Politics in the British Isles Politics in the British Isles The British Isles comprise two sovereign states, Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, and three dependencies of the British Crown, Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. Ireland is a unitary state and a republic. Since 1998, it shares certain common institutions with Northern Ireland, in the United Kingdom, from which it was partitioned in 1921. The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy and also a unitary state comprising England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Also since 1998, the United Kingdom has devolved significant domestic powers (though differing in extent) to administrations in Northern
British Isles naming dispute acronym IONA is a useful way of addressing the coming together of these two islands." This name is ambiguous, because of the other islands in the North Atlantic which have never been considered part of the British Isles. Some academics in the 1990s and early 2000s also used the term "Northwest European archipelago"; however, its use appears sporadically in historiography and rare outside it. The name "West European Isles" is one translation of the islands' name in the Gaelic languages of Irish and Manx, with equivalent terms for "British Isle". In Irish, (literally "Ireland and Great Britain") is the more