After the last of the High Kings, Ireland underwent many changes. The Vikings had left their mark, including a significant contribution of vocabulary to the Irish language. It was largely through Viking influence and trade that the larger towns were established, notably Baile Atha Cliath (‘Town of the Shallow Ford’), later called Dublin (‘Black Lake’). The Normans, and even the Anglo-Normans, introduced limited change, many of them becoming Gaelicized themselves, even speaking some Gaelic. The profound changes to Irish society began in the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII and Elizabeth I introduced a far more aggressive English control of Irish affairs. The Reformation exacerbated the situation and established religious labels for an essentially political difference which have remained stumbling blocks to open discussion to this day. Catholic Ireland was now dominated by Protestant England. Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who claimed descent from the Ui Neill, led a rebellion against the Protestant hegemony, but was forced to flee to France in 1607. His territories in Ulster were seized and settled, as a matter of deliberate policy, by Protestants of Scottish and English stock, and the foundation of modern Ulster was laid. The uprising of 1641 led to atrocities against the Protestant communities, which were answered by the even greater atrocities of Oliver Cromwell’s campaign, to which much of the present Irish resentment of British rule can still be attributed. The sealing event which created two Irelands, the Catholic Republic of Eire and the Protestant enclave of Northern Ireland, was the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when the new Protestant King William of Orange, William III of England, or King Billy, defeated the deposed Catholic King James II at the siege of Londonderry.
Under King Billy, the Penal Laws passed between 1702 and 1715 severely restricted the Catholic population. The religious orders were banished. Catholics were barred from public office, from Parliament, from the university, from practising law, even from teaching or keeping a school. By 1714, only 7 per cent of Irish land was owned by Catholics. There was another Catholic uprising in 1798, which ended in dismal failure, and Ireland was forcibly joined with Britain in 1801.
The eighteenth century not only introduced a separate Protestant Ulster; it also introduced a new and different culture to the rest of Ireland. Dublin acquired its Georgian streets and facades. The culture of the Gael, of pre-Reformation Celtic society, was suppressed in favour of neoclassicism. The ancient poetry was rejected as barbaric, and was replaced by a far more genteel and predictable type. The traditional longhouse was replaced by the English-style small farmhouse. Beech trees and limes were introduced in great number and the rambling old farmsteads were tamed into small squares.
Ironically, the potato, which many people think of as so typically Irish that it must have been grown there for ever, was one of the additions to Irish culture during this phase. The plant was probably brought to Munster by Sir Walter Raleigh towards the end of the sixteenth century, but it only achieved widespread popularity during the cultural changes of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Put even more simply, it was really the English who brought the potato to Ireland. Before then, the Irish had subsisted on the same staples as all the other Celtic nations: barley, wheat and oats, supplemented by meat (salted in winter) and dairy products. The introduction of the potato in extensive plantings interrupted that traditional, Celtic way of life, and the potato famine was one of the direct results.
The population of Ireland in 1801 was five million. By 1840 it had risen to eight million, and when the potato blight struck in the years 1845 to 1847, there was mass starvation. It has been estimated that over a million Irish died in the potato famine, mostly children and the elderly, and another million emigrated. In the hundred years between 1840 and 1940, over five million Irish people emigrated to America alone, as well as others who went, along with the Scots, the Welsh and the Cornish, to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, or to the rapidly growing industrial cities of Britain, like Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham.
One of the immediate results of the potato famine was a much closer identification of Catholicism with national aspirations. In the late 1700s, it was the Presbyterians of Belfast who were talking about a United Ireland and bringing their ideas to the revolutionary congresses in Philadelphia and Paris. After the famine, it was only the Catholics of the devastated and deserted south who claimed the moral right to speak for ancient Eriu, the Celtic nation. There were further disastrous harvests between 1877 and 1879, which led to a fresh round of emigrations, and to a series of confrontations, known as the Land War, between poverty-stricken tenants and desperate landlords.
One of the results of the Land War was the virtual elimination of the Catholic Irish landed gentry. It meant that the fight for Irish independence, when it came, would be a proletarian one, as indeed it was. One of the early leaders and supporters of the Land League was Charles Stuart Parnell, himself actually of a patrician Anglo-Irish family with estates in County Wicklow. The struggle became known as the struggle for Home Rule. The Easter Rising of 1916, incomplete though it was, saw the first proclamation of a free and independent Irish Republic, although it was to take several more years before any real political independence was achieved, and that independence did not include Irish sovereignty over Ulster. As William Butler Yeats wrote, all was ‘changed, changed utterly’.
World History
