Anglo-Irish

Anglo-Irish
Angla-Éireannach

St Patrick's Cross is often seen as a symbol of the Anglo-Irish
Regions with significant populations
Ireland
Languages
Standard English, Hiberno-English, Irish
Religion
Anglicanism (see also Religion in Ireland)
Related ethnic groups
English, Irish, Ulster Scots, Welsh, Scots

Anglo-Irish (Irish: Angla-Éireannach) was a term used primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries to identify a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were mostly the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy. They mostly belonged to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until 1871, or to a lesser extent one of the English dissenting churches, such as the Methodist church. Its members tended to follow English practices in matters of culture, science, law, agriculture and politics but tended to define themselves as simply "Irish" not "Anglo-Irish", and rarely, if ever, as "English". Many became eminent as administrators in the British Empire and as senior army and naval officers.

The term is not usually applied to Presbyterians in the province of Ulster, whose ancestry is mostly Scottish, rather than English or Irish, and who are sometimes identified as "Ulster-Scots". The Anglo-Irish held a wide range of political views, with many of them being outspoken Irish Nationalists. And while many of the Anglo-Irish were part of the English diaspora in Ireland, some were of Irish Catholic origin but had converted to Anglicanism.

The term "Anglo-Irish" is often applied to the members of the Church of Ireland who made up the professional and landed class in Ireland from the 17th century up to the time of Irish independence in the early 20th century. In the course of the 17th century, this Anglo-Irish landed class replaced the Gaelic Irish and Old English aristocracies as the ruling class in Ireland. They were also referred to as "New English" to distinguish them from the "Old English" who descended from the medieval Hiberno-Norman settlers. A larger but less socially prominent element of the Protestant Irish population were the immigrant French Huguenots and the English and Scottish dissenters who settled in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries, many of whom later emigrated to the American colonies.