The religious aspect of the Plantation is very interesting. I’ll speak first of all of the Catholic native Irish. You know, it just wasn’t that the Catholic native Irish were dispossessed of large amounts of their land; but they were also basically expected to become Protestant. And it wasn’t just a matter that they were expected to become Protestant - if they didn’t convert to Protestantism, they were subject to basically penalty, persecution. There is considerable evidence that in the initial years after the Plantation, that thousands of native Irish Catholics in Ulster were prosecuted for failing to turn up at Protestant services. So you had this sort of mix of persecution and dispossession - and obviously a very potent cocktail. You had, you know, Catholic priests who were banished from Ireland in 1611 and you had, you know, Crown troops hunting them out - so there was this tremendous grievance as a result of religious persecution. So that’s from the Catholic point of view.

It’s equally interesting from the Protestant point of view (and I use ‘Protestant’ in the widest term) because, at the start, when the settlers were being encouraged to come from Scotland and come from England to go to Ulster, it didn’t matter what type of Protestant you were - whether you were of Calvinist or ultimately Presbyterian persuasion, it didn’t matter in the Early years. It was a matter of getting, as it were, you know, almost bums on seats - get the Protestants to Ulster, we need them there, we need as many as we can. And at a later stage, when the Plantation in fact became more successful, and when Charles I in particular was King, the Crown authorities became more choosy about which type of Protestant they wanted in Ulster. So what you actually had, ironically, was you actually had persecution of Scots Presbyterians, some of whom in fact left Ulster because they had been made unwelcome from a religious perspective.

So there’s a notion perhaps that, you know, Protestants came as a group and they were homogenous etc, but the reality was that there was this difference very soon surfaced between the Anglican Protestants and the Calvinist Protestants, and the Calvinist variety -certainly by the 1630s - had been made to feel distinctly unwelcome in Ulster.