Ulster

Ulster — the planted province. Historically the most Gaelic and last-conquered of Ireland's provinces, it was transformed when the 1607 Flight of the Earls opened the way for the 1610 Plantation that settled Scots and English Protestants on confiscated land. That deliberate implant of a Protestant majority among the dispossessed Catholic Irish — hardened by industrial Belfast's Protestant ascendancy — is the origin of the fault line that produced the partition of Ireland in 1921 and the Troubles. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement built an uneasy power-sharing peace, though marching season, gable-end murals and segregated schooling persist; Brexit's Irish-border question reopened the old argument over the province's place between two states.

• Existed: 1610 CE – present
• Type: Entity