Ireland

Ireland, officially the Republic of Ireland, is a sovereign state in Northwestern Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland, with a population of about 5.4 million and Dublin, home to over 1.5 million people, as its capital and largest city; it shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. It is a unitary parliamentary republic whose legislature, the Oireachtas, comprises the lower house Dail Eireann, the upper house Seanad Eireann, and an elected president who serves as largely ceremonial head of state, with the Taoiseach as head of government. The Irish Free State was created with Dominion status in 1922 following the Anglo-Irish Treaty; a new 1937 constitution named the state Ireland and made it effectively a republic, formally declared under the Republic of Ireland Act 1948, effective 1949, and the country joined the United Nations in 1955 and the European Communities in 1973. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Irish and Northern Irish governments have cooperated on policy through the North/South Ministerial Council, and Ireland today is a developed country ranked sixth in the world on the 2024 inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, with an advanced economy centered on Dublin's financial hub; it maintains military neutrality and is not a NATO member, though it participates in the Partnership for Peace and aspects of PESCO.