Although it is clearly established that the people of Europe hold a firm understanding and connection to their cultural and historical roots, few Europeans do to such a degree as the Irish. And to the people of British Northern Ireland, this history plays a part of their every day lives; the political, class, culture and ethnic divisions run every bit as strong today as throughout Irish history. But why have these divisions hardened over time? Many European states manage religious and ethnic differences with tensions to a minimum. I propose that these tensions are the consequence of suppression of the Roman Catholic majority of a Protestant ruling elite for several centuries, which has left lasting implications on the modern class structure.

Ever since the Norman English first made contact with the Irish in the early centuries of this millennium there has been a mutual sense of doubt of each other’s intentions. There still remained a relatively peaceful isolated relationship. The real catalyst of tensions occurred in the seventeenth century when English and Scottish settlers began emigrating to relatively under populated Ulster, in Northern Ireland. There was a concurrent situation of overpopulation in Scotland, and sending Scottish labour to cultivate Ulster was an ideal solution.1 The Gaelic clans of Northern Ireland were quickly suppressed which led to more emigration to central and west Ulster. The peak of this influx from the British Island didn’t occur until well into the seventeenth century.2 These settlers were known as Anglo-Irish, and Ulster Scots. They were not a cohesive unit, religious differences between them also were an issue, as the English crown at first looked upon the Scottish Presbyterians in the same disdain as the Irish Catholics. Northern Ireland remained a quiet area until 1641, when the Irish Gaelic clans organized a rebellion to expel the settlers from their land. Open warfare broke out, with the Irish led by Rory O’More. His forces succeeded in driving the settlers out of central and west Ulster. Not until when the Scottish army, in 1642 was sent, could the Anglo-Irish and the Ulster Scots return. At the same time external political issues were brewing elsewhere in Europe. King Charles’ attempt to rule England as an absolute monarch had precipitated a civil war in 1642. Although a protestant, Charles had a very lenient view on Catholics: a stance, which endeared him to many Irish Catholics and drew their support to the royalist cause. An Irish civil war raged along side the English one. But the lines of it were clear: Protestants versus Catholics. The Irish Catholics saw the weakness of the English at this point and tried to regain their territories. Following the victory of the parliamentarians Oliver Cromwell effectively ruled England. In 1649 Cromwell was left with extensive war debts. To pay these off he came to Ireland with his army and ruthlessly occupied the country. He seized all the land of his adversaries, who were mainly Catholics, and partially seized the land of those who stayed neutral during the war. This is documented in the Act of Settlement of 1662 in which, “many Protestant and nearly all Catholic landowners, according to their guilt in the eyes of the parliament, had lost all or a portion of their estates.”3 Even those who were in support of him were relocated to land of lesser value, in Connaught.4 This dramatically changed the class demographic of Ireland. PreCromwellian Ireland had many Catholic Landlords. Oliver Cromwell’s redistribution of land to, in many cases, absentee Non-Irish Protestant landlords destroyed them, and dramatically increased resentment and bitterness between the two religious sects. It had been the case with the Irish Catholic landlords that they had shared an affinity with their fellow Catholic tenants. When the Protestants came in they neither shared religion, language nor culture with their tenants and there was no affinity, as they were not present on their estates for a majority of the time. Upon Cromwell’s death, the Irish Catholics began to regain power, supporting James the second to re establish the monarch under Catholic auspices, which would facilitate the return of some of their land. When in 1689 he began to implement laws to this effect, the Protestants backed William the Orange, a Protestant Dutchman. This culminated in the battle of the Boyne in 1690, where William the Orange defeated the Catholic forces under James. The catholic army, upon its defeat left Ireland to fight under other countries’ forces, such as French, Spanish, or Austrian.

Ireland in the post Battle of the Boyne era was a very different place. It was one of complete Protestant domination, an era in which the Protestant upper class attained utmost power and prestige. Known as the Protestant Ascendancy, it was a time of repressive laws towards Catholics. Alarmed that they had very nearly lost their position of ascendancy to the Jacobite forces, the Protestants became more repressive. In 1691 the English parliament passed a bill that forbade Catholics from becoming MP’s. So during this period the “propertied interests” of the Protestant minority were the utmost concern of the Irish parliament.5 This ruling Protestant class wasted no time consolidating its power, the years between1695 and 1729 they introduced as series of “penal laws”, which curtailed the political, economic and religious freedoms of the Catholics, who composed roughly 75% of the Irish population. One such of these laws forbade Catholics to lease land for over thirty-one years. Also upon the death of a Catholic landowner, his estate was divided equally among his sons, which ensured the death of Catholic family fortunes. This policy became evident as Catholic ownership in Ireland dropped from 22% in 1688 to 14% in 1700. However, if one of the sons were to convert to the Church of Ireland, the Irish equivalent of the Anglican Church, he would inherit the entire family fortune.6 These penal laws not only pertained to Catholics but also to so called “Irish Dissenters”, whom were mainly the Scottish Presbyterians of Northern Ireland. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, some of these laws loosened in enforcement. Although welcomed by the beleaguered Catholic population, it also served to undermine the respect of the government’s conviction, and drove the Catholics even more into the arms of their church for order. One of the biggest grievances of Catholics today is that the protestant class represents British interests solely. Nothing really expresses this as much as the Protestants’ lack of resistance to the Declaration Act of 1720. This act “denied that the Irish House of Lords had any jurisdiction over appeals from the courts, and asserted the rights of British parliament to pass legislation binding on Ireland.”7 This widened the gulf between Protestant and Catholic, and started the gradual drift of Catholics from legitimate politics as a form of expression. Between 1739 and 1741 a severe famine spread across Ireland. Due to the Protestant dominance of land ownership, the Catholics generally blamed their systems of land allotment and organization for the hardships. In the minds of the Catholics the hardships they were enduring were not going to be remedies through protest to the Protestants who held all the power. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Protestant politicians started making concessions to persons of the Catholic faith. In 1778 a Relief Act was introduced that finally allowed Catholics to lease and inherit land on the same terms as other religious denominations could. But this was seen as too little, too late by the Catholics, as most of their assets and estates had withered away. Instead of legal forms of political advocacy, in the late eighteenth century secret organizations started emerging. One of the first of these was the Catholic Defender Movement in Ulster. The main goal of these groups was to protect what little land and rights they had left, through armed confrontation if necessary. One such incident, which lives on in Protestant folklore is the Battle of Diamond Hill in 1795, where a small band of Protestant defenders held the hill when outnumbered by a surrounding Catholic force. This incident gave birth to one of the strongest Protestant movements, the Orange Order. The Orange Order would become one of the most visible organizations in the country, marching through Catholic neighbourhoods in Ulster, which draws conflict even today. But also many Catholic uprisings took place in this period, marshal law even had to be imposed in Ulster in March 1797, and later nationwide as one of the bloodiest periods in Irish history was ravaging the countryside. It became clear that the status quo wasn’t working in Ireland, so in May of 1800 a Union bill was introduced in the Irish House of Commons.

The Bill passed and Ireland entered into a new period of its history, one of political union with Great Britain. Ireland was now allowed to send one hundred MP’s to the House of Commons in London, and thirty-two peers to the House of Lords.8 This act only harboured deeper resentment from the Catholic community. Irish Catholics felt that they had been invaded by the Protestants then annexed by the United Kingdom. There was no political representation by Catholics in this arrangement either. The only difference was now England’s military might be able to be exacted on the Catholics of Ireland much easier, as they were subjects of the Crown. The Irish Catholics never accepted rule from London, immediately upon union Daniel O’Connell, an upper class catholic lawyer began lobbying for amendments to the Act of Union. He was of firm belief that the Catholics of Ireland would be loyal subjects to the crown if granted the same rights as their Protestant compatriots.9 The Protestant politicians of the day were not monolithic, there were pro Catholic emancipation candidates, and in the 1826 general election a large number of Catholics defied their landlords and voted for them. This sent a strong message to the Protestant Oligarchy in Ireland, one of inevitable reform. The next step of Catholic rights was O’Connell running for office, and winning resoundingly. Although he could not take his place in London, there was an empty seat in his place. This symbol made the Unionists Protestants in Westminster seem completely illegitimate as far as democratic ideals are concerned. So under worries of a possible Catholic revolution in Ireland, British lawmakers passed the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 passed, allowing Catholics to hold office, and participate in the military and civil service. O’Connell’s next campaign was to reinstate the Irish Parliament. But he was by no means a separatist; he believed that Ireland could function well under the British Crown.10 To gain this O’Connell aligned his cause with the Whig party. This new movement slowly caught on, even among some Protestants. But the Protestants of Northern Ireland remained steadfast in their Unionism, mainly due to their demographic and class superiority over the Catholics, and any Irish State would surely bring that to a close. Unfortunately the Catholics split in two, the ones in favour of an Irish Republic and those in favour of an Ireland aligned with the Crown. Upon his death in 1847 the cause was rapidly deteriorating. It was all but wiped out by one of the most infamous tragedies in Irish history, the great Potato Blight of the late 1840’s to the early 1850’s in which massive emigration took place along with the starvation. Starvation which many historians have attributed to the Whig party’s economic doctrine of Laissez Fair, which advocates non interference by government. The Irish who survived the famine felt betrayed by the party whom had been so close to their cause. This wound is still deep as Tony Blair even remarked in Cork in 1997, “ That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today.”11 This outrage led to an increase in paramilitary home rule advocates throughout Ireland, in many cases supported financially by displaced relatives abroad. One such organization was the Feinians, a militant nationalist (arguably terrorist) organization. But militancy was not the sole cause for Catholics, they also employed non-violent methods of protest such as strikes, and the first Boycott, used against Captain Charles Boycott in 1880. The cry for home rule could be heard clearly in Westminster and to the MP’s Ireland was becoming more trouble than its worth. By the break of the twentieth century Irish home rule seemed a matter of time. It seemed to be on the brink when, in 1914 World War One took the forefront and any home rule had to be suspended. During the Battle of the Somme a large contingent of Unionist Ulstermen sustained heavy casualties, dying for the Crown and country they wish to stay in. After the war, British troops were sent to Ireland to suppress the paramilitaries. This civil lasted only a year and a half and ended with the partition of Ireland, home rule for the South, and continued inclusion in the United Kingdom for the North. This volatile mix of almost equal parts Catholic and Protestant exists to this day, with various groups fighting for Republicanism and Unionism.

This history rings are painfully true in the ears and hearts of those living in Northern Ireland today. The Catholics of this region see freedom to their South, but the Protestants see the enemy. The Protestants feel very much British, and wish to remain a political unit with the rest of Britain, while the Catholics feel suppressed living in an uncivil system, with class divisions founded on religion. They are both painfully aware of the circumstances that brought them to this point. So modern Northern Ireland is somewhat comparable to Ireland of years past, one with two very separate and mutually antagonistic groups. The difference now is, unlike in centuries past, democratic ideals can’t mitigate the problem, for the population is roughly split with a small majority going to the Protestants. They fear annexation by the Republic of Ireland will exact discrimination of them, due in a large part to historical grievances. Even if the Protestants are willing to recognize their tattered past; they certainly don’t see it as a foundation for recompense.

I left out much of 20th century Irish conflict for two reasons: the first being I didn’t want to spread this essay too thin, being only a 2000 word paper (which I went over in either case), and second, because I feel that grounds for the conflict in the 20th century were lays in advance. I see the recent events as more of a struggle and less of a reason why this antagonism exists. For I feel that history in this case plays the largest role in the region, with both sides deeply aware of their past, and that assimilation or integration with the enemy would not fall into the framework laid out by their forefathers.