Ireland

Ireland, also called the Republic of Ireland, is the north-west European country of twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of the island, with Dublin as its capital and largest city. The Irish Free State was created with Dominion status in 1922 after the War of Independence, and the constitution of 1937 made it Ireland, a sovereign republic in all but name, which left the Commonwealth in 1949. It is a unitary parliamentary republic: the Oireachtas holds a lower house, the Dail, an upper house, the Seanad, and an elected president who is mostly ceremonial but holds real reserve powers, while the Taoiseach heads the government, elected by the Dail and appointed by the president with his ministers. The state holds its only land border with Northern Ireland, and is otherwise ringed by the Atlantic, the Celtic Sea, St George's Channel and the Irish Sea. Neutral in the Second World War, it grew into the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s.