Chapter 5

                            This chapter, and the last, interlope into the story to give a brief outline of conventional history.  Famous people, battles, major events, and trends.  The next chapter then returns to the beginning of the last, and puts us back in the mass of history rather than the particular;  individuals of the nameless thousands who are mentioned fighting for, or killed by, this or that notable person.

      The modern era begins around 1601 when the last of the Irish chieftains were defeated in the Battle of Kinsale, by the English, and eventually sailed to the Continent and the Papal Court from Lough Swilly in 1607.  Ulster became the domain of the hated English planters who were granted lands at low rents.  The name of ` planter` comes from the fact that they were aliens implanted into the country.  They policed the land with soldiers, and treated the natives with less respect than they gave their cattle.

      The slaughter of the native Irish Catholics continued with churches and monasteries taken over and destroyed, until it peaked with the subjugation of the country by Cromwell after 1649.  Cromwell completed the transference of the land from the Irish to British proprietors, which had began with the kings of the House of Stuart.  His reasons were threefold: to pay off the soldiers who had fought and the capitalists who had provided the monies for conquest; to render the British hold secure; and lastly, to extirpate Catholicism.  He managed the first two objectives.  The native population remained on their farms as menials under new foreign landowners, who rack-rented them.  Cromwell left the land of Ireland, as it long remained, with the persecuted priests as the leaders of the people; as a direct result of the systematic English destruction of the class of native gentry.  The Cromwellian settlement rendered the Irish for centuries, the most `priest led` people in Europe.

      In 1690 The Battle of the Boyne was fought on two distinct quarrels.  It was a struggle of the Anglo/Scots against the Celto/Iberians for the leadership of Ireland, but it was no less the struggle of Britain against her European allies to prevent the Jacobite restoration in England.  The outcome was to subject the native Irish to persecution and tyranny for several generations to come, but at the same time it saved Protestantism in Europe.  The new regime in Ireland reflected the prejudice and rash ignorance of the Whigs and Tories in the Westminster Parliament who were the actual overlords of the land.  The new Penal Code placed the Catholics in Ireland under every political and social disadvantage that malice could invent.  A Lord Chancellor once ruled that the law did not presume that such a person as an Irish Catholic exists.

      The Penal Laws, which were to reduce Catholics to chattel status without human rights, stated:-

      No Catholic was allowed to own land on freehold; allowed to vote; allowed to hold public office; allowed to work in the Civil Service; allowed to own a weapon; allowed to own a horse of the value over five pounds; allowed to be educated in or out of Ireland; allowed to earn more than one third of the value of his crops; permitted to practice as a lawyer or doctor, trader, or professional.  The Catholic religion was largely forbidden, with no facility to train new priests, and foreign-educated priests were outlawed.  All Catholics were compelled to pay a tithe to the Anglican Protestant Church.  Priests returning from the Continent were hunted down to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in the diamonds¹ of the Ulster townships.  Celebration of the Mass went `underground` and was offered in caves and sheds called sc`athlans, the one in Gortahork lasting until 1786.

      During the American Wars of Independence, Ireland fell into the hands of the Volunteers, who were Protestant but supported by Catholic opinion.  The Volunteers were prepared to defend the island against the French on dictated terms: the abolition of Ireland`s commercial disadvantage and the formal independance of their parliament.  They secured free markets for their goods but political independence for the next two decades was apparent rather than real.  The worst of the Penal Laws were repealed and Catholic and Protestant fanaticism was dormant.

      In 1795 the liberal minded viceroy, Lord FitzWilliam, was recalled from Dublin after building up hopes of conciliation to Catholics which Pitt could not fulfil.  This left the door open to French military propagandists who offered Ireland a republican liberty.  Their advance was accepted by leaders of the United Irishmen, Wolfe Tone and Lord FitzGerald.  These men hoped to unite the religions of Ireland against the English.  The alliance with the French was to set both sides, Catholic and Protestant, against each other.  The Ulster Scot, who was Presbyterian, could not join the French to set up a Celtic Republic dominated by priests.

      The rebellion of 1798 was defeated by a combination of the hard pressed British Government and the loyalists of Ireland now re-converted to anti-Catholic fear.  The loyalists began to organise themselves into the new `Orange` lodges and the military and political weakness of England at that critical moment made her depend, to a dangerous degree, on these local partisans who treated the native Irish with cruel rigour.  It was self interest; not any high inspired motive; with the iniquitous status quo that prompted their actions.  This anti-Catholic fear was fuelled by the fact that, with the repeal of the vile Penal Code, Catholics by the 1790s were able to bid on land leases.  The perverse landlords, after being harassed by bands of Presbyterian and Catholic peasants in an attempt to keep rent and rights within humane limitations, now set to divide them by playing on the Presbyterian fear of the erosion of their privileged position.  It created a sense of anger and fear, and the Peep O`Day Boys who had ridden out against the landlords now rode out against the new threat of the native Catholic trying to reclaim his land.

      A new permanent order had been born out of the Rising of `98.  The Catholics and the Presbyterians were alienated forever with the latter establishing that Ulster principle of a fanatical loyalty to the British monarchy.  The tragedy was that the two peasantries had been driven into sectarian conflict which left the British aristocracy, who had stolen the land in the first place, as the only winner.

      Pitt decided that the union of the two islands was the only permanent method of restoring order and justice, and for the following twenty-eight years Catholics were to be prohibited from sitting in the United Parliament.  The delay was fatal and the `land` question was beginning to take foremost place in a land populated by potato-fed oppressed tenant farmers ripe for the popular oratory of the Catholic lawyer; Daniel O`Connell.  The years 1823-43 were the era of O`Connell when emancipation was won for Catholics.

      In September of 1845 the first signs of the potato blight appeared to herald the Great Famine which shook Ireland as no other event in her past history had managed.  Emigration, the decimation of families by death, and the upheaval, all had a profound effect on her culture, family life, and politics.  From then till Independence it is a history of the formation of Brotherhoods and Societies with abortive Risings, interspaced with various Land Acts by the British Parliament.