Long
term consequences of the Plantation
Long term consequences - Dr. Raymond Gillespie
It would be wrong to try and remove from any understanding of the Plantation, the colonial element: I mean there was expropriation, there were people from another country came and settled, people were moved off land, and land was confiscated - I mean those are all realities. I think, on the other hand, we need to balance that by the fact that across Europe (and in north America of course) there are schemes not dissimilar to this, and in Bohemia, for example, you are getting very similar types of movements. Again in Scotland, James VI is considering the Plantation of Lewis, Plantations of the Highlands - I mean this is not something specifically directed against the Irish: this is part of a much wider European phenomenon. So we have to see it in its contemporary context to begin with.
Now inevitably it does leave a residue of hatred: there are accommodations clEarly made between the two groups; there are also people who do not like the situation; but I think in some ways it’s what happens after the Plantation which is much more important for the enduring legacy. It’s the fears of the Irish which are created in 1641, the fear of massacre, the fear of attack, that somehow or other accommodations which had been made before were no longer possible after that because the Irish were quite simply, as John Temple put it in his history of the rebellion ‘untrustworthy’. And that book was repeatedly reprinted - I think the last time it was reprinted was 1912, so that this message (the message not of the Plantation but the message of the rebellion) is the one that persists and the one which is used continuously right through the 19th century - that the Catholics are untrustworthy; that we can’t do business with them; we shouldn’t be involved with them; they are part of a large conspiracy to do us down.
That having been said, of course, in the 19th century, with their ideas of social Darwinism, the changes which took place in Ulster in the 17th century - the shift, for example, from a rather old-fashioned lordship style of society to a much more modern style of economy and estate, this was seen by many of the Presbyterians as the origins of the industrialisation of north-east Ireland; and it was the Scots, the thrifty Scots who came in, who improved Ulster, who made Ulster a wonderful place. And many of those in the 19th century, looking back you know, saw this as their lineage and they wrote their history accordingly; and this was particularly true of the Presbyterians in the 19th century who wrote of the prosperity of Ulster in comparison to Ireland, and explained that using the Plantation.
Long term consequences - Dr. John McCavitt
So far as the legacy of the Plantation is concerned, it is important to bear in mind that the official Ulster Plantation covered the modern counties of Armagh, Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan and Donegal. The official Plantation didn’t cover Down and Antrim: there had already been private Plantations taking place in Down and Antrim.
But the significant thing is that the further you go west, the less dense Protestant settlement was and, to some extent, at the time of partition, this is reflected in the fact that Donegal was a planted county - but it became part of ultimately the Irish free state: there weren’t sufficient numbers of Protestants in Donegal and similarly in Cavan. The Plantation hadn’t taken root there as much as it had in other counties.
And in fact where the Plantation had taken root was mainly in the private planted areas of Down and Antrim, and that is reflected today in the fact that these remain the areas of very dense Protestant settlement.
The other interesting aspect, as far as the legacy of the Plantation is concerned, is that segregation was built into the Plantation at the start: we have this modern problem where you know segregated or divided societies. It’s just not a product of what has happened today; to a large extent, it actually reflects the fact that the Plantation itself enshrined the doctrine of segregation. In the lands allocated to British undertakers, whether they be English or Scots, the intention was to clear all native Irish Catholics off those lands.
And one of those areas, for example, was north Armagh, and you know, we still have that today where in fact north Armagh has a, you know, quite a preponderance of Protestants, as opposed to say south Armagh where that didn’t happen. So to some extent some of the, sort of, segregated areas that we have today, while not absolutely dependent on what happened in the 17th century, can perhaps attribute to some of the reasons for that, back to the Plantation of Ulster in 1610
Long term consequences - Professor Nicholas Canny
Unquestionably, the Plantation in the medium-term - the fact that it wasn’t a total success - means that you have the survival of a historical memory of dispossession. The fact that the Plantation was, after 30 years, followed by the insurrection of 1641, and all of the unpleasantness associated with that, means on both sides that you have the formulation of opposition statements, and the cultivation of historical memories resulting from the atrocities which occurred on both sides, if you proceed from 1641 forward to the Cromwellian confiscation of the 1650s.
None of these are unique to Ulster: the Plantation happened in many parts of Ireland other than in Ulster. The principal ingredient that makes Ulster different is that the Plantation in Ulster was followed at the end of the 17th century, in the 1690s, and again continuing into the Early years of the 18th century, of a significant further influx of Scottish people.
So that it was at this juncture that the population balance in Ulster moves, in particular areas, particularly the north-eastern parts of Ulster, significantly towards Protestantism rather than Catholicism, and towards Scots rather than English. Because you have this further in-migration which occurs because a Scottish population in Ulster already existed and because a calamitous collapse in the Scottish economy occurred during the 1690s. And Ulster was the principal place of outlet for people who were fleeing effectively from the collapse of an agricultural economy, and that dramatically transforms the population balance, particularly in the Ulster north-east.
And this would have been happening at a time when the Protestant population on the ground in Munster, for example, where population had also occurred, the Protestant population was probably declining through out-migration to the Americas at that point, and then you have this dramatic increase occurring in the particular Scottish element in the Ulster Plantation