Between 1874 and 1878 a large British Army barracks went up in the town. It would shape Tipperary's twentieth-century reputation more than anything else. The barracks trained soldiers for the First World War, and during the Irish War of Independence it became a base for the Black and Tans - the auxiliary force whose violence in Ireland is still a charged memory. The very first engagement of the War of Independence happened a few miles north of here, at Soloheadbeg Quarry on 21 January 1919, when Dan Breen and Sean Treacy led a group of IRA volunteers in an ambush against Royal Irish Constabulary men who were transporting gelignite. Two RIC constables were killed. The war had begun. In 2005, in a striking gesture of reconciliation, President Mary McAleese unveiled the refurbished Memorial Arch of the old barracks - the only remaining portion of the officers' mess - bearing the names of Irish, American, British, and Australian war dead. The Royal Munster Fusiliers banner was carried at the ceremony.

The other great drama of Tipperary's nineteenth century was the Land War. Between 1888 and 1889 tenants of Arthur Smith-Barry, the local landlord, withheld their rents in solidarity with his tenants in County Cork - a tactic borrowed from the wider Plan of Campaign organised by Irish nationalists against landlord power. Smith-Barry evicted them. Led by Fr. David Humphreys and the journalist-politician William O'Brien, the evicted tenants decided to build a new town on land outside Smith-Barry's control. The streets that became Dillon Street and Emmet Street in Tipperary today were the heart of it. The work was done by local labour but financed by funds raised in Australia and the United States - the great international Irish diaspora that kept the home struggle alive. On 12 April 1890 the William O'Brien Arcade was opened: a row of shops to give the evicted businesspeople a place to trade. Eventually compromise was reached and most of the tenants returned to the original streets. But the New Tipperary lanes are still there, an unusual physical monument to a struggle that played out as architecture.

The town sits on the N24 between Limerick city and Waterford city, with the Galtee Mountains rising visibly to the south and the Slievenamon range to the east. It is a long-established market town with a large agricultural catchment in west Tipperary and east Limerick. Today it still has substantial butter-making and milk-processing industries; the cattle of these limestone valleys have been producing fat-rich milk for centuries, and the dairy industry the small towns spawned remains one of Ireland's biggest. Tipperary Racecourse, technically located at Limerick Junction a few miles outside the town, draws racegoers from across Munster for its summer meetings. The railway station opened in 1848, on what is now the Limerick to Waterford line, with two services a day in each direction. The town is sometimes mistakenly believed to be the county seat. It is not. Clonmel - bigger, older, on the Suir - holds that distinction.

The list of people the town has produced is unusually international. Peter Campbell was a naval officer who became the founder of the Uruguayan navy. George Thomas, called the Raja from Tipperary, was an Irish adventurer who established his own independent kingdom at Hansi in northern India in the late 18th century. Michael F. O'Connell served in the Wisconsin State Assembly. John Walsh fought in the Union Army during the American Civil War and won the Medal of Honor. Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century novelist of Tristram Shandy, was born in Tipperary in 1713 - his father a soldier briefly stationed here. The pattern is consistent: Tipperary sent its sons to every corner of the British Empire and American republic, and they made themselves at home. Mick Kinane, one of the great flat racing jockeys, was born here, as was the Munster and Ireland rugby international Alan Quinlan. Shane Long, who played in the Premier League, came up through St. Michael's.

The Tipperary International Peace Award was founded by locals who wanted to counter the association between their town and war. The song It's a Long Way to Tipperary had attached the name of their home to one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, and they tried to detach it again with a different signal. The first award went to Sean MacBride in 1984. Live Aid founder Bob Geldof has received it. So has UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in 2014. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won it in 2017 for his role in ending the long civil war with FARC. The award is described as Ireland's outstanding award for humanitarian work. The town also runs a programme of twin-town links with Mautern in Steiermark, Austria, and Parthenay in France. In 1984 Ronald Reagan, visiting his ancestral village of Ballyporeen in south Tipperary, quoted the line: "And I'll never more roam, from my own native home, in Tipperary so far away." The town keeps its songs, its history, its long roads in and out. It has never forgotten that the most famous thing about it is its name.