New Ireland

As a general rule, you can get away with a lot in alternate history by mentioning any given place once. Most places are still there, and it isn't foreordained that the same stuff should happen at the same places; that's what gave rise to the Skete of Orsa, for example - the random derpy idea that there may be a Battle of Taizé, and there is a Battle of Stockholm, and where in Sweden could I plausibly put a Taizé-like community? That minimal amount of work saves you a lot of the shame of Hollywood geography by making a lot of ill-documented places important.

Then there are the hard ones: the places (usually countries) that have long, well-documented histories, which potentially are going to be significantly altered by the changes you make. Places that give rise to lots of people who understandably have the right to wonder what the hell happens there.

Places like Ireland, for instance.
The waterway that IRL is known as the Saint Lawrence River cuts through Ontario and Quebec. Which is a headachey thing, because neither Quebec nor Ontario exists. Maybe Ontario, but certainly not Quebec; after all, France was busily colonizing a fair chunk of the American Southeast instead, and in the Age of Exploration North America went to the Scots (and Norwegians) instead.


So what's there in its place? Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you New Ireland.

New Ireland 101

Why? Because in the beginning I'd assumed way too much parallelism and successfully ignored the history of Ireland, which I knew even less about than I do now. (And that's saying something, because I've officially butterflied an enormous amount of Irish history after it gets an Anglo-Norman king.) Also because I knew very well that I'd butterflied the existence of Quebec away, and was too lazy to redraw the map around it. New Ireland filled that Quebec-shaped hole, and gave me a patchwork temporary solution to the matter of Ireland.

• Who? Lots of Gaels. Lots and lots of Gaels.
• What? The single largest Gaeltacht in the world, stretching all the way down...
• Where? ...the St. Lawrence River, and by periods in history south and north a bit.
• When? Starting in the early 1800s, but it really picks up once the Burning Thirties get underway in Europe and the UCNA starts fighting over the mostly unsettled land around the Great Lakes and west to the Pacific Ocean.

And that leaves the question open: How?

A brief history of New Ireland 

Originally, the capital of New Ireland was named "New Waterford." Nobody ever called it that, though, and as the population increasingly Gaelicized, the name was changed to what it was actually called: Port Lairge. It's located somewhere around the site of Toronto, but I'm not sure where yet.

New Ireland's cultural significance

New Ireland is relevant because in many ways, even despite being the single largest Gaelic-speaking population in the world, it's an island of canniness in an alt-history gone very weird.

• Music. IRL American music has a lot of Celtic roots; country and western music derives from hillbilly music of the 1900s, which derives from largely Scotch-Irish songways, which in turn derives from whatever they brought over from 18th-century Ulster. New Andalusian music goes off in a totally unrelated direction very early on; by comparison, New Irish songways are probably much more recognizable to the untrained American ear. (The Celtic influence is significantly stronger, but that's rather to be expected given how many of the lyrics are written in at best macaronic English.)
• Alcohol. Uniquely the UCNA develops a cider culture, and its dominant hard liquor is various forms of (usually but not always apple-based) brandy. By contrast, New Ireland is the heart of American whiskey production; the UCNA considers it as exotic and foreign as sake. (It bears noting that it's specifically whiskey with an /e/; stylistically they're obviously not Scotch-influenced.)
• It's worth noting that New Ireland is also responsible for a very distinctive strain in North American beer styles.
• Theology. New Ireland is at least as Catholic as Ireland is IRL; what makes this remarkable is that it's Roman Catholic. The UCNA, because of its Moorish ties, is hegemonically Isidoran Rite (which causes no small amount of tension between the Catholic French and Mozarabs, weakening them as a bloc in ways that doubtless serve the Umayyads well); New Ireland's seminaries (which are probably more Sodalite than the UCNA's) are, once again, going to be relatively recognizable, certainly moreso than church as the Mozarabs do it.