Ireland to raise carbon tax to help fight climate change
Taoiseach says move is necessary as part of climate change obligations.
Ireland
This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Ireland — covering policy advances, community-led efforts, and social progress reported from across the country. Read about what’s working and why.
Ireland votes to end abortion ban
Ireland voted decisively to repeal one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans, dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church.
Ireland becomes first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote
Ireland legalized same-sex marriage by popular vote on May 22, 2015, becoming the first country to enshrine it through a national referendum. More than 1.2 million voters said yes, with only one of the country’s constituencies returning a No majority. In a nation where divorce had been illegal two decades earlier, citizens rewrote their own constitution.
Amelia Earhart becomes first woman to fly the Atlantic solo
Amelia Earhart lifted off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland on May 20, 1932, and pointed her red Lockheed Vega east across the Atlantic. Fifteen hours later, battered by ice, flames from a cracked manifold, and a broken altimeter, she landed in an Irish pasture — the first woman to fly the ocean solo, and only the second pilot ever.
Sylvia Beach publishes James Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris, reshaping modern literature
Ulysses arrived in Paris on February 2, 1922, James Joyce’s fortieth birthday, printed through Sylvia Beach’s Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare and Company after no commercial publisher would touch it. The novel followed three Dubliners through a single ordinary day and turned it into an epic. A century on, writers are still walking through the door it opened.
Irish rebels proclaim the Irish Republic during the Easter Rising
The Easter Proclamation was read aloud on a Dublin street corner on 24 April 1916, when poet and schoolteacher Patrick Pearse stepped outside the General Post Office and declared Ireland a republic. Printed overnight at Liberty Hall, its seven signatories were executed within weeks — yet its words outlived them, shaping Irish independence for decades to come.
Wales preserves its oldest myths in the White Book of Rhydderch
The Mabinogion was committed to parchment around 1350 C.E., when a Welsh scribe copied eleven sweeping tales into what we now call the White Book of Rhydderch. The stories—shape-shifting kings, tragic queens, an older and stranger King Arthur—had already lived for centuries in the mouths of professional storytellers. The manuscript caught them mid-flight.
Ireland’s early farmers raise over a thousand megalithic tombs
Ireland’s megalithic tombs, built around 3500 B.C.E., reveal a remarkable feat of Neolithic engineering. Farming communities raised over 1,000 monuments across the island, including Newgrange in the Boyne Valley, whose passage aligns so precisely that winter solstice sunlight still reaches the inner chamber each December. They built for the dead on a scale meant to speak across millennia.
Céide Fields of Ireland may be the world’s oldest field system
Céide Fields, buried beneath peat on Ireland’s northwest coast, may be one of the world’s oldest known farming landscapes, with radiocarbon dating pointing to around 3,500 B.C.E. A local schoolteacher first spotted the stone walls in the 1930s while cutting peat. Hidden below the bog lies over 100 kilometers of walls — the quiet trace of a community that chose to reshape its land.
Bear bone from County Clare reveals possible evidence of Ireland’s first humans
A bear bone pulled from an Irish cave in 1903 sat unstudied for nearly a century before radiocarbon dating revealed its age: roughly 12,500 years old. Faint cut marks on its surface, likely made by stone tools, hint that humans may have reached Ireland thousands of years earlier than the Mesolithic arrivals long believed to be first.