Matt Richards

4-28-2008

Protestants vs. Catholics:  The Truth behind the Conflict in Ireland

            In my previous research posting for this class, I discussed the process that Ireland has gone through towards a lasting peace and how much did this new peace mean to the Irish nation.  That is good and all, but I forgot to talk about the history of the conflict or why do the Protestants of Northern Ireland hate the Catholics who live in the rest of the country.  I believe that finding out the history of the conflict and looking for what started the feud in the first place will help give an understanding into the horrors of British colonialism in Ireland and ultimately show why peace in Ireland took so long and for what reason did so many of my fellow Irishmen died.

            The first thing that I wanted to understand was the reason behind these centuries of hatred between the Protestants and Catholics or in simple terms what started this hatred.  Before I did my first research posting I really wasn’t aware of how long this feud had been going on.  I had though that the reason for the feud was because of a difference in religion.  Basically, I had thought the Irish hated each other for the same reasons that the three religious groups in the novel ‘Train to Pakistan” hated each other.  I was under the impression that the sole reason the conflict started was because of religious oppression during colonialism, but that was only a small part of it.  Wikipedia says, “The origins of conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the north of Ireland lie in the British settler-colonial Plantation of Ulster in 1609, which confiscated native owned land and settled Ulster with (mainly Protestant) English and Scottish “planters.”  

            This knowledge was surprising because I had never heard anyone say that the conflict was over social class that was put into place by the British Empire.  I had always thought that the reason for the hatred was religious only, but that is probably because my exposure to these two religious groups was from seeing how my parents dealt with their differences here in the United States.  My parents, who have been married for almost 26 years, have very different religious backgrounds.  My mom is Catholic and my dad is Baptist or, in the eyes of the Catholics on her side of the family, a Protestant.  The only reason this could have been a potential problem was when I was born, they had to decide what religion to raise me in.  The reason that it was never a conflict was because my dad never pushed his religious background as an issue.  He sees church as church and that it is worship of the same God so it never was a problem.  He goes to the Catholic Church with us and has never made it an issue.  Because my parents are Protestant and Catholic living together in harmony, I never thought that this conflict was such a serious issue.  I guess things would probably have been different if we lived in Ireland. 

            The reason for the conflict in Ireland was colonial.  The British came into Ireland and because they had the wealth and power they made the poor native Irish move off of the land they had for centuries.  Basically the conflict was a because of social status and religion.   The native Irish did not peacefully give up their lands.  They fought in two wars with the British Protestants from 1641-1653 and 1689-1691.  The native Irish were a poor class of Catholics, but they fought for almost a hundred years to get their lands in Northern Ireland back from the British and Scottish.   The reason that religion played a part in the conflict was because of the “Penal Laws” that the British Protestant enforced as they took political control over the natives.  These laws according to Wikipedia, “curtailed the religious, legal and political rights of anyone (including both Catholics and Dissenters, such as Presbyterians) who did not conform to the state church- The Anglican Church of Ireland.”

In all of my research I have found that the British treated the Irish Catholics as the other because they were different then them.  The conflict started out as the rich Protestants British taking control over land that wasn’t theirs and then making all of these rules that kept the poor Irish Catholic working class from stopping this colonization. 

I have discovered that the British and Irish were divided over origin of nationality, religion, social class, and the roles of colonizer and colonized.  Now I see why peace was so important to the Irish nation because they can finally get back the life and identity that they had before the British came over.  This brings me back to the words of Flogging Molly front man, Dave King, which he said at the Flogging Molly show on March 11, 2008.  He said, “We have a reason to drink now sons of Ireland because the British oppressor is gone and it looks like peace has been achieved.” 

Works Cited

King, Dave

Flogging Molly

March 11, 2008

Wikipedia “The History of Northern Ireland”

En.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Northern_Ireland 

March 31, 2008