The Irish Penal Laws
Following the Williamite victory in Ireland (1690-1691), the Protestant-controlled Irish Parliament enacted a sweeping body of legislation, the Penal Laws, designed to neutralise the Catholic majority as a political and economic force. Successive statutes between 1695 and 1728 barred Catholics from buying land, inheriting on equal terms, holding public office, sitting in Parliament, voting, attending university, bearing arms, practising law, or holding military commissions; the disabilities culminated in the disenfranchisement of Catholic freeholders in 1728. The Test Acts simultaneously excluded Presbyterian Dissenters of Ulster from public office, driving the beginnings of the Scots-Irish emigration to Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. The effect on the Catholic majority — roughly three-quarters of the population — was the creation of a 'hidden Ireland': priests saying Mass at outdoor 'Mass rocks', hedge schools teaching Latin and Irish, and a Catholic merchant class operating through Protestant frontmen. The Church of Ireland, representing around a tenth of the population, monopolised the Irish Parliament, the great landholdings, and the tithes paid by all. Structurally the Penal Laws were a regime of confessional persecution: a ruling minority used the legal apparatus of the state to dispossess and subordinate a religious majority along ethno-religious lines. They defined Irish politics for the eighteenth century, generating the grievances that fed Catholic emancipation campaigns, agrarian secret societies, and ultimately the revolutionary nationalism of the 1790s.
- Year: 1695 CE
- Category: Political
