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History of Ireland Quiz

Can you answer these questions about the history of Ireland?
Includes both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland
Quiz by Quizmaster
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Last updated: March 18, 2019
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First submittedJanuary 24, 2019
Times taken16,620
Average score70.6%
Rating4.32
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Answer
What group of people migrated to Ireland starting around 500 BC?
The Celts
What stick-based Irish sport has roots that go back at least 2000 years?
Hurling
According to tradition, what saint introduced Christianity to Ireland in the year 432?
St. Patrick
What group of people first raided the island in 795 - and later settled in Dublin?
The Vikings
What was the name of the small area around Dublin that was under direct
English control during the Middle Ages?
The Pale
What English king added "King of Ireland" to his titles in 1542?
Henry VIII
What English leader brutally reconquered Ireland from 1649–1651, earning the
eternal hatred of many Irish people?
Oliver Cromwell
What Dublin brewery opened in 1759?
Guinness
What group, founded in 1795, is a Masonic-style organization devoted
to the Protestant cause?
Orange Order
What 19th century leader, nicknamed "The Liberator", campaigned for
Catholic rights and Irish independence?
Daniel O'Connell
What crop failed in the 1840s, causing the Great Irish Famine?
Potatoes
What country received nearly 4 million Irish immigrants in the 1800s?
United States
What famous ocean liner was christened in Belfast in 1911?
RMS Titanic
What Irish novelist published "Ulysses" in 1922?
(it was censored in Ireland until the 1960s)
James Joyce
The IRA were terrorists to some and freedom fighters to others.
What do the letters IRA stand for?
Irish Republican Army
What was the nickname for the violence in Northern Ireland that started in the 1960s?
The Troubles
What did Ireland legalize in 2019 that was already legal in
most European countries?
Abortion
+8
Level 78
Jan 24, 2019
PotatoEs
+8
Level ∞
Jan 25, 2019
Pulled a Quayle, lol
+2
Level 76
Jun 21, 2022
Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew.
+1
Level 77
Jun 9, 2023
What’s taters?
+1
Level 79
Mar 17, 2019
Didn't do very well on this quiz. 11/17
+3
Level 82
Mar 17, 2019
You can't be a terrorist to some and freedom fighters to others unless one of these two groups is using a bad definition of the word terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic whereby you willfully target random civilians or public property without real strategic value so as to instill fear in the general populace that they or something they value could be hurt next, enough so that due to that fear these people will put pressure on their leaders to change public policy. Either you do it or you don't do it, doesn't matter if you think the side doing it is in the right or not (though if you believe that intentionally killing random civilians is justified then you are probably a horrible person, regardless of what the cause is).

This idea that any person or group can be terrorist to some, freedom fighter or patriot to others, is an awful meme that has contributed toward the widespread confusion people have about what terrorism actually means. It's not a pejorative it's a specific tactic.

+6
Level 61
Mar 18, 2019
Certain Protestant-hating Catholics primarily viewed the IRA as freedom fighters. That doesn't change the fact that they're terrorists but they weren't viewed as terrorists primarily by these select few which I'm sure was the intended meaning behind the question.
+2
Level 19
Jun 18, 2022
Can't someone fight for freedom via using terrorism?
+2
Level 82
Mar 17, 2019
All of that being said, is the IRA a terrorist organization? It's a little bit murky because most if not all of the IRA leadership actually denounced terrorism, preferring to target police, military, and political leadership specifically over random civilians or public property. Which is not terrorism. Also, if they specifically targeted Protestants in Ireland over Catholics, that could just be a hate crime, also not terrorism. However, it was definitely part of their plan to generate broad public support for their political goals, and to that end they became pretty indiscriminate about who ended up getting killed or wounded. If you rope in all of the people ever affiliated with the group, some of whom did intentionally target civilians in a somewhat random fashion, then, yes, they were terrorists.
+6
Level ∞
Mar 18, 2019
I think you've explained it perfectly. Some people in the IRA were definitely terrorists in that they killed indiscriminately. Others were more principled. Taken together, it's possible for some people to see them as freedom fighters and others to see them as terrorists. I'd lean more towards terrorists personally. But having visited Ireland, it's almost inconceivable how they could be so terrible. The people in Ireland were absolutely charming - probably the nicest of any country I've ever been too.
+1
Level 82
Mar 18, 2019
I guess it just depends on whether or not you believe the entire organization should be held accountable for the actions of all those associated with it or not. Personally I believe they should, as I don't think they were aggressively distancing themselves from those who were behaving as terrorists. If they had been we could label them rogue actors. This can be a problem with any large group that lacks strong, centralized leadership.
+1
Level 82
Mar 19, 2019
btw, Quizmaster, the link you included goes to an article about an attack carried out by the INLA, which was a group founded by former IRA members who thought the IRA was not militant enough. Not quite the same thing and they were worse and more obviously terrorists.
+1
Level 60
Jun 17, 2022
Having lived with the IRA bombings in London, I find the idea of 'some say terrorist, some say freedom fighter' offensive. How is bombing the London Underground or the Brent Cross flyover anything other than an act of terror?
+1
Level 59
May 5, 2023
Rozzi I agree, though some people are more disconnected from the violence and thus consider them freedom foghters, hence the description.
+5
Level 61
Mar 18, 2019
Terrorism isn't exclusively terrorising civilians. If it instils terror by killing a civilian or a government agent, it's still terrorism.
+2
Level 82
Mar 19, 2019
No, it's not. Terrorism is not best defined as "that which is scary." This is an incredibly bad misuse of the word but given that the term gets misused *a lot*... over time I'm sure it will eventually lose all meaning. I'm going to keep reminding people of what it is supposed to mean until then, though. If we defined it your way then targeted assassination, blowing up bridges, shooting down war planes, and in fact almost ANY action could be defined as terrorism.
+1
Level 82
Mar 19, 2019
When the Allies landed at Normandy... do you think some German agents stationed in France may have felt scared by this? Maybe the Germans manning one machine gun nest on Omaha beach looked over and saw the one further down the beach hit by a grenade. If the Germans in that machine gun nest felt terror, was it then an act of terrorism? This is just a catastrophic misuse of the term.
+1
Level 82
Mar 19, 2019
Tell me how you would define guerilla or partisan warfare, or armed resistance to an occupation, so as to specifically not qualify as terrorism. Because the definition I offered up differentiates between the two easily. If you can't do that, then you've effectively rendered the term terrorism meaningless and there's no need for it. Bear in mind that EVERY such action could potentially impact morale of either those in command or the rank-and-file soldiers or police force, and often are even designed to. But such tactics go back as far as recorded history goes back and have never been called terrorism until people started over applying the term recently.
+3
Level 77
Jun 16, 2022
So after doing some research and reading the first 100 pages of the Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, the definition of terrorism lacks any meaningful consensus. An academic consensus from 1988 appears to be the strongest attempt to define it, where many experts in the field answered various questions about the definition. The book very clearly states that this is just an academic consensus and does not define terrorism for the USA or UN. Interestingly, the US government doesn’t appear to actually have a specific definition. However, if the attack on the pentagon during 9/11 is considered a terrorist attack, then there are clearly non-civilian targets who would count as victims of terrorism. This is one of the points someone brought up in that handbook, which is pretty interesting. Anyway, I’ll just put the most definitive definition of terrorism below, and everyone can keep in mind that there isn’t a definitive answer, as much as it’d make things easier.
+3
Level 77
Jun 16, 2022
Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.
+4
Level 77
Jun 16, 2022
This definition seems to imply that motive defines terrorism, at least in part. The FLQ in Canada, for instance, kidnapped a couple politicians and killed an MLA, Laporte, to garner attention to their demands that Quebec be separated from Canada. I wouldn’t think members of government are civilians, right? It can be random, but more importantly the victim represents a class of people that the terrorist wants to victimize. So while the FLQ’s worst crime was not targeted at a random civilian, it was still a terrorist act; the goal was not violence against Mr. LaPorte, but terror against the class he represented.
+3
Level 77
Jun 16, 2022
And, also interestingly, I found that the 1988 academic consensus definition was pared down a bit from an early definition. The old version actually included violent acts during combat that went so far beyond the norms of combat as to instil terror. That suggests that at least some portion of the academic and field experts in terrorism believed that violating the norms of warfare specifically to instil terror is itself terrorism. That was removed from the definition, likely because including military-sponsored terrorism would muddy the definition. Anyway, long story short, there’s no official international definition accepted by everyone, but the one I gave above seems to be the most common. The UN cant come up with a workable ad hoc definition after like 50 years, so we probably won’t land on a better “official definition” on this quiz site.
+2
Level 19
Jun 18, 2022
If you seek to achieve goals via instilling terror, then it's terrorism. Seems pretty straight forward to me. Terror (fear of something happening in the future) is literally in the word. Seems people trying to "well actually" that definition are doing so just because they don't want to say something they could imagine supporting is terrorism given the word has such negative connotations now.
+11
Level 80
Mar 17, 2019
The last one made me sad
+1
Level 14
Mar 17, 2019
same. I am surprised so little people did not get hurling
+2
Level 75
Mar 17, 2019
Curling is the closest I came to it, but I knew that wasn't quite right.
+1
Level 73
Mar 17, 2019
I thought hurling was a Scottish thing. Learned something today!
+2
Level 59
Mar 22, 2019
The game played in Scotland is called shinty. Shinty and hurling are similar.
+1
Level 60
Aug 17, 2022
Some folk in Ireland still call it Hurley, after the stick. But why is Camogie not allowed?
+1
Level 78
Oct 10, 2023
I think hurley should be accepted, anecdotally I've mostly heard it referred to as that
+1
Level 51
Mar 9, 2024
yes, well leprechauns don't play hurling, so that's why so little people didn't get it
+3
Level 88
Mar 17, 2019
And, as is so often the case with these quizzes, I got sucked down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia, and learned that "beyond the pale" (outside of the bounds of what is considered acceptable/civilized) comes from the Pale--i.e., if you went beyond the boundary or fence that delineated the English-ruled area, you were going outside the rules and bounds of "proper civilization."
+3
Level 59
Mar 22, 2019
I always think allowing kings and queens without the regnal number makes it a little too easy, especially on country-specific quizzes. Plenty of Kings Henry have meddled in Ireland, so it's not really testing one's knowledge.
+3
Level 57
Jul 15, 2019
The Abortion vote in Ireland took place May 2018, and came into effect in September 2018, when the revised constitution was drawn up.
+2
Level 51
Oct 11, 2019
14/17. Couldn't think of the last one. Was kicking myself when I saw the answer
+4
Level 89
Jun 16, 2022
I got abortion eventually but I guessed same sex marriage and weed first.
+4
Level 44
Nov 11, 2021
Re this one...

"What Dublin brewery opened in 1759?"

The correct answer to this question is St James's Gate.

While it's often referred to as the Guinness brewery, that's just the most famous beer brewed there.

Both answers should be accepted.

+1
Level 77
Jun 16, 2022
So saying that something is beyond the pale is insulting the Irish??? :O
+1
Level 72
Jun 16, 2022
No, nowadays that's just said to convey if someone went a bit too far with something, maybe criticism for example
+1
Level 47
Mar 13, 2024
can you accept "St. James' Gate" for "Guinness"?