Ireland: why it is on this list at all

Ireland is the entry on this site most likely to draw the objection, and the objection is reasonable. Ireland in 2026 is a prosperous European democracy. Nobody there is facing famine or airstrikes. Listing it alongside Sudan, where famine is confirmed and tens of thousands have been killed in a single city, invites the accusation that this is a shop cynically attaching an easy market to hard cases.

So the argument has to be made properly rather than assumed.

The first reason: it is the template

Nearly every instrument that appears elsewhere on this list appears in Ireland first, and over a longer period than anywhere else here.

Plantation and settlement. From the sixteenth century onward, land was confiscated from the existing population and granted to settlers brought in from Britain, with the explicit aim of changing who held the country.

Law used to dispossess. The Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries barred Catholics — the large majority — from owning land above a certain value, entering the professions, holding office, or being educated in their own faith. The Irish language was pushed out of official life and, over generations, out of ordinary use.

Famine under an administering power. Between 1845 and 1852 roughly a million people died and another million emigrated. Ireland continued to export food throughout, under a government whose policy response was shaped by a conviction that intervention would interfere with the market. Whether that constitutes deliberate policy or catastrophic ideological failure is still argued. That it happened under British administration is not.

Partition imposed as settlement. In 1921 the island was divided along a border drawn to produce a permanent majority in the north. The consequences ran for the rest of the century.

The second reason: what came after

The Northern Ireland civil rights movement of 1968 modelled itself explicitly on the American civil rights movement — marches, sit-ins, demands for equal access to housing, jobs and votes. In Derry in January 1972, British soldiers shot dead thirteen unarmed people at one such march.

What followed was three decades of conflict, ended by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

And then the part that actually justifies Ireland’s inclusion here: Irish solidarity with Palestine is among the most consistent in Europe, and it is not a coincidence. Ireland was among the first EU member states to recognise Palestinian statehood, in 2024. Palestinian flags fly from lampposts in Irish towns with no Palestinian population. This is a country that recognises the shape of something because it went through it.

The argument, stated plainly

Ireland is last on the Stand With page and last in this list because it is the one that came out the other side.

That is not a lesser position. It is the whole point. Every other case on this list is unresolved, and it is easy for people watching from a distance to conclude that these situations are simply permanent — that this is how those places are. Ireland is evidence against that. It took eight centuries, and the ending is imperfect and incomplete, but it ended.

And having come out the other side, what Ireland demonstrably does is turn around and pay attention to whoever is still in it. Tiocfaidh ár lá — our day will come — reads differently when the people saying it have seen theirs arrive and have not used that as a reason to stop looking.

That is what Ireland is doing on this list: not equivalence, but the argument that these situations end, and that ending them creates an obligation.