Just a bit more for Sunnybaudelaite and her professional offendedness - I'm amused by the use of Eire in your post - oh the irony! But this sums it up I think:
^Today Éire is almost unused, with the exception of right wing anti-Irish newspapers like the Daily Telegraph', the '"Daily Mail and newspapers from the Express Newspapers group. (The London Times has abandoned general usage and only use it at a time of major Anglo-Irish controversy.) The tone of their usage of the word has been such that the word's usage at all has been actively abandoned by everyone else. (Even using the word on wiki led me to be accused of being anti-Irish; I had to explain to five different users, 2 Irish, 1 British and 2 American, that far from being anti-Irish I am Irish myself, and was simply mentioning it in the context of Irish nomenclature and the 1937 constitution.)
The notoriously tactless Duke of Edinburgh had to be formally advised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office not under any circumstances to call Ireland Éire such was its right wing anti-Irish meaning, thanks to its usage by right wing anti-Irish publications.
While the word carried no negative connotations when first coined constitutionally in 1937 decades of later usage by the right wing in Britain and by some extreme unionists in Northern Ireland has discredited it. During the most recent world cup one right wing daily newspaper in Britain managed to write an entire article without using the words Republic of Ireland to describe the football team, even though that is their name, the RoI football team. Instead they used the "Éire soccer team.
The article was littered with terminology and clichés (eg, 'drunken Micks', 'boozing paddies') that were criticised even by other British media outlets and which resulted in complaints over rascist stereotypes. (There was talk of a complaints to the Press Complaints Commission, but I don't know if they actually were made in the end.) That anti-Irish elements used Éire exclusively in anti-Irish (or anti-Éire) articles and commentaries has severely discoloured the word's implied meaning.
It is noticeable that as different newspaper groups in the UK have launched Irish editions, the very first thing to change is the abandonment of the word Éire from usage because they themselves recognise the manner of its previous usage and the fact as it result it is now seen as an offensive anti-Irish term.^
