The London Companies encountered great difficulties because the London Plantation was to be the jewel in the crown, basically, of the Ulster Plantation process: you know the London Companies had the money.

And there was the situation in Coleraine (at the building of the town of Coleraine in 1610) where a visiting Crown delegation said that it was all a ferment of activity, that there was all this very industrious implementation of the Plantation. The reality was that this was such an enormous scheme that even the great wealth of the London Companies wasn’t enough to secure the adequate finance to implement the schemes as outlined by the London Government.

And one of the great oversights of the Ulster Plantation planning was that there was no consideration taken for what happens as the native Irish were displaced and then the Protestant settlers were to be brought in. Now what I mean by that is, the crops had been sown for the summer of 1610, but if you take away the native Irish, the people who would actually reap the crops, who was going to harvest the crops? (because there weren’t enough Protestant settlers coming in). So you actually had, you know, an in-built fault in the system whereby basically there was this problem with feeding the new settlers etc.

So what happened was that in the initial stages, the Londoners and other British undertakers, appealed to the London Government and said ‘Look perhaps we could have the native Irish on our lands for another year while the buildings are taking place and while this period of transition takes place’. But it became another year and another year and eventually what happened was that the Crown Authorities in London became convinced that the London Companies were stringing this out - that the native Irish were proving themselves to be of such a benefit insofar as a workforce is concerned, that the London Companies didn’t want rid of them at all.

There is also considerable evidence that the London Companies spent more of their time chopping down the great woods in County Londonderry and exporting the pipe staves rather than chopping down the woods to build the Plantation and this is one of the reasons why the London Companies fell foul of the Crown Authorities.