The republic of Ireland, separated from Great Britain by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St. George’s Channel, shares its island with Northern Ireland to the northeast. Area: 70,285 sq km (27,137 sq mi). Pop. (1996 est.): 3,599,000. Cap.: Dublin. Monetary unit: Irish pound (punt), with (Oct. 11, 1996) a free rate of £Ir 0.62 to U.S. $1 (£Ir 0.98 = £1 sterling). President in 1996, Mary Robinson; prime minister, John Bruton.
Political life in Ireland was dominated throughout 1996 by efforts to sustain the faltering peace process in Northern Ireland. The progress made during the previous year was abruptly terminated in February by the ending of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) cease-fire and by the detonation of a bomb at Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands. In a struggle to reinstate the process, both Irish Prime Minister John Bruton’s government and the British under Prime Minister John Major tried to set dates for all-party talks. The majority Unionist parties (which favoured the continued unification of Northern Ireland and Great Britain) objected to the talks, however, and interminable meetings failed to break a deadlock, principally over the decommissioning of arms by the IRA and other paramilitary organizations. Further violence followed in Manchester, Eng., and in County Limerick, with the promise of more violence implicit in the discovery of a bomb factory in County Laoighis. In October an IRA bomb attack on the British army base in Lisburn, N. Ire., restored the full cycle of violence.
This left the Irish government with their overall peace strategy in ruins. There was all-party consent in the republic that Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, would be excluded from talks while IRA violence continued. Despite a working agreement on talks between the Ulster Unionists and Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (which sought reunification with Ireland), all political parties in the republic remained convinced that talks without Sinn Fein, the political party allied with the IRA, would make only limited progress and that the only route forward depended on a permanent IRA cease-fire.
The Irish economy performed well during the year, with an unprecedented boom in consumer spending and confident predictions that disposable incomes would continue to rise, boosted by declining tax rates and low inflation, which was expected to remain below 2%. Despite substantial economic growth and impressive job creation, unemployment remained stubbornly high, at an estimated 12.25%. The agricultural sector was severely affected by the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow" disease), with both home and export markets, especially to the Middle East and Russia, badly affected. Taxpayers were faced with a penalty of £ Ir 50 million from the European Commission for infringement of rules governing the beef trade.
The activities of organized gangs of criminals who were making large sums of money from illicit drug dealing caused much public concern. This culminated in June with the contract killing of Veronica Guerin, an investigative journalist who had achieved a high profile with her courageous probings into the activities of major criminals. Public outrage and condemnation of the murder led the government to introduce a £ Ir 53.9 million anticrime package in July. A proposal to tighten up the bail laws was decisively approved in a referendum in November.
During Ireland’s six-month presidency of the European Union, which began in July, Bruton highlighted the two major planks in his program: an international campaign against drugs and crime, and procedures to reduce the number of long-term unemployed.
The minister for health established a judicial tribunal in November to investigate the political, administrative, and medical circumstances surrounding the contamination of blood and blood products in the Irish Blood Transfusion Service. This resulted from the tragic circumstances in which 1,600 women contracted the hepatitis C virus from contaminated immunoglobulin. It was widely regarded as the most serious scandal ever to have hit the health service.
One of the republic’s most celebrated citizens during the year was Michelle Smith from Rathcoole, who won three gold medals and one bronze medal in swimming at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Ga., which ensured her place in the history books and in the hearts of the Irish people. (See BIOGRAPHIES.)
See also United Kingdom.