With Irish history everything is interconnected to the next thing. In the plantation of Ireland you will see the seeds planted that resulted in the Great Famine*, the partition** of 1921, and the current state of 'the Troubles'*** in the North of Ireland today.

A good study of the parallel clearance of Scotland can be found here:

The Jockspot: the Highland Clearances

.

this map is from Encyclopedia Britannica Concise here.

.

link

"Ulster is one of four provinces in Ireland. Geographically it is in the north of the country and takes in nine counties: Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Monaghan and Tyrone. Of these nine counties, six are in the political and administrative unit which since 1921 has formed the state of Northern Ireland.

Before the plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century, Ulster was the most Gaelic part of Ireland and had successfully resisted English colonial ambitions. There had been earlier plantations throughout Ireland which had succeeded in confiscating land and grafting on a new aristocracy. The Plantation of Ulster in 1609 was comprehensive. By 1703, only14% of the land in Ireland remained in the hands of the Catholic Irish. The colonists were Protestant and represented a culture alien to Ulster. This policy of comprehensive colonization was a result of the advice of the Solicitor General to King James I, and was an attempt to replace one entire community with another. The Catholic Irish remained in conditions which emphasized their suppression.

The sum of the Plantation was the introduction of a foreign community which spoke differently, worshipped apart, and represented an alien culture and way of life. The more efficient methods of the new farmers, and the greater availability of capital which allowed the start of cottage industries, served to create further economic differences between Ulster and the rest of Ireland, between Catholics and Protestants. The deep resentment of the native Irish towards the Planters, and the distrustful siege mentality of the Planters towards the Irish, is a crude interpretation of the contemporary Irish problem.

The next two centuries supplied many dates essential to the conflict. The Rising of 1641 against the Planters caused a massacre of Protestants, and the Cromwellian conquest in the 1650s resulted in a massacre of Catholics.

The Battle of the Boyne in 1690 has been sanctified in murals on a hundred gable walls as the victory of the "Prods" over the "Micks" when William of Orange defeated King James II.

The aftermath of William of Orange's victory at the Boyne was much more important than the campaign on the whole. It was a mark of the sustained hostility between Planter and Gael that the Penal Laws were enacted by the Irish parliament in Dublin. The laws accentuated the differences between the Irish establishment and its opponents. Having established an exclusively Protestant legislature in 1692, a comprehensive series of coercive acts against Catholics were implemented during the 1690s. Catholics were excluded from the armed forces, the judiciary and the legal profession as well as from parliament; they were forbidden to carry arms or to own a horse worth more than £5.00; Catholic bishops and clergy were banished in 1697; Catholics could not hold long leases on land or buy land from a Protestant; when Catholics made their wills, property had to be divided equally among children, unless the eldest conformed to the Anglican faith; they were forbidden to run schools or to send their children abroad to school. The Penal Laws entrenched the divide between Catholics and Protestants and strengthened Irish Catholicism by adding a political component to it.

During the second half of the eighteenth century relations between the religious communities in Ireland were in a situation of considerable flux. The fact that there were also penal laws against the Presbyterians, which excluded them from a share of political power created a Catholic-Presbyterian relationship which was sometimes closer than that between the Protestant sects.

The early success of the Society of United Irishmen in attracting both Presbyterians and Catholics into a revolutionary republican movement during the 1790s appeared to indicate a new Irish cohesion, which disregarded religious denominationalism and was determined to establish an independent republic of Ireland. A skirmish in County Armagh led to the formation of the Orange Order, which attempted to unite all brands of Protestantism by stressing the common interests of all Protestants.

Early tolerance of Catholics in Belfast was related to their numbers in the city. In 1707, George McCartney, the Sovereign of Belfast, reported "thank God we are not under any great fears here, for... we have not among us seven papists". The industrial expansion of Belfast at the beginning of the nineteenth century attracted large numbers of Catholics to the city. Between 1800 and 1830 the proportion of Catholics in Belfast rose from 10% to 30% and the first signs of serious urban conflict occurred.

The same period saw considerable changes within the Presbyterian church as the liberals were challenged theologically and politically by the hard-liner Henry Cooke who was closely involved with the Orange Order. Cooke and his supporters were victorious. The liberals under Henry Montgomery broke away and formed the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church. The community divisions began to assume a form similar to one that is well known today."..."

excellent synopsis of the Troubles from plantation on found here:

link

I highly recommend this site. (Idunn)

.

The partition was originally implemented as a TEMPORARY situation, never intended to be a permanent one.

"The end of the war brought the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State of 26 counties within the British Commonwealth and recognized the partition of the island into Ireland and Northern Ireland, though supposedly as a temporary measure."

link

**********************************************************

"A related phenonemon [sic] can be witnessed in relation to Unionist attitudes to a United Ireland. Partition was always meant to be a temporary affair, as even Carson acknowledged. And indeed [a United Ireland] is inevitable one way or the other within a generation. Unionists know this to be the case. They know there is no long-term future in the Partition Experiment. "

link

.

Excellent source for "The Troubles" and conflict resolution in the North of Ireland here:

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/

This is an excellent site. Here is another map of the plantation of Ireland:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~irlkik/ihm/ire1600.htm

and more maps from that site:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~irlkik/ihm/index.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Laws_(Ireland)

"The Penal laws in Ireland refers to a series of laws imposed under British rule that sought to discriminate against Roman Catholics and Protestant non-Conformists (those not conforming to the Anglican Church) in Ireland in favour of the established Church of Ireland which recognised the English monarchy as its spiritual head...

...In Ireland, new laws were put into force from the late 1500s and coincided with a determined effort to bring all of Ireland under English government for the first time (see Tudor re-conquest of Ireland) and the colonisation of the country in the Plantations of Ireland. The Penal legislation had a pronounced effect over two centuries, disenfranchising in 1728 the richer part of the majority of the Irish population, who were Roman Catholic, and most Scottish settlers, who were Presbyterian in favour of the much smaller official Church of Ireland - initially mostly composed of English settlers. Though the laws affected adherents of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (who were concentrated in Ulster), their principal victims were the wealthier, landed members of the Roman Catholic Church, whose co-religionists comprised over three quarters of the people on the island. ...

With the defeat of Catholic attempts to regain power and lands in Ireland, the new Protestant Ascendancy sought to insure dominance with the passing of a number of laws to restrict Catholics and Dissenters . The son of James II, the Old Pretender, was recognised by the Holy See as the legitimate king of Britain and Ireland until his death in 1766, and Catholics were obliged to support him. This provided a further political excuse for the new laws. Among the discriminations now faced by victims of the Penal Laws were:

• Exclusion of Catholics from most public offices (since 1607), Presbyterians were also barred from public office from 1707.
• Ban on intermarriage with Protestants
• Presbyterian marriages were not legally recognised by the state
• Catholics barred from holding firearms or serving in the armed forces (rescinded by Militia Act of 1793)
• Exclusion from membership in either the Parliament of Ireland or the Parliament of Great Britain from 1652, rescinded 1688, reinstated 1691;
• Disenfranchising Act 1728, exclusion from voting;
• Exclusion from the legal professions and judiciary;
• Education Act 1695 - ban on foreign education;
• On a death by a Catholic, a legatee could benefit by conversion to the Church of Ireland;
• Popery Act- Catholic inheritances of land were to be equally subdivided between all an owner's sons.
• Ban on converting from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism
• Ban on Catholics buying land under a lease of more than 31 years
• Ban on custody of orphans being granted to Catholics
• Ban on Catholics inheriting Protestant land
• Prohibition on Catholics owning a horse valued at over £5 (in order to keep horses suitable for military activity out of the majority's hands)
• Roman Catholic lay priests had to register to preach under the Registration Act 1704, but seminary priests and Bishops were not able to do so.
• When allowed, Catholic churches were to be built from wood, not stone, and away from main roads.
• No person of the popish religion shall publicly or in private houses teach school, or instruct youth in learning within this realm. [1]

...The main intended effect of the Penal Laws was to ease the conversion or dispossession of the landed Catholic population. In 1641 Catholics had owned 60% of land in Ireland and by 1776 Catholic land ownership in Ireland stood at only 5%...

...Historians disagree over whether the Penal Laws were a tool of political as opposed to religious repression. Some argue (for instance Eamonn O Ciardha) that they were intended make Catholic in Ireland powerless and to place landed and political power in Ireland in the hands of an English Anglican settler class. Others (for instance Sean Connolly) argue that it was intended to convert the Irish en masse to the Protestant faith and that it should be likened to the Irish Government's efforts to revive the Irish language since Irish independence..."