So far as the legacy of the Plantation is concerned, it is important to bear in mind that the official Ulster Plantation covered the modern counties of Armagh, Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan and Donegal. The official Plantation didn’t cover Down and Antrim: there had already been private Plantations taking place in Down and Antrim.

But the significant thing is that the further you go west, the less dense Protestant settlement was and, to some extent, at the time of partition, this is reflected in the fact that Donegal was a planted county - but it became part of ultimately the Irish free state: there weren’t sufficient numbers of Protestants in Donegal and similarly in Cavan. The Plantation hadn’t taken root there as much as it had in other counties.

And in fact where the Plantation had taken root was mainly in the private planted areas of Down and Antrim, and that is reflected today in the fact that these remain the areas of very dense Protestant settlement.

The other interesting aspect, as far as the legacy of the Plantation is concerned, is that segregation was built into the Plantation at the start: we have this modern problem where you know segregated or divided societies. It’s just not a product of what has happened today; to a large extent, it actually reflects the fact that the Plantation itself enshrined the doctrine of segregation. In the lands allocated to British undertakers, whether they be English or Scots, the intention was to clear all native Irish Catholics off those lands.

And one of those areas, for example, was north Armagh, and you know, we still have that today where in fact north Armagh has a, you know, quite a preponderance of Protestants, as opposed to say south Armagh where that didn’t happen. So to some extent some of the, sort of, segregated areas that we have today, while not absolutely dependent on what happened in the 17th century, can perhaps attribute to some of the reasons for that, back to the Plantation of Ulster in 1610.