AHC: Completely Different Ireland?

With a POD in 1000, come up with an Ireland that is completly unrecognizable to our world, meaning not Celtic or Norse.
 
The Norse invasion started in the late 700's. The Celts were Irish that left Ireland and settled in Wales / Scotland.

If you wanted to change Ireland don't have the epidemics in the late 800's, this weakened Ireland to the point that the Normans could walk in after they conquered England.
 
No epidemics, united under one king, avoids Spanish, French and quite so much British influence, becomes protestant, avoids Potato famine, becomes major coloniser and centre of industry. Idk something like that?
 
Fugitives from al-Andalus make an expedition that converts and conquers Ireland, thereby creating the Emirate of Dublin, a strong centralised Arabic-speaking state which keeps its independence until now.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
A strong, ambitious king unifies Ireland and defends succesfully against Norman incursions. The Kingdom of Dublin becomes an established European state and is an impacable enemy of Norman England.

Even better, have Andalusian Muslims convert Ireland to Islam.
 
1000 AD is a pretty late POD for such a massive change, but here's my stab at it:

Due to some trivial innovation in cod-processing techniques, Basques begin to settle permanently on the western coast of Ireland. These settlements become early centers of whaling, the cod fishery, trans-Atlantic trade, etc. They grow prosperous and populous. Amid tensions with the Gaels, the Basque whalers adopt Calvinism. Their ranks are gradually swollen by waves of Huguenots and other Protestant refugees from the continent.

Ireland becomes the site of proxy wars between Spain and England. (This causes more Basques to flee to Ireland, which is now widely seen as the "Basque Island".) The Anglo-Basque alliance captures the coasts of Ireland and squeezes the Gaels from all directions, leading to a much bloodier and more thoroughgoing conquest. Instead of being merely dispossessed, the Gaels are exterminated. The few survivors are confined to scattered pockets, mostly in the mountains.

The term "Irish" comes to refer only to the descendants of those allied Protestants who defeated and supplanted the Gaels. The island develops a culture combining Basque, French, Scottish, and English influences, all united by a Reformation ethic. With no Popish menace on the island, the Protestants never develop a culture of hyper-loyalism, and in fact tend in the opposite direction. As dissenters and rugged Presbyterians, they are often united against aristocratic Anglican elements. In the seventeenth century, Ireland becomes a stronghold of the Parliamentary forces. Perhaps it even holds out for some time as an "Irish Commonwealth". After the restoration, Ireland is the preferred sanctuary for English dissenters and radical Puritan separatists. (Thus butterflying away the Plymouth Colony and New England as we know it.)

With a more diverse economy and a less dysfunctional political system, Ireland never suffers an event like the Famine. The population grows at the same rate as the rest of the UK, reaching 16 million by 1900 and 25 million by 2000, by which time it accounts for roughly a third of the UK's population. Compared to the big island, its culture is more egalitarian and wild-westy, with a trigger-happy honor culture, a restless entrepreneurial spirit, and a propensity to religious conservatism. In effect, many of the cultural forces which in OTL took root and flourished in the United States are instead bottled up in Ireland and allowed to develop in miniature within the UK. (Meanwhile, the French do in North America what the Spanish and Portuguese did in South America.)
 
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