Is the Government’s Asylum Policy a Plantation?

As Ireland’s political debate continues to be dominated by Immigration & Asylum, the political & media class try their best to make the spontaneous protests in towns across the country over asylum centres somehow disappear. Slogans such as “Get Them Out” & “House the Irish First” are a regular sight on signs at protests, but the ones that have drawn the most ire from those in power are ones that call the Asylum policy a “Plantation”.

While the first two phrases are fairly meathead, the third is making a much more historical claim that attacks the legitimacy of a State and set of political parties that claim to come from the tradition of 1916 and the First Dáil, the tradition which the three main parties Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil & Sinn Féin all claim to come from. The plantations are still taught in official Irish history classes as explicitly a bad thing, a key part  of a dark ages of English rule in Ireland, ended by a Nationalist uprising in the struggle for independence. 

RTE published an article late last year wheeling out some left-wing academics to debunk the notion that Ireland’s current asylum and immigration policy is a “Plantation”. The article did not actually go into much detail about the history, and was more of a paragraph from a few people saying “it’s not a plantation, I’m an expert” and throwing in the usual “Ah sure the Irish went everywhere” for good measure. One thing the article was correct about however was that only 5 years ago, the only people making the plantation comparison were confined to the fringes of online politics on Twitter, while now this comparison has gone nationwide. This level of change in such a small period of time has our political class very displeased.

Even centre-right commentators such as David Quinn have said using the term “plantation” is a far-right move. But is it? How accurate is it in describing the government’s current asylum policy? In order to assess whether the government’s asylum & immigration policy is a plantation, we must first take a quick look back at the history of the English Plantations of Ireland in more detail.

What were the Plantations of Ireland?

The Plantations of Ireland were English programs of colonisation for Ireland, which took place during the 1500s and 1600s. Settlers from England and Scotland were financed or encouraged to migrate to specific regions and settle in the area in farming communities called plantations, administered by Lords in fealty to the English Crown.

The primary goal of these was to extend English Rule to the whole of the island of Ireland, and solidify it where it existed already de-jure. A secondary goal was the pacification & civilisation of the rebellious natives, who were viewed as primitive and barbarous by the more advanced & powerful Kingdom of England. Beginning in the 1550s, just after the English Reformation, the newly-born religious divide added much fuel to the fire, as Irish Catholicism was now viewed as a superstitious heresy, and the crusading mission to remove “Popery” from the island gave further cause to the colonising English Crown.

Early colonisation took place under the “Surrender & Regrant” policy whereby Irish clans were converted from a clan-based social structure and incorporated into the late-fuedal system under English Law. The first type of colonisation was known as “exemplary plantation", in which small colonies of English settlers would provide model farming communities, that the Irish would emulate and be taxed. This was an attempt at generally non-violent means of bringing Ireland fully under English rule.

Under Queen Mary, the Laois and Offaly Plantation was enacted, which had limited success. This used the second type of colonisation, confiscating lands from natives who had previously rebelled, and replacing them with English settlers completely. In Laois Offaly, land was confiscated from The O'Moore and O'Connor clans, who routinely raided “The Pale”, the area around Dublin that had always been securely under English control, even when much of the island had returned to de-facto Irish-control by the native Gaelic clans. 

This plantation was not very successful due to repeated raids by the native Gaelic Irish, and settlers were only able to be placed in walled towns and cities that were also military fortifications. This plantation taught the English crown the high financial cost of colonisation, and the need to encourage private investment ventures from English Lords & Merchants.

Under Queen Elizabeth I, there was the Munster Plantation. This began off the back of rebellions by Irish Lords nominally in allegiance to the English Crown, and aimed to settle new, more loyal peoples in land that had been confiscated from those involved in the rebellions. The Munster Plantation was a result of English victory in the Demond Rebellions, which began as a local dispute by two Hiberno-Norman Lords, but soon snowballed into two bloody rebellions fought over both political and religious grievances, with James FitzMaurice FitzGerald beginning the Second Desmond Rebellion by landing in Munster with a force of Papal troops. 

The Munster Plantation was again of limited success. The plantation was poorly managed, with inaccurate surveys giving the impression much more land was available than there was in reality. It made much greater use of private enterprise, privateers and investors could buy land in Munster extremely cheap as undertakers. One example was Walter Raleigh, who owned large estates and was involved in the trade of tobacco pipes and wine barrels. Businessmen would encourage prospective settlers to migrate to Munster and work in their enterprises. 

One newly-landed Lord was Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, an archetypal Capitalist-Colonist of the period, who like Raleigh made a significant fortune in Munster, while also being involved in the colonisation of the New World, with Boyle investing in the Virginia Company. The Plantation was not very successful, but was able to create a small but significant Protestant population of English origin, mainly centred in urban areas. Many would be killed in the Confederate Wars in the 1640s.

The Ulster Plantation was the biggest & most successful, regularly being cited during The Troubles as having profound ramifications down throughout the centuries, and to this day as seen with the Island’s two jurisdictions. This Plantation began after the Flight of the Earls, taking land confiscated from Gaelic Chiefs who fought against the English Crown during the Nine Years War, which was led by Hugh O’Neill. 

By this time, the crown highly desired Protestant colonists, as the English fear of the threat of Rome was at its greatest, due to events such as the Spanish Armada, the Papal Excommunication of Elizabeth I, The Gunpowder Plot, and the fact that the Second Desmond Rebellion & the Nine Years War were both led by native Catholic Lords with who claimed Elizabeth was a heretic queen whose allegiance they did not owe as a result, and who fought with military backing from the Roman Church.

The Ulster Plantation took place between 1609 and the 1630s and created a significant Ulster Protestant population which was large enough to remain secure in the region, but small enough to not completely displace the natives, creating the conditions for centuries of sectarian bloodshed. The change in this province was profound, as Ulster had previously been the most Gaelic, least Anglicised of Ireland, the most rural, and with the Gaelic Clans enjoying the most independence in the entire island. This situation would be in complete reverse 300 years later with the foundation of Northern Ireland, showing the far-reaching consequences of large-scale demographic change in a region.

The English had learned a great deal from the failures of their previous plantations. Whereas before, planters were settled in isolated pockets of land, this time the Crown confiscated all of the land and redistributed it, creating concentrations of British settlers around new towns and garrisons. At the outset, it was desired that all tenants were to be English or Scottish Protestants, to completely remake the demographics of the region. 

However as time went on this proved to be impossible to do in practice, and many native Gaelic Catholics were eventually taken on as tenants, in many cases on land they had previously worked or even owned, which sowed the seeds for much resentment and hostility towards the newly-settled Colonists. As time went on, those on the ground such as the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Arthur Chichester remarked that taking on the native Gaelic Irish as tenants had become a standard practice throughout the province, despite this being officially illegal under the Act of Plantation and against the expectations of King James’ government far away in London.

The Ulster Plantation again had significant involvement from English enterprise. The official plantation covered the 6 counties of what is today Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Donegal, and Londonderry. Antrim, Down, and Monaghan were colonised by privately by English & Scottish Lords with the king's support. A new city called Londonderry was created, named as it was financed by investors from the City of London, and Belfast was also incorporated as a City during this period by the Lord Deputy Chichester, who planted the surrounding lands. Many of Ulster’s other towns were also founded during this period. 

It is important to note that while the official Crown-sponsored program of Plantation in Ulster lasted roughly 20-30 years, Protestant migration to Ulster from Britain continued in significant numbers throughout the rest of the 1600s, and on into the 1700s and 1800s. Over time, the line begins to blur between whether someone migrating is a colonist, as someone officially financed to settle in an area, sometimes involved in military conquest, and foreign workers migrating in search of better work prospects, or refugees fleeing for their lives in desperate situations. 

Further migration occurred after peace returned to the island at the end of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, however it would not be until the very end of the century until Scottish Presbyterians would become a majority in the region.  During the 1690s there was a severe famine in Scotland, and many Scots fled to Ulster as refugees. Further refugees would come to Ireland at this time with the Hugenots, who were French Protestants fleeing religious persecution after Louis XIV made Protestantism illegal by revoking the Edict of Nantes, which had previously granted religious toleration. 

In the early 1700s, more Protestant refugees came to Ireland from Germany, fleeing warfare and harvest failure in the regions of Palatinate, Hesse and Baden. While in England this was simple humanitarianism towards refugees and solidarity with their co-religionists, in Ireland this refugee settlement & migration also had a convenient political & ideological benefit, tilting the demographic balance further in the direction the government in England desired, at a time when Protestant Ascendancy was an explicit goal and legally enforced.

Another short-lived Plantation took place under the Cromwellian Republic in the 1650s, as the English Exchequer was effectively bankrupt from the Civil War, and desperate to pay off the very large and radicalised New Model Army, which had for many of the final years of the Civil War resisted any attempt at it’s disarmament before being paid in full. In a politically volatile environment, many would be paid off by being allocated land in Ireland, as again those native Irish involved in rebellion had their lands confiscated and made to move out to land in Connacht, where the land was of the poorest quality. This event is memorialised in the phrase “To Hell or To Connacht”. Other native Irish were transported to the West Indies to serve as indentured servants.

There was also significant amounts of land that was left completely uninhabited by the end of the war, due to the enormous loss of life of native Irish in the Confederate Wars, with estimates of death ranging between 15 and 50% of the pre-war population of roughly 2.1 million people. Contemporary writers noted whole villages & areas where not a single person remained due to the scale of the devastation from war, famine & disease.

Many of the English allocated land would simply sell theirs off, but some remained. By the end of this process, the demographic remake was stark. Before the wars (and after the previous plantations) Irish Catholics had owned 60% of the land. During the Cromwellian Interregnum, this figure fell to 8%. By the time of the Stuart Restoration and compensations had been made to Catholic Royalists, they owned only 20% of it.

Protestant Migration would continue well into the 1800s, with the rapid growth of Belfast as a powerful Industrial city creating massive population growth in the region. In 1808, around 25,000 people lived in the city; by 1911, it had reached 385,000, in part due to native population growth and partly due to immigration from Britain. This variation in the migration origins among the Irish Protestant population can be seen in the ancestry of some of Ireland’s most notable Protestants in the early 20th Century. 

CS Lewis’ paternal grandfather came to Ulster from Wales in the middle of the 1800s, while his mother was from an Anglo-Irish family. Edward Carson’s grandfather had migrated to Dublin from Dumfries in Scotland in 1815, while his maternal ancestry was again from an Anglo-Irish family. W.B.Yeats had ancestry from both the old Anglo-Irish Butler family associated with the Earls of Ormond, and from a Williamite soldier Jervis Yeats, who settled in Ireland after the Williamite war. This contrasts with other notable Irish Protestants in history, such as Lord Castlereagh, whose paternal ancestry traced back directly to a Scottish Lord who settled in Donegal during the Ulster Plantation.

Settlers involved in the Plantation were colloquially known as “planters”, called such for their work on the Plantations. This word has dual meaning in the English language, also able to describe the “planting” of settlers in Ireland by the English Crown. Over time, the term “Planter” remained in use as a sectarian slur used against Protestants, with common use as such well into the late-Twentieth century & The Troubles. 

Sectarianism always has the accuracy of a shotgun rather than a sniper rifle, and it was not exactly checked whether someone was descended from German Lutherans from the Palatine region, Scottish Presbyterian colonists settled as part of an official policy of displacing natives, or an English Parliamentary soldier who personally took part in militarily conquering Ireland. Narratives such as this would in turn trigger resentment from Irish Protestants, who do not regard themselves as colonists or land thieves, creating a cycle of resentment & grievances between communities that was self-perpetuating. 

If there is a lesson from this, it must be that with demographic change and the ethnic conflict that can too often arise from it, any nuances and subtleties like above are often forgotten, and only the blunt, big picture narratives will remain common knowledge throughout generations.

The fallout of a radical Royal program to remake Ulster by King James I in the early 1600s was still being felt in the early 1990s in tit-for-tat sectarian killings in the region, as political factions desperately tried to bring about a final settlement to The Troubles. If we had wise leaders who governed for the long term, this would surely make them see demographic change as something to be managed and kept at as slow a pace as possible, but where we should have wise leaders, we instead have Helen McEntee & Roderic O’Gorman.

Today’s Ireland

What can we see today with Ireland’s current immigration & asylum policy? The most obvious similarity would surely be the forced settlement of foreign migrants despite enormous & sometimes violent opposition from the native people in an area. In the current era, this happens with Asylum seekers being “planted” in small towns and villages throughout the country, placed there by the ruling government in Dublin. Many instances of this ended with the need for the riot squad of the Gardai to physically force them through a blockade by locals. 

Newtown Mount Kennedy is the most blatant example of the need for forceful means of suppressing local opposition, with militarised police beating away a line of locals made up of many non-violent & women. The government’s line since the protests took off has consistently been “No one has the right to veto who lives in their community”, writing off any notion of choice or democratic decision on the policy.

Tense scenes of fearful and agitated local communities rallying outside a prospective centre, lamenting the forceful input of foreigners by a far-off government perceived as callous and disconnected. Some even call the government foreign, due to its ties and ideological loyalties to international organisations, causes & trends, most notable in the constant reference to our “international obligations”.

While the most visual examples of opposition to the asylum policy are blockades by locals from the village or town being planted, this is all reflected in opinion polls. Between 66% and 79% oppose this nationwide, depending on how the question is asked. In Kildare, an asylum seeker town has been constructed that is so vast and fenced off that it actually resembles a walled city. And again this was railroaded through despite local opposition. The Newtownmountkennedy camp has a similar vibe of a militarily fortified town.

Financial Gain

The second similarity is the fact a small number of people are making an enormous amount of money from the scheme, and also aiding the state in suppressing local opposition. As Gript reported earlier this year:

“strong arm tactics are, and will, be backed up by legal measures taken by companies who are getting fat on the billions being poured into asylum accommodation.

The amount of money being made by a select numbers of companies from the asylum mess is simply staggering. Hundreds of millions are being handed over from taxpayers’ funds – with companies owned by the McEnaney family raking in more than €130m by the State to house asylum seekers and refugees since 2020, for example.”.

This has led to a perverse set of economic incentives where Hotels are now moving away from a tourist business to getting lucrative government contracts to house asylum seekers, which will pay more money and require much less maintenance work & staff to maintain. Almost 30% of Irish tourist beds are now used by government contracts by the State. The case study of The Blarney Stone Hotel by Matt Treacy in Gript is a must-read example.

Even politicians like Michael Healy-Rae who pay lip service to the shambles of our asylum policy are themselves making large amounts of money from it by housing asylum seekers.

Demographic Remake

The third similarity is the desire to demographically remake the country anew. While in the past this was to Protestantise & Anglicise, today it is increasing the diversity, in particular ethnic & racial diversity of our small country, mimicking the slogans and goals of the Progressive Left in every Western country.

As opposition to immigration has swollen, the government parties are pulling every lever to increase the amount of migrant candidates and party members. Like in history before, we again see that as a native populace becomes increasingly disloyal, the desire to shore up loyalty with a newer, foreign-born population arises. The most cynical example of this is after the Parnell Street school stabbing by a migrant that led to the Dublin riots, Fianna Fáil is now running the Brazilian migrant who intervened as a party candidate in that area.

The Irish Left, copy-pasting slogans from their progressive counterparts in Britain & other Western countries, use the slogan “Deport racists for refugees”, seen on tweets and t-shirts. Somehow they have not realised that this is literally the same goal as the English Plantations, of replacing a disloyal native population & replacing it with something better.

The Irish Left like to pretend Ireland’s Nationalist history & tradition has nothing to do with nativism or anti-foreigner sentiment, but that is simply putting one’s head in the sand. They have tried to weaponise this tradition against the Right, one recent example was a pro-immigration counter-protest outside the International Protection Office, where the crowd sang “Oró, Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile”. As many commenters under the tweet were quick to point out, the English translation of one key verse goes:

“Welcome lady who faced such troubles

Your capture brought us to our ruin 

With our fine land usurped by thieves 

And you sold to the foreigners!”

Even the Irish’s Left’s greatest nationalist hero James Connelly, writing about a much smaller wave of migration from Britain in the early 1900s, described this as an “invasion”, a phrase that is also regularly used to describe the current levels of immigration by anti-immigration activists. Far from Irish Nationalism being supposedly exceptionally pro-migration, the tradition is steeped in nativist and anti-foreigner sentiment, as all movements that identify as “anti-colonial” end up doing, whether they intend to or not. For Ireland, this all has its roots in the era of the Plantations.

Native Disenfranchisement

A fourth parallel with the Plantations would be the sense that the Irish today are losing their own land, as today’s mass immigration takes place in the context of the Housing crisis. Last year Ireland built roughly 33,000 new homes, but took in over 150,000 new legal immigrants, not even counting the numbers coming in under asylum. While the futile attempts to outbuild this migration are endlessly thwarted by a NIMBYist home-owning class, Irish people struggling to get a home for themselves and their family look around and see entire towns being built  immediately for people who have arrived effectively yesterday, and who are likely not real asylum seekers.

From the Patriot Parliament in 1690, through the Land League and subsequent land war, to today’s Housing crisis and Generation Rent, land and land ownership has always been an issue of tremendous difficulty & importance. And it easy to see the same sense of native disenfranchisement & displacement that was felt in earlier centuries arising once more in a new era.

Take this video, of the site at Thornton Hall which is due to be turned into a giant asylum centre, even though it was originally supposed to be a prison, at a time when the country desperately needs one. It is not difficult to see parallels with the past, of an ordinary Irish man watching all of Irish land seemingly be swept up for planting foreign migrants in the area, regardless of local opposition, and the sense of loss and disenfranchisement that one would feel.

The Verdict

Whilst not identical, a comparison with English-driven Plantations reveals that the government’s asylum policy qualifies as a Plantation. Liberals and Left-Republicans may quibble about the number of differences from the earlier eras to the present day, but as history shows repeatedly, during times of hardship or polarisation, only the big picture themes will be remembered. 

Today, young generations are resigned to the fact many of their generation will never be able to afford a home, and are stuck between living with their parents through their 30s and 40s, or on a rental market with a continuously shortening supply of available accommodation and rent prices that only rise.

At the same time, they see a Nationwide campaign, prosecuted with the same zeal as the Covid pandemic was, to have foreign migrants, overwhelmingly male, planted in areas despite enormous local opposition, even to the point of violence in a desire to demographically remake the country, while a small few make a fortune off the whole affair. All at the expense and the displacement of the native population. It may not be the exact same, but there sure is a lot of historical rhyme going on.