The conflict in Ireland was never about theology. Religion functioned as a badge of identity, a convenient label for political allegiance. Even an atheist had to be “a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist.” Differences in creed became a pretext for division, plunder, and control, not the cause of them.
The supposed Catholic–Protestant divide masked a deeper truth: discrimination targeted those who lived in Ireland, not those who held a particular faith. Northern Presbyterians were themselves descendants of earlier Irish migrants to Scotland, while many southern Catholics descended from Norman, Elizabethan, or Cromwellian settlers. So being Irish or being Catholic was not the motivation for discrimination, but being in Ireland was.
Ironically, republicanism in Ireland was born not among Catholics but among Ulster Presbyterians. They founded the United Irishmen in the 1790s and preached unity across religious lines. Of the twenty‑eight founders, twenty‑six were Presbyterians; none were Catholic.
It was not the Young Irelanders or the Fenians or Sinn Féin or the IRA, but a group of Ulster Protestants, in the 1790s that gave birth to the ideology of nationalism and republicanism in Ireland. The period belongs to one great man – Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Of the twenty-eight founders of the United Irishmen, twenty-six were Presbyterians. Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell were members of the Established Church. It was Tone, and the Presbyterians of the North, that made the Irish Catholics into republicans. The Catholics had been ‘always the devoted friends and too often the devoted victims of, royalty’, William Drennan wrote in a letter to Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795.
Tone was anti-clerical. He was anti-Catholicism. He wrote after a visit to the cathedral of Rouen: ‘Heard part of the sermon, this being Easter Sunday. Sad trash. …I wonder how people can listen to such abominable nonsense.’
What matters, to the Irish, is that Tone fought England. He was the champion of Catholic Ireland. He is the father of Irish Republicanism and the man that Republicans look to.
Wolfe Tone was born in Dublin in 1764, and educated at Trinity College. His father inherited property in Bowdenstown, County Kildare. After an elopement, Tone completed his law studies at Trinity College in 1789. By his own admission he had never spoken to a Catholic, so complete was segregation of the native Irish and the colonial Irish, until he reached the age of twenty-one.
Young Tone used to spend much of his free time (which a meagre law practice left him in abundance) in the galleries of the Irish House of Commons. There he made the ‘Great Discovery’ which was to influence not only the whole course of his own life, but the future direction of Irish history. Here is his discovery in his own words: ‘That the influence of England was the radical vice of our Government, and that Ireland would never be either free, prosperous, or happy, until she was independent, and that independence was unattainable whilst the connection with England existed’.
Up in his place in the gallery of the House in College Green, Wolfe Tone at length got his political theory clear. ‘To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country, these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissension, and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter – these were my means.’ (Dissenters were northern Presbyterians, who were also victims of religious discrimination despite their support for the Williamite cause.)
The whole Gospel of Irish Nationality was contained in these words.
If anybody bothered to analyse some of the religious differences, they would find that, paradoxically, the Catholic Church as an institution was never in favour of republicanism. It was, in effect, as anti-republican as the British Government. And furthermore, most of the leaders against British rule in Ireland were Protestants: Tone and Emmet, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas Russell, Henry Joy McCracken and Henry Munroe, from the years of the United Irishmen; John Mitchel, Thomas Davis, William Smith O’Brien and many others from the Young Irelander days, as well as such notable politicians as Charles Stewart Parnell and Isaac Butt.
Britain put an end to most of them one way or another.
British rule in Ireland long predated any Protestant–Catholic divide and was marked by extreme brutality. Medieval English churchmen declared that killing an Irish person “is no offence against God,” and statutes such as 5 Ed. IV effectively permitted the killing of any Irish man, woman, or child “without any impeachment.” There was torture, burnings, floggings, and executions, including the fate of countless unnamed victims.
The repression intensified in the 1790s as the government sought to crush the United Irishmen. Homes were burned, civilians tortured, women assaulted, and suspects subjected to picketing and half‑hanging. Lord Moira described men being tortured repeatedly “upon mere suspicion,” noting these were not isolated abuses but “part of the system.”
Lord Moira, in the House of Lords, described the suffering of the people:
When a man was taken up on suspicion, he was put to the torture; nay, if he were merely accused of concealing the guilt of another, the punishment of picketing, (A military punishment where a victim was suspended by the wrist with their bare heel resting on the sharp, blunt point of a wooden peg.) which had been for some years abolished as too inhumane was practised. I have known a man, in order to extort confession of a supposed crime, or of that of some of his neighbours, picketed until he actually fainted; picketed a second time, until he fainted again; picketed a third time, until he once more fainted; and all upon mere suspicion. Nor was this the only species of torture; many had been taken and hung up until they were half dead, and then threatened with a repetition of this cruel treatment unless they made confession of the imputed guilt. These were not particular acts of cruelty, exercised by men abusing the power committed to them, but they formed part of the system. They were notorious; and no person could say who would be the next victim of this oppression and cruelty.
The destruction of monasteries, churches and schools became a passion. Even the possession of a manuscript on any subject whatever incurred the death penalty. Poets and historians were put to the sword, and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man ‘might know his grandfather’. All Irishmen were to be confounded in ignorance and abasement, all glories gone and all rights lost. The great object of the English government was to purge the land of Ireland of its sons and daughters. It was their aim to destroy the national tradition, to wipe out Gaelic memories, and to begin a new English life.
Some of the subjects chosen for religious initiation, ‘were burned before a slow fire’; some were put on the rack (an apparatus used for torture by stretching the body) and tortured to death; whilst others, like Ambrose Cahill and James O’Reilly, were not only slain with the greatest cruelty, but ‘their inanimate bodies were torn into fragments, and scattered before the wind’. The fate of the gentle and saintly Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett is well known. He was executed in England in 1681 following the Popish Plot invented by Titus Oats. He was accused of being in touch with the French; it was a favourite charge against Catholics and one which could easily be brought forward by people who did not mind swearing to a lie. And it could not easily be disproved by men who could only assert their innocence. Lord Shaftsbury was the patron of Titus Oats the man who concocted the plot and who was the perjured murderer of scores of innocent men.
Men could not be found to condemn the Archbishop in Ireland so he was taken to England for trial. He was not allowed time to procure the necessary witnesses, and the court would not allow certain records to be put in, which would have proved the character of his accusers. Six of the most eminent English lawyers were arrayed against him and he, without counsel, was condemned to die. ‘Thus then he hung betwixt Heaven and earth, an open sacrifice to God for innocence and religion; and as soon as he expired the executioner ripped his body open and pulled out his heart and bowels, and threw them in the fire already kindled near the gallows for that purpose.’
(The deep regret for his martyrdom, which was felt by all except those who had procured his doom, tended to still the wild storm of religious executions at that time. He was the last to be executed at Tyburn for the faith and was canonised a saint in 1976.)
The following are a few samples of the tens of thousands of efforts for the reforming of the Irish:
Two Franciscans were taken and thrown into the sea, and another was trampled to death by horses. Three laymen, at Smerwick, had their legs and arms broken with hammers, and then were hanged, and similar torture was inflicted on the Abbot of Boyle. Three Franciscans, at Abbeyleix were first beaten with sticks, then scourged with whips until the blood came, and finally were hanged. A man, Roche, was taken to London and flogged publicly through the streets, and then tortured in prison until he died; another being flogged, had salt and vinegar rubbed into his wounds, and then was placed on the rack and tortured to death. And Collins, a priest at Cork, was first tortured then hanged, and whilst he still breathed, his heart was cut out and held up, soldiers around crying out in exultation, ‘Long live the Queen’.
At Cashell where two thousand were slaughtered, General Broghill, took the bishop of Ross, cut off his hands and feet and then hanged him, a Dominican friar had his fingers and toes cut off before he was slain. And at Clonmel, a Franciscan was first drawn on the rack and then had his hands and feet burned off, after which he was hanged. The parish priest of Arklow was tied to a wild horse’s tail and dragged to Gorey, where he was hanged.
Fr Charles Meehan was arrested when his ship was wrecked in the Irish Sea and he was forced ashore in Wales. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Ruthin in 1679, for being an Irish priest in the jurisdiction of Rome.
The first Republican victim of a show trial and execution was a Presbyterian from outside Antrim Town in Co. Antrim, William Orr.
William Orr was a prosperous young farmer of Co. Antrim, a Presbyterian, and a United Irishman. The family were in comfortable circumstances. He stood six feet two inches (1.88 m) in height, and was always carefully and respectably dressed. Lord Castlereagh (“I met Murder on the way, He had a mask like Castlereagh” wrote Shelley) decided an example must be made of a Presbyterian to teach them all a lesson.
While Orr was imprisoned a neighbour organized the corn and potato diggings, and the ploughing.
He was tried and executed, on a charge of administering the oath of the United Irishmen to a soldier.
The sentence was hardly passed on William Orr when regret seized on those who had aided in securing that verdict. The witness Wheatly, who subsequently went insane, and is believed to have died by his own hand, made an affidavit before a magistrate admitting that he had sworn wrongly against Orr.
Several of the jury made a solemn oath after the trial, that, when they were locked up for the night to ‘consider’ their verdict they were supplied abundantly with intoxicating drinks, and informed, one and all, that, if they did not give the required verdict of guilty, they should themselves be prosecuted as United Irishmen.
The oath that he didn’t administer is worth remembering because the phrase “brotherhood of affection” was a concept of friendship and solidarity that was intended to transcend ingrained religious divisions amongst Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian.
In the presence of God, I do voluntarily declare that I will persevere in endeavouring to form a brotherhood of affection amongst Irishmen of every religious persuasion, and that I will also persevere in my endeavours to obtain an equal, full, and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland.
In the strange perversity that masquerades as British justice, Mr Orr was offered his life and liberty if he would admit his guilt, but he loved truth not wisely but too well, and he showed the world how an honest and sincere man could die. Orr’s pre-execution words were:
If to have loved my country, to have known its Wrongs, to have felt the Injuries of the persecuted Catholics and to have united with them and all other Religious Persuasion in the most orderly and sanguinary means of procuring Redress – If these be Felonies I am a Felon but not otherwise …
The English justified their actions through a distorted religious worldview. Cromwell, hailed by Carlyle as “a soldier of God the Just, terrible as Death,” epitomised this mindset.
Thomas Paine’s critique of biblical violence underlines how scripture was used to rationalise conquest and atrocity.
Paine challenges the authority and intentions of organized religions, suggesting they are human constructs designed to control and profit:
In his treatise The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine vehemently critiques the Bible as a book of systemic barbarism. He argues that Old Testament violence delegitimizes the text as the word of a moral God, observing: “It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man”.
Paine argues that ascribing atrocious acts to divine command corrupts human ethics. He points specifically to massacres, the slaughter of women and children, and accounts of sanctioned plunder as incompatible with a just, benevolent Creator. He reserves some of his harshest criticism for figures like Moses, Samuel, and David. Paine systematically dismantles the heroic status of these biblical figures, exposing their accounts of warfare and vengeance as acts of ruthless tyranny. For Paine, these stories degrade the divine character and demonstrate how religion has historically been weaponized to validate atrocities and consolidate state power.
Yet despite systemic barbarism the Irish endured. English observers like Spenser admitted the Gaels were “valiant… great scorners of death.” Despite centuries of oppression, the Irish spirit proved ungovernable — except, ironically, in the lands to which they emigrated, where they contributed to stability and prosperity.
Religion was never the cause of Ireland’s suffering. It was the mask. The real engine was conquest, exploitation, and the determination of a people to remain free despite everything done to break them.
No more illuminating light could be thrown upon the extraordinary attitude of Britain towards Ireland, than to quote here the sentiments of the great Englishman Carlyle concerning the coldest-blooded butcher of all the many butchers, by whom Ireland had been in a thousand years afflicted: ‘Oliver Cromwell came as a soldier of God the Just, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom doing God’s judgments on the enemies of God …’
Doing God’s judgment! Since this opinion of Cromwell and his Bible-thumping Puritans, emanated from the great and most respectable of the English people, there is no reason for being astonished at the attitude towards Ireland of the mass of the British people.
They got their inspiration from the Bible, and in the words of Tom Paine;
The cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled makes it more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God … a history of wickedness and the greatest vices that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.
From ‘The Age of Reason’ by Thomas Paine
Besides, the character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation…
Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses….. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters.
So, were the English just doing God’s judgment?