Eire and Britain (GotW x 1983: Doomsday)

Doomsday caused the total collapse of the United Kingdom as a viable nation-state, as many had predicted. While the national government was able to set in motion its emergency plans for the event of a nuclear war, the hardships and chaos of the aftermath prevented any successful continuity of government. Some of the UK's emergency sites managed to gain stable control over their immediate local regions, but these fragments were never able to reunite; the states that formed out of them remain independent of one another.

The pieces of the UK can be grouped into three broad geopolitical regions. The northwestern regions are mostly members of the Celtic Alliance, anchored around the Republic of Ireland. The southeast is dominated by a confederation of smaller states, the Commonwealth of Great Britain, and formerly was the core of the Organisation of British Nations. In between these blocs are four larger states with a mostly nonaligned stance - Northumbria, Lancaster, southern Scotland, and Southern England - and a number of small, isolated settlements. Efforts to bridge these divides and competing interests have failed to reunite the country.

The devastation of the Third World War wrought a sudden reversal of the relationship between Ireland (Éire) and Great Britain. After a millennium of dominance and exploitation by the larger island, the Republic of Ireland suddenly found itself the strongest power in a region that otherwise was facing total collapse. In the years following Doomsday, Ireland led efforts to build new political structures for the region, efforts which culminated in the creation of the Celtic Alliance, a confederation encompassing Eire, Northern Ireland, northern Scotland, Wales, the former British Crown Dependencies, and several pieces of England. Since the 1990s Ireland has taken on a new international role as the leading nation of the Alliance.