Ireland, A Cautionary Tale

Timeline of Irish History 1100 - 1730 (Wiki)

1167		Following exile by Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, Dermot MacMurrough seeks support from Henry II of England to reclaim his Kingship.
1171		Henry II of England lands at Waterford and declares himself Lord of Ireland.
1175	6 October[21]	The Treaty of Windsor consolidates Norman influence in Ireland.

13th century[edit]

Year	Date	Event
1216	12 November	Great Charter of Ireland issued by Henry III of England.
1252		The Annals of the Four Masters records a Summer-time heat-wave and drought.[22]
1297		The first representative Irish Parliament (of the Lordship of Ireland) meets in Dublin.[23]

14th century[edit]

Year	Date	Event
1315	26 May	Edward Bruce arrives in Ireland and rallies many Irish lords against Anglo-Norman control.
1366		The Statutes of Kilkenny are passed at Kilkenny to curb the decline of the Hiberno-Norman Lordship of Ireland.
1398		Gerald FitzGerald, 3rd Earl of Desmond, mysteriously disappears; Gearóid Íarla is forever afterwards judged to be sleeping in a cave under Lough Gur, waiting to gallop out on his silver-shod horse and rescue Ireland at the moment of greatest need.

15th century[edit]

Year	Date	Event
1494	1 December	Edward Poyning, Henry VII of England's Lord Deputy to Ireland, issued a declaration known as Poynings' Law under which the Irish parliament was to pass no law without the prior consent of the English parliament.
1497		The Annals of the Four Masters refers to a famine which "prevailed through all Ireland".[26]

16th century[edit]

Year	Date	Event
1534	11 June	Thomas FitzGerald, the 10th Earl of Kildare, publicly renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII of England.
1537	3 February	FitzGerald was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn.
1542		The Irish parliament passed the Crown of Ireland Act, which established a Kingdom of Ireland to be ruled by Henry VIII and his successors.
1570	25 February	Pope Pius V issued a papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, declaring Elizabeth I of England a heretic and releasing her subjects from any allegiance to her.
1575	May-Aug	The Annals of the Four Masters record a drought, in which no rain fell "from Bealtaine to Lammas" (May 1 to August 1), which resulted in disease and plague.
1577	November	The Annals of the Four Masters record that the Great Comet of 1577 "was wondered at by all universally".
1579	16 July	Second Desmond Rebellion: James FitzMaurice FitzGerald, a cousin of the 15th Earl of Desmond, landed a small force of rebels at Dingle.
1594		The Nine Years' War commences in Ulster, as Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell rebel against Elizabeth I's authority in Ulster.

17th century[edit]

Year	Date	Event
1607	14 September	The Flight of the Earls: The departure from Ireland of Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell.
1609		Plantation of Ulster by Scottish Presbyterians began on a large scale.
1641	22 October	Irish Rebellion of 1641: Phelim O'Neill led the capture of several forts in the north of Ireland.
1642		Irish Confederate Wars: The Irish Catholic Confederation was established, under the nominal overlordship of Charles I of England, with its capital at Kilkenny.
1646	28 March	The Supreme Council of the Irish Catholic Confederation signed an agreement with a representative of Charles I, which procured some rights for Catholics in return for their military support of the royalists in England.
		The members of the Supreme Council were arrested. The General Assembly renounced the agreement with England.
1647		A more favorable agreement was reached with Charles's representative, which promised toleration of Catholicism, a repeal of Poynings' Law, and recognition of lands taken by Irish Catholics during the war.

18th century[edit]

Year	Date	Event
1740		Extreme winters in successive years result in poor harvests, causing a largescale famine in which between 310,000 and 480,000 die.
1760	February	Battle of Carrickfergus: A French invasion.
1782		After agitation by the Irish Volunteers, the Parliament of Great Britain passed a number of reforms - including the repeal of Poynings' Law - collectively referred to as the Constitution of 1782.
1796	December	Expédition d'Irlande: Attempted French invasion.
1798	24 May	Battle of Ballymore-Eustace: A miscarried surprise attack on the British garrison at Ballymore in County Kildare was counterattacked and defeated.
	22 August	Irish Rebellion of 1798: One thousand French soldiers landed at Kilcummin in support of the rebellion.
	27 August	Battle of Castlebar: A combined French-Irish force defeated a vastly numerically superior British force at Castlebar.
		Irish Rebellion of 1798: The Republic of Connacht was proclaimed at Castlebar. First United Irishmen rebellion

Jonathan Swift

Edmund Burke

Penal Acts 1700-1760

The Anglican bastards ("Protestant Ascendancy) sought to ensure dominance with the passing of a number of laws to restrict the religious, political and economic activities of Catholics and Dissenters. Harsher laws were introduced for political reasons during the long War of the Spanish Succession that ended in 1714. The son of James II, the "Old Pretender", was recognised by the Holy See as the legitimate King of Britain and Ireland until his death in 1766, and Catholics were obliged to support him. He also approved the appointments of all the Irish Catholic hierarchy, who were drawn from his most fervent supporters. These aspects provided the political basis for the new laws passed for several decades after 1695. Interdicts faced by Catholics and Dissenters under the Penal Laws were:

• Exclusion of Catholics and Presbyterians from most public offices 
• Ban on intermarriage with Protestants
• Presbyterian marriages were not legally recognized by the state
• Catholics barred from holding firearms or serving in the armed forces
• Bar from membership in either the Parliament of Ireland or the Parliament of England
• Disenfranchising Act 1728, exclusion from voting
• Exclusion from the legal professions and the judiciary.
• Education Act 1695 – ban on foreign education
• Bar to Catholics and Protestant Dissenters entering Trinity College Dublin
• On a death by a Catholic, his legatee could benefit by conversion to the Church of Ireland;
• Popery Act – Catholic inheritances of land were to be equally subdivided between all an owner's sons with the exception that if the eldest son and heir converted to Protestantism that he would become the one and only tenant of estate and portions for other children not to exceed one third of the estate.
• Ban on converting from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism on pain of Praemunire: forfeiting all property estates and legacy to the monarch of the time and remaining in prison at the monarch's pleasure. In addition, forfeiting the monarch's protection. No injury however atrocious could have any action brought against it or any reparation for such.
• Ban on Catholics buying land under a lease of more than 31 years
• Ban on custody of orphans being granted to Catholics on pain of 500 pounds that was to be donated to the Blue Coat hospital in Dublin.
• Ban on Catholics inheriting Protestant land
• Prohibition on Catholics owning a horse valued at over £5 (to keep horses suitable for military activity out of the majority's hands)
• Roman Catholic lay priests had to register to preach under the Registration Act 1704, but seminary priests and Bishops were not able to do so until 1778
• When allowed, new Catholic churches were to be built from wood, not stone, and away from main roads.
• 'No person of the popish religion shall publicly or in private houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm' upon pain of twenty pounds fine and three months in prison for every such offence.
• Any and all rewards not paid by the crown for alerting authorities of offences to be levied upon the Catholic populace within parish and county.

From Conditions in 18th Century Ireland:

By 1729 political, economic and religious struggles both within Ireland and between English and Irish interest had reduced Ireland--which in 1199 had been passed to King John to hold as a sister-kingdom to England--to a virtual colony of the latter.

In 1720 Swift broke nearly 20 years of silence to develop rapidly into the strongest voice of protest against this trend, which had all but reached its perfection. His "fierce indignation" at the deplorable state of the nation led him to condemn both the arrogance and greed of the English and religious fanaticism, short-sighted self-interest and political despondency which prevented the Irish from presenting a united front against disastrous exploitation: He once remarked, "We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

One hardly knows where to begin in discussing the complex roots of the exasperations of 18th-Century Ireland, but the religious divisions seem as good a place as any for a launch. In any case we shall have to limit ourselves here to sketching only a few facts in order (hopefully) to at least suggest the tangle of frustrations which nearly strangled that country.

The overwhelming majority of the population was Roman Catholic, but the immigrant Protestant minorities had united with the English to force through Parliament a series of discriminatory inheritance laws which effectively broke up large Catholic estates and put them at the mercy of rapidly consolidating Protestant landowners, with the result that the Catholics, who in 1641 had held 59% of the land, in 1703 held only 14%. Some twelve years before, the Protestants had found--at what great cost we shall see--legal means to deprive Catholics of any right to serve in Parliament or administration. The hierarchy of the Roman Church was banished, along with all priests who would not swear that they no longer recognized the claims of the Catholic Stuarts to the two thrones. Catholics were excluded from practicing law and forbidden to purchase land or even to hold a valuable lease. Nor were they allowed to possess arms or to own a horse above the value of £5. In 1627 there were denied the right to vote.

However, the suppression of Catholics was practically the only issue capable of pulling together the Protestant Dissenters, most of whom had come from Scotland a century earlier to make Ulster a center of zealous Presbyterianism, and the Church of Ireland, the Irish arm of the English Establishment Church. Economic and doctrinal motives, along with a Tory English administration, enabled the establishmentarians in 1704 to exclude dissenters from civil and military position, though not from Parliament. Indeed this act is of special interest for the light it throws on the priorities of the dissenters themselves: the clause which guaranteed this exclusion of non-establishment Protestants was tacked as a rider to a bill which promised further hurt to the Catholics, so the Presbyterian Members of Parliament (MPs) went along with it. (It was not repealed until 1780.) Finally the dissenters as well as the Catholics were required by law to furnish financial support to the "episcopal curate" (see n. 10 to the "Proposal,").

So far then, it might seem that the country belonged to the so-called "Anglo-Irish," people of English descent who lived in Ireland and for the most part supported the Established Church--Swift himself was an example. But this group found itself continually at odds with the government administration in Dublin, the posts of which were largely filled with English appointees of whatever political party happened to be in power, hence in debt to certain supporters, whom it repaid with offices in which irresponsibility and incompetence would not be politically costly but which offered opportunities for accepting comfortable bribes.

But snobbery and corruption were not the most forceful goads to Irish resentment of the English presence and policy. The Irish Parliament (itself habitually split between a Tory Lordship and a Whiggish House of Commons) had no autonomy anyway. Ever since the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509) "Poyning's Law" had ordained that the Irish Parliament could be convened only by decree of the English King (through his lord lieutenant) and could pass no law without the approval of the Kind and his Privy Council, to whom it send "Heads of Bills" for deletion, addition or outright rejection with full discretion. If a bill were returned, the Irish Parliament was empowered only to accept it with whatever changes the Privy Council had worked on it or to reject it in full. Nor is this all. Irish Protestant properly had been threatened by the Catholic uprising in the wake of England's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 (see n. 2 to "Proposal," below).

Many of them--including the young Swift, who was then on the verge of taking his MA at Trinity College--crossed over to England in 1689. When they returned after the defeat of the Pretender's forces at Limerick in 1691, they refused to cooperate with the clemency of William III's treaty with the rebels. Instead they pressed for revenge against the Catholics, whose (revolutionary) Parliament had in 1689 provided for a sweeping redistribution of land. English permission for legislation to disable the Catholics was dearly bought, however: the Irish Parliament had to barter away its right to originate money bills--a power until then very jealously guarded. And it even allowed the English  Parliament to impose that oath denying the doctrine of transubstantiation as a prerequisite for membership in the Irish Parliament. Fear of the Catholics made virtual political suicide worth the price to the Anglo-Irish, just as it would about a decade later (we may recall) to the Presbyterians.
As we shall see, the legal impotence of the Irish Parliament was not only humiliating but would eventually insure the country's utter prostration before the exploitative legislation of the English Parliament in response to powerful agricultural, industrial and commercial lobbies. Meanwhile we must keep in mind, as the Anglo-Irish certainly did, that it was England after all who pronounced and ruthlessly pursued the principle that "It is in the interests of...this country, that Ireland should be humbled." The member of the English Commons who declared that did not mean by "Ireland" the Catholic majority or the dissenting minority but all of Ireland, including the Anglo-Irish. And why? Because Irish prosperity meant competition for English farms and businesses. The following laws are a sample from England's systematic policy for destroying the Irish economy:

(1) During the reign (1660-1685) of Charles II, a series of Navigation Acts prohibited the exportation of goods to any English colony unless they were loaded in English ships (carrying English crews) at English ports. At first Irish ships could export Irish goods to America. Soon, however, she too was reduced to colonial status--as a place for unloading exports for specie and compelled as well to serve as a source of revenue for the mother country's shipping industry. 

(2) The Cattle Acts (1666 and 1680). The many Irish who had depended for their livelihood on raising and exporting livestock to England were ruined when the latter outlawed the importation of cattle, sheep, pigs, and related (processed) items. Nor could they turn to other foreign markets, since the export duties on shipments to non-English ports were prohibitive. 

(3) Ireland's most promising industry was all but demolished by the Woolen Act of 1699, through which the English Parliament absolutely forbade Ireland to export her woolen goods to any country whatsoever. It went further still, not only removing Irish competition at home and abroad, but providing to domestic industry an extra-cheap source of raw wool, by restricting Ireland to exporting unworked wool only to special ports in England, so that the English industry would not have to compete with others in order to secure Ireland's resources. This, of course, was classic mercantilism: all resources are geared to maximize the exploitation of the subject colony's raw resources and to minimize its threat in whatever markets are coveted by the mother country's enterprises. The result: weavers emigrated by the thousands; other remained and starve, in like numbers, or survived through beggary or crime. 

There is no need to repeat here our remarks on Declaratory Act of 1720 or the corrupt attempt to foist off Wood's halfpence on the staggering nation. We have as yet made no mention of the phenomenon which Swift thought one of the most inexcusable contributions to Ireland's woes: absenteeism among landlords, who in order to escape the depressing spectacle left their estates in the hands of stewards and spend at least a third of their incomes (Swift calculated) outside of the kingdom, thus aggravating tremendously the flow of specie from the land. Not only were their stewards corrupt in their treatment of tenants, but the landlords continued to put most of their states into grazing even after the crushing of the Irish wool industry, and Ireland continued to starve untenanted peasants and to import grain from England.

Let us sum up by saying that by 1729 England had contrived, with the help of Irish venality, to wreck Ireland's merchant marine, her agriculture and her growing woolen industry.

We might ask why Ireland did nothing to protect at least her domestic market for her own industry by levying protective tariffs, as Swift had urged in his boycott proposal of 1720. The answer is very simple. If you will recall the terms of the "Poyning's Law," you can to guess just what England did in order to maintain an "open door policy" for its mercantile interests in Ireland. The greed of Irish drapers who sold faulty goods and the vanity of a population who esteemed foreign items ­ and especially things English ­ as a mark of prestige: these did the rest.

In 1718 the Archbishop of Dublin had written to a friend that "[t]he misery of the people here is very great, the beggars innumerable and increasing every day....One half of the people in Ireland eat neither bread nor flesh for one half of the year, nor wear Shoes or Stockings; your Hoggs in England and Essex Calves lie and live better than they." How much worse must conditions have been in 1729, when Ireland lay in the grip of a famine resulting from three years in a row of bad harvests. And yet Swift surely had a point when he remarked, in his Proposal that the Ladies Should Appear Constantly in Irish Manufactures, that "the three seasons wherein our corn hath miscarried, did no more contribute to our present misery, than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned would contribute to his death."