ABSTRACT
Political and military violen ce in Ireland is not a phenomenon of the last twenty-five years. Ireland's history over the last 300 years is one of a protracted struggle for land and power between groups with competing interests and religions. In partieular, the modern eonfliet hinged upon the battle between those who sought to rid Ireland of its English eonneetion and those who wished to maintain the link with the Protestant mainland. This division between so-called Unionists and nationalists can be traeed baek to the seventeenth-eentury Protestant 'plantation of Ireland', when the British Crown sponsored English and Seottish Protestants to settle in the north-eastern part of the eolony. The 'plantation' of Ulster, as it beeame known, opened aperiod in whieh the Protestant English gentry eonfiseated land and oversaw a massive influx of Seottish settlers. They took into Ireland a different religion and eulture from that of the indigenous peoples. These settlers and their deseendants formed a Loyalist base and firmly implanted a eonneetion with the mainland. Violenee was endemie between the Anglo-Seottish settlers and the native Irish inhabitants as disputes over land ownership broke out.! These struggles foreshadowed the development of what might be termed two nationalisms in Ireland over the next 200 years. The two nationalisms or identities are best deseribed as that of a 'Catholie Irishness' and a 'Protestant Irishness', which established distinet identities and interests aligned to geographie loeations; the Catholies in the south and the Protestants in the north of the island. The later British problem in Ireland was shaped in this period. The English supported the Protestants in securing their
positIOn in the island, but were unable fully to subdue the Catholics into acceptance of the arrangement.
