The Connacht Deadline
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.