Anglo-Irish people (Irish: Angla-Éireannach) denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland.

In the late 18th century, the Parliament of Ireland in Dublin won legislative independence, and the movement for the repeal of the Test Acts began.

They participated in the popular English sports of the day, particularly racing and fox hunting, and intermarried with the ruling classes in Great Britain.

[8] The Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen memorably described her experience as feeling "English in Ireland, Irish in England" and not accepted fully as belonging to either.

[10] At the beginning of the 20th century, the Anglo-Irish owned many of the major indigenous businesses in Ireland, such as Jacob's Biscuits, Bewley's, Beamish and Crawford, Jameson's Whiskey, W. P. & R. Odlum, Cleeve's, R&H Hall, Maguire & Patterson, Dockrell's, Arnott's, Goulding Chemicals, the Irish Times, the Irish Railways, and the Guinness brewery, Ireland's largest employer.

Prominent Anglo-Irish poets, writers, and playwrights include Oscar Wilde, Maria Edgeworth, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, George Darley, Lucy Knox, Bram Stoker, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, Cecil Day-Lewis, Bernard Shaw, Augusta, Lady Gregory, Samuel Beckett, Giles Cooper, C. S. Lewis, Lord Longford, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor and William Allingham.

Others were prominent officials and administrators in the British Empire, such as: Frederick Matthew Darley, the Chief Justice of New South Wales; Henry Arthur Blake, Antony MacDonnell and Gavan Duffy.

Prolific art music composers included Michael William Balfe, John Field, George Alexander Osborne, Thomas Roseingrave, Charles Villiers Stanford, John Andrew Stevenson, Robert Prescott Stewart, William Vincent Wallace, and Charles Wood.

Between the mid-nineteenth century and 1922, the Anglo-Irish comprised the bulk of the support for movements such as the Irish Unionist Alliance, especially in the southern three provinces of Ireland.

[15] During World War I, Irish nationalist MP Tom Kettle compared the Anglo-Irish landlord class to the Prussian Junkers, saying, "England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for junkerdom in Ireland.

For instance, author Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, vigorously denounced the plight of ordinary Irish Catholics under the rule of the landlords.

Reformist politicians such as Henry Grattan (1746–1820), Wolfe Tone (1763–1798), Robert Emmet (1778–1803), Sir John Gray (1815–1875), and Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), were also Protestant nationalists, and in large measure led and defined Irish nationalism.

The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was led by members of the Anglo-Irish and Ulster Scots class, some of whom feared the political implications of the impending union with Great Britain.

Anglo-Irish politicians such as Sir Horace Plunkett and Lord Monteagle became leading figures in finding a peaceful solution to the 'Irish question'.

Considering the Irish State unable to protect them, many members of the Anglo-Irish class subsequently left Ireland forever, fearing that they would be subject to discriminatory legislation and social pressures.

[21]Following the English victory in the Nine Years' War (1594–1603), the "Flight of the Earls" in 1607, the traditional Gaelic Irish nobility was displaced in Ireland, particularly in the Cromwellian period.

By 1707, after further defeat in the Williamite War and the subsequent Union of England and Scotland, the aristocracy in Ireland was dominated by Anglican families who owed allegiance to the Crown.

Some were families of British or mixed-British ancestry who owed their status in Ireland to the Crown, such as the Earls of Cork (whose surname is Boyle and whose ancestral roots were in Herefordshire, England).

Pat: No, no, an ordinary Protestant like Leadbetter, the plumber in the back parlour next door, won't do, nor a Belfast orangeman, not if he was as black as your boot.