Catholic Church in Ireland in the context of "Ordinary (Catholic Church)"

Ulster Protestants are an ethnoreligious group in the Irish province of Ulster, where they make up about 43.5% of the population. Most Ulster Protestants are descendants of settlers who arrived from Great Britain in the early 17th century Ulster Plantation. This was the settlement of the Gaelic, Catholic province of Ulster by Scots and English speaking Protestants, mostly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England. Many more Scottish Protestant migrants arrived in Ulster in the late 17th century. Those who came from Scotland were mostly Presbyterians, while those from England were mostly Anglicans (see Church of Ireland). There is also a small Methodist community and the Methodist Church in Ireland dates to John Wesley's visit to Ulster in 1752. Although most Ulster Protestants descend from Lowland Scottish people (some of whose descendants consider themselves Ulster Scots), many descend from English, and to a lesser extent, from Irish, Welsh and Huguenots.

Since the 17th century, sectarian and political divisions between Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics have played a major role in the history of Ulster, and of Ireland as a whole. It has led to bouts of violence and political upheaval, notably in the Irish Confederate Wars, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, the Williamite War, the Armagh disturbances, Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Irish revolutionary period, and the Troubles. Today, the vast majority of Ulster Protestants live in Northern Ireland, which was created in 1921 to have an Ulster Protestant majority, and in the east of County Donegal. Politically, most are unionists, who have an Ulster British identity and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom.

The Church of Ireland (Irish: Eaglais na hÉireann, pronounced [ˈaɡlˠəʃ n̪ˠə ˈheːɾʲən̪ˠ]; Ulster-Scots: Kirk o Airlann, [kɪrk ə ˈerlən(d)]) is a Christian church in Ireland, and an autonomous member church of the Anglican Communion. It is organised on an all-Ireland basis and is the second-largest Christian church on the island after the Roman Catholic Church. Like other Anglican churches, it has retained elements of pre-Reformation practice, notably its episcopal polity, while rejecting the primacy of the pope.

In theological and liturgical matters, it incorporates many principles of the Reformation, particularly those of the English Reformation, but self-identifies as being both Reformed and Catholic, in that it sees itself as the inheritor of a continuous tradition going back to the founding of Christianity in Ireland. As with other members of the global Anglican Communion, individual parishes accommodate differing approaches to the level of ritual and formality, variously referred to as High and Low Church.

Norman Irish or Hiberno-Normans (Irish: Normánach; Old Irish: Gall 'foreigners') is a modern term for the descendants of Norman settlers who arrived during the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century. Most came from England and Wales. They are distinguished from the native Gaelic Irish, although some Normans eventually became Gaelicised. The Hiberno-Normans were a feudal aristocracy and merchant oligarchy which controlled the Lordship of Ireland. The Hiberno-Normans were associated with the Gregorian Reform of the Catholic Church in Ireland and contributed to the emergence of a Hiberno-English dialect.

Some of the most prominent Hiberno-Norman families were the Burkes (de Burghs), Butlers, and FitzGeralds. One of the most common Irish surnames, Walsh, derives from Welsh Normans who arrived in Ireland as part of this group. Some Norman families were said to have become "more Irish than the Irish themselves" by merging culturally and intermarrying with the Gaels.

Ireland was conquered by the Tudor monarchs of England in the 16th century. The Anglo-Normans had conquered swathes of Ireland in the late 12th century, bringing it under English rule. In the 14th century, the effective area of English rule shrank markedly, and from then most of Ireland was held by native Gaelic chiefdoms. Following a failed rebellion by the Earl of Kildare in the 1530s, the English Crown set about restoring its authority. Henry VIII of England was made "King of Ireland" by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. The conquest involved assimilating the Gaelic nobility by way of "surrender and regrant"; the confiscation and colonisation ('plantation') of lands with settlers from Britain; imposing English law and language; banning Catholicism, dissolving the monasteries, and making Anglican Protestantism the state religion.

The Tudor policies in Ireland sparked the Desmond Rebellions (1569–1573, 1579–1583) and the Nine Years' War (1594–1603). Despite Spain sending an armada to support the Irish Catholics during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), by 1603 the entire country was under English rule. The Flight of the Earls in 1607 largely completed the destruction of the Gaelic aristocracy and left the way open for the Plantation of Ulster, which established a large British Protestant population in the north. Several people who helped establish the plantations of Ireland also played a part later in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the West Country Men.

The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn association, formed in the wake of the French Revolution, to secure representative government in Ireland. Despairing of constitutional reform, and in defiance both of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division, in 1798 the United Irishmen instigated a republican rebellion. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Irish Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain.

Espousing principles they believed had been vindicated by American independence and by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Presbyterian merchants who formed the first United society in Belfast in 1791 vowed to make common cause with their Catholic-majority fellow countrymen. Their "cordial union" would upend the landed Anglican Ascendancy and hold government accountable to a reformed Parliament.

The title of Supreme Head of the Church of England was created in 1531 for King Henry VIII when he first began to separate the Church of England from the authority of the Holy See and allegiance to the papacy, then represented by Pope Clement VII. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 confirmed the King's status as having supremacy over the church and required the nobility to swear an oath recognising Henry's supremacy. By 1536, Henry had broken with Rome, seized assets of the Catholic Church in England and Wales and declared the Church of England as the established church with himself as its head. Pope Paul III excommunicated Henry in 1538 over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

Similarly, in Ireland, the Parliament of Ireland passed the Act of Supremacy (Ireland) 1537, establishing Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of Ireland. Again Henry seized assets of the Catholic Church in Ireland and declared the Church of Ireland as the established church with himself as its head. He made himself King of Ireland in 1541, which reinforced his status (previous English kings had held the title of Lord of Ireland, and the island was considered a papal fief based on an 1155 papal bull).

The Irish Army or Irish establishment, in practice called the monarch's "army in Ireland" or "army of Ireland", was the standing army of the Kingdom of Ireland, a client state of England and subsequently (from 1707) of Great Britain. It existed from the early 1660s until merged into the British Army in 1801, and for much of the period was the largest force available to the British Crown, being substantially larger than the English and Scottish establishments. Initially solely under the monarch's control, from 1699 the army was jointly controlled by the monarch and by the Parliament of England. The Parliament of Ireland took over some responsibilities in 1769, extended after 1782 when it began passing its own Mutiny Acts. The army, funded by Irish crown revenues, had its own Commander-in-Chief.

For much of its history, only members of the Anglo-Irish Anglican Protestant minority could join the army, while both the Catholic majority in Ireland and Protestant Nonconformists were barred from enlistment. During the reign of the Catholic king James II (r. 1685–1688), Catholics were actively recruited into the army and quickly became a majority within it. When James was overthrown by in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, most Irish Army troops stayed loyal to him and fought on his side as Jacobites in the Williamite War in Ireland. Following James's defeat, many of these troops went into exile in France, where they became the core of the Irish Brigade.

Armagh (/ɑːrˈmɑː/ ar-MAH; Irish: Ard Mhacha, IPA: [ˌaːɾˠd̪ˠ ˈwaxə], "Macha's height") is a city and the county town of County Armagh, in Northern Ireland, as well as a civil parish. It is the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland – the seat of the Archbishops of Armagh, the Primates of All Ireland for both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland. In ancient times, nearby Navan Fort (Eamhain Mhacha) was a pagan ceremonial site and one of the great royal capitals of Gaelic Ireland. Today, Armagh is home to two cathedrals (both named after Saint Patrick) and the Armagh Observatory, and is known for its Georgian architecture.

Statistically classed as a medium-sized town by NISRA, Armagh was given city status in 1994 and Lord Mayoralty status in 2012. It had a population of 16,310 people in the 2021 Census.