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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Anglo-Irish
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Irish people of English descent, in the centuries before the independence of the republic of *Ireland (1921). The term is sometimes applied to the descendants of the Norman barons, such as the Fitzgeralds, who were granted feudal lands in Ireland from the 12C onwards and who at the time of the *Reformation remained Roman Catholic like the rest of Ireland. But these are more often called the Old English, leaving the name Anglo-Irish for the English families who settled in Ireland in the 16–17C and who were therefore Protestant. These people formed the Irish ruling class in the century before the Act of *Union (1800), and it was they who provided so many talented writers, from Swift, Goldsmith and Sheridan to Wilde and Shaw.
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