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The immediate source of much conflict was the tithe. Agricultural occupiers were obliged to pay it for the support of the established Church of Ireland, although most of the population was Roman Catholic and, in Ulster, many Protestants were Presbyterian. The Tithe Composition Act of 1823 had aimed to substitute fixed money payments for payments in kind, but it did not remove the fundamental resentment felt by people asked to finance a church to which they did not belong. It also left collection dependent on local legal processes, distraint of livestock and sales which neighbours could obstruct.
O’Connell’s admission did not mean that political equality had suddenly been achieved. The 1829 settlement allowed Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold many civil offices, but it retained significant exclusions, particularly around the established church, the universities and certain great offices of state. Nor did it restore an Irish parliament: Irish representatives still travelled to Westminster under the Union of 1801. The importance of O’Connell’s seat was therefore symbolic as well as practical. It showed that the Catholic majority could no longer be wholly excluded from the legislature governing Ireland, while also concentrating hopes and grievances upon a small number of MPs in London.
The immediate background belonged to the years before 1829, but it determined the shape of this one. Daniel O’Connell, a Kerry-born barrister and leader of the Catholic Association, had been elected for County Clare in July 1828. As a Catholic, he could not take the existing oath required of a member of parliament. His election nonetheless demonstrated that a Catholic candidate could defeat the nominee of major Protestant property and government influence through open, legal electoral mobilisation. The result placed the ministry of the Duke of Wellington and the home secretary, Robert Peel, under pressure to find a settlement which they had previously resisted.
The position of Irish Catholics in 1828 contained a glaring contradiction. Since 1793, qualifying Catholics in Ireland had been able to vote in parliamentary elections, and Catholic candidates could put themselves before an electorate. But a successful Catholic could not take the parliamentary oaths required at Westminster without denying principles of his religion. The franchise thus gave Catholic freeholders a voice in choosing representatives while excluding a Catholic whom they might choose from sitting as one.
Charles II was king, and Arthur Capel, earl of Essex, was lord lieutenant of Ireland. Essex had first taken office in 1672, but after a period in England he returned to Ireland in May 1676. His restoration administration was preoccupied less with parliamentary politics than with the difficult mechanics of authority: revenue, land titles, local charges, security and the management of competing interests among officeholders, Protestant landowners and the large Catholic population.
The word “transplanter” carried a long and painful history. Under the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s, many Catholic landholders and their dependants had been compelled, or pressured, to leave lands in Leinster, Munster and Ulster for assignments in Connacht and County Clare. The slogan commonly associated with that policy, “To Hell or Connacht”, oversimplifies a complicated process, but it captures the coercive geography behind it. Families had to establish rights to new holdings, while soldiers, adventurers, Protestant purchasers, restored royalists and old proprietors advanced overlapping interests elsewhere.
Sir William Petty’s Down Survey lay at the centre of that process. Commissioned to provide a detailed measurement of lands available to satisfy the arrears owed to the Commonwealth army, it was an extraordinary administrative enterprise. Petty’s teams measured land at local level, recording baronies, parishes, townlands, boundaries and the distinction between profitable and unprofitable ground. Maps and accompanying books turned complicated local landscapes into information which Dublin and Westminster could use for allocation.
The most pressing date was 1 May 1654. Under the Commonwealth settlement, persons judged liable to transplantation were required to remove themselves, their families, dependants, livestock and movable goods to Connacht or County Clare by then. The policy was rooted in the Act for the Settlement of Ireland of August 1652 and instructions issued during 1653; it was not an order born suddenly in 1654. Yet the arrival of the deadline made its implications acute in communities across Leinster, Munster and Ulster. Catholic proprietors and others classed by the regime as transplantable faced the prospect of abandoning inherited estates east of the Shannon for allotted land in the designated western zone.
The year opened with the remnants of the wars still visible in Ulster. Sir Phelim O’Neill, a leading figure in the rising of 1641, had continued resistance after the collapse of larger Catholic armies. Betrayed in Tyrone in February 1653, he was carried to Dublin before the Commonwealth’s high court of justice. The authorities offered him pardon if he would implicate the dead Charles I in the origins of the 1641 rebellion. He refused. On 10 March he was executed for his alleged part in the killings of Protestant settlers during the opening violence of the rebellion; his remains were displayed at Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk. The execution was intended both as punishment and as a political statement: the new regime would present itself as the avenger of 1641 as well as the conqueror of Ireland.
Modern Ireland is used here as a geographical shorthand. There was no Irish state, no people called Irish, and no political territory with fixed borders. The island’s present coastlines were also a poor guide to the land and sea of the time. Global sea level was substantially lower than today because immense volumes of water were stored in continental ice sheets. Yet lower sea level did not automatically create a convenient dry crossing between Ireland and Britain: local land levels and water depths were altered by the changing weight of ice, while the Irish Sea basin remained a major environmental barrier. Any discussion of travel or contact must therefore remain conditional rather than imagining a simple land bridge.
