Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) - Fionn Davenport [14]
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A History of Ulster by Jonathan Bardon is a serious and far-reaching attempt to come to grips with Northern Ireland’s saga.
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The end for James came at the banks of the River Boyne in County Louth on 12 July 1690, when his forces were roundly defeated by William’s 36,000-strong army. James’ ignominious defeat (he fled the battlefield and is to this day remembered by the Irish as Seamus a Chaca, meaning ‘James the Shit’) was a turning point for Irish Catholics: five years later the introduction of oppressive Penal Laws, known collectively as the ‘popery code’, prohibited Catholics from owning land or entering any higher profession. Irish culture, music and education were banned in the hope that Catholicism would be eradicated. Most Catholics continued to worship at secret locations, but some prosperous Irish converted to Protestantism to preserve their careers and wealth. Land was steadily transferred to Protestant owners, and a significant majority of the Catholic population became tenants living in wretched conditions. By the late 18th century, Catholics owned barely 5% of the land.
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MAKING SENSE OF THE 12TH
The key day in the Northern Loyalist calendar, 12 July, marks the anniversary of William’s comprehensive defeat of the Jacobite forces of James II at the Battle of the Boyne. Not quite. According to the Julian calendar, the Battle of the Boyne took place on 1 July 1690; just over a year later, on 12 July 1691 the remaining Jacobite forces were crushed and 7000 were killed at the Battle of Aughrim in County Galway in what is still the bloodiest day in Irish history. For decades thereafter, Irish Protestants marked the 12th as the anniversary of Aughrim, not the Boyne. When the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752 shifted the Battle of the Boyne to the 12th, Protestants, suspicious of anything to do with Rome, refused to alter what they were celebrating and so continued to mark the anniversary of Aughrim. The shift eventually occurred following the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795 and, while it remains unclear why exactly the Boyne was given precedence over Aughrim, it has remained so to this day.
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IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED…
With Roman Catholics rendered utterly powerless, the seeds of rebellion against autocracy were planted by a handful of liberal Protestants, inspired by the ideologies of the Enlightenment and the unrest provoked by the American War of Independence and then the French Revolution.
The first of these liberal leaders was a young Dublin Protestant, Theobald Wolfe Tone* (1763–98), who was the most prominent leader of a Belfast organisation called the United Irishmen. They had high ideals of bringing together men of all creeds to reform and reduce Britain’s power in Ireland, but their attempts to gain power through straightforward politics proved fruitless, and they went underground, committed to bringing change by any means. Wolfe Tone looked to France for help, and Loyalist Protestants prepared for possible conflict by forming the Protestant Orange Society, which later became known as the Orange Order. The tragic failure of the French to land an army of succour in 1796 left the organisation exposed to retribution and the men met their bloody end in the Battle of Vinegar Hill in 1798.
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The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith is the classic study of the Great Famine of 1845–51.
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The Act of Union, passed in 1801, was the British government’s vain attempt to put an end to any aspirations towards Irish independence, but the nationalist genie was well out of the bottle and two distinct forms of nationalist expression began to develop. The first was a breed of radical republicanism, which advocated use of force to found a secular, egalitarian Irish republic; the second