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Ireland in the 1750's. |
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Penal Laws. The Irish Protestants felt very threatened after the Ulster Rebellion in the early sixteen hundreds and while the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 finished the wars, the Catholics were stronger than expected. In 1695, the first two bills of the Penal Laws were enacted. Catholics could carry no arms nor could they own a horse valued greater than five pounds. There were other Penal Laws, which were all a ragbag of measures enacted in a very piecemeal fashion over a period. Land was political power and in the 18th. century, the laws were directed at Catholic property. The Act of 1704 prohibited Catholics from buying land nor could they lease it for a period longer than 31 years. At the death of a proprietor, a Catholic owned estate had to be divided amongst all the sons, unless the eldest joined the Established Church, in which case, he got the whole estate. As well as this, if a son joined the Established church in his father's lifetime, the son became the owner and the father a tenant to his son for life. By 1776, it was estimated that Catholic land ownership was reduced from 14% to about 5%. Evictions were quite common. What could Catholics do? They could trade, for example, in the provisions trade - There were no restrictions in this area. So it was that many Catholics got economic strength in the commercial trades and in the professions associated with the middle classes. In relation to the Catholic religion specifically, the Banishment Acts and the Registration Acts could have reduced the presence of the Catholic Clergy in the country. Essentially, they weren't successful, although the Bishop numbers were reduced. Education for Catholics basically was not good. There was a determined effort that Catholics would receive no foreign education. The English didn't wish the Irish to receive new political ideas from the Europeans, who were turning the European political systems upside down. Some women of the 18th. century in Ireland. In the 18th. century, there were some interesting women making their presence felt in Irish society. They, like Edmund Rice, were to have a profound influence in this country and the rest of the world. In 1829, a Catholic convert, Catherine McAuley, after building a school for poor children and a home for women, founded the Sisters of Mercy. When confirmed in July 1841 by the Holy See, this became the largest religious congregation in the English speaking world. Catherine died in November 1841. Around the 1750s, Nano Nagle, who was educated in Paris, with her own money, established a group of schools in Cork for the education of poor boys and girls. She handed over her schools to the Ursuline Sisters, but had a major disagreement with them over their actions in teaching the rich and not the poor, as she had wished. By 1777, she had founded the Presentation Sisters Order and built a convent and another school to teach the poor in Cork, again at her own expense. She died, aged 55 years, in 1784, before Rome had approved her Rules for the new Order. Another woman, Mary Aikenhead, who was also a Catholic convert, had founded the Order of the Sisters of Charity in Dublin with a convent in William Street, and St. Vincent's Hospital in Stephen's Green, by the time she died in 1858.
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