The Republic of Ireland is divided into 30 administrative regions, mostly tied to the 26 constituent counties (county Tipperary is divided in two and county Dublin in four).
For a comparatively small country, Ireland has made a disproportionate contribution to world literature in all its branches, in both the Irish and English languages.
The island's most widely-known literary works are undoubtedly in English. Particularly famous examples of such works are those of James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde and Ireland's four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature; William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney.
Ireland is an island in northwest Europe in the north Atlantic Ocean whose main geographical features include low central plains surrounded by a ring of coastal mountains.