious sites.

And by the end of the 830s, we start getting references to Viking camps being established in Ireland.

-These camps would become permanent settlements and Ireland's first cities -- Limerick, Cork, Waterford, and Wexford.

The largest and most important was Dublin.

[ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -The sheer volume of Viking warriors that are actually flooding in can't be underestimated.

They were all very young -- between 17 and 20.

From almost the very beginning, the Viking warriors were intermingling and intermarrying with the Irish population.

So straight away you're getting a mix of cultures.

♪♪ -The Hiberno-Norse continued to become more fully integrated into our society, intermarrying and trading with their Irish neighbors.

By the early decades of the first millennium, the Irish shared a common culture, spoke the Irish language, and had their own literature, customs, and laws.

♪♪ In Europe, society was violent and in the process of rapid change.

Much of that change was driven by the Normans -- land-hungry warrior elite in northern France.

Descended from earlier Viking raiders, they now set about conquering vast territories in Europe.

♪♪ In the year 1066, they set their sights on England.

♪♪ It would be 100 years after the conquest of England before the Norman elite would venture across the Irish Sea.

[ Men shouting ] -This is the beach of Baginbun, made famous by the rhyme, "At the creek of Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won."

That rhyme has its origins in a very important event that took place here in May of 1170.

-Raymond Le Gros comes with his 100 to 150 followers, and they set up fortifications on Baginbun Head.

And they haven't got supplies with them, so they raid around the local area, pillaging.

And this obviously causes then a coalition of Irish forces to be raised against them.

♪♪ -The local Irish were joined by a force of Hiberno-Norse from nearby Waterford.

They now outnumbered the Normans.

♪♪ -They've used a stampede of cattle to confuse the Irish, and they beat them.

According to various contemporary sources, what happened next was that 70 of the men of Waterford were captured.

-[ Speaking Old Irish ] -"They gave an ax of tempered steel to a servant girl, who beheaded them all and then threw the bodies over the cliff, for she had lost her lover that day in the battle.

The girl who served the Irish thus was called Alice of Abergavenny."

-Why all this brutality was indulged in was to send a message to the Irish that they were not going to be treated as equals.

-The Battle of Baginbun was this event that was seen to give the English a secure foothold in Irish territory, which then led to the loss of much of the rest of the island to English control.

-What really mattered was not the conquest, but the process of colonization that followed down from that.

The earliest conquerors -- they all come over with their female relatives.

They were making a statement from the very start that they were here to stay.

-One of the first places the settlers put down roots was the southeast of Ireland -- the most Norman part of the country.

-They don't get rid of the Irish people that were living on the lands that they conquered.

They were really essential for making the land profitable.

You had to have laborers.

There was also an influx of English and Welsh sort of peasants, who are drawn to the colony by the promise of land.

-The establishment of castles in particular had a military function.

It had an economic function, because it was around the castle that the new towns would grow.

-Bigger towns such as Kilkenny also attracted a cosmopolitan population.

-What we begin to find is actually quite a mixture of ethnicities, I suppose -- settlers coming in from England, from Wales, but, also, French settlers.

And by the 14th Century, we have quite a number of Flemish settlers, as well.

[ Thunder rumbles ] [ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -At the beginning of the 14th Century, a dark cloud lay over Europe.

-The Black Death is the greatest trauma that Europe experienced in the Middle Ages.

-It kills between one-third and 50% of the population of Europe.

The 1340s is when the plague comes to Britain, and then it crosses the Irish Sea.

-It was a very visual disease.

You broke out in great, black pustules.

So the fear must have been enormous.

-John Clyn, a friar of the Franciscan abbey in Kilkenny, would leave behind a vivid and terrifying eyewitness account of those dark and dreadful days.

-"It was very rare for just one person to die in a house.

Usually husband, wife, children, and servants went the same way, the way of death."

-Perhaps the most tragic part of all is that while he's writing about this, suddenly, his chronicle stops.

He then succumbed to the plague, as well.

♪♪ -The colonists now felt besieged like never before.

Suffering both the effects of plague and the attacks from the resurgent Irish, it was now a colony on the brink of collapse.

-So there's a real shift in cultural, economic, and political power in the 14th Century out of the hands of the English colonists and more to favor the Irish Gaels.

♪♪ -As these differences played out in Ireland, the wider world was about to change radically.

The Middle Ages had now gave way to the beginnings of the modern world.

-We used to talk about it as the Age of Discovery.

It was all very heroic stuff about these galleons setting off and discovering new lands and all of this kind of stuff.

But of course this is also the start of colonialism and exploitation.

-The Irish would play a part in this new and expanding world.

♪♪ The vibrant and busy port of Seville was a magnet for Irish sailors.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The most famous of these explorers was Christopher Columbus.

Columbus allegedly visited Galway in 1477.

When he later left Spain on his fateful voyage westwards, he had an Irish sailor from Galway with him.

-A man called William Eyre from Galway was on that famous voyage of 1492 -- Guillermo Herries, as he's known in the Spanish sources.

Eyre was put ashore in Hispaniola, which would be today Haiti, the Dominican Republic.

He lived there for a short time, but then was killed by the indigenous population.

There was a rising.

♪♪ [ Seagulls crying ] ♪♪ -We're here in the old port of Lisbon, a place called Belém.

The Irish people are coming here not just to trade and go home, but they actually begin to settle.

And you have the formation, really from the late 15th and into the early 16th Century, of a small, expanding Irish colony composed of all sorts -- merchants, as you would expect, cobblers, tailors, students, people from all sorts of backgrounds.

And it becomes a really vibrant and varied community here in that period.

-As Spain and Portugal pursued their global interests, England saw the rise of a new dynasty -- [ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -- the Tudors.

The effects on Ireland and the Irish would be profound and devastating.

-In the reign of Henry VIII, who ascended the throne in 1509, we start to see different attitudes being taken towards who was in control in Ireland.

-This was also a period of great religious turbulence in Europe.

It was the era of the Protestant Reformation and would see England, under Henry, break with Rome.

-In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and this would ultimately precipitate a schism in European Christianity that had enormous implications for Ireland.

-England were suddenly becoming conscious of themselves as a power that is separated from the continent in terms of it's now Protestant in its identity.

-Religion becomes that important badge of, well, are you loyal or are you not?

So if you're Catholic, you're disloyal.

If you're Protestant, you're loyal.

It creates huge tensions during Henry's daughter's reign, Elizabeth I. You get sustained attempt to press ahead with the introduction of the Reformation, the Protestant faith.

-The Elizabethan conquest develops, which pits the state in Ireland in a series of escalating confrontations with Gaelic and Gaelicised lordships.

♪♪ And we get this extraordinary situation.

The traditional English population of Ireland, the Anglo-Norman population rooted there from the 12th Century, who consider themselves to be English in identity, who are loyal to their English sense of themselves, who are loyal to the English monarch, become alienated from their own government.

If you're looking for assistance against Elizabeth in wars and rebellions, then the logical place to look is to her continental enemies.

And those continental enemies are Catholic and above all Spain.

[ Guitar plays ] -What we find is that in the early 1590s, Hugh O'Neill, second Earl of Tyrone in Ulster, greatest political figure in Ireland in that era, has agents in the Spanish court who are actively negotiating for military assistance.

Once he gets an assurance that he has that military support from Philip II of Spain, he openly declares war in 1595.

♪♪ -The rebellion led by O'Neill and O'Donnell would become known as the Nine Years' War.

[ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -The promised Spanish reinforcements finally arrive, but it was too little, too late.

And most importantly, they arrived in the wrong place.

The Spanish had landed not in Ulster, but in Kinsale, the furthest part of Ireland from the rebellion's heartland.

♪♪ -It was a great debacle.

It was great defeat for the Irish and the Spanish.

-Any possible Spanish plans to send further assistance to the Irish were now abandoned.

-With the defeat of Hugh O'Neill, we see for the first time all of Ireland is now controlled by England.

-O'Neill finds out that he's no longer master in his own house.

English common law is rolled out across the island, from Malin Head to the Beara Peninsula.

-O'Neill finds the increasing pressure from the new English regime untenable.

Finally, on the 4th of September, 1607, O'Neill makes one of the most fateful decisions in Irish history.

His departure from Ireland, together with his followers, would go down in history as the Flight of the Earls.

-1607, with the flight of the earls O'Neill, O'Donnell, Cuchonnacht Maguire, and the crème de la crème of the Gaelic Ulster aristocracy -- we anchor here in Rathmullan, make their way out into the Bay of Biscay.

-[ Speaking Gaelic ] -"This night sees Eire desolate.

Her chiefs are cast out of their state.

The grieving lords take ship.

But these our very souls pass overseas."

♪♪ -O'Neill's original destination was Spain, but their ship was blown off-course and O'Neill and his followers made their way through Europe.

He finally died in Rome, a broken man.

-It's not just that he has died, but with him the dreams of Gaelic Ireland have died, as well.

-The ancestral lands of the Ulster lords were now ripe for plantation.

What happened changed the face of Ireland forever, its legacy felt to this day.

-If you look around, you actually can see the mouth of the Bann, the Foyle, and the Swilly.

If you control these three great rivers, you controlled a huge swathe of Ulster.

-The state now takes six of the nine counties of Ulster, confiscates them, and relocates them to colonists, the majority of whom are Protestants from Scotland, England, and Wales.

♪♪ -It was Daire Coluimb Chille -- the Oak Grove of Coluimb Chille -- but it was refounded as Londonderry.

This is the Protestant citadel.

♪♪ They built the walls.

They built St.

Columb's Cathedral.

And they also arm this city.

♪♪ In the 17th Century, Catholics could not live in a walled city.

They were treated with suspicion.

There were a fifth column.

So the Catholics tended to live on the periphery of the city, and that was the bog.

[ Dramatic music plays ] -For the Catholic Irish, the beacons of civilization now lay overseas.

♪♪ The established Irish colleges of Europe expanded as they attracted more students from Ireland than ever before.

♪♪ One of the most famous and influential of these colleges was founded by the Franciscan Order.

♪♪ -So, this college is hugely important for Irish culture in particular, firstly because it provides trained Franciscans who return to Ireland, but it's also hugely important as an oasis for the preservation of Gaelic culture.

♪♪ -Leuven, with its Irish-language printing press, is hugely important here in cultivating these ideas of an Irish nation.

They are explicitly rejecting these very negative representations the English are peddling against them.

♪♪ -They're hugely important in forging this sense that all Catholics of Irish origin belong to a shared Catholic nation.

♪♪ -They are telling Ireland's story to their Catholic counterparts.

This is a story of persecution.

This is a story of loss, bloodshed, atrocity.

♪♪ [ Mid-tempo music plays ] -As the 1600s progressed, religious tensions were growing.

♪♪ Land in Ulster was now held predominantly by Protestant colonial settlers.

-We're dealing with a Catholic population that has everything to gain and nothing to lose by rising in rebellion.

[ Gaelic music plays ] -The rebellion finally broke out in 1641.

It was particularly brutal in the heavily settled regions in Ulster.

-Attacks on both sides, both from the native Irish and Catholic Irish on the settler community and, then, from the colonial government, as well.

-Extreme violence and a bloodletting on a scale that has never been seen before -- moments of what we would call today ethnic cleansing.

It's probably one of the darkest moments in Irish history.

♪♪ ♪♪ -It confirmed all their prejudices and suspicions about the Irish Catholics, and they were more determined than ever to crush all elements of Irish Catholic political and economic power in Ireland as a result.

-Following the end of the civil war in England, the Irish would now be faced with the most implacable of foes.

His name was Oliver Cromwell.

-Cromwell has retained this macabre fascination for the Irish, because, really, all the evils and sins of that period are placed on him.

He was the head of the army of conquest.

There's no question about that.

But he was one of many.

This was the English Parliament and the English nation at the time that was actually undertaking this conquest.

-Cromwell had arrived in Dublin in August 1649 at the head of one of the most feared armies of the age, the New Model Army.

He marched north and laid siege to Drogheda.

The town held out for eight days before cannons breached the walls.

[ Men shouting ] -"The enemy retreated.

Our men getting up to them were ordered by me to put them to the sword."

I forbade them to spare any that were in their arms in the town.

[ Blades clanging ] And I think that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men."

-Civilians, women, and children were also put to the sword.

Cromwell and his army now marched on Wexford.

[ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -Cromwell instigated a massacre of men, women, and children.

The thing that was emphasized again and again was Irish papists, that it absolutely allows us to obliterate you.

The lesser breed and the lesser creed.

-This was an act of vengeance.

He was very clearly over, as far as he was concerned, to avenge the massacres of 1641 of Protestant settlers.

I think he was really laying down a marker.

Cromwell was saying, "I'm here.

There will be absolutely no deal or settlement or any kind of reconciliation.

I'm here to conquer."

-In May 1650, after nine months, Cromwell left Ireland.

But the war carried on over the next three years.

Its effects were catastrophic.

♪♪ -There are elements of that conquest which are definitely genocidal in terms of simply wiping out entire communities, clearing entire areas of the country, with a view to refashion Ireland into a new England, and one that will be Protestant and loyal.

But the impact on the population in Ireland is absolutely disastrous.

-By 1653, the conquest was complete.

The Cromwellian settlement which followed would change the face of Ireland.

-A revolution in landholding that was utterly unprecedented.

Something like 8 million Irish acres are confiscated and then redistributed primarily to more Protestant colonists.

-This is the single largest transfer of land anywhere in Western Europe.

♪♪ -One of the other consequences of the 1650s particularly was the transplantation of populations, really from the east coast of Ireland to the west -- in other words, to hell or to Connacht.

-You are talking tens of thousands of people who are being transplanted across the River Shannon effectively into a native reservation.

-The move west had to be made mostly in winter.

The weather was very severe and the roads almost impassable.

Hundreds perished along the way.

Those who disobeyed were subject to being killed on sight.

-[ Speaking Gaelic ] -"Most generous God, Lord of all blessings, look at the Irish now left powerless.

As we travel westward to Connacht, our old friends, bereft, are left behind us."

[ Gaelic music plays ] -One Irish poet described it as "the war that finished Ireland."

While many were displaced and dispossessed at home, others found themselves transported thousands of miles to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ Once they arrived in Barbados, the captives were sold as indentured servants and sent to work on the many sugar plantations on the island.

-So, when you hear the term "indentured," seems almost benign, but what you're really dealing with are men, women, and children from as young as 5 to maybe about 50s, 60s being rounded up, like shanghaied, and sent to an island that they know absolutely nothing about.

♪♪ The way in which one seeks to oppress and suppress a native population and to exploit them both economically and politically, is transferred from Ireland to the Caribbean.

♪♪ -On this plantation, they are still cultivating the sugar cane, like they would have back in the 17th Century.

We would have had hundreds of Irish indentured servants working in the fields, often alongside African chattel slaves.

And it wasn't just the men who worked in the fields.

The women did, as well.

A third of the indentured servants who came from Ireland were female.

We also had children.

Many of them were Irish speakers.

And this is backbreaking work.

It's brutal, it's hot, it's humid.

♪♪ -And when you take a look at the historical record in early documents, that sense of wanting freedom is shared by both the Irish indentured and the enslaved Africans, to the point where some of the early rebellions in the 1670s and 1680s actually collaborations between Irish indentured and enslaved Africans.

[ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -The final decades of the 17th Century would also be filled with conflict back in Ireland... ♪♪ ...as the Catholic King, James, faced a rival for the throne, his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.

♪♪ The supporters of James were known as Jacobites.

♪♪ -James is deposed.

Ireland rallies to James' cause.

The Catholics, the Jacobites -- they support their king in the hope that when he is restored that he would restore the states that most of them had lost fighting for his father and his brother against Cromwell.

-The battle for control of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland would be a European conflict fought on Irish soil.

It began with an advance by King James and his army on the Protestant citadel of Derry.

-It's the apprentice boys.

It's the young men of the city who take the fateful decision to close the gates.

They at this stage held this city for William, for the Protestant cause.

A siege begins.

It's the longest siege in British and Irish military history.

-The siege lasted for 105 days until the city was relieved... and the Jacobite forces retreated.

-The siege of Derry is an iconic event in Ulster Loyalist history and memory.

♪♪ Derry became a symbol of Ulster Protestant resistance and resilience and determination never to surrender.

-William now left England and followed James to Ireland.

Their armies faced each other at the Battle of the Boyne.

[ Men shouting ] -William marches in.

James flees the field, leaves the Irish to stew in their juice.

-And the result is a win for William III.

The Jacobite forces largely are able to retreat in good order.

-They meet their Waterloo at the Battle of Aughrim.

The Jacobites' army is obliterated.

They're forced them to retreat behind the walls of Limerick.

-Patrick Sarsfield, the leader of the Irish Jacobite forces, now signs the Treaty of Limerick, which allowed the defeated army to follow King James to France.

[ Geese honking ] Over 12,000 Irish soldiers and their families left Ireland.

They would be known to history as the Wild Geese.

♪♪ -"These men are leaving all that's most dear in life for a strange land to serve in an army that hardly knows our people.

They are true to Ireland and have still hopes for her cause.

We will make another Ireland in the armies of the great King of France.

-Louis XIV formed several regiments.

These regiments are manned by rank-and-file Irish, officered by Irish in the 1690s and in the early 1700s.

-Les Invalides was established in 1671 by King Louis XIV of France.

And he invested enormously in his army, and this was part of that project, which was to construct a hospital where wounded soldiers could recuperate.

A total of 2,600 Irish veterans came and stayed here.

We have evidence of Irish men playing hurling out on the fields.

So a little bit of Ireland here at Les Invalides.

-The Wild Geese spread all over Catholic Europe, but in Ireland, new laws called the Penal Laws were introduced.

They would ensure the primacy of the new Protestant regime.

[ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -This code, as it becomes known, of penal laws is imposed on the Irish statute that ultimately renders the Irish Catholic a second-class citizen in his own country.

They are the African-Americans at the back of the bus.

♪♪ -So in every way now, we're seeing the Protestant community control the political, the economic, the commercial infrastructure of Ireland.

-It's best encapsulated in a couplet from Eoghan Rua O Súilleabháin.

As he said, you know... [ Speaking Gaelic ] "It's not the poverty.

It's the indignity."

It's that idea that you are never -- you are never under any illusion as to who the top dog is.

[ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -By the middle of the 18th Century, instead of looking to Europe, more and more Irish were looking westwards.

Their destination?

The British colonies of North America.

-Three-quarters of the migrants who came from Ireland to North America in the 18th Century were Protestant, and three-quarters of those Protestants were Presbyterians from Ulster.

♪♪ -The British colonies in North America are not welcoming for Catholics.

They don't like Catholics at all.

Just about every colony has discriminatory laws against Catholics.

-At the end of the 17th Century and into the 18th Century, Catholicism was proscribed.

You could not be a practicing Catholic.

If you were, you would be penalized.

If you were a Jesuit, you would be hung.

-Other Irish set their sights further north, drawn to the rich fishing grounds around Newfoundland, known to the Irish as Talamh an Eisc -- the Land of Fish.

-After about 1720, the Irish began to arrive in some numbers.

The first were young men almost entirely from around Waterford city and the hinterland -- southwest Wexford, south Carlow, south Kilkenny, southeast Tipperary, all County Waterford, and even southeast Cork.

And they would fish as servants for the English masters.

Some of them did not have English, so they would learn their English here from the English planters.

And gradually, women joined, settled, so Irish families began to settle.

Today, two-thirds of Petty Harbour at least is of Irish Catholic descent.

♪♪ [ Seagulls crying ] [ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ -The latter years of the 18th Century would be known as the Age of Revolution in both the New World and the old.

♪♪ -The role that the Irish played in the Revolution is primarily the Ulster Presbyterian Irish.

They tended to be patriot.

They were on the American side, not the British side.

-They had a real grudge against the British crown.

So when the opportunity came, they joined the colonists and fought against the British.

-But the American Revolution would not be the only seismic event of the time.

The French Revolution would set Europe alight.

Many of the Irish elite were closely aligned with the deposed King Louis XVI.

His execution and that of his wife, Marie Antoinette, stunned Europe.

♪♪ A firsthand account of Louie's execution is preserved in the library of the Irish College in Paris.

-These are the letters from the Abbé Edgeworth.

Edgeworth was born in Edgeworthstown, in Longford, moved to Paris, where he was educated and became a priest.

He became the confessor to Louis XVI, and indeed attended him on the scaffold at the time of his execution in 1793.

And in his letters, he describes the aftermath of the actual execution.

-"As soon as a fatal blow was given, I fell upon my knees, and thus remained until the vile wretch who acted the principal part in this horror tragedy came with shouts of joy, showing the bleeding head to the mob and sprinkling me with the blood that streamed from it."

-An Irish person is present for probably one of the most tumultuous events that marks the watershed in the transition from Ancien Régime Europe to the modern period.

♪♪ [ Dramatic music plays ] -Inspired by revolutionary events abroad, a new movement, the United Irishmen, was founded in Ireland by Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant radical.

Their aim -- to unite Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter and to break the link with England.

-I think in the 1790s Ireland was a very combustible country, and that all came to a head in 1798, then, when the United Irishmen attempted a rebellion.

it broke out in Wexford.

-The guerrilla hit-and-run stuff that they were doing was working really well.

The British cavalry and the yeomanry and whatever were absolutely terrified of pikes -- the long pikes.

The cavalry never went near pikemen.

They were very successful in the fields -- the barley fields of North Wexford.

They were very successful in doing that.

But fighting a pitched battle where the British were able to bring in their cannon and so on, you know, as what happened here on Vinegar Hill -- that was foolish.

-"On Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

20,000 died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin... ...and in August the barley grew up out of the grave."

♪♪ -Each part of the rebellion was isolated and crushed by the British, and it failed because they were able to use their superior military power to crush it.

-The brief but bloody rebellion had been defeated.

The unity that had been seen between Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter was now broken.

♪♪ The Act of Union made Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom.

Irish Catholics were hopeful that the British Parliament at Westminster, which was now in control, would repeal the Penal Laws and grant Catholic emancipation.

-This was another betrayal by the British, and so there was huge resentment.

-This resentment would be expressed not in violent rebellion... but in a mass movement under a charismatic leader.

♪♪ -Daniel O'Connell is a massively important figure in molding this new concept of a modern Ireland and what it meant to be Irish.

-He was the great civil rights leader of the 19th century, and he raised Irish Catholics, he raised Irish nationalists from their knees.

He gave them back their self-respect and he also won them their freedom.

-Daniel O'Connell finally won Catholic emancipation for his people, but his fight for civil rights was not confined to Ireland.

-Daniel O'Connell was a liberator who believed that everyone should be free.

And the plight of men, women, and children born into slavery, being whipped, being abused, being raped, being tortured, that moved him deeply because he knew what it was like to be an oppressed people, and he was going to make himself a champion of freedom, whether that was in Ireland or Britain or in the United States.

-Among the people that Daniel O'Connell inspired was Frederick Douglass, one of the most famous Black abolitionists of the 19th century.

Douglass, who had escaped from slavery himself, visited Ireland in 1845.

Douglass saw firsthand the suffering and strife of the people experiencing the first months of what was to become known in Irish as An Gorta Mór -- The Great Hunger.

-"I've heard much of the misery and wretchedness of the Irish people.

I must confess, my experience has convinced me that the half has not been told.

I see much here to remind me of my former condition."

♪♪ -The Great Famine is a monumental disaster, and it's the Irish poor who are the victims of this ghastly tragedy.

-"On this very day a cry of Famine, wilder and more fearful than ever, is rising from every parish and county in the land."

-The famine was a huge failure of the British state, and I think there is no way around that, that I think if the exact same thing had been happening in any part of England, Scotland, or Wales, the response of the British Parliament would have been different.

-"The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the people."

-There was a belief, effectively, that the Irish character and attitude needed to be totally changed.

-"For our part, we regard the potato blight as a blessing.

When the Celts once cease to be potato eaters, they must become carnivorous."

-The cancer of dependency had to be cured.

The cure in question proved to be extraordinarily cruel... and the result was a horrific calamity in which a million people plus died.

-You essentially had a society which was disappearing.

Whole valleys, whole hillsides turned silent.

Massive transition from being essentially a very loquacious, bilingual culture into one which was increasingly monoglot anglophone, but which had also turned quiet.

The singing, the dancing, the young people, the vibrancy had gone.

♪♪ -[ Singing in Gaelic ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -"The black potatoes scattered our neighbors, sent them to the poor house and across the sea.

They are stretched in hundreds in mountain graveyards.

May the heavenly host take up their plea."

-In a population of 8.5 million approximately, over 1.1 million died, just over 2 million people left the country.

That's a reduction in the population by 1/3 in 10 years.

That's an event without parallel in contemporary European history.

♪♪ -The Dunbrody is a replica of an actual famine ship, and it was operated and owned by the Graves family from New Ross.

Between 1848 and 1858, over 20,000 people traveled from the quayside here in New Ross.

There would have been upwards of 300 people on some of those vessels that would have traveled on a six- to seven-week journey across the Atlantic.

♪♪ -Many of those who fled Ireland during the famine years made their way first to Liverpool.

In 1850 alone, over a quarter of a million arrived in the city.

-We're here in the Albert Dock.

In front of us is the River Mersey, which is where all of the Irish would have arrived.

There are huge paupers' graves with thousands of the Irish dead in Liverpool from that period.

People may have ended up on fever vessels.

They may have ended up in the workhouse or gone on to America, Australia.

But certainly nobody was ever going home again.

-♪ A stór mo chroí ♪ ♪ When you're far away ♪ ♪ From the home that you'll soon be leaving ♪ ♪♪ ♪ And tis many is the time by night and by day ♪ ♪ That your heart will be sorely grieving ♪ -The ones who got to North America felt they were lucky.

But again, we have to temper that with the fact that we know maybe 10% of them died onboard ships.

We don't know precisely.

Emigration was largely unregulated.

And then, as we know from the records in Grosse Ile and Montreal, people died on arrival, and people's life span because of what they'd been through was shortened.

So even though people fled from famine, they didn't totally escape from its consequences.

♪♪ -"They are dying on the rocks and on the beach, where they have been cast by the sailors who simply could not carry them to the hospitals.

We buried 28 yesterday, 28 today.

And now, two hours past midnight, there are 30 dead we will bury tomorrow."

♪♪ -The idea that the famine was a Catholic thing, it's been proven wrong by many Irish historians now.

In Canada, a large number, maybe 20% of the 38,000 migrants who landed in Toronto in 1847, were Protestant.

Typhus knew no religion.

There were Protestants on those ships.

They died here as well as Catholics did.

♪♪ -The United States would remain the preferred destination for the majority.

♪♪ -Behind me is the waterfront that bordered the 2nd and 4th Wards of New York.

During the famine years, hundreds of thousands of Irish would have set their first foot in America here on these East River docks.

-In the 1840s, the Irish accounted for 45% of all immigrants to the United States.

That means the Irish were very, very visible.

-Many Irish made their homes in Lower Manhattan, an area then known as Five Points -- today's Chinatown.

-This is one of the more affordable neighborhoods in the 19th century.

Outsiders saw it as noxious, dangerous, known for drinking, prostitution, gambling.

The people who lived here, to them, it was home.

♪♪ -These were also the days of "no Irish need apply."

-Native-born Americans saw the Irish wherever they looked, and they didn't often like what they saw.

They objected to how they dressed, how they spoke, how they looked.

♪♪ -They were portrayed as having kind of simian characteristics, the way that African-Americans were portrayed.

♪♪ Irish and African-Americans live together harmoniously in a number of communities, and there was a lot of cultural interconnection.

♪♪ -This was the major Catholic cemetery for the Archdiocese of New York in the second half of the 19th century.

It is arguably the largest Irish graveyard on the entire planet.

♪♪ -The famine migrants who arrived in New York in these years were not coming into a vacuum.

Many Irish had arrived earlier in the century.

Many of them made good.

When thousands of their impoverished fellow Irish arrived, they did not turn their backs.

-I mean, we have this image of the starving, poverty-stricken Irish, but that's only part of the story.

You also had wealthy middle class and upper class Catholics who were ready and able to help.

-♪ Well, myself and a hundred more to America sailed o'er ♪ -The Irish arrived to a country that would soon be torn apart by political differences.

In 1861, the American Civil War broke out.

Irish-led regiments drawn from the East Coast cities where the majority of the Irish had settled were prominent on the side of the Union.

-♪ Saying "Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln" ♪ -The Irish fought on both sides.

Those who were in the South fought with their -- their state, as was the pattern throughout the Civil War.

♪♪ -Gradually, in all the major urban areas where the Irish settled in numbers, the next generation began increasingly to move up in society.

Their political acumen was obvious from the beginning.

-People moved to cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York, and the Irish community organized themselves politically, provided all sorts of support services for one another.

And I think that helped maintain this community.

-The real way that that power change came about was through sheer numbers and organization, and in places like Boston and New York and Chicago, it was actually numbers of Irish immigrants who then registered to vote that really made the change.

♪♪ -As well as crossing the Atlantic, some Irish set their sights on an even more distant location -- Australia.

The first Irish to arrive had been sent as convicts.

In the decades following the famine, the Irish and others were now coming to Australia as free settlers.

-Around 1875, you've got thousands of Irish people.

They're going to South Australia, to Victoria, to Melbourne, to Sydney.

These are desperate people.

They're trying their best to help their children and their families survive.

A lot of them are tied to assisted migration schemes.

One is the Earl Grey orphan scheme.

-It was a very male society.

They needed women.

So they came up with an idea that, "Okay, we've got a whole lot of overcrowded workhouses in Ireland.

Let's get some of these surplus women in particular to come to Australia."

So they went around deliberately selecting girls from the ages of 14 to 18, and they were to be servants and wives.

Because they were Irish, terrible things were said about them.

These were the lowest of the low that they wouldn't know how to behave, and that they were going to contaminate the breeding stock.

-By 1900, the Irish made up almost a quarter of the white population of Australia.

They were a significant minority, but they remained under suspicion.

-They came from a majority Catholic country to a vastly majority Protestant country.

So you have this sort of inbuilt situation where the English don't trust these Catholics, and they very much see them as lower than themselves on a racial hierarchy.

The relationship between the Irish and the indigenous people is complex.

Some small numbers were sympathetic and tried to make it better for indigenous people.

And then there were many who were quite active in the dispossession as police were removing children, or as part of the push to take land off the indigenous people.

♪♪ -As well as their presence in the English-speaking world, the Irish were also found in almost every country in Latin America.

Many had risen to prominence, including Mayo-born William Brown, founder of the Argentinian Navy.

Argentina would see a large and more systematic migration.

While some Irish stayed in the city of Buenos Aires, many moved to the grasslands known as the Pampas.

♪♪ This is the land of the gauchos.

♪♪ -The Irish, they were very successful because they brought all their knowledge from home, how to work in the land, how to breed sheep, graze cattle, and also they were excellent horsemen.

So they became kind of Irish Argentines or Irish gauchos here in the Pampas.

-Part of what it means to be Irish in the second half of the 19th century is emigration.

The flood gates that are opened by the famine remain open throughout that period, and indeed they remain open throughout the 20th century.

♪♪ [ Bell tolling ] -By the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was the largest in the world.

It was the empire on which the sun never set.

♪♪ The Irish were particularly visible in one of Britain's largest colonies -- India.

♪♪ Britain's presence in the subcontinent had begun in the days of the East India Company.

-We're standing in Mumbai, the amazing financial capital of India.

But in the early modern period, it was called Bombay.

It was built by an Irishman called Gerald Aungier.

He was born in Ireland in the 1630s, and he became one of the most important early governors of Bombay.

His grandparents were very active colonists planting Ireland.

And it's that mind-set that Aungier brought here.

♪♪ -As Britain tightens its grip on its largest colony, one area where the Irish had a noticeable presence was in the military -- the hard and cruel fist of Empire.

-The army was composed of a white officer class, including many members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, especially Ulstermen, and then the rank and file were composed largely of Irish Catholics and Indian sepoys, who were basically native troops.

The Irish Catholics were never allowed to become officers.

They were treated as if they were indigenous.

-Irish people also served in the administration of the British Empire.

-Increasingly, Irish middle class Catholics joined the upper echelons of the Indian Civil Service.

We find that they are much more sympathetic.

They draw these parallels between what had happened in Ireland during the Great Famine and what was going on in India.

-The kind of policies which destroyed the local economies, devastated the peoples of India and Ireland, famines were an expression of that.

There is a tendency to see Irish colonialists, particularly those who were policemen or viceroys of India but were Irish in origin, as being complicit in empire.

I think that doesn't really capture the reality, because these were merely individuals.

Ireland was as much of a classic colony right from the beginning.

♪♪ -In Ireland in some quarters, there is a sense of growing hostility to the British Empire.

It is also even more apparent among the diaspora, the children and grandchildren of the famine generation.

-There are opportunities abroad for Irish people who emigrate and who are forced to emigrate.

But there's also dislocation.

There's resentment.

There is festering sores about being displaced.

-Many went to the United States with nothing but bitter memories of British rule in Ireland.

It was a disaster for Britain because what you were doing was creating a disaffected group of people who passed on that message of anger and resentment and bitterness down through the generations.

-From the middle of the 19th century on, there was no Irish nationalist movement of any kind -- moderate nationalist, militant nationalist, cultural nationalist -- which didn't seek support from among the Irish of the diaspora and which didn't get support.

-The support of the diaspora was crucial to one of the most critical events in modern Irish history, The Easter Rising of 1916.

-There are those abroad who want to be a part of the Irish Revolution.

They feel it very deeply.

-Following the execution of the leaders of 1916, nationalist opinion in Ireland and throughout the world turned in favor of the Irish rebels.

An election victory was followed by the outbreak of a guerrilla war, where the Irish Republican Army, as they were now known, took on the might of the British Empire.

-Even when Sinn Fein is conducting its political war of independence from 1919, it prioritizes the idea of having Sinn Fein representatives abroad.

Eamon de Valera, for example, during the War of Independence, spends a year and a half in the United States.

-The War of Independence lasted from 1919 to 1921 and ended with the signing of a treaty with the British.

It would cause bitter division and lead to a civil war with some men and women, who had fought side by side, now bitter foes.

It also confirmed the partition of the island.

26 counties became independent, while the remaining six counties remained part of the United Kingdom and would be known as Northern Ireland.

-And the very substantial 1/3 nationalist and Catholic minority in Northern Ireland feel abandoned.

They feel that they are on the wrong side of the border.

There are also in the region of 70,000 Protestants who feel they're on the wrong side of the border because they're in Southern Ireland.

-The new independent Irish state was socially conservative.

It was also anxious to make its mark.

-This new country has to announce itself somehow, not just as a new independent state, but also as a modern state, and get it away from what they see as that kind of old rural isolation of how Ireland existed under British rule.

The Free State has arrived.

It has its own flag, its own coins, its own banknotes.

It has embassies opening up around the world.

It's there.

It's a real thing.

♪♪ -In 1939, the Second World War broke out.

♪♪ -[ Shouting in German ] -Ireland remained officially neutral.

However, many Irish participated in the Allied war effort.

-A number of Irish volunteer for the war effort, be it in civilian jobs in the UK or by joining the British Armed Forces.

-Irish women were particularly sought for because they were single, for the most part, and could be redeployed from munitions factory to munitions factory as needs must.

Also, women's fingers being small, they were often desired to make munitions.

They were handy for that.

-Hugh O'Flaherty is one of my great heroes.

Here's a man very much in the O'Connell tradition.

He's a Kerryman, like O'Connell.

-Every time he helped, you know, a British soldier to escape or helped a Jewish person to escape the clutches of evil Nazism in Rome, he put his life in danger.

-His own life didn't matter to him as much as doing the right thing for others.

[ All cheering ] ♪♪ -From time immemorial, the sea had been the main highway, the only route out of Ireland, but now a means of transportation revolutionized travel into and out of the island.

-Aviation is an emerging technology.

-Once-quiet fields in County Clare have become a world center of air transport.

-And transatlantic air service is vital for post-war development of Ireland.

-Transatlantic flights by American airlines, such as Pan Am, had been leaving Shannon since 1945.

In 1958, the first Irish transatlantic flights took place, followed by the establishment of a national airline, Aer Lingus.

It was a long way from the famine ships that had carried previous generations to a new life in the United States.

-Ireland uses aviation as a way to project its image internationally.

It shows the diaspora in the United States that Ireland has modernized.

-A new era is opening for the people of Connemara.

-Quiet studio now, please.

-Cue on one.

-One... -I am privileged in being the first to address you on our new service, Telefis Eireann.

♪♪ -The Irish were now Britain's largest ethnic minority.

-Some historians talk about the Irish in Britain as operating in kind of an in-between space.

Many did choose to live together in certain areas and visit dance halls that were known to be Irish.

This was just a very handy way to get jobs, find out about accommodation, maybe meet your marriage partner.

-So many of the Irish who were coming to the United States were obviously from rural areas and agricultural backgrounds, like my own family.

And then they settled primarily in big cities, New York or Boston or Philadelphia or Chicago or St.

Louis.

♪♪ -Most of the immigrants that came here were working-class men and women.

You know, my father was a dockworker.

My wife's father was a dockworker.

My mother cleaned office buildings.

These are the people that made America and produced the children that became the citizens that led us to new heights.

-Those Irish in succeeding generations came here and served in such big numbers in police force and firefighters and politics or other realms of public service.

I think that strengthens the attachment and why so many Irish Americans are patriotic about the United States.

-One of the most significant events for Irish America, and still hugely significant today, was the election of John F. Kennedy as the first Irish Catholic President of the United States.

-For Irish immigrants, the election of JFK as president was a real conclusion point to being an immigrant community.

Getting an Irish-- Catholic Irishman into the Oval Office was a sign that you weren't knocking at the door as the underdog.

You know, those signs -- "No Irish need apply."

Suddenly, there was an Irishman -- not just an Irishman, a Catholic Irishman, in the Oval Office.

-In June 1963, John F. Kennedy paid a triumphant visit to Ireland, returning to the town his great-grandparents had left during the famine.

-When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things -- a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Five months after returning from his visit to Ireland, President John F. Kennedy fell to an assassin's bullet in Dallas, Texas.

♪♪ The end of the turbulent decade of the 1960s had seen a world in turmoil.

Ireland was not immune.

Suffering discrimination since the foundation of the state, young Catholics, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, now took to the streets of Northern Ireland to demand fair treatment.

-We do not wish bloodshed or violence.

[ All cheering ] -They were met with batons.

♪♪ Later with bullets.

[ Gunshots ] ♪♪ A resurgent IRA now face the British Army on the streets of Northern Ireland.

Loyalist paramilitaries also targeted those they saw as enemies of Ulster.

♪♪ [ Explosion, alarms blaring ] This was the beginning of the Troubles.

♪♪ -The impact of the Troubles is, of course, absolutely huge and bloody.

I think they have left still-painful legacies in terms of human cost.

♪♪ -The conflict would see horrific atrocities in Northern Ireland.

Some also occurred south of the border.

♪♪ The Troubles would also cross the Irish Sea and continue to haunt Britain and Ireland until the peace process and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

-After two years of talks, a truly momentous agreement.

-Even with all its faults, the most successful peace process anywhere in the world the last half century is the Northern Ireland peace process.

-The American contribution to the peace process was enormous.

There was enormous generosity, enormous support, enormous involvement by Americans, most ably led by George Mitchell.

-I want to honor those whose courage and vision have brought us to this point.

-It would not have happened, though, without the American dimension.

-Increasingly, the face of our diaspora is changing.

-Gone are the days that people fled Ireland and came here to make their fame and fortune.

You tend to see now the Irish immigrants who come here are coming as industry leaders or as very high-level management or as transfers from the many, many Irish companies who have operations in the U.S., as well, and are employing American people here.

-I've interviewed a lot of Irish Americans, and some of them are 100% Irish, but most Irish Americans are a bit German or a bit Italian or they could be Jewish or they're part African-American.

We're more and more diversifying our opinions of what it means to be Irish and American.

-Almost 40% of African-Americans have some Irish ancestry, so the mission of the African American Irish Diaspora Network is to forge relationships between African-Americans and Ireland based on shared heritage and culture.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Since joining the EU, the Irish have also rekindled their long-rooted connection with mainland Europe.

-Being an island off the coast of Europe is not a barrier to Europe.

The Irish have always been a people who broaden out, who travel, who trade.

That is part of us.

-The Irish are everywhere.

No matter where you go, you're going to bump into an Irish person.

And what DNA shows and what even the records that we have show is that no matter what city you're in, you're going to find an Irish person, and they're going to have descendants today that are -- they're Irish.

They're part of our wide diaspora.

♪♪ -♪ Oh, how sweet it is to roam by the sunny Shure stream ♪ -On the coast of Newfoundland, the speech patterns of the Irish can still be heard today.

-♪ With you, lovely Molly ♪ ♪ The rose of Mooncoin ♪ -There's so much Irish up here that they changed the name of the road to the Irish Loop.

We've been told that the bulk of the Irish Newfoundlanders that came here all came from 30 miles of Waterford city.

Our people came over here from New Ross, County Wexford, in 1827.

♪♪ We go to Ireland on trips.

People say, "Where are you from?"

And we'd say, "We're from Canada."

"Go on by.

You're not from Canada.

For the love of Moses.

I'd swear you're from up the road."

That's what they'd say to us.

I said, "No, swear to God, we're from Canada."

♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ -Have the Irish left a legacy in the Caribbean?

Short answer -- yes.

You've just got to open the phone book, look at the names, and there they are.

But beyond that, you've just got to listen to some of us speak.

In Barbados, depending on where you are on island, the lilt of how we speak does sound Irish, whether it's from County Cork or somewhere closer to the coastline.

So that's the legacy.

-Ireland's footprint on the world stage is evident.

But above all, Ireland's soft power is most often seen on St.

Patrick's Day.

On the 17th of March, a large portion of the world turns green.

-Happy St.

Patrick's Day!

♪♪ -It's possible to joke about sham-roguery and about, you know, turning rivers green, but no other country in the world, I think, is able to achieve this.

♪♪ -All of this -- Capitol Hill down to the White House -- is taken over by a nationality for a day, and that's what happens around St.

Patrick's Day.

That's an incredible level of influence for one small country to have.

-I think part of the connection is just never losing the nostalgia, you know, the music, the longing.

I mean, that's part of the identity is the longing.

-Rhasidat Adeleke has taken Ireland up to first.

And the gold.

What an upset.

What a surprise.

-Today, the Irish enjoy global success... ♪♪ -[Chanting] Kellie!

Kellie!

-It's great to see that, from a small island like Ireland, you can come from there and go to the Olympics.

♪♪ -...displaying the flexibility and the determination that are part of the Irish story since the very beginning.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The opening decades of the 21st century have seen quite extraordinary and accelerating changes take place in Irish society.

But it's not just the growth in the population, but it's increasing diversity.

-I'm going to cry.

-It's a feeling that I cannot explain.

I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.

-I feel at home here.

I work here, schooled here, and it's a country I want to be part of.

-Culturally, such a small country has given so much to the world.

-20,000 people have come here tonight to see U2.

-Would you welcome, please, Sinead O'Connor.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Thin Lizzy, ladies and gentlemen.

♪♪ -The Cranberries.

♪♪ -I think people want that affiliation because it's not a tainted one.

♪♪ It's one of great storytelling, great literature.

You know, what's not to love?

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -I would hope that Irish society, in 20 years' time, will continue to be in a creative debate.

What Irish means will not have a single answer.

What is important is that it continues to be an abiding question.

♪♪ -The story of the Irish has its highs and lows.

♪♪ It is the story of a people rooted in Ireland, but at home in the world.

A story that can and should give us hope in a world of fear and uncertainty.

♪♪ Ultimately, it is a story of the triumph of the human spirit.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪