The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern two-thirds of the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola and has a land border with Haiti on the west. The country has an area of nearly 49,000 sq km/19,000 sq mi, twice as large as the state of Vermont or Wales.
It is the most mountainous of the Caribbean Islands, with the highest peaks rising over 3,000 m/10,000 ft, but there are also considerable areas of lowland.
Apart from the mountains, which are cooler and wetter, the weather and climate are represented by the table for Santo Domingo on the south coast. The north coast is almost twice as wet throughout the year and has rather more rain in the winter season than is usual in the Caribbean.
The Irish Republican Army (IRA) (Irish: Óglaigh na hÉireann), sometimes known later as the Old IRA, was a military organization descended from the Irish Volunteers which was recognised in 1919 by Dáil Éireann as the legitimate army (from the perspective of Irish republicans) of the unilaterally declared Irish Republic, the Irish state proclaimed in the Easter Rising in 1916 and reaffirmed by the Dáil in January 1919. In Irish, it was referred to as Óglaigh na hÉireann.
Though a series of organisations later claimed to be a continuation of the IRA from the 1920s to today, many Irish people disagree with these claims. After the signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, members of the IRA who supported the Treaty formed the nucleus of the National Army founded by IRA leader Michael Collins in 1922. While the anti-Treaty IRA continued to exist after its defeat in the Irish Civil War, by the late 1930s it had lost most of the legitimacy with which most supporters of the Republican side initially regarded it. A small minority of Irish people accepts later claimants to the name as the political heirs of the original Irish Republican Army, though none had their claims accepted by Dáil Éireann.
To distinguish between the army of the Irish Republic, and later claimants to the name, the original army recognised by the Dáil is sometimes called the Old IRA.
Provisional Irish Republican Army (Irish: Óglaigh na hÉireann or An tArm Sealadach Phoblacht na hÉireann) (IRA; also referred to as the PIRA, the Provos, or by some of its supporters as the Army or the ‘RA.) is an Irish Republican, left wing paramilitary organisation that, until the Belfast Agreement, sought to end Northern Ireland’s status within the United Kingdom and bring about a United Ireland by force of arms and political persuasion. Since its emergence in 1969, its stated aim has been the overthrow of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and their replacement by a sovereign socialist all-island Irish state.
The organisation is classified as an illegal terrorist group in the United Kingdom and as an illegal organisation in the Republic of Ireland. However it is not currently listed as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” by the United States of America.