Elizabeth Platt ([email protected])
Mon, 28 Dec 1998 16:19:10 -0800 (PST)
On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, [email protected] (MISS PATRICIA M HEFNER) wrote:
> So..."when did English settlers arrive"? I was referring to "English
> settlers" in the abstract because the original writer wrote that Irish
> Protestants are of English descent. Actually, this "English settler"
> thing is tricky, because yes, a whole slew of these people were Norman
> French.
It all depends on how far back you go--the Welsh-Normans arrived in the
High Middle Ages (11th/12th Centuries). A number of very Irish
surnames--e.g., anything with "Fitz" in it (Fitzgerald, Fitzwilliam), as
well as Burke, Roche, etc.--all have Welsh-Norman roots. Over the
centuries, there were a fair number of genuinely "English" settlers who
arrived in Ireland (usually referred to in the history books as the "Old
English" and "New English", though the "New" ones still arrived in the
Middle Ages!), but they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves".
Assimilation with the "natives" was the bane of the British crown, which
is why they had to resort to sowing religious sectarianism as a means of
political and economic control over Ireland.
>Hell, we could go back to the Celts themselves if we pushed it
> to the logical extreme and talked about *everyone" who's ever settled in
> Ireland.
You could say that about any part of Europe--and yes, the Gaels were also
"foreigners" in Ireland once upon a time! Most historians agree that they
probably came over from the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, and
from Ireland crossed over to the Isle of Man and Scotland. (The Celts who
settled in what is now Wales and England probably came over from Brittany
and the Low Countries.)
> As for Northern Ireland, well, there was that big time Scottish
> settlement around Belfast. That's where you start pushing the hot
> buttons.
Well, some hot buttons need to be pushed once in a while--not doing so
allows the auld "status quo" to remain unchallenged. Yes, the Ulster
Plantation was largely settled with Protestants from Scotland--but we're
talking the early 17th Century, folks; they're hardly arrivistes in
Ireland. Many of the "settlers" were, in fact, people who were forced
from their ancestral homes in the Scottish lowlands, due to British
government "clearances" (aka ethnic cleansing) designed to keep Scotland
subdued and under crown rule. The choice was to pack up and help "settle"
the newfangled "plantation" in the northeast of Ireland, or get killed.
Some choice, huh? Meanwhile, the land that made up the Plantation had
been seized from the "native" Irish after a failed rising by their
chieftains--quite a tidy deal, the crown could stomp on the uppity locals
in two countries, then use those displaced by one "clearance" to hold the
land taken in _another_ "clearance". And by pitting two equally dispossed
people against each other, ensure that British rule would never be
effectively challenged. Since the two peoples had such a similar
_ethnic_ background, _religious_ differences were exploited to keep them
divided.
(And by the way, yes, these "Plantations" that were being experimented
with in Ireland, from Elizabethan times onward, were indeed the prototypes
for the plantations that were subsequently established in America.)
The damndest thing is, by the end of the 18th Century, plenty of
Protestants in Ireland, both of the Anglo-Irish gentry and the descendants
of the original Ulster planters, came to regard themselves as very much
Irish indeed. Irish Republicanism sprang largely from the Protestants in
Ireland, and both the British government and the more reactionariy
Catholic/Irish elements (including, of course, the Catholic Church
itself), continued to foment sectarian hatred and ideology, the better to
divert people from such "foreign" notions as radical democracy!
So, to keep the history lesson a bit shorter than it should be...some of
us will have to make an issue out of it when people airily repeat some of
the old sectarian myths, e.g., that anyone in Ireland who is Protestant is
"English", that only Catholics are truly "Irish" and so on. It's bunk,
but it's been some brutally effective bunk, both at home and abroad.
> Oh, hell....there's a rumor circulating outside of this classroom that
> we are on a U2 discussion list, not an Irish history class that we do on
> the Internet.
Problem is, if you and anyone else really wants to challenge the
prevailing sectarianism in Ireland, you'll _have_ to learn and re-learn
the history of the country and it's people. And, for good measure,
deconstruct it and learn it all over again. It won't do to just say
"can't we all just get along?" or urge people to bury their heads in the
sand, or, worst of all, quote random lines from U2 songs! Knowledge is
power and all that--which may explain why most standard histories of
Ireland don't do much to make people think and question the way things are
today.
Slan,
Elizabeth Platt
[email protected]
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