The Treaty of Limerick was signed on 3 October 1691 by delegations led, respectively, by Sarsfield and the Williamite commander, Godard van Reede van Ginkel. From the Williamites’ pointof view, it was a reasonable (if not perfect) agreement that would enable them to return their attention to the war in Europe. Ironically, a key provision of the treaty was that the Irish Jacobites’ army would be removed to the continent, and many ended up in the French service: the so-called “Wild Geese.” Those Catholics who remained were to be confirmed in their estates and permitted to practice their professions(and even to bear arms, depending ontheirsocial status). They were also to be granted an ambiguous form of religious toleration, and would be insulated against any retrospective legal retribution for their actions in wartime. Yet the perceived leniency of these terms outraged Irish Protestants, who were unhappy that they would not be compensated for losses they had endured in the war and that Catholic Ireland remained, in their eyes, undefeated and dangerous. There was no attempt to ratify the treaty in the first postwarIrish parliament, called in 1692, and another attempt in 1695 was abandoned. The Irish parliament did not ratify the treaty until 1697, and even then it was only in a greatly diluted form that omitted the clauses relating to civil and religious toleration. One side effect of England’s Glorious Revolution was the emergence of an all-Protestant parliament in Ireland, which first sat in 1692. From the outset, it was dominated by constitutional questions that were ultimately about who was actually in charge. Wasit the government, usually headed by an Englisharistocrat, with English appointees in key offices, or was it to be the representatives (such as they were)ofIreland assembled in the parliament? It was obvious that British and English interests did not automatically correspond to Irish interests in general, and to thoseofIrish Protestants in particular. It had suited the Williamite government, afterall, to strike a deal with the Jacobites. But the signing of the Treaty of Limerick, complete with clauses that the Irish Protestant interest found highly objectionable, seemed to suggest that they and their concerns would ultimately be consigned to second place. And this could not be tolerated. Money wasalso an issue for the Irish parliament, as the question of parliament's “sole right” to initiate financial legislation to fund the governmentand administration of Ireland emerged, and MPs recognized that control of the purse strings could be used once again to exert a wider control over Irish affairs in the face of English oversight. On the other hand, from the 1690s the government began to utilise “managers” who would massage the parliament to pass legislation by deploying patronage on a large scale. Both styles of governance continued to evolve in the decadesthat followed. The “sole right” claim wasinitially made by the Irish parliament in 1692, and the deadlock that ensued eventually forced the government into a compromise in 1695, which ultimately resulted in the advent of regular parliamentary sessions in Ireland. Thereafter, along with the passing of a modified version of the Treaty of Limerick, the lingering fears of ProtestantIreland beganto be addressed by the gradual passing of the popery, or penal, laws. Catholics had been barred from the Irish parliament as early as 1691, after members were required to swear the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, and to take a declaration against transubstantiation, measures that Catholics would find repugnant. The first of two penal laws passed in 1695 officially limited Catholic ownership of weapons and horses over five poundsin value, lest these prove useful to either a future invader or a Catholic rebellion from within. The second penal law of 1695 effectively sought to curtail the numbers of students attend ing Irish colleges on the continent, and thereby the links between Irish Catholics and their European co-religionists. Given that the Wild Geese added a new military dimension to Catholic Ireland’s already extensive intellectual and mercantile networks on the continent, these can plausibly be described as security measures in time of war.! Further restrictions followed. Collectively, the laws passed from 1695 to 1709 were intended to hobble the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of Catholic Ireland. The ecclesiastical hierarchy and regular clergy were to be banished. A limited number ofsecular clergy were permitted to stay but were required to register with the authorities, and by 1709 these were also obliged to repudiate the Stuarts, who had been welcomed into exile in France and who were widely perceived as being intent on taking back the thrones ofthe three kingdoms. Given that landed wealth was essentially the basis of political and military power, many of the “penal laws” were aimed at restricting Catholic land ownership. Catholics were barred from purchasing land in 1704 and could not lease land for more than thirty-one years. The manner in which they inherited land wasalso restricted in 1704: instead of inheritance by primogeniture, wherebyan eldest heir might inherit a land holding in its entirety, Catholics could only inherit land by gavelkind, in which case the land in question was to be divided amongst the family, thereby reducing the size and profitability of the land holding. Security concerns were also reflected in some of the other penal laws. In 1728 Catholics were deprived of the franchise, and by the 1730s Catholics were barred from local government offices, attending Trinity College Dublin (then the only university in Ireland), and practising at the bar.’ These restrictions on political and economic rights (especially in relation to land) and on involvement in the state, the professions, and the armed forces were essentially aimed at securing Anglican Ireland from what was seen, for much of the eighteenth century, as a Catholic and Jacobite threat that, while based overseas, retained a potent followingin Ireland. With regard to the restrictive nature of the penal laws, at least some members of the Protestant community debated whether or not they were simply instruments of repression, or could be an inducement for Catholics to convert to the established church: after all, would conversion not be a long-term solution to the problem? There were occasional attempts to promote conversion, especially through education, but this was the work of a minority. Some Catholics did convert, and some Protestants helped Catholic neighbours and relations to sidestep the provisions of the penal laws. They were devised in a piece- meal fashion, and were not always fully enforced. But collectively, the penal laws facilitated the creation of an officially Anglican state in eighteenth-century Ireland. Dissenters were also victimised, most obviously by the sacramental test of 1704 that made adherence to the Church ofIreland a prerequisite forstate office, a condition that dissenters found repugnant. Those Protestants who did not con- form to the state church also forfeited their right to participate in the state itself. The passage of the first penal laws had paved the way for the ratification of the Treaty of Limerick. In line withits provisions, land confiscations followed in the 1690s, but the settlements that ended the war—the articles of Galway and the Treaty of Limerick— offered legal protection to most of those who were vulnerable to punishment. Pardons were offered in some cases, and in others families were permitted to claim back at least some of what was confis- cated: usually land taken from those who had been killed, or who had departed for France. The Williamite confiscations were not on the scale of their Cromwellian predecessor, but they eroded the share of Catholic-owned land in Ireland even farther. By the middle of the eighteenth century Catholics may have owned aslittle as 5—ro percent ofIrish land—an extraordinary transformation. It is worth pausing to reflect on who now owned this land. By 1700 Ireland had acquired a Protestant population of various denominations and social classes that made up perhaps 20 percentof the whole, split between the established church and nonconformists (the latter grouping had been topped up in the 1690s by a renewed surge of Presbyterian immigration). They were usually of British descent, but also had continental elements thanks to immigration by groups such as Huguenots in the later seventeenth century. And some of these had done very well indeed. But the ruling elite was Anglican. Protestantism was the key, and the bond provided by Protestantism was bolstered by the punctual commemoration of key dates in what could be described as a Protestant calendar: William’s birthday on 4 November, the execution of Charles I on 31 January; the restoration of the monarchy on 29 May; the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion on 23 October; and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November. These dates were marked byofficial and unofficial ceremonies—bells, bonfires, drinking, often elaborate fireworks, parades, and church ceremonies—that appealed across social classes, so long as those classes were Protestant. The discovery and outbreak of the 1641 rebellion was marked by the Church of Ireland in a way that reminded Irish Protestants of their deliverance from destruction at the hands ofIrish Catholics (and could also be used to inculcate a moral message). As time went by another anniversary was added to the list: the battle of the Boyne on 1 July (old style). These reminders of the past also served to keep an awareness of the lurking Catholic threat alive, and such fears remained a crucial componentof Protestant identity in the early eighteenth century. From the point of view of Protestantsofall kinds, the Catholic danger had not receded inthe years after 1691; it had simply been exported. The “Wild Geese” constituted a strong and vigorous Irish military tradition on the continent throughoutthe eighteenth century, with the exploits of the “Irish Brigade” in the French army at the battle of Fontenoy in 1745 attracting particular renown. There were genuine fears in Britain and Ireland of a Jacobite resurgence in the generations after the Glorious Revolution. The repercussions of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were weaker in Ireland than in England or Scotland, but they had certainly heightened tensions, and until the middle of the eighteenth century Protestant Ireland retained the lurking fear that a Catholic danger lay across the seas and would eventually attempt to strike at them. If such fears posed the question of what Protestant Ireland should do to protect itself, then the answer lay in security. In the 1690s Ireland’s defences were seen to be in a poor condition, and from 1698 a new networkof residential barracks was built throughout the island (the Royal Barracks in Dublin, which was the largest barracks in Europe whenit opened in 1710, was the most spectacular example of these). The new military installations were also intended to deal with the lingering threat posed by rapparees in certain areas, but having persisted in the aftermath of the war this threat receded in the 1720s. Fears of Jacobitism survived, however, and Jacobite scares often prompted the seizure of Catholic weapons and horses, the detention of suspects, and bans on public assembly. From 1699 to 1769 the Irish army was nominally 12,000 strong in peace- time, increasing to 15,500 thereafter, althoughthe real numbers en- listed were always lower. From 1701, Catholics and Irish Protestants were officially barred from the army, though these strictures were often relaxed in time of war, and both Catholics and Protestants could always be found amongst the rank and file. The ban on Trish Protestants was designed to maintain the integrity of the Protestant community by ensuringthat it was not weakened by having substantial numbers of Protestants on overseas service; recruits in- stead came from Britain. Anglicans seem to have been accepted within the ranks from the 1740s onwards, though dissenters were still barred. But during the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63 the demand for manpower saw the recruitmentofIrish Catholics. The Irish armyin the eighteenth century was usually perceived as an external imposition due to both its composition and its quar- tering in barracks that were separated fromthe community at large. This also became a way of maintaining a standing army forservice across the burgeoning British empire that would have been unpopu- lar to maintain in Britain itself: instead, the army would be kept outof sight, out of mind, and ready foruse in the new barracks in Treland.

The Exercise of Power How did ProtestantIreland govern? The viceroy stood at the head of the government, but was usually English and non-resident unless parliament wasin session; senior officials usually ran things on a day-to-day basis. Beneath this camevariouslevels of administration and bureaucracy, ofoffice holders and sinecures. These otherlayers of the apparatus of state were populated by Irish Protestants. Naturally, the same was true of the Church ofIreland, despite a widespread assumption that it was overwhelmingly populated by English clerics. The established church was essentially an arm ofthe state in its own right, and was perennially concerned with the condition of the Prot- €stant community while being preoccupied with educational and proselytising schemes to expand the base of that community. The law was administered by the judiciary, which was based in Dublin but travelled around the country on the intermittent assize circuit. Then there was a plethora of local officials: magistrates, sheriffs, and justices of the peace. These positions were dominated by the gentry and were responsible for local judicial activity, along with the maintenance and development of infrastructure and public works. Essentially, the county grand juries lay at one end of the administrative spectrum, with parliament at the other end, and an increasingly elaborate bureaucracy in between.* The parliament itself was based onits English counterpart, with the two chambers meeting on an increasingly regular basis from the 1690s onwards, which was very different from the infrequent meetings of previous centuries. The upper house (lords) was populated by the Irish peers and the twenty-two bishops and archbishops of the established church. The lower house (commons) consisted of three hundred members sitting in two-seat constituencies, many of which were dominated by the gentry, and as such were little more than sinecures. The rural electorate consisted ofProtestant landowners, though a wider franchise could be found in the urban boroughs where membersofcorporations and freemen could vote. Whig and Tory alignments were replicated in the Irish parliament during the reign of Queen Anne, though these distinctions faded away by the 1720s and did not reemerge until the latter decades of the century. But there were ultimately limitations to the parliament’s power. The Declaratory Act of 1720 affirmed, amongst other things, the right of the British parliament to legislate for Ireland. In 1722 the decision to award a patent (sold on by the king’s mistress) to mint copper coin to William Wood of Wolverhampton prompted a furious backlash. The idea was intended to replenish Ireland’s depleted currency in circulation. This prompted ferocious hostility on the grounds that Ireland would be flooded with worthless coin, and it was successfully resisted. But the affair was seen to have had symbolic overtones as a clash between Irish and British interests, most famously articulated from outside the parliament by Jonathan Swift’s Drapier’s Letters (1724-25), the fourth of which addressed his concerns to the “whole people of Ireland.” In the aftermath, the government resolved that in future all senior offices would remain in English hands, and that parliament would be rendered malleable by “andertakers.” The key to the undertakers lay in their name: in the absence of the lord lieutenant, they “undertook” to manage the meetings of parliament, being consulted about legislation and being granted access to the considerable patronage at the disposal of the government, the better to smooth the passageofbills through the parliament. The conceptof “managing” parliamentary factions had existed earlier in the century, but became more firmly entrenched from the 1720s on. The task was usually given to figures of considerable wealth and prestige, who usually occupied senior positions, most notably William Connolly up to 1728 and Henry Boyle after 1732. Essentially, they sought to cajole and bribe on behalf of the government, and continued to do so until the 1760s.

Wealth In 1731,  the opening of a new Parliament House in Dublin gave impressive expression to the powerof Ireland’s Protestant ruling class: the so-called “Protestant ascendancy” (the term itself apparently dates from the 1780s but was—is—applied retrospectively)’ After 1715 parliament was meeting on a biennial basis; in the eighteenth century Dublin, as the seat of parliament, became a magnetfor the Protestant ruling elite, as the city expanded enormously against the backdrop of a lengthy economic boom. The Irish economy recovered slowly after the devastation of the Jacobite-Williamite war, though the 1720s were a period of particular hardship, with a succession of poor harvests causing famine conditions in some regions. Harvest failures and epidemics were by no means uncommon,as was seento horrific effect during the nationwide famine caused by the Arctic winter of 1740~4I. But the long-term trajectory of the eighteenth-century Irish economy was upwards; from the 1660s to the 1770s there was a fivefold increase in Irish exports. Different ports had a different focus. Drogheda and Belfast dealt in linen; Dublin, Limerick, Cork, and Waterford exported livestock and food. There was no direct trade with the British colonies from 1696 to 1731: Irish exports, along with imports of sugar and tobacco, rum, timber, and flaxseed all went via Britain, as the larger ports squeezed out the smaller ones. Internal economic expansion was alsofacilitated by changesin the man-made environment. Landed estates and urban networks had been expanding since the seventeenth century, but the developmentof infrastructure such as roads, towns, and market fairs accelerated in the eighteenth century; the first turnpike roads had been established by 1729, and there were three thousand fairs established by the 1770s. At the start of the eighteenth century there were perhaps two thousand estate farms inIreland, the majority of which were smaller than four thousand acres, with some major estates as the exceptions.® Larger grazing farms for cattle emerged in Munster, Leinster, and east Connacht, putting pressure on smaller holdings. They also had another long-term impact: by using up the lowland pastures the prevalence of big farms accelerated the shift to widespread cultivation of the potato, which was easily grown in poorer upland soil. The large-scale shift to dairy farming had been prompted by the Atlantic provisions trade to the colonies, though Britain had become the primary market by the end of the century; it was the destination for 79 percent of Irish exports in 1800, having been the ‘recipient of 45 percent in 1700. Salt beef and dairy products were the mainstay of the colonial trade, which shifted from the West Indies to North America over the course of the century.’ Wealth and commercial expansion also left a mark in the Irish ports from which goods were imported and exported. Catholic and dissenter mercantile interests remained unaffected by the penal laws, which were principally directed at landed wealth. Textiles such as linen remained major exports, and the linen heartlands of the northeast would become the wealthiest regionin Ireland bythe end of the century. The massive expansion of the linen trade in Ulster was encouraged by landlords, in part due to poor land yielding low rents; landlords also facilitated markets at which to sell the new produce, and the Armagh~Dungannon-—Lisburn “linen triangle” of east Ulster became one of the great centres of economic growthin the second half of the eighteenth century. The linen industry eventually reached west to the Atlantic seaboard (for kelp) and south to Dublin (to the Linen Hall), which kept its preeminence as the centre of banking and capital flows. The street names around the location of the old linenhall in Dublin—suchas Lisburn Street, named after the eponymous Armagh town—still bear testament to the link to Ulster via the linen trade, just as the elongated houses of eighteenth century weavers remain a feature of the vernacular architecture of the northern regions of Ireland; the extra length was needed to accommodate their looms. Another physical expression of wealth and security that could be seen across the island was the change in the nature of gentry residences and demesnes from the 1 7308 onwards, as they evolved away from the semi-fortified dwellings of the past. “Georgian”Irelandleft a rich architectural legacy, and the aristocratic residences of the eighteenth century are per- haps the most important componentofthat. Yet tensions remained beneath the surface of the society ruled by the “Protestant ascendancy,” for the new “big houses” remained embedded in the countryside of what wasstill an overwhelmingly Catholic country. It is to this reality that attention must now be turned.

Catholics and Jacobites In July 1711, Richard Thomas, the zealous vicar and rector of Headford in County Galway, wrote to John Vesey, the bishop of Tuam,to inform him that he was optimistic of converting two leading members of the O'Flaherty family, “which would strike a great stroke in making that a Protestant country, that is, if we do not meet with an extraordinary opposition from the moles the priests and friars that work underground.”! There are two things that can be taken from this: that the Church of Ireland (or at least individual members ofit) felt compelled to attempt the conversion of leading Catholics to exploit their influence within the Catholic community; and that they faced major obstacles from their Catholic opponents as they tried to do so (there was a long-running contemporary debate over whether or not the purpose of the penal laws was to prompt the conversion of Catholics). If Ireland was, in legal terms, a country in which only members of the Church of Ireland could participate fully in public life, then that excluded most of the population on purely sectarian grounds. Thisletter is a subtle reminder of that stark fact. The existence of a “hidden” Ireland, or Irelands, as used here refers to those segmentsof the Irish population that were excluded from formal political public life. Ironically, that means that the vast majority of the Irish population in the eighteenth century could be described as hidden. Catholics made up most of the population but were excluded from participation in the state. That is not to say, however, that the life of Catholic Ireland was of no account; its political affiliation was of great concern to Protestant Ireland. Jacobitism—allegiance to the deposed Stuart monarchy—remained strong in Catholic Ireland throughout the eighteenth century, with support from some influential Protestants. Jacobite loyalties were reflected in Gaelic poetry and song, which still constituted a vibrant oral and scribal tradition. Despite the seventeenth-century renaissance, the pressure brought to bear on the Gaelic order since the sixteenth century had taken a toll on its intellectual life and its learned classes (which had long been viewed with hostility by the English authorities). But secular schools for poets, genealogists, lawyers, and doctors had survived well into the seventeenth century and beyond. The social cachet of the poetic class may have declined, but its members continued to respond to the world in which they now found themselves. Poetic genres such as the aisling (depictinga vision that often conveyed an allegorical message) survived and were adapted to new purposes, becoming far more demotic as they did so. There was a line ofdescent from the poetic elite of the seventeenth century to the Catholic schoolmaster of the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies. A good example is found in the career of Aodh Bui Mac Cruitin. Born in County Clare around 1680 into a family with a tradition of serving as hereditary historians to the O’Briens of Thomond, he wrote poems eulogising membersof the local gentry before progressing to more explicitly Jacobite verse. He moved to Dublin and translated numerous works before publishinga book in English that drew on the work of Seathrin Céitinn to challenge the writings of Protestant historians of Ireland such as Richard Cox. Moving to Louvain, he edited and published a manuscript on Irish grammar before joining the French army in 1728. In 1731, in Paris, he assisted in the publication of an English-language dictionary before returning to his native Clare and establishinga school. As a poet, Jacobite, scholar, soldier, and teacher at home and abroad, Mac Cruitin encapsulates many elements ofthe Irish Catholic world of the early eighteenth century Catholic allegiance to the Stuarts was long-standing, and survived long after they had lost the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland. This was not mere nostalgia: Jacobitism held out the prospect that the new Protestant dispensation in Ireland could be re- versed to the benefit of Irish Catholics. If the Stuarts regained the thrones they had lost, surely they would reward the Catholic subjects who had remained loyal to them, it was believed. A residual Catholic gentry had survived the confiscations of the early eigh- teenth century, but as land holders, tenants, and tenant farmers rather than land owners. Perhaps as much as 20 percent ofIrish land effectively remained in unchanged hands, and although those hands belonged to “middlemen,” these remnants of the older aristocracy —the “underground gentry,” as they have been termed—retained this status within their community.’ Jacobitism was often associated with other forms of unrest, such as the threat posed by rapparees prior to the 1720s. It also had the sanction of the Catholic Church: 124 of 129 Catholic bishops ap- pointed to Ireland from 1687 to 1765 were officially approved by the exiled Stuarts. But Jacobitism was sustained and made all the more threatening by continued links to the continent, as hinted at by the testimony of an informant aboard a ship moored in County Kerry in 1727. On hearing the ship’s master toast “Jemmy,” he asked who this was, to be told “damn his blood if he valued a halfpenny who heard him and that he meant King James the Third and accordingly drankhis health in the aforesaid terms and then struck at a gentleman in company whenhe and I drank King Georges health.” Celebrations of the pretender’s birthday, seditious toasts, and re- ‘cruitment for foreign military service all served as reminders to Protestants that the return ofthe Stuarts mightyet be a possibility, and many leading Catholics (and some Protestants) would have favoured such an outcome. Yet the prospect of a Stuart restoration depended on the disposition of powers such as Spain, France, and to a lesser extent Sweden and Russia. After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, for instance, the French, who were the most obvious ally of the Jacobite cause, had come to an accommodation with the British against the Spanish that lasted into the 1730s. Lingering hopes that continental powers might be induced to land in Ireland ebbed and flowed throughoutthe eigh-teenth century, but the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 garnered virtually no support in Ireland. The Jacobite cause in Britain and Ireland never recovered from the failure of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745; the death ofJames Il’s son and heir James Francis Edward (the “Old Pretender”) in 1766 marked the end of the Stuart cause. Irish Jacobitism could not be detached from Catholic Ireland’s links to Catholic Europe. In many ways, the centre of gravity of Catholic Ireland had been dispersed into émigré communities. Alongside the existing network of Irish colleges and Irish military emigration, Irish Catholic merchants had established themselves in such cities as Nantes and Bordeaux; some certainly dabbled in the slave trade from these ports, but the trade in wine and wool with their former patrimony remained the primary occupation to most. The Catholic mercantile elite who had emerged in Ireland’s towns and cities in the second half of the eighteenth century reached out to their counterparts (and often their relations) on the continent. Some Irish Catholics did reasonably well at home and abroad. This is not to say that the socioeconomic issues that affected the majority should be overlooked. Between 1740 and 1815 the dairy industry expanded from west to east. A number of distinct regions could be identified: dairy in the south and cattle fattening in west Leinster and east Connacht, with tillage in Leinster. The latter facilitated food processing such as brewing and milling. But tillage needed labour: hence the growth of an “underclass” of landless labourers. The less profitable western seaboard, on the other hand, came to be dominated by small farms. Communal farming practices such as rundale (in which a landholding was shared by a number of individuals or families, with individual plots being allocated bylots on a rotating basis) helped regulate the pressure of a growing population, by maximising the use of scarce resources on poor land. This world was not hidden, and was not unsophisticated; but it was often viewed with incomprehension by observers who dismissed it as primitive. The expanding economy also stoked tensions between landlord and tenants. The relationships between these was often policed by a range ofsecretive peasant societies, most famously the Houghers and “Whiteboys” of Munster (the latter so called after the rough disguises they wore). Agrarian unrest was often conflated with allegations of Catholic disaffection and Jacobite plotting teenth century, but the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 garnered virtually no support in Ireland. The Jacobite cause in Britain and Ireland never recovered from the failure of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745; the death ofJames Il’s son and heir James Francis Edward (the “Old Pretender”) in 1766 marked the end of the Stuart cause. Irish Jacobitism could not be detached from Catholic Ireland’s links to Catholic Europe. In many ways, the centre of gravity of Catholic Ireland had been dispersed into émigré communities. Alongside the existing network of Irish colleges and Irish military emigration, Irish Catholic merchants had established themselves in such cities as Nantes and Bordeaux; some certainly dabbled in the slave trade from these ports, but the trade in wine and wool with their former patrimony remained the primary occupation to most. The Catholic mercantile elite who had emerged in Ireland’s towns and cities in the second half of the eighteenth century reached out to their counterparts (and often their relations) on the continent. Some Irish Catholics did reasonably well at home and abroad. This is not to say that the socioeconomic issues that affected the majority should be overlooked. Between 1740 and 1815 the dairy industry expanded from west to east. A number of distinct regions could be identified: dairy in the south and cattle fattening in west Leinster and east Connacht, with tillage in Leinster. The latter facilitated food processing such as brewing and milling. But tillage needed labour: hence the growth of an “underclass” of landless labourers. The less profitable western seaboard, on the other hand, came to be dominated by small farms. Communal farming practices such as rundale (in which a landholding was shared by a number of individuals or families, with individual plots being allocated bylots on a rotating basis) helped regulate the pressure of a growing population, by maximising the use of scarce resources on poor land. This world was not hidden, and was not unsophisticated; but it was often viewed with incomprehension by observers who dismissed it as primitive. The expanding economy also stoked tensions between landlord and tenants. The relationships between these was often policed by a range ofsecretive peasant societies, most famously the Houghers and “Whiteboys” of Munster (the latter so called after the rough disguises they wore). Agrarian unrest was often conflated with allegations of Catholic disaffection and Jacobite plotting —white, after all, was a colour associated with the Jacobites—though sometimes such claims were little more than a pretext for harsh repression on the part of the magistrates drawn from the landed elite. Yet as the century wore on, change wasin the air. In 1758 restrictions on full Catholic membership of guilds was successfully challenged. In 1760, during the Seven Years’ War, a small French force briefly seized the Ulster town of Carrickfergus, which prompted a flurry of protestations of loyalty from a range of Catholic voices and led in turn to the creation of the “Catholic committee,” an organisation composed of largely urban middle-class Catholics arguing for the repeal of the penal laws. The “Catholic question”—-the readmission of Catholics to political and economic rights—would become one of the defining political issues of the second half of the eighteenth century.

Dissenters and Their Diaspora Catholics were not the only victims of punitive legislation: Protestant dissenters were also targeted by the Anglican state. Ireland’s Anglican elite were traditionally suspicious of nonconformists, but the Williarnite war had seen Presbyterians fight alongside Episcopalians. This fortuitous coalition led some membersof the Church of Ireland to conclude that ultimately Presbyterians and Anglicans would come together iffaced by a common Catholic danger. Therefore, the necessity to ease restrictions on dissenters was not an imperative. Presbyterians naturally viewed the sacramental test of 1704 that restricted their participation in public life with great hostility, though by the 1720s a degreeof de facto toleration was evident once again. Yet the penal laws continued to victimise Presbyterians and other nonconformists, albeit to a lesser degree than Catholics. Presbyterians, for example, could vote, but thanks to the 1704 act they were barred from holding public office. In addition, their marriages were not recognised by the law—an issue with very serious implications for the manner in which they might inherit land. On the whole though, their exclusion was less thorough than that of Catholics. A concrete sign of this was that Presbyterian clerics tended to be far more vocal commentators on public affairs than their Catholic counterparts. The migration that had brought Presbyterians to Ulster in the first place had mainly come from lowland Scotland, which brought with it distinct cultural traits, such as local dialects, educational practises, vernacular architecture, and the oat diet. Links to Scotland remained strong; indeed, given that that they were effectively barred from attending Trinity College Dublin, Presbyterians who could afford a university education traditionally looked to the Scottish universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The last major influx of Scottish immigrants had come in the 1690s, but this was soon overshadowed by another migration, as many ofthe Scots in Ulster began to emigrate to North America. Unfavourable economic conditions —increases in rents and downturns in the textile trade—were crucial drivers of this migration, though the appeal of more land and fewer petty restrictions on the other side of the Atlantic should not be underestimated. Perhaps 150,000 Presbyterians left Ireland for North America between the 1680s and the 1830s (along with very substantial numbers of Catholics). The Delaware region became a key destination for Ulster emigrants, and the frontier regions of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia saw major settlement from Ulster. Extensive transatlantic links were thereby forged in the eighteenth century: flaxseed imported from America subsidised people going the other way. Both Catholics and Presbyterians were deeply divided from one otherin the Ireland of the ascendancy. Yet to a far greater extent than their Anglican rulers, both Catholics and Presbyterians lived in worlds whose mental and geographical maps extended far beyond Irish shores.

Womenand Ethnic Groups It may seen bizarre to consider women aspart of a “hidden” Ireland; but if membership of this hidden Ireland is defined by exclusion from public and political life, then Irish women were most definitely a part ofit. Political life was, in purely institutional terms, a male preserve. Yet politics extended far beyond the membership ofinstitutions such as parliament, and involved a much wider sphere of cultural politics that did include women. Even within the ruling elites of medieval and early modern Ireland, aristocratic women had played an influential role in political life; the right of women to in herit land and property gave them a degree of political, economic and social influence. Yet this only applied to the elite; further down the social scale, women could find a role for themselves as domestic servants. By the eighteenth century women were still excluded from formal political power, but the opportunities available to them expanded quite considerably. Women could carve out their own spheres of influence by setting up their own businesses, often in clothing and crafts, though some women in urban areas were forced into prostitution. Marriage remained the most obvious gateway to women’s formal status in society. But the institution of marriage was also linked to the “vicious and reprehensible” crime of abduction, which was often accompanied by violence and rape, ending in a forced marriage. As a crime, abduction was primarily economic in motivation and was very mucha crime of the “middling” classes in origin, but violence against women was casual and common. Yet the fact that abduction was a capital crime hints at a more complexreality than just the existence of a patriarchal society. A woman like Letitia Bushe, for instance, the daughter ofa relatively minor landowner from Kilkenny who had intermittently held some public offices, could carve out a fulfilling and relatively independent life amidst “polite society” in Dublin and Meathin the mid-eighteenth century, while maintaining her own views on issues such as politics and war that were, in official terms, assumed to be purely male preserves; the very real constraints imposed upon Irish women in this period and others cannot tell the whole story of their experience.’ Likewise, the intermittent presence in Hanoverian Ireland of black men and women from Africa or the East Indies—often domestic servants or slaves—-points towards other dimensions of human experience that can be overlooked by historians.6 There were many “hidden Irelands” in eighteenth-century Ireland.