Ireland: landmarks, animals & facts for kids

Ireland is a country in northwestern Europe that covers most of the island of Ireland, in the Atlantic Ocean west of Great Britain. It includes 26 of the island's 32 counties, and shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland is nicknamed the Emerald Isle for its green fields, and it is known for its music, storytelling, writers and St Patrick's Day.

On My Earth Toy you can stand at the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, which drop straight into the Atlantic. You can also discover Skellig Michael, a rocky island with an early Christian monastery, the Guinness brewery at St James's Gate in Dublin, and the wreck of the ocean liner Lusitania off the south coast.

Geography and nature

Ireland has a low, green centre of farmland and bogs, ringed by hills and mountains near the coast. The highest peak, Carrauntoohil, is 1,038 metres tall, and the River Shannon is the longest river in Ireland. Warm Atlantic currents give the island a mild, damp climate, so the grass stays green all year. In the west, the Burren is a striking landscape of bare limestone where Arctic and Mediterranean flowers grow side by side. Ireland has no native snakes.

People, languages and culture

Ireland has two official languages, Irish (Gaeilge) and English. English is spoken by almost everyone, while Irish is taught in schools and spoken daily in areas called the Gaeltacht. Traditional music with fiddles, tin whistles and the bodhrán drum fills pubs and festivals, and Irish dancing is famous worldwide. Hurling and Gaelic football are much-loved national sports. Writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett came from Ireland, and Halloween grew from the old Celtic festival of Samhain.

History in a nutshell

Farmers built huge stone tombs such as Newgrange more than 5,000 years ago. Celtic culture spread later, and Christianity arrived in the 5th century, linked in tradition to St Patrick. Vikings founded towns including Dublin, and from the 12th century English rule grew. The Great Famine of the 1840s killed about a million people and forced many more to emigrate. After the 1916 Easter Rising and a war of independence, the Irish Free State formed in 1922, and Ireland became a republic in 1949.