Ireland is known worldwide as a country that produce emigrants. The existence of the Irish ‘diaspora’ is the subject of this fifth instalment of the 'Irish perspectives' collaboration between Pen and Sword and History Ireland.

The history of sexuality in Ireland remains relatively understudied when compared with the more well-worn paths of political and military history, but that is not to say that it has never been considered.

In the aftermath of the First World War, a political revolution took place in what was then the United Kingdom. Such upheavals were common in postwar Europe, as new states came into being and new borders were forged.

In the twenty-first century there are two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, and two very different heads of state represent the populations of Ireland and Northern Ireland respectively: the elected presidency of the republic, and the hereditary monarchy of the United Kingdom.

The 1790s is one of the most critical decades in the history of modern Ireland. The decade witnessed the birth of the modern ideology of separatist Irish republicanism, the creation of the Orange Order, and the greatest bloodletting in modern Irish history in the form of the 1798 rebellion.