The Irish Penal Laws
A series of statutes from 1695 excluded Irish Catholics from land, office, arms, education and the professions. The context is the war of 1689 to 1691, in which Irish Catholics had fought for James II and lost, and the Treaty of Limerick had promised them the toleration they had enjoyed under Charles II. The Irish Parliament, entirely Protestant, declined to ratify that article and legislated in the opposite direction. The provisions accumulated over thirty years. Catholics could not sit in Parliament, vote after 1728, hold commissions, carry arms, own a horse worth more than five pounds, teach, or send children abroad to be educated. They could not buy land or take a lease longer than thirty-one years, and land held by a Catholic had to be divided equally among his sons on death rather than passing to the eldest — unless one son conformed to the established church, in which case he took the whole. The intention was to break up Catholic estates, and it worked: Catholic ownership fell from about fourteen per cent in 1703 to five per cent by 1778. The laws were not enforced with equal rigour everywhere and mass was said in the open at rocks in the countryside. Their effect was to produce a Catholic society without a landed class, led by priests and by an emerging Catholic merchant interest, and to make the land question the centre of Irish politics for two centuries. Burke, whose mother was Catholic, called the system a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression and degradation of a people as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man. Most of the laws were repealed between 1778 and 1829.
- Year: 1695 CE
- Category: Political
