One hundred years ago today on the 22nd January 1901 Queen Victoria passed on to higher or lower things. During her reign hardly a year went by without British soldiers fighting in some little war or other in various parts of the globe. When they weren't fighting they were annexing. This was the woman whose reign was described in a 1938 movie starring Anna Neagle as "Sixty Glorious Years". Yet under her "benign" rule the population of Ireland was almost halved from something in the region of 8.1 million in 1841 to just over 4.7 million in 1891.