Protestants and Gaelic culture in 17th-century Ireland
The complex political and religious developments in the seventeenth century continue to be a subject of considerable debate among historians of Ireland. Central to these discussions is the problem of how a Protestant administration with an English monarch as head of state governed a kingdom that was predominantly Catholic and apparently loyal only to the pope. In this scenario Ireland is seen as a country riven by sectarian hatred, where the Protestant “New English” community was continually at loggerheads with its ethnic and religious adversaries: the Old English and native Gaelic Irish. There is little indication that this trend is losing momentum. These acute confessional divisions, manifested in the violence of the 1641 rebellion, still hold centre stage in the study of the seventeenth century. Therefore, the indications are that the current orthodoxy seems set to prevail.
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Mark Empey
He is Dr Garret Fitzgerald post-doctoral fellow in the humanities at NUI Maynooth.