The Penal Laws

1695 - 1780s — A series of laws that stripped Catholics (and Dissenters) of land, education and political rights.

After the Jacobite defeat in the Williamite War — the rout at the Boyne in 1690 and the surrender at Limerick in 1691 — the victorious Protestant interest moved to secure its dominance for good. The Treaty of Limerick had promised Catholics a measure of tolerance, but its terms were largely set aside, and Limerick became known as 'the city of the broken treaty.' From the 1690s the Dublin Parliament passed a growing body of legislation, the Penal Laws (Na Péindlíthe), aimed at the Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, at Presbyterian Dissenters.

The laws struck first at the Catholic Church. Bishops and members of religious orders were banished in 1697, and ordinary parish priests were required to register with the authorities in 1704. With the hierarchy outlawed, Mass was often celebrated in secret at outdoor 'Mass rocks' (carraigeacha an Aifrinn), served by priests who risked arrest at the hands of paid 'priest-hunters.'

They then struck at land and livelihood. Catholics were forbidden to buy land or to take a lease longer than thirty-one years, and on a Catholic's death his estate had to be divided equally among all his sons — unless the eldest conformed to the Established Church, in which case he inherited the lot. The effect was dramatic: Catholic-owned land fell from about 14% of the country in 1703 to roughly 5% by the 1770s. Catholics could not legally bear arms, and could be compelled to sell any horse worth more than £5 to a Protestant who offered that sum.

Public life was closed off almost entirely. Catholics were barred from Parliament — and from voting after 1728 — as well as from the army, the law, most professions and public office. They could not run schools, teach openly, or send their children abroad to be educated. Presbyterians did not escape either: the sacramental Test of 1704 excluded them from office and helped drive tens of thousands of Ulster families to emigrate to America.

Yet the old culture survived underground. Illegal 'hedge schools' (scoileanna chois claí) taught reading, Latin, mathematics and the Irish language in barns, ditches and cabins, keeping Gaelic learning alive through the darkest decades. From the 1770s the harshest measures were dismantled piece by piece through a series of Catholic Relief Acts (1778, 1782 and 1793), and the era finally ended when Daniel O'Connell won Catholic Emancipation in 1829, reopening Parliament to Catholics at last.