The New Irish Constitution: An Exposition and Some Arguments
History
The New Irish Constitution: An Exposition and Some Arguments
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government
Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and
wreaked on their landlords, in the massacre of 1641, vengeance for a
generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of
indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots,
English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell
repaid the massacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a
further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More
than two-thirds of Irish land had now passed into the hands of Englishmen;
and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the
Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more
than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that
category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about
half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the
Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet complete: the new expropriation was
followed in 1689-90 by yet another attempt on the part of the Irish to
recover their inheritance, and the failure of that attempt by further
confiscation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century three-quarters of
the land was owned by the English garrison, and the progress of the
century was marked by fresh evictions. Political reasons had ceased, but
economic causes supplied their place; and wide stretches of pasture were
needed in order that the landlords might turn _their_ property to the most
profitable grazing purposes. Only land that would not do for cattle was
left to the Irish peasants; from the bogs there looked up, from the barren
hills there looked down, the Roman Catholic disinherited upon the smiling
meadows of their Protestant supplanters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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