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The British Isles is a traditional term commonly used to identify the group of islands off the northwest coast of Europe consisting of Great Britain, Ireland and the many smaller adjacent islands. These islands form an archipelago off the west coast of Europe, 315,134 km (121,674 square miles), consisting of:
- Great Britain
- Ireland
- The Isle of Man
- The Isle of Wight
- The Orkney Isles
- The Shetland Isles
- Fair Isle
- The Hebrides
- The Small Isles
- Anglesey
- Lindisfarne
- The islands of the lower Firth of Clyde, including Arran and Bute
- The Isles of Scilly
- Lundy
- Looe Island
- The Channel Islands
and many other smaller islands surrounding the islands of Great Britain and Ireland.
The term "British Isles" owes its origin to the geographical proximity of the islands, separate from continental Europe. Just as the Hawaiian Islands archipelago is identifed by the name of its largest member, so are the British Isles. This convention was used by early european map-makers to identify maps of the islands. For example, Balthasar Moretus (1624), Giovanni Magini (1596), Abraham Ortelius (1570) and Sebastian Munster (1550) produced maps bearing the term "British Isles". Since 1922, the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland) has existed as a separate state, causing problems with the use of "British Isles" for many Irish people who see it as an agenda-laden term.
Politically, the archipelago is now divided between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Bailiwick of Jersey. The last four of these are not part of the United Kingdom, although the last three are British crown dependencies.
Many people in Ireland and the Irish diaspora dislike the term "British Isles" because they think it may suggest that Ireland is, or should be, part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and reflects the past, not the current relationship.
In cases where what is being referred to is the two largest islands, the term "Great Britain and Ireland" can be used. Of course, in those cases, the term "British Isles" would not be appropriate to begin with. There is no other brief term in common use to refer to the island group as a whole; "Great Britain, Ireland, and surrounding islands" gets at the basic meaning, but at the cost of conciseness.
In the context of the Northern Ireland peace process the term "Islands of the North Atlantic" (IONA) has been used as a neutral term to describe these islands.
