Sectarian and socioeconomic matters have forced compromises in the aspirations of Irish nationalism: ‘Irishness’, heavily influenced by its neighbors, is a scaled rather than a territorial or residential characteristic.

At the period’s outset, there were Old Irish (Gaels), old English (Elizabethan but Catholic colonists), and New English (Protestants). Newcomers, who saw the country as already loyal (i.e., not conquered), contended with a society premised on tuath, an extended practice of family and foster family, of temporary clan alignment. Neither common nor Roman law prevailed, social organization was parallel to but not congruent with English feudalism. Towns exhibited a more Viking / Norman / English character than the Gaelic countryside. The Catholic Church was split between Francophile Jesuits and residents of Old English towns, and pro-Spanish clerisy in the country. The Old English might have turned but Protestant but for the Counterreformation’s success combined with heavy-handed Westminster policy (as represented by Thomas Wentworth). Was the 1609-10 English settlement to be gradual Anglicization or sharply anti-Gael colonization? 1613’s parliament favored the newly settled provinces of Ulster (then the poorest region) and Connaught. For the new English, Anti-Catholicism was a civilizing mission; settlers were not to reside among Catholics. But the skilled artisans needed for settlement didn’t leave England, save those in the West country who went to Munster, and the important demographic trend was Scottish Presbyterian migration to Ulster, later accelerating in the 1640s. Hugh O’Neill was not the source of 19th- and 20th-century Ulster separatism, nor a nationalist, but only an icon of tuath era.

During the English Civil War, the Old English took the Old Irish (i.e., Catholic) view of education, land, and law; but split over foreign Catholic presence. Parliament raised £1 million on security of 2.5 million acres of Irish lands. Cromwell cowed surrender to the Cavalier army. Appropriate displaced Catholic landowners but not all residents. Because lands were quickly re-sold, settlement was hard to disentangle. Meanwhile spoken Gaelic began receding more quickly than in Scotland, Wales, or Breton France.

William invaded England for European not English purposes: James’ 1689 stand on the Boyne was Louis XIV’s aim not the Stuart goal. Nonetheless, the militarily inconclusive outcome shaped almost three centuries of Irish government and politics. The Treaty of Limerick settled military matters by facilitating the flight of Jacobite wild geese, but altered or ignored guarantees of security for Catholic landowners and to a lesser degree Catholic religious freedom. ‘Patriot’ politics originated herein, not the later 18th century, its aims crystallizing as the repeal of Poynings Law, the establishment of habeus corpus, and public policy made domestically. (Though the Woolen Act of 1699 was not so much Westminster’s doing as economic interests refracted through MPs.) The Declaratory Act of 1719 abolished the Irish House of Lords’ right to appellancy, making Ireland finally dependent. Consequently, nationalism in the context of the Protestant Ascendancy couldn’t rely on natural law, since that would include Catholics. Though the settlers asserted primacy in Irish territory, that they represented the true Irish nation, they were indeed colonizers, for their authority was divorced from the real power in London. Foster describes this as the decisive milestone in Ireland to 1972.

In the 18th century, agriculture drove increasing Anglo-Irish trade, counterbalanced by the incipient English Industrial Revolution. Wool went to Liverpool and Bristol. Beef and butter were traded for sugar, tea, and coal. Middle-class, town Catholics began trading with English co-religionists, and began prospering from the1750s. Supply of specie grew in the 1770s. Thus complaints of restricted trade were more political than real. Irish rents were low in relation to the capital value of land, especially during the Ascendancy, so little capital was invested on improvement. But absenteeism was also explained by such pursuits as military or diplomatic assignment. The Ascendants patronized (Georgian) memorials for land, family, and residencies rather than (Anglican) churches or sculpture. Penal laws were little used, though an effective barrier to Ascendancy politics (Burke: ‘connivance in relaxation of slavery is not the definition of liberty’.) Ulster was already distinctive because of its unique linen trade, dominated by Protestant families. Adding cotton, it became a manufacturing center. Yet 40% of contemporary Irish emigration of 250,000 was Ulster ‘Scotch Irish’. Economic growth then faltered, extending in the next century: the population came to outrun the land, and secretive rural violence (‘the boys’) took root.

By the end of England’s Seven Years War with France, Ireland was more troublesome than North America. Ascendants, thinking themselves Irish with English-style civil rights, were elitist but not nationalists, for whom politics was a badge of status. Showing new responsiveness to public opinion, parliamentarians claimed budgetary control and other powers, though somewhat contrary to O’Brien’s Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt, external pressures (renewed French warfare, the formation of Irish Volunteers – the start of Ireland’s paramilitary tradition – and general public discontent) prompted 1779’s trading concessions and 1882’s panicked yielding of legislative right (technically the repeal of portions of Declaratory Act). Clientelism persisted and Grattan was friends with Catholic interests only so far as they didn’t conflict with the Ascendancy. It was more the French Revolution that drove affairs leading to the Act of Union. In Ulster, now-established traditions of Presbyterian, libertarian republicanism predated the Gaelic nationalism now taking root, spurred by French egalitarianism.
The Ascendants, unwilling to ally with Catholics, were subsequently absorbed into the metropole, and Ireland precluded from 19th-century dominion status of Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Underground loyalties and protest groups began to influence electoral politics. O’Connell rose off the back of low-cost subscriptions. 1828 marked the Ascendancy’s first electoral reverse, 1829’s Roman Catholic Relief Act the acknowledgement of the Lords, Wellington, and Peel that Irish public opinion was not entirely sectarian: Catholic liberation coincided with reduced voting rolls.

Meanwhile, population had been growing unsustainably, such that emigration was on its way to becoming the main feature of 19th-century society, the Catholics joining Protestants. Many went to Liverpool, which became 25% Irish; London; or America. Most were under age 25, and emigration per capita was double England’s rate. In consequence, residual population became more conservative, particularly the countryside. Remittances and fatalism took their place. The Church’s social authority increased, since the clerisy rose in numbers. The lower classes were decimated, the bourgeois already exhibiting latter marriages and childbirths. The decisive precursor to the Famine was economic collapse after the Napoleonic wars, when agricultural demand collapsed. Recovery was slow and weak, the ecosystem turned to the potato monocrop. Would the Famine have happened anyway? Contemporary Irish poverty is not well understood.

Post Repeal, high politics came to be divided between Whiggish Irish liberals and Tory-minded Protestant scions of the Ascendancy. In the 1870s, the instinctive political deference of middle-class farmers lapsed. The Irish Republican Brother (the Fenians) merged with the rural Ribbon societies, making respectable republican separatism (independence). Agrarian violence became political violence as evictions swelled. The Land League introduced women to political activism and more important established nationalism among Catholics; the opposite side of the Land War was pro-English, Protestant, urban exemplified by Ulster and Trinity College. Land purchase rights, working to the favor of tenants, was the crucible of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which Parnell shaped into a disciplined Westminster party. Home Rule then surpassed Irish Whiggery, the Tories becoming unionists. Moderates who saw law depended on force not opinion deserted Gladstone in the 1886 and 1893 failures of Home Rule; the 1912 bill was very close to the latter, but stalled by World War I.

The Boer War crystallized separatism as a Catholic political aim (and kicked off international decolonization), while Protestant Ulster became irrevocably unionist as 250,000 (of 1.6 million) signed a declaration of loyalty (though Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Derry city exhibited doubts). The Gaelic League, Yeats, and others pointed to the literary revival as preeminent, even more important, a trend underpinned by the Gaelic Athletic Association’s rise. At the start of the war, the Irish Volunteers, which had foolishly been pledged to support Britain with concomitant implementation of Home Rule, were infiltrated by the IRB, and many soon joined Sinn Fein, especially after the return of Easter Rising prisoners. Sinn Fein supplanted the Parliamentary party after Lloyd George’s failed effort to boost conscription in exchange for restating Home Rule transition. Irish guerillas were confident English liberals would flinch; shadow Dail courts trimmed the excesses of Sein Fein’s cattle driving and land seizures. Indeed, public and political opinion broke the UK government’s nerve while the IRA was still in the field. As Anglicization and modernization had enabled the spread of 19th-century nationalism, so 19th-century socioeconomic development had created the social classes which fueled the 20th-century guerillas. Meanwhile, the population hit its nadir, falling to 4.4 million in 1911 from 8.2 in 1840.

The Treaty of 1921 did not enable partition; partition in the form of 1920’s Government of Ireland Act, the successor to 1912 Home Rule bill, made the Treaty possible by creating two devolved parliaments linked by a council of Ireland. The UK tried for a 9-county Ulster but unionists insisted on 6 in the interest of heavier Protestant representation. Southern Ireland’s boycott left Lloyd George to govern the 26 as a crown colony under military law, so he countered by offering Dominion status. The Irreconcilables rejected the treaty because it failed to deliver a republic, rather than all 32 counties (which wasn’t on offer since Ulster was loyal), the Oath of Allegiance being entirely unacceptable. Sheer outlawry was also averse to settlement, but most of the countryside favored resolution. Ironically de Valera and Collins took opposite sides of common expectation, the latter being more pragmatic; the IRB split 11-4 in favor. If the result of the Anglo-Irish war was predictable, the civil war’s denouement was not. The 20th century’s main fault line ran through constitutionalism and the IRA, rather than class (labourism) or emigration.

In the Free State era, gaps between the riven IRA and Dail were rife, de Valera having withdrawn until 1932. The government sought to assert cultural identity of the new country through compulsory study of Gaelic in schools and other means. Ulster was uncompromising in opposing Catholic political interests, driven by middle-class Protestant opinion (including ex-WWI soldiers). During the depression, the north saw heavy emigration to the UK.

De Valera’s Fianna Fail came to stand not only for small farmers and shopkeepers of rural Ireland but also the bourgeois. Quashing the neo-fascist blue shirts demonstrated article 2A of 1937’s constitution would apply to the dissident IRA. He had preferred ‘external association’ with the Commonwealth, rather than 32-country republicanism (though the revised constitution claimed to legislate for Ulster and sought to appeal to northerners); but saw the repudiation of the governor-general; disavowal of annuity payments to English landowners, which sparked a trade war; and subsequent recovery of the ‘Treaty ports’ as his crowning nationalist achievement. Unintentionally, the outcome bound Ulster into British shipbuilding and broader economy; Ulster was raided in World War II while southern Ireland enjoyed a ‘pro British’ neutrality.

In the postwar era, Finance department planners were all-powerful in seeking for development, leading (among other things) to the arrival of foreign corporations in the 1960s. In the same decade, Church authority began receding while Fianna Fail retained hegemony and population resumed growing. Though a Peronist, rural ideology pervaded government doings, it was a decade of exposure to the winder world. In Ulster, the crisis within Protestant unionism as much as radical political Catholicism instigated the Troubles. The IRA resurfaced as fighting the UK’s military might in the form of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, rather the Protestant majority.

Foster would say attempts to remake society as if a tabula rasa end badly, and that as with so many revolutions, the decisive factor is suitably defining the enemy (rather than agreeing final objectives). Ireland and India each chose to fight following partition – which is not the UK’s responsibility – and both became one-party states rather than the pluralities of colonial era.
However magisterial, the push for EEC membership only succeeding in 1972, the study has necessarily been surpassed by Ireland’s gains from European Union membership and consequent socioeconomic change.