Pope Urban VIII had urged Catholics to make the supreme sacrifice...

Such dispositions on the part of the clergy were fuelled by experiences of persecution. In 1611 the Privy Council in London sent instructions that a Catholic bishop ought to be apprehended and put to death as a deterrent to others. The 80-year-old Franciscan Cornelius O’Devany, Bishop of Down and Connor, and his chaplain Patrick Loughlain, were duly arrested and hanged. On the scaffold the bishop made clear that he was being executed for religious rather than political reasons. Furthermore in 1614 the Lord Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, received instructions from London that he was to proceed against the Catholics for non-attendance at Protestant services with all possible severity.

These actions undermined whatever basis there may have been for harmony between settler and native in Ulster. This atmosphere of distrust gave rise to several minor attempts at insurrection in 1615 and 1627. In 1625 Pope Urban VIII had urged Catholics to make the supreme sacrifice in the defence of their religion. In November of that year the newly appointed Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, and his suffragan bishops issued a statement declaring that the ‘religion of papists is superstitious and idolatrous … erroneous and heretical.’ To give any concessions to Catholics would be ‘a grievous sin’. None of this was designed to make life easy for Catholics or Protestants.

even Catholic authorities worried about its continuation...

The Plantation did occasion a number of ironies. The emergence of Sir James Hamilton (the Earl of Abercorn) as an important Scottish planted landlord in the Strabane area of County Tyrone despite his Catholicism, helped ensure some Catholic prosperity and continuity. Hamilton’s presence also served to re-enforce the connection between Ulster and Scottish Catholics in the Plantation era. Similar tales of influential Catholics who were powerful magnates in their own right, such as the MacDonnells in Antrim, indicate that even at the height of Protestant infiltration into Ulster things were not necessarily bleak for all Catholics.

For the most part, however, Catholicism survived in Ulster as a token of resistance to English and Scottish Protestantism. As we have seen, the state of the Catholic religion in the Province at the time of the planters’ arrival was such that even Catholic authorities worried about its continuation. Had more sustained effort been made by government and by the Established Church to convert the natives to the reformed religion Catholicism would not have endured to the extent it has done. One of the ironic benefits of the Plantation was to help strengthen Ulster Catholic identity since ultimately the experience of living side by side with planters convinced most Catholics that the net effect of Plantation was to their disadvantage.

Protestantism was more successfully established in Ulster than elsewhere in Ireland...

Some historians stress that later developments in the century rather than the Plantation per se were responsible for sowing the seeds of sectarian bitterness in Ulster. However to say that relations between the planters and Catholics from 1609, were not wholly negative is to state no more than that all human relations have their complexities. The fact remains that Protestantism was more successfully established in Ulster than elsewhere in Ireland because of the 17th century Plantation. The resistance to the reformed faith and to the mores that it brought overshadowed the relationship between Catholics and their Protestant neighbours.

If the Plantation sets the tone for inter-community animosity such antagonisms were given further edge by later events. We can point, randomly, to instances that fuelled the fire of sectarian hatred. Such a list must include the Williamite wars, encompassing the Siege of Derry, the foundation and subsequent history of the Orange Order, traditions of sectarian hatred in Belfast from the 1840s and the partition of Ireland into its respective spheres of Catholic and Protestant influence. All these episodes played their part in exacerbating the troubled history of Catholic-Protestant relations in Ulster. In particular Catholic disgruntlement with the Northern Ireland State after 1921 would in the end give rise to the murderous activity of the IRA in more recent times. For many Protestants the experience of ‘The Troubles’ would confirm, for a community whose origins were non-native and whose place in Ulster was to some extent uncertain, that their real security in the land came only from a strong military infrastructure. The Belfast Agreement does give a new context for Catholic and Protestant relations in Ulster; whether it will succeed in overcoming the centuries-old antagonisms, which have their origins in the Plantation, only time will tell.