I have no Idea what battle was fought, what is your point???????

Battle of the Boyne 1690

It is complicated to explain why The Battle of the Boyne is so important in Ireland’s political history and we have to go back to the 17th Century when religion played such a prominent part in the politics of the day.

In 1688 much of the political class in Britain detested the new king, James II, for his autocratic ambitions and – worse – his Catholicism. A powerful group of English aristocrats, nicknamed the Whigs, promised James's Protestant daughter Mary, and her husband William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, their allegiance if they would invade Britain and depose James. James II fled without a fight and William and Mary became joint monarchs.

The supporters of James II did not disappear when the king went into exile in France. And many Scots were aggrieved at the treatment of their king and countryman. It is these people who became known as the Jacobites. The period 1688 to 1745 was a time of simmering dissent from these Jacobites and it periodically burst into open revolt. William inflicted a heavy defeat on the gathered forces of James II in Ireland, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The battle went into the folklore of Ulster as the Protestants scored a massive victory over the Catholics.The battle itself was fought on July 1 for control of a ford on the River Boyne at Oldbridge, near Drogheda Ireland.

Mistrust and bad feelings resulting from the colonisation of Ireland by Protestant settlers were followed by centuries of political and social segregation of Catholics and Protestants in all of Ireland. The resulting compromise was the partitioning of Ireland into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1920. At the time of Partition, the government of Great Britain devolved authority to the two governments of the Irish Isles. The Irish Free State in the south (which later left the Commonwealth to become the Republic of Ireland), and Northern Ireland were each allowed to elect their own parliaments, implement local laws, and, in general, conduct their own internal affairs

The Battle of the Boyne remains a controversial topic today, especially in Northern Ireland, where Protestants remember it as the great victory over Catholics that resulted in the sovereignty of Parliament and the Protestant monarchy. In recent years, there has been many confrontations as members of the Orange Order attempt to celebrate the date by marching past or through what they see as their traditional route. Some of these areas, however, now have a nationalist majority who object to marches passing through what they see as their areas. This change is mainly due to natural population migrations, whereby rural Irish Catholics have moved to major cities to be closer to potential employers.

Each side thus dresses up the disputes in terms of the other's alleged attempts to repress them; Catholics still see Orange Order marches as provocative attempts to "show who is boss", while Protestants insist that they have a right to "walk the Queen's highway" and see any attempt to deny them the right to walk through traditional routes used for centuries as a move to marginalise them and restrict their freedom to celebrate their Protestant identity earned in the Glorious Revolution settlement. Since the start of The Troubles, the celebrations of the battle have been seen as playing a critical role in the awareness of those involved in the unionist/nationalist tensions in Northern Ireland.

Sorry it so long but I have tried condense it as much as possible!

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Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. - Bertrand Russell