It is worth remembering some past facts. From Duff, Six Days to Shake an Empire the following Laws applied to the Irish under English domination until 1922:
Laws applying to Irish Catholics:
No Catholic permitted to vote in parliamentary, county, borough or corporation elections.
No Catholic permitted to stand for parliament, or for a county or borough or corporation.
No Catholic permitted to hold a commission in the army or navy, or a post in the civil service.
No Catholic permitted to be a member of a learned profession, except medicine, and in that only a chosen few.
No Catholic permitted to open or administer a school.
No Catholic permitted to teach.
No Catholic permitted to carry a firearm without a licence, seldom granted.
No Catholic permitted to own a horse worth more than £5 .
No Catholic in trade or industry permitted to have more than two apprentices (except in the linen industry, which was to the Ascendancy’s advantage).
No Catholic permitted to manufacture or sell books or newspapers. (This included all printing.)
No Catholics permitted to marry a Protestant.
No Catholic estates permitted to be entailed.
No Catholic permitted to take or grant mortgages.
No Catholic permitted to take a lease for more than 31 years, and then at two-thirds the annual value.
No Catholic priest permitted to enter the country from abroad.
All Catholic archbishops and bishops must leave Ireland under the penalties for high treason
One priest only permitted to each parish, however large.
All Catholics were made to pay special taxes.
All Catholic owners of land were subjected to special restraints and disabilities.
All of any Catholic’s estates must at death be divided among all his children.
No Catholic priest permitted to move one step outside his own
parish.
Laws affecting Protestants:
No Protestant permitted to marry a Catholic.
By conforming to Protestantism, a Catholic wife acquired the right to live apart from her husband and make him support her.
By becoming a Protestant, a Catholic ipso facto made his father a tenant on that father’s land, which the son could inherit entirely.
Catholic orphans must be brought up as Protestants.
Protestants were forbidden to take Catholic apprentices.
A Protestant landowner lost his civil rights if he married a Catholic.
A Protestant heiress who married a Catholic, forfeited her inheritance.
To the English, from 1170 under Henry II to 1922 when it became an independent Dominion, not yet a country, the above Penal Laws applied. Now from Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851, we have the following observations:
This optimistic prognosis cannot be applied to one part of the midcentury United Kingdom, namely Ireland, where standards of living continued their decline throughout the 1840s, culminating in the horrors of the potato famine. Unlike continental Europe, there was widespread starvation in Ireland; perhaps one million people died from hunger and disease. The extreme nature of the famine helps explain why there was no revolution in Ireland, although there was certainly plenty of impetus towards it, and Irish immigrants seem to have been major supporters of Chartist plans for insurrection in England during 1848. Another factor needs to be emphasized, however, the enormous police presence. There were some 13,000 police stationed in Ireland at mid-century, one for every 500 inhabitants: fourteen times as many per capita as in Prussia, the absolutist “police state,” four times as many as in France, the most heavily policed country in continental Europe. Police forces were substantial in parts of England, particularly the capital city, as well. The greater ability of the liberal state in Great Britain, with its parliament and elaborate legal system, to enforce its will, when compared with the surprisingly feeble forces of repression in the absolutist monarchies on the continent, also helps explain why the United Kingdom rode out the revolutionary wave with little rocking of the boat.
Thus for some 850 years there was domination, control, and death. From 1848 through 1852, the famine drove many from the land and caused the death of millions from starvation, bodies of mothers and children decomposing on the road side.
Just a reminder.
Posts
