Like Ghosts Crying Out

IT is one of the supreme ironies of Ireland's history that a mid-12th century Pope first granted the land to England. For centuries thereafter the English fitfully sought to establish their dominion over the warlike yet poetry-intoxicated Gaelic tribes. It was not until the Reformation, however, that London determined once and for all to bring Ireland and its stubborn Catholics to heel. English colonies were "planted" on Irish soil, often with great bloodshed; sometimes peasants were stripped naked and thrown into bogs for the amusement of the invaders. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Poet Edmund Spenser witnessed the horrors and described the wretched survivors: "Out of every corner of the woods and glens, they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves."

Ulster proved to be the most difficult section of Ireland to subdue, with its strong tradition of the old Gaelic order of poets, brehons (jurists), chroniclers and powerful lordships still intact. Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell, with the help of the Spaniards, successfully fought Elizabeth's minions for more than a decade. But in 1603, after the Battle of Kinsale, they capitulated. O'Neill led his Catholic chiefs in the "Flight of the Earls" to the Continent, leaving Ulster open to the infamous "plantation" of 1608. The earls' vast lands were forfeited to English and Scottish colonizers, who in turn were pledged to settle them with British farmers of the Protestant faith. These new landowners began the harsh social and economic domination of Ulster's Roman Catholics.

In 1689 the exiled Catholic King of England, James II, landed in Ireland to fight to reclaim his throne from William of Orange. But James failed to take Londonderry, despite a 105-day siege, and the following year, at the Battle of the Boyne, he was finally defeated and fled to France. By 1700 the Catholics owned only one-seventh of their own soil.

The enmity that existed between the imported Scottish and English "planters" and the oppressed native Gaels was deepened by religious hatred between Catholic and Protestant. A venomous drinking toast dating back to the early days of the Protestant Orange Order illustrates how savage feelings were:

"To the glorious, pious and immortal memory of King William the Third, who saved us from Rogues and Roguery, Slaves and Slavery, Knaves and Knavery, Popes and Popery, from brass money and wooden shoes; and whoever denies this toast may he be slammed, crammed and jammed into the muzzle of the gun of Athlone and the gun fired into the Pope's belly, and the Pope into the Devil's belly, and the Devil into Hell, and the door locked and the key in an Orangeman's pocket; and may we never lack a brisk Protestant boy to kick the arse of a Papist."

The worst afflictions, however, were the Penal Laws passed by the Parliament in Dublin to ensure the continued supremacy of the Protestant minority. Protestant Wolfe Tone characterized the laws as "that execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and the malice of demons, to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics." Execrable they were. Catholic priests were branded on the cheek with a red-hot iron if they failed to register their names and the names of their parishes. Catholics were excluded from political life and forbidden their own schools. They were not permitted to marry Protestants, acquire land from a Protestant, carry arms or own a horse worth more than -L-.5.

Impoverished by these laws, Ulster's Catholics were willing to work on farms for far lower wages than the Presbyterian peasantry. At the "Battle of the Diamond" in County Armagh in 1795, Protestant peasants beat up Catholic workers and later that evening founded the Grand Orange Lodge of Ulster. Other Orange lodges soon proliferated and sent howling mobs of Protestants out to brutalize the Catholics. Eventually, the Irish Catholics started terrorist groups of their own.

By the early 20th century, widespread terrorism made it evident to Britain that Ireland was, in the long run, uncontrollable from London. Home rule seemed imminent. The Protestants in Ulster feared for their future in a largely Catholic Ireland. Invoking slogans like "Home Rule Is Rome Rule," the Protestant Ulstermen drafted their own constitution, and pledged to fight the British for the right to remain British. Home rule for Ireland was shelved with the advent of World War I and the "Easter Rising" in Dublin in 1916. But the Irish Republican Army had been created, and it fought a bloody guerrilla war until independence was finally granted in 1921. Ireland was partitioned into the 26 counties forming the Irish Free State in the south and the six counties that make up Northern Ireland.

After an uneasy half-century under this arrangement, the age-old religious hatred, social injustice and tribal attitudes persist, making future peace a questionable prospect. In 1615 Barnaby Rich wrote in his Anatomy of Ireland: "The diseases of Ireland are many, and the sickness is grown to that of a contagion that is almost past cure." His admonition, sadly, is still relevant.

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