I'm on a journey around an exotic
and beautiful land at the edge of Europe.
I'm in Ireland.
It's a place that's so near and yet can seem so far away
and I've never really explored it.
I'm going to travel all the way around Ireland by land,
by sea and by air.
This is incredible!
I want to find out more about this island divided between two
countries with an often troubled history.
I'll be meeting the enterprising...
Yes, here's success - success, excellent!
..and the mildly eccentric...
I just keep getting offered more monkeys, you know.
You would take more if you could? Yeah, absolutely.
This is a land steeped in religious faith.
What are you doing? Why barefoot?
Well, they say it's the proper way to do it.
And in ancient myths and legends...
I meet people regularly who have met the fairies and you don't interfere with them.
Don't mess with the fairies. Exactly.
But in the 21st century,
many here are embracing extraordinary changes.
Who would have thought that homosexuality would unify Ireland?
I mean, that's pretty amazing.
On this last leg of my journey, I'm going to be travelling
down the east coast to the great cities of Belfast and Dublin.
Look at this!
And on to the south of Ireland, where my travels began.
I'm in Northern Ireland. I'm starting the second leg
of my journey around the island of Ireland
and I'm here at the Giant's Causeway - one of the wonders of the world!
The columns here are the result of an ancient volcanic
eruption, of course.
But the myths and the legends that surround this place
are much more interesting.
The main legend is that giants used this as a road, as a causeway,
between Ireland and Scotland - which isn't many miles in that direction.
And it's quite a convenient myth in many ways for many Protestants,
particularly here in the north of Ireland, because it
reinforces their connection with Scotland and with Britain.
The links between Ireland and Scotland have been strong
since the Stone Age.
At their narrowest point, there's only 13 miles of water.
Many Protestants in Northern Ireland are descended from Scots who
arrived in the 1600s during the organised colonisation
known as the Plantation of Ulster.
The plantation was devised partly as a way of taking
control of an unruly region of Catholic Ireland by flooding it
with tens of thousands of Scottish and English settlers.
Of course, that ultimately led to deep divisions and violent conflict.
For decades, much of Northern Ireland was torn apart by the sectarian
conflict known as the Troubles.
Protestants were mainly Loyalists and Unionists who wanted to
stay part of the United Kingdom, whereas Catholics were generally
republicans and nationalists who either wanted to separate from
the UK or unite with the Republic of Ireland to form a United Ireland.
But I'm heading now to a community where Protestants
and Catholics live together in relative peace and harmony.
I'm going to find out how they manage that.
Kate? Hello - Simon.
Hello. Lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you as well.
Permission to come aboard? Absolutely, yeah.
Kate Burns is from one of the many communities in Northern Ireland that
didn't suffer the pain of intense sectarianism during the Troubles.
She was taking me to Rathlin Island.
It's a mixed-faith community in what's called a Special Area of Conservation.
A few decades ago, jobs were scarce here
and the island's population was in decline.
Now there's tourism and fishing
but Kate's also pioneering an unusual new industry.
So tell us a bit about Rathlin Island.
How many people live here?
There's about 123 and it's been growing.
About 123? Yeah, yeah.
And are you...you're a new arrival?
Well, I arrived in 1978.
Oh, that's very recent. You only just got here, then!
What was life like here during the Troubles?
From a community perspective, we just didn't have - there just
wasn't this division that there was on the mainland, even though
there were the two communities, Catholic and Protestant communities
on the island, and they've always worked together and played together.
Catholics and Protestants here went to the same school -
unusual in Northern Ireland, where education's still shockingly segregated.
They've even ended up together.
People on the island were buried together - are buried together?
They are buried together.
And that sounds - as an outsider, well, yes - of course, that's very normal.
But it wasn't and still isn't that normal in Northern Ireland, is it?
Not normal at all, actually. But... So, they're all here.
And what a beautiful place to be buried as well.
Yes, absolutely.
Rathlin is stunning,
but to keep this remote community alive in the 21st century,
Kate and the other residents have had to be imaginative.
So, Kate, where are we going?
Right - this is quite a good place to get kelp.
Ugh! Wet welly - not good.
This is what we're here for.
Seaweed!
HE LAUGHS
Now, to too many people, this is just something that rots
and smells on the seashore.
But this is a superfood.
Why should people be eating this -
something they think of as just a slimy sea-y weed?
Well, it's lovely, it's a superfood and it's good for the ocean,
it's good for you and it's good to eat.
Well, I would pay money for that as a snack, even as it is there. Mmm.
The taste isn't too strong - it's quite subtle.
Subtle ocean flavour.
Subtle ocean flavour, yeah. It has.
Seaweed's incredibly versatile - as a biofuel, in medicine and as a food.
Kelp's been used to make noodles in the East for centuries and it's
becoming fashionable in the West, so Kate's started farming it.
Yes, here's success! Success, excellent. OK!
What have you found?
Now this is what I'm after today, this particular kind of kelp,
which has got brown patches on it.
Can you see those patches? Yes, yes.
Those are the seeds.
Really? And so what are you going to do with it?
We're going to make baby kelp plants from it. THEY LAUGH
The seeds Kate gathers here are used to plant enormous
quantities of kelp in a farm out at sea.
There's almost no negative impact on the environment from growing
the superfood this way.
Low in calories but rich in vitamins and minerals,
Kate believes it's a foodstuff that could revolutionise
the economy of this remote island, but growing seaweed could
also help to meet the world's increasing food needs.
Kate has licensed 22 acres of sea for her underwater farm
and can now produce between 60 and 80 tonnes of food a year.
Her son Duncan helps run the farm.
The kelp grows on more than a dozen ropes strung out across the sea.
Got it!
Maybe what they're growing here will be in a supermarket or restaurant near you soon.
Yay! Look at that!
Oh, that's fantastic.
Look! Here we go.
So for us making noodles and salads from this,
this is a lovely, fine clean product.
Each one of these buoys has ropes like this
and it goes on for miles. HE LAUGHS
How do you feel when you see this?
Look, it's growing successfully here on your farm.
I just think this is just super.
I just get really excited when I see it.
And this hasn't taken masses of pesticides and fertilizers.
It's taken nothing, no.
It's just been put in the sea.
Is this the future of food?
I think what we're doing here is
the start of something which is going to grow in other places.
But, yeah - this is what food should be.
Feeding seven billion people on this planet is a huge challenge for us
and growing food on land is becoming quite difficult -
we're running out of space and people are using enormous
amounts of fertilizers and pesticides and insecticides.
Growing it out here in the sea like this - naturally, organically,
sustainably - it's got to be the future.
Back on the mainland,
I resumed my journey down the east coast, leaving Rathlin Island behind.
I'm now going to head along the causeway coastal route
towards Belfast.
That coastal route has been rated as one of the top drives in the world.
Look at this place!
This beautiful coast road has always been celebrated by locals.
But since peace has come to Northern Ireland,
the rest of the world has woken up to it, too.
Tourists are coming back and the film and TV industry now uses
studios in the province and landscapes as locations.
There's one hugely popular US TV series in particular that's
making Northern Ireland's scenery internationally famous.
It's boosted Northern Ireland's economy by tens of millions of pounds
and created thousands of jobs.
It's beautiful round here.
There's a road up ahead that's particularly picturesque.
This is it.
It's called the Dark Hedges.
Oh!
It seems a few other people have heard about it as well.
Game Of Thrones is the international smash-hit TV series.
It's shot in a former shipyard building in Belfast
and at locations like this.
We've got travellers coming from Asia
to look at a road in Northern Ireland that's featured on a TV series.
It's a changing world!
Where have you come from?
California. California!
People have really got into the whole world of
Game Of Thrones, haven't they?
Yeah, well, you know... It's a novelty.
We don't have medieval, you know, castles and history and horses...
Water, rain! Water, green!
So what are the sort of key things that you think of
when you thought of Northern Ireland?
It's, er, I mean, Game Of Thrones definitely influences a lot of the people I work with.
I work with a lot of nerds.
I work at a software company
so we have like, you know, comic-con day and dress-up day
and stuff like that, so we always have characters walking around... From Game Of Thrones!
So you have a dress-up day...
Yes! ..at your California internet technology company? Yes.
This is brilliant!
Many think Game Of Thrones has been the biggest
positive publicity boost the province has had in decades.
I headed to Northern Ireland's capital city, Belfast -
which for many outsiders still has a tricky reputation.
Before I get into Belfast, there's something I wanted you to see.
And that is...
the view of Belfast. Look at this!
How many news reports have I seen from Belfast over the decades...
..talking of death and suffering
and tragedy and conflict?
Hundreds and hundreds.
And yet this is Belfast today.
Looks shiny, looks peaceful.
Let's go and see what it's like on the ground.
Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on the redevelopment
of Belfast since the Good Friday Peace Agreement.
The checkpoints have gone.
A whole generation has grown up in relative peace.
There are still political militants and paramilitaries here, of course,
but the majority of people just want to move on from the Troubles
and they're often embarrassed by the antics of the minority.
So this is, I'm pretty sure, the Cathedral Quarter,
which is the sort of, you know, trendy bit of Belfast.
That's where I'm going.
I'm on my way to meet a bloke called Jake O'Kane.
Bet there's nowhere to bloody park, though.
Goodness me! A man with a lemur on his head.
Things have changed so dramatically here, it's got to the point
where people can joke about religion and politics.
I met up with one of Belfast's leading comedians and satirists.
Jake? Simon, welcome, welcome.
Thank you very much indeed.
What have you said in the past, Jake?
I've said a lot in the past. That's what I do.
I say things that people think but don't say. That's very important.
Are you an equal opportunities satirist?
Oh, I hate everybody.
I have no respect for power, I have no respect for privilege,
I have no respect for history.
I have no respect for what's gone before.
How would you describe Belfast today? Is this Belfast today?
Yeah. This is Belfast. This is the Belfast I know.
So my generation, when I was a younger man,
we never came into the city centre.
We always socialised in our own little camp. Why?
Because it was dangerous. Because you could get shot.
Very simple, very basic.
And it's become busy and vibrant since.
It's totally opened up.
Since when?
Started after the Good Friday Agreement. Started after peace.
Started after we stopped shooting each other.
Naturally, that's when things began to open up.
Today, kids are coming into Belfast city centre, they're mixing,
no-one gives a damn whether they're Protestant or Catholic.
Is there such a thing here as an embarrassed majority?
Yes. And are you part of it? Yes.
The majority here are not tied or captured by their past.
They have...they are not giving up who they are,
who they believe they are,
but they are willing to reach the hand out and accommodate
and compromise and say, "Let's find a middle ground."
But not everyone in Belfast feels able or ready to reach out a hand.
It's only a short drive from the lively Cathedral Quarter to
less affluent and still divided areas of Belfast.
Now, this - this is a real shocker.
This is one of the euphemistically named peace walls.
A security wall that divides communities -
this is a Loyalist community on this side
and on the other side is a republican community.
And they have to be kept apart.
And you know what's really tragic?
A lot of these walls have actually gone up
since the peace process began.
There's dozens of the barriers and locals still don't want them removed.
It sounds extraordinary but many people killed in the Troubles
died where peace walls had been built, and I for one can understand
why their friends and relatives might not want to take them down.
I arrived in Belfast on the most important weekend of the year
for many in the Unionist and Loyalist community.
The main event of the summer marching season
celebrates an historic military
victory in which the Protestant King William of Orange defeated
Catholic King James II in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
It secured the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland for generations,
to the detriment of the Catholic majority.
Marching bands like this one practice all year for the main event
on July 12th, in which thousands parade through the streets.
I met up with Michael Crosby,
a long-standing member of the Pride of Ardoyne Flute Band.
Now it's a street party?
Street party, yeah. It's a community festival.
Can you tell us just a little bit about the community?
Give us a sense of the community here,
that's quite a small area, I'm thinking.
This is Glenbryn estate which we refer to as Loyalist Ardoyne.
You have nationalist Ardoyne, so we refer to this as Loyalist Ardoyne.
We have something like seven to eight streets.
It's been through a lot of hard times during the Troubles.
We've lost a lot of people in here,
shot dead, whatever, through the Troubles.
But we're a close-knit community.
Seven or eight roads is a pretty small community, isn't it?
And are you...do you feel hemmed in, surrounded here?
If you look down the street, you have houses that still have
barbed wire in front of the windows. This is 2015.
But, of course, a stone's throw away in nationalist Ardoyne,
Catholics feel just as besieged.
Celebrations for the 12th July kick off with huge bonfires
lit all around the city the night before.
Look at the size of that!
Tradition has it that bonfires were originally lit to guide
the ships of the Protestant King William of Orange.
I felt this was one tradition that had got rather out of hand.
Many Catholics feel it's a triumphalistic celebration
of the victory of Protestants over Catholics.
I do struggle, I must say, to understand how burning hundreds
and hundreds of pallets is really an expression of culture.
But it feels intimidatory as well.
What's curious, I suppose, is this sort of thing would never be
tolerated in many other British cities.
But here, still allowances are being made, have to be made,
otherwise people would get very angry.
Nationalist and Catholic symbols - like effigies of the Pope -
can be burnt on the pyres.
It can be deeply upsetting to Catholics.
It felt strange to be in Belfast on the 12th. It's not a normal weekend.
Many people in the city have no interest in the event
and leave for a holiday.
On the Glenbryn estate, they're about to light their giant bonfire.
I met up again with Michael Crosby from the Pride of Ardoyne Flute Band.
You're loading up there.
Now obviously, we've got an IRA sign here.
That's going to go up.
Above it, you've got the flag of the Republic, the tricolour -
the Republic of Ireland. Why are you burning that?
Because this is British. This is British Northern Ireland.
This is Northern Ireland, part of the British state.
That's a foreign flag.
Now you know some people are going to say that's very provocative.
It's not provocative. It's not. It's not a flag of my country.
The flag of my country is the Union Jack and the Ulster flag.
But putting it up there isn't just another country - that's the enemy, isn't it?
Yeah. And it still feels that way? Yeah.
CHEERING AND SHOUTING
Bloody hell!
The heat is astonishing.
The whole scene is completely surreal for me.
Many people here feel their culture, identity,
and survival is under threat, even though recent polls show that
most Catholics in Northern Ireland also want to stay part of the UK.
What is your ultimate concern?
Shared space and a shared future.
Is your ultimate concern that you're going to be pushed
out of Ireland, basically?
I hope in my generation,
when I'm dead and buried, that this country is still British.
And my grandkids can still go to school and express our culture
like I'm doing tonight, having a few beers.
The whole weekend, we enjoy our culture and enjoy our freedom.
What a scene.
It's really sad to hear the fear,
actually, the concern
that people here have about the loss of their culture,
their identity, their territory.
Their sense of Britishness.
As an outsider, obviously, I see it completely differently.
From my perspective, the Loyalists won.
This is still a separate country.
They don't see it that way.
They see their position under threat.
It's easy to judge this community for not moving on,
but many died here during the Troubles
and I could sympathise with their reluctance to abandon traditions.
There's also high unemployment here.
Their British identity gives a sense of pride.
It was the morning of the 12th
and members of the Protestant Orange Order were matching through the centre of Belfast.
I actually feel a little bit defensive about this
because although it is odd, although it is exotic,
this is a largely working-class celebration of their fundamental identity.
Don't knock it and don't try and take it away from them,
unless you're going to give them something to believe in.
So here comes the Pride of Ardoyne
and they're getting quite a reception from the crowd.
I spotted Michael.
Michael. Michael! Can we come with you?
Yes, by all means!
You've got a massive smile on your face!
It's our culture. It's the best day of the year.
Why are you stopping playing here? Or just going to a single drumbeat. To respect the cenotaph.
The war memorial's just there.
Yup, the people who fought the two world wars and Afghanistan and Iraq.
And here. Yeah, and here, yeah.
That's really interesting, cos as outsiders,
we can perhaps forget that people here, your community,
probably people in your band, fought and bled for Queen and country.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that feels absolutely at your core?
Oh, aye. You have to respect what they've done for this country and for Britain.
For many lining the route, it's a family day out.
CHEERING
But Catholics don't think this day is a time for celebration.
For them, it commemorates a tragic time in their history.
Some Loyalist bands still want to follow traditional routes
close to nationalist areas.
In previous years, enraged Catholics have rioted.
I headed back to the Ardoyne area of Belfast
and met up with Catholic priest Father Gary Donegan.
So I think most Loyalists would see this
weekend as a time of celebration.
How do you see it?
For us, it's a time where people in the community
generally are under siege.
What happens is during a parade, the area becomes like lockdown.
And you see massive police operations.
Let's stop here for a second.
Why do so many Catholics feel under siege at this time?
By the time the evening takes place, that stage,
people have been drinking, people have been taking
all sorts of substance abuse on both sides of the community
and you've got the perfect storm then for a possible riot or public disturbance.
I re-joined the parade.
Tension was rising.
Goodness me!
The Independent Parades Commission had banned marchers
from taking their flags home past the Catholic area up ahead.
So they're singing, if you can't hear, "We want to go home."
# We want to go home. #
But they already knew that the police weren't going to let them through.
What are you feeling about what's up ahead?
I'm nervous.
You're nervous - really?
Yeah, in case something kicks off.
All it takes is one brick, one bottle - you know what I mean?
The Orange Order and bands arrived at the police blockade
and there was a tense standoff.
It wasn't long before violence erupted.
Come on, we better go back.
Already, instantly - my God, bottles are being chucked, hoods are coming up.
We need to move back out of the way.
Go back. Go, go, go.
So we've now come round behind the police line.
I think the barricade is up ahead.
To me, as an outsider, it all felt bizarre and faintly absurd.
This just has far too much of a feel that...
..people here have done this for a long time, so there's
lots of camera crews on this side
who clearly know how far these folk can chuck their bottles.
They're at a certain line, then the police are further ahead.
It feels like people know what their positions and roles are
in this situation, because it's played out year after year.
God, how depressing.
These local Catholic residents watch from afar.
The police seem to think they might get it from both sides,
but the rioters - this year at least - were all Loyalists.
They're chucking bricks, bottles, bolts, even traffic cones.
The water cannon's been brought up.
Incoming!
An officer has just been hit just there.
My God! They're having to drag him away.
The water cannon's being used now, look.
This is going to go on for hours, I fear.
There obviously was a peace process, but there wasn't a resolution
of the fundamental issues that are dividing the society.
So there is now management of stalemate.
And there have got to be advances made in bringing communities
together and integrating them,
getting them to live together.
It's going to take a long time, but this situation here,
this is a small part of the story of Northern Island
and it's a small part of the story of the island of Ireland.
The violence I saw was the only trouble over the entire weekend.
Even just a few streets away, life continued as usual.
For the majority of people living in Belfast,
sectarianism and tribal conflict is largely a thing of the past.
You realise quite quickly there's a lot of leafy, middle class suburbs here.
And of course to most of the people who live here,
they'll say, "Well, yes - of course there are."
But to many outsiders who still think of Belfast as being a gritty,
grimy city of conflict, they perhaps don't realise that this exists here.
But Belfast is not all flags and fighting.
A lot of it is just very, very normal.
Some of the barriers here are coming down -
the barriers in people's minds.
I'm off to summer school!
Linda Ervine come from a family of leading Unionists,
but she's become a champion of the Irish language and a teacher.
You're from what some would say is the Loyalist royal family,
almost, here in Belfast.
So it's quite unusual that you started to learn
and love the language, because that's the standard view
of Gaelic Irish speakers, that they would be Catholic.
Yeah. And some people would regard the language as something divisive,
something that's saying, you know, that you're nationalist,
that you're in favour of an all-Ireland, for instance.
But, for me, with the language, the Gaelic language actually unites us
and for anybody to deny that, they need to look in their British passport.
Because if they look in their British passport,
it's written in three languages. It's in English, Welsh and Gaelic.
Gaelic is a language of the British Isles.
That is a good point.
And as somebody who uses that passport quite a lot, I think I'd forgotten that. Yeah.
One of the things I don't want to do is I don't want to go down the road
of "We're taking it back" - there's enough of that in Northern Ireland.
What we always wanted to do was just take our place within the Irish language community.
The Irish language, or Gaelic, is associated with being Catholic
and nationalist, but many of the early Protestant settlers here in the north spoke Gaelic.
SHE SPEAKS IRISH GAELIC
I was thinking that this was the real muppet beginner class,
which was probably appropriate for me, but... Did you not know that this is for the fluent speakers?
Yes, I think this is quite advanced, isn't it? We're doing grammar.
We're going to have to get someone to teach Simon some Gaelic.
Um, please. Thank you. Two fried eggs!
You'll also need "Sassenach". Sassenach.
Sassenach - cos you're an Englishman.
SHE SPEAKS IRISH GAELIC
HE REPEATS IN IRISH GAELIC
Linda teaches in an Irish-language school in a Loyalist area.
The schools are springing up across Northern Ireland.
Why do you think so many people are now wanting to learn Irish?
So it's kind of strange. It can totally change your outlook
and I think the work that Linda has done and is doing
and the work that's happening in east Belfast is miles ahead,
streets ahead, in terms of community relations.
You look at it. It's 16 years since the Good Friday Agreement.
All the work has been done in a divisive way.
So it's all about - we'll have ten Protestants and ten Catholics
and if we talk about St Patrick's Day, we'll talk about the Boyne.
Everything focuses on difference.
And, for me, all we do is, you know,
we're not interested in we'll have 50% Catholics and 50% Protestants - we're offering a language.
Come and learn a language.
And we don't take a note of whether you're Catholic or Protestant
cos I'm not interested.
I'm interested in people who want to learn the language.
And that's what we need to do in Northern Ireland, bring
people together in a way that they can meet, integrate and something
that interests them, rather than focusing on how they're different.
This is home, so to travel to part of my own country
and learn about the situation there has been really fascinating.
I'm leaving Belfast now. I'm leaving Northern Ireland, in fact,
and I'm heading south, continuing my journey.
I travelled down the east coast, crossed the border
into the Republic of Ireland and headed towards the town of Drogheda.
In 1649, English forces under Oliver Cromwell attacked
and took Drogheda under an epic siege and battle.
As a result, Cromwell became a hate figure in much of Ireland.
But what exactly happened during the attack is still being
argued about to this day.
Tom Reilly is a local historian who has made an extremely
detailed study of first-hand accounts of the period.
Oh, goodness!
Tom, why have we come here?
We've come here because this is the site of exactly where
Cromwell broke into the town.
Just over here. The church?
On the wall, yes. Oh, the wall, I see.
In 1649, Cromwell and his Puritan supporters
had just overthrown King Charles I.
Then Cromwell turned his attention to Ireland and Drogheda,
a vital port that was supporting the King.
These are the medieval town walls.
Old Drogheda here. Yeah. You're inside the town walls.
And who was inside?
Royalists. This is essentially an extension of the English Civil War.
Why did he want to take Drogheda, then?
Because there was a possibility, a very strong possibility, that an army from Ireland
could have been assembled, could have gone to England,
and could have put the king back on the throne.
Cromwell and his 12,000 troops surrounded the town.
The siege went on for a week.
Cromwell brought in heavy artillery by sea
and pounded the defensive walls.
Eventually, they broke through.
Do we know where the breach was? Yeah, so there's a breach here.
So the wall has been... Well, it looks as though this has been
rebuilt a bit. It has. So, this... The breach was from here to there.
Yeah, exactly.
So, if you were standing here, 1649, about five o'clock,
you would hear psalms being sung. You'd be walking on bodies
and you'd want to run,
because Cromwell is coming up with a bodyguard
and he means trouble.
Cromwell and his army entered the town.
What happened after that is what is still disputed today.
What is the conventional story of what happened here?
Well, like everybody is still being taught,
I was effectively told that Cromwell, this monster, this ogre,
this blacker than black individual
came to my town and killed, essentially, all the civilians in it.
And this resonated through my childhood. Everybody's childhood.
Not just in this town, but in Ireland. Anyone.
He epitomises English oppression.
And what's your version of what happened here?
My take on that is that Cromwell came to Ireland,
encountered what was essentially an English town,
they took the English town
but they kept the battle in a military context.
You're saying that Cromwell was framed.
I'm exactly saying that.
He wrote a document in 1649, after Drogheda,
and ten times in that document he says,
"Civilians are to be left out of the war."
It's all very clear. There's a mountain of evidence.
Tom's version of events is controversial but fascinating.
Hatred of Cromwell and what he's said to have done in Drogheda
further poisoned the relationships between the Brits and the Irish.
Many Irish schoolchildren are still taught he's the devil incarnate.
Does this all matter, now, in the 21st century?
As I'm concerned, it's history.
All of these things happened in the past.
But, in Ireland, we are still inspired by our history.
We hold our nationalism dear to our hearts
and so we hate Cromwell.
If you take Cromwell away, what are we going to hate?
What's not disputed is that after capturing Drogheda,
Cromwell tightened the English grip on the rest of Ireland.
It was another 250 years before Ireland achieved independence.
30 miles south of Drogheda,
I arrived into Dublin, the Republic's capital.
Irish nationalists were staging their own parade here,
organised by Sinn Fein, the republican political party.
It was nearly 100 years
since the Easter, 1916 uprising that led to Irish independence,
and they were beginning a series of events to mark the occasion.
This is an extraordinary story
and it's the story of the birth of a nation.
Irish nationalism, in many ways, has gone into the background
in the Republic.
It's not front and centre in people's minds.
They've got other concerns
and this is part of a series of events that Sinn Fein are using
to try and reawaken that sense of Irish national identity,
of one Ireland.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
support for an independent Ireland was gathering speed.
By 1915, public meetings by members of the Republican movement
were banned, so they used the funeral of a revered activist,
O'Donovan Rossa, as a call to arms.
Today, Sinn Fein was staging a re-enactment
of the funeral, attended by party leaders.
It included a reading from a fiery speech by Patrick Pearse,
a nationalist leader at the time.
"We pledge to Ireland our love
"and we pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate.
"Life springs from death
"and from the graves of patriot men and women, spring living nations.
"They think they have provided against everything.
"But the fools, the fools, the fools!
"They have left us our Fenian dead
"and while Ireland holds these graves,
"Ireland, unfree,
"shall never be at peace."
As much as anything,
it was that speech that sparked
the revolution that led to the creation of the Irish Republic.
The Irish Free State was established in 1922,
but the revolutionaries had only won a partial victory.
The island was partitioned and six out of 32 counties,
Northern Ireland, remained part of the United Kingdom.
I suppose it's the events, the historic events,
and what's happened here that has inspired this sort of fervency in the extremes.
The sense I get here, though,
is there is still passion for nationalism.
There is still passion for a united Ireland,
but there's not the fire.
Things are changing. Things are developing.
But the dream of the united Ireland,
I think, is gone, certainly for this generation.
The Irish government had held its own ceremony just a few hours earlier.
The Sinn Fein commemoration was a bit of a stunt,
but they need to keep the dream alive for the next generation.
The key event that freed Ireland from the Brits occurred
just eight months after O'Donovan Rossa's funeral.
In Easter, 1916, a group of revolutionaries,
mostly volunteers,
launched a bloody rebellion against British rule.
Manchan Magan is a descendent of one of the leaders of the uprising.
We met up in the heart of Dublin.
So we have come to one of the most important, well, areas,
but one of the most important buildings in the history of modern Ireland, haven't we?
This is the Post Office.
This is the hub of any empire.
This was where all telecommunications,
the telegraph came, all mail came. The only way you could control
the realms beyond your own front door was through this building.
If you could destroy this,
you could basically destroy the stranglehold Britain had.
On Easter Monday, 1916,
score of rebels approached the General Post Office.
One of their leaders was Manchan's great grand-uncle,
known as The O'Rahilly.
Despite being relatively untrained,
they caught the guards unawares, and seized the building.
So, when they came in here through the doors,
they knew they were most likely not going to leave.
If you're a tiny little group of volunteers
fighting against the might of a massive empire,
you all will be hung or executed at the end.
It's inevitable.
So they wanted a glorious blood sacrifice.
The rebels hoped to take advantage of the British Army being
distracted by the First World War,
but the British government sent thousands of troops
and heavy artillery into Dublin.
A Royal Navy gunboat sailed up the River Liffey.
The British responded with overwhelming force.
The gunboat was dropping bombs
and eventually it starts dropping bombs on top of this building.
The roof goes on fire and they decide,
"We need to get out of this building, otherwise the roof is going to fall in on us.
"We won't be martyred in a blood bath. We'll just be crushed by a building."
So they decide, "Let's try and escape the side door of the GPO,
"run down Henry Street into Moore Street,"
but right at the edge there, there's this whole barricade,
with a Lewis sub-machine gun
and my great grandad, The O'Rahilly,
has his sword out. He's charging and suddenly he's ripped with
bullets from the shoulder, right down to the belly, right across and
he manages to crawl into a doorway here, on what was called Moore Lane.
It's now called O'Rahilly Parade after him.
And, slowly, he dies there.
As it was founded in blood,
you had an identity.
You had a real sense of yourselves.
Has that helped or has it been a hindrance
or has it just been what it is? Yeah.
Because the fight was so glorious, because it was led by poets
and leaders and idealists, it was a glorious fight
and then we became infused by the myth of that fight and that
did have bad results.
That led to the whole Northern Ireland question.
The strength and passion of the fight clearly was so potent that it
was like an intoxicating dream that has dizzied us all for a century.
And I worry, now, 2016,
that we're going to mire ourselves in the past.
Our only chance now, as a nation, as a world, is to put behind us these
ridiculous dreams of nationhood and struggles for nationality we had
and to try and become pan-global, sort of, human-focused.
The Catholic church was central to the identity of the new nation.
The future Archbishop of Dublin even helped draft the constitution.
Some say the Republic became almost a colony of the Vatican.
But in recent years, the Church has been losing its influence,
largely due to a series of child sex abuse scandals.
Four out of five Catholics went to weekly mass in the 1980s,
compared to one in five today.
That's an enormous change for what was one of the most
conservative and religious countries in the world.
In May 2015, Ireland took the world by surprise
and became the first country to vote in a referendum to legalise
gay marriage,
despite fierce opposition from the Church.
I went to Dublin's LGBT film festival
to find out how this dramatic change came about.
Hello.
I don't have an invitation but I'm with him.
Is it OK to come in? Thank you.
The curtain raiser for the festival was
a film about the campaign for equal marriage.
I was with film-maker Anna Roberts
and festival organiser Ger Philpott for a gala screening.
It feels like this is such a colossal event in Irish history.
It is. The nation was unified. Yeah.
And when you see the response of people on the screen and why,
it's amazing and it doesn't get tired.
I've watched it quite a few times because it reminds me
of what happened that day.
The Yes vote won by a landslide.
Almost two thirds of Irish people voted in favour of equal marriage.
APPLAUSE
VOICE ON FILM: "..a message from this small, independent Republic
"to the entire world is one of dignity and freedom and tolerance.
"Liberte, fraternite, egalite!"
CHEERS
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
There's a calm sense of celebration, I would say.
You've lived through quite an extraordinary evolution,
transition, whatever you want to call it, in Ireland's culture,
in its society.
Homosexuality was profoundly illegal here until very recently.
It was pretty awful. I was a criminal in my country.
I certainly shed a lot of tears on the 23rd of May
when the results were coming through.
Was it a victory for your community or was it actually a defeat
for the Church and for the old way of doing things and the old ideas?
I think it was a defeat for the Church in many respects
and I think because of the way society has unfolded here,
and the Catholic Church and the child sexual abuse issues,
people said, "Well, actually, no, thank you.
"We don't have to be dictated to. We can do what we want to do."
It feels to me like you stopped listening to the Church.
Yes, I think so. I think that's probably what it really comes down to.
They lost their grip on us. They lost their power over us.
If the Irish have that fundamental belief in the Church taken
away from them, is there a risk that they lose a sense of their identity?
No, I don't think so.
I think that the results on the 23rd of May showed that Irish
people are accepting. They're tolerant. They're embracing
and they're welcoming.
That's what Irish people are.
Who would have thought that homosexuality would unify Ireland?
I mean, that's pretty amazing.
Both homosexuality and divorce are now legal,
but the Church hasn't lost all it's power.
It's the Church, not the state that runs most of the education system.
CAR RADIO: 'OK, we've go music on the way from Westlife.'
Many think the Church has a role to play in defining Irish identity.
At a radio station on the outskirts of Dublin, I met broadcaster,
Wendy Grace, a spokeswoman for pro-Church group, Catholic Comment.
You are listening to the Morning Show on Spirit Radio.
That track is called Stars Go Dim
and You Are Loved on the Morning Show.
And our next guest is an intrepid explorer.
We're delighted to have him in the studio to tell us
what he's been up to in Ireland, Simon Reeve.
How are you doing, Simon? I'm doing very well.
Thank you very much for having us in here.
You've been to so many amazing places all over the world.
Tell us a little about why you decided to come to Ireland?
Ireland was, until very recently,
quite possibly one of the most
religiously minded, orientated countries in the world.
Church attendance across the board has completely plummeted.
I'm fascinated to know what is happening,
why is it happening, and are people who love the Church,
who are associated with the Church, are they worried about it?
Only last week I was in a church I'd never been in before
and, again, it was full.
And there was young people my age, so I'm often kind of perplexed
because I keep hearing about this kind of, you know,
declining figures and stuff,
but my experience has been very, very different.
I only got ten minutes on the radio and then our time was up.
Right, thank you for having us in.
Can we go and have a cup of tea? Yeah, we can have a cup of tea.
After you.
The Church itself says, "We're in trouble.
"We've lost a grip on the young, particularly."
It just feels like the tide has changed in Ireland.
The sense of what it is to be Irish has moved away from being,
"Well, we are Catholic. We are traditional,"
to being something slightly different.
For so long, like you were saying,
the Church had such an influence in every area of life
that the pendulum has almost swung in the other direction,
where it's kind of the other extreme.
I wonder what our identity is in Ireland at the moment, actually.
I think we're kind of being absorbed into this globalised,
commercial world, where, really, do we have an identity that we can...?
They've swapped Catholicism for consumerism?
I think so, yeah.
Ireland's had a roller-coaster ride.
The Republic's been through a series of incredible transformations.
As recently as the 1980s,
a third of the population here lived below the poverty line.
In just a generation, it's been both a poor European backwater
and a tiger economy.
It's been devoutly religious and now commercialised and globalised.
As the world changes around them, what values will people hold on to?
I'm heading south out of Dublin now.
I am near the end of my journey around the island of Ireland.
But I've still got a couple more things
I'd like to see before I finish.
It's only about five miles from the outskirts of Dublin
to the border with County Wicklow and a stunning national park.
It's one of the most beautiful corners of Europe.
I was heading to meet someone who, as Ireland has changed
around him, has held true to his own set of principles and values.
I'm in the Wicklow mountains now
but I can't tell you exactly where I am
because I'm heading to a secret sanctuary.
Here we go.
Secret turn.
Aargh! Is it safe to proceed?
The only thing is the emus love...
the newer, the shinier the car... Did you say, "the emus"? Yes.
He's waiting for you.
Willie Heffernan lives in this remote sanctuary with
a menagerie of rather unusual rescued animals.
So, this is your bit of paradise by the looks of it.
Well, it's my last retreat.
Where are we going?
To the monkeys.
To the monkeys?
To see the monkeys, yeah. Let's go and have a look.
Monkeys, then? Well, I got an e-mail... Ah...! It's OK.
WILLIE LAUGHS
Oh, I'm sorry. No, that's OK.
I did have a big breakfast, but...
Willie wanted to introduce me to his longest-serving residents.
There's Charlie. Charlie!
Yeah, he likes his treats.
He's an old-timer, you know?
Charlie is a black capuchin monkey who was used in laboratory
experiments for more than a decade.
15 years is a long time in the clink.
You mean Charlie was in a lab? He was being experimented on or what?
Yeah. Here, throw him a crabstick.
Wave it to him. Throw him? Yeah.
Go for the big leaves.
Is that your action of throwing?
Well, I was waving it about.
This is the first time in my life, Willie, I've had to show
a crabstick to a monkey.
I know that might come as a surprise, but... Incoming!
Oh, nice.
Charlie and the crabstick!
Willie has set up Ireland's first and only monkey sanctuary.
He takes in primates from around the world,
most of which have been used in laboratory experiments.
Here you go. Here you go. Give Sam one.
Here you go, Sam.
The monkeys live on islands Willie's carved out of acres of bogland.
I let them go past so they can relax. There are monkeys everywhere!
He's an old-timer, you know?
Charlie's still on the crabstick.
He took me for a proper introduction with Charlie.
So we're landing on the island? Yeah. Excellent.
This is Charlie's and Sam's island.
There we go. Look at this. Aren't they wonderful?
How is that after 15 years in a cage in the laboratory?
The transformation.
They screamed for six months when they first came, with madness, you know?
So they were completely institutionalised?
And controlled, down to the very grape, the very peanut.
You set them free? Yeah.
How many monkeys have you got?
There's 25 at the moment. I keep getting offered more monkeys.
You'd take more if you could?
Yeah, absolutely. I was offered 300 the other day, you know?
What happens to most primates,
most monkeys who are used
in laboratories and research centres when their time is up?
I'd say most of them are euthanized.
That's the way it goes. They're put down.
Yeah, yeah. Sadly, that's it.
Tens of thousands of primates are still being
used in laboratories around the world at any one time.
It's an enormous moral issue.
Many are subjected to horrific experiments,
often for our medical benefit.
Hey, you can't have two. Give him another one. Yeah?
Oh, you can. All right.
No, you can't fit three in there.
Tell us how you keep the place going.
My old age pension. That's it.
Are you serious? Yeah.
That and donations?
Well, on food, yeah. We don't get any financial support.
At all? No, no.
Willie, I hope that you don't think that I'm exaggerating... No.
..but this is the most extraordinary place I've been to in Ireland. Fair play to you.
What you have done here is really inspiringly amazing.
Well, the monkeys tell me that every day.
A monkey sanctuary is the last thing
I expected to find on my travels around Ireland.
Jesus, I'll need a pint after all this!
He might be unconventional,
but the thing about Willie is that he just really cares
and in that, surely, there's a lesson for us all.
It's quite a blustery day, but beautiful.
I'm getting to the end of my journey around Ireland now.
But look at that view!
So, just over there is Roslere.
That's where I started my journey around Ireland,
but this is where I finish.
I have loved Ireland and I have loved the Irish.
Being up in the north, of course, felt just like being at home,
but - shh, don't tell them - here in the south
feels pretty familiar as well.
History may have divided us,
but we're really pretty similar.
The Irish are a wonderful bunch and this is a beautiful island.
With the Open University, you can further explore Ireland's
rich history and culture.
To find out more, go to our website
and follow the links to the Open University.