Catastrophic Dimensions

34 Pages 8585 Words

gious discrimination as a primary cause of the emergence of a distinct Old English identity in seventeenth-century Ireland. The anti-Catholic thrust of the 1613-1615 parliament, Foster has suggested, was incidental to the government's more significant attempt to secure English interests in the turmoil wrought by the failed rebellion of Hugh O'Neill, the renegade earl of Tyrone. "The real priority of government," Foster has argued, "was to reorganize representation, incorporate new boroughs and Protestantize the personnel of parliament. This produced a decisive, if dependent, Protestant majority in the 1613 parliament, ranged against a largely Old English minority."(4) The Irish government thus pursued strategies of Anglicization and Protestantization not as punitive or exclusionary measures but rather as matters of internal regulation; these strategies, intended to rein in particularistic, myopic, local interests, bore no nationalistic implications.(5) That "version of Irishness" cultivated by the Protestant New English settlers in the Irish administration most effectively conduced to the governance of Ireland "with English priorities and in English interests."(6) Policies intended to stabilize, however, soon gave rise to instability; the aggrandizement of Protestant New English interests stirred resentment in the Catholic Old English community. "[T]hese developments in politics," Foster has suggested, "coupled with the threat to land titles and the effects of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, completed the politicization of the Old English, the phrase now applied universally to those 'English of Irish birth.'"(7) The anti-Catholic legislation passed by the 1613-1615 parliament, Foster has argued, responded to no single threat to the interests of the crown in Ireland but rather to a political situation fragmented by local competition and dissent in both the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish communities. Protestantization and Anglicization simply...