AHC: Plantation of Leinster is as successful as the Plantation of Ulster

What if the plantation of Leinster became as Protestant and British-descended as the plantation of Ulster? What would the effect be on the development of Irish national identity and independence?
 
Well with both Leinster and Ulster majority Protestant you might not see an independent Ireland for starters. Though historically Leinster was fairly thoroughly planted but during the 18th and 19th century you had the Protestant population proportionally decline in the face of higher Catholic birthrates and higher levels of Protestant emigration to the colonies so it might not stick.
 
Though historically Leinster was fairly thoroughly planted but during the 18th and 19th century you had the Protestant population proportionally decline in the face of higher Catholic birthrates and higher levels of Protestant emigration to the colonies so it might not stick.

Yes, this. I don't think you are realistically going to get better conditions for a Leinster plantation than happened in OTL and it still failed. Dublin had a Protestant majority for a little over a century (from the mid-17th century to the late 18th century) and became majority Catholic because the city was successful and therefore attracted rural migrants from the rest of Ireland.

Ironically the only way to have the Protestant plantation 'succeed' in Leinster would be to have Leinster stay poorer.
 
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Yes, this. I don't think you are realistically going to get better conditions for a Leinster plantation than happened in OTL and it still failed. Dublin had a Protestant majority for a little over a century (from the mid-17th century to the late 18th century) and became majority Catholic because the city was successful and therefore attracted rural migrants from the rest of Ireland.

Ironically the only way to have the Protestant plantation 'succeed' in Leinster would be to have Leinster stay poorer.

So basically just hold down the native Irish a little harder? That or be more discriminatory to Catholics that immigrate
 
How about the other way around? Some (possibly foreign-backed) revolt, post-plantation, actually succeeds in ripping away the rest of Ireland from English control. As a result, not only does Protestant settlement get even more concentrated in Leinster/Ulster, but there will both be additional efforts to colonize (and maintain an even larger garrison of Protestant troops) and additional discrimination/expulsion of Catholics, who will be seen as potential infiltrators and fifth-columnists to seize the remaining English region. Plus, with an international border, it will be harder for poorer Irish Catholics (and the independent Catholic region would almost certainly be poorer, just due to geography) to enter into the Protestant regions.

Even if the Protestants eventually retake the territory, if the division lasts long enough it will harden, with Dublin seen as the center of Protestant Ireland, and [wherever the Catholic state was headquartered] as the center of Catholic Ireland.

Of course Ireland will likely be even more of a sectarian mess in this timeline, but that's likely to happen with more successful plantations anyway.
 
How about the other way around? Some (possibly foreign-backed) revolt, post-plantation, actually succeeds in ripping away the rest of Ireland from English control. As a result, not only does Protestant settlement get even more concentrated in Leinster/Ulster, but there will both be additional efforts to colonize (and maintain an even larger garrison of Protestant troops) and additional discrimination/expulsion of Catholics, who will be seen as potential infiltrators and fifth-columnists to seize the remaining English region. Plus, with an international border, it will be harder for poorer Irish Catholics (and the independent Catholic region would almost certainly be poorer, just due to geography) to enter into the Protestant regions.

Even if the Protestants eventually retake the territory, if the division lasts long enough it will harden, with Dublin seen as the center of Protestant Ireland, and [wherever the Catholic state was headquartered] as the center of Catholic Ireland.

Of course Ireland will likely be even more of a sectarian mess in this timeline, but that's likely to happen with more successful plantations anyway.

You wanna talk about a messy 20th century..... Dublin and Belfast being centers of violence and terrorism might not ever end.
 
So basically just hold down the native Irish a little harder? That or be more discriminatory to Catholics that immigrate

But that's the problem - the Irish government can't be even more discriminatory if it wants Ireland to succeed. Landlords do not have an inexhaustable supply of peasant farmers to work their land after all and even in the best of times migration too Ireland is going to be limited. Likewise it will always be far cheaper to employ Catholic rural migrants in Dublin than ship in expensive Protestants from Britain.

Essentially to achieve the result you're looking for you need an Irish Protestant elite so fanatically anti-Catholic they'd be happy to seriously damage their own economic interests for literally generations.
 
It would be more interresting to discuss a successful plantation of Munster and how that would effect the Irish independence movement
 
Random thought but if Leinster still had a sizeable Protestant population even if they had been gradually overtaken by the Catholics what happens to them if or when an independence movement breaks out? IIRC population transfers were still considered to be a respectable solution to ethnic problems at the time. A voluntary or encouraged population swap between North and South would be an interesting prospect.
 
Yes, this. I don't think you are realistically going to get better conditions for a Leinster plantation than happened in OTL and it still failed. Dublin had a Protestant majority for a little over a century (from the mid-17th century to the late 18th century) and became majority Catholic because the city was successful and therefore attracted rural migrants from the rest of Ireland.

Ironically the only way to have the Protestant plantation 'succeed' in Leinster would be to have Leinster stay poorer.

This seems to be ridiculously determinative. You could certainly have a much broader area of land being given to English landlords, and you could also up the incentives for British people to move over.
 
This seems to be ridiculously determinative. You could certainly have a much broader area of land being given to English landlords, and you could also up the incentives for British people to move over.

Not really. For starters by 1690 post the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite War in Ireland essentially all Irish land is in the hands of either English landowners or Irish Anglican converts and they were desperate to get loyal, culturally and racially "superior", Protestant tenants but they weren't able to. If you are a younger son of a smallholder who feels there is more to life than working as a farm labourer in Lincolnshire you have lots of options. You can go to one of the of the rapidly growing towns (London especially grew enormously over the course of the century, you can go and get freehold land in BNA and maybe even get slaves to work it if you do well, you can head to the Caribbean and be an overseer with amazing pay (because it was an awful job with a high chance of death from disease or slave revolt) or you can go to Wexford and be a tenant farmer on worse land than what you're leaving behind.

I think the best way to get a really through and successful plantation is throughout the 17th and 18th centuries have Britain do a lot worse. So that rather than having 500,000 cross the Atlantic they have no other option than Ireland. Now Ireland is a lot less attractive than Pennsylvania or Trinidad so less will go but it will be more than OTL.
 
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Not really. For starters by 1790 post the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite War in Ireland essentially all Irish land is in the hands of either English landowners or Irish Anglican converts and they were desperate to get loyal, culturally and racially "superior", Protestant tenants but they weren't able to. If you are a younger son of a smallholder who feels there is more to life than working as a farm labourer in Lincolnshire you have lots of options. You can go to one of the of the rapidly growing towns (London especially grew enormously over the course of the century, you can go and get freehold land in BNA and maybe even get slaves to work it if you do well, you can head to the Caribbean and be an overseer with amazing pay (because it was an awful job with a high chance of death from disease or slave revolt) or you can go to Wexford and be a tenant farmer on worse land than what you're leaving behind.

I think the best way to get a really through and successful plantation is throughout the 17th and 18th centuries have Britain do a lot worse. So that rather than having 500,000 cross the Atlantic they have no other option than Ireland. Now Ireland is a lot less attractive than Pennsylvania or Trinidad so less will go but it will be more than OTL.

Exactly, something extraordinarily radical like that really the only way I can see anything at all like the amount immigration from Britain needed to transform Leinster.

In OTL the conditions were tremendously favourable to a successful plantation as is. If the result was still a failure it might be because the goal was not a practical or plausible one to begin with.
 
Exactly, something extraordinarily radical like that really the only way I can see anything at all like the amount immigration from Britain needed to transform Leinster.

In OTL the conditions were tremendously favourable to a successful plantation as is. If the result was still a failure it might be because the goal was not a practical or plausible one to begin with.

Then how come the Ulster plantation got so many more than Leinster?

This map suggests many more plantations were tried in Ulster than Leinster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland#/media/File:Plantations_in_Ireland.png
 
In OTL the conditions were tremendously favourable to a successful plantation as is. If the result was still a failure it might be because the goal was not a practical or plausible one to begin with.

Then how come the Ulster plantation got so many more than Leinster?


Well they weren't actually that favourable because while Ulster and Leinster both had the landownership element in their favour Ulster was done in the early 1600's under Elizabeth and James I before the American Colonies or real urbanisation were available as alternatives. By the time Leinster was started it was too late. One scenario is as part of the whole Elizabeth Wars in Ireland/Flight of the Earl's you have the whole of Ulster and Leinster opened up. With a limited number of settlers spread over a wider area instead of having Ulster become overwhelmingly majority Protestant and Leinster remain overwhelmingly Catholic both are much more mixed. If you can avoid the OTL ethnic cleansing of the 1640's you could have a very interesting situation in the Chinese sense.
 
Well they weren't actually that favourable because while Ulster and Leinster both had the landownership element in their favour Ulster was done in the early 1600's under Elizabeth and James I before the American Colonies or real urbanisation were available as alternatives. By the time Leinster was started it was too late. One scenario is as part of the whole Elizabeth Wars in Ireland/Flight of the Earl's you have the whole of Ulster and Leinster opened up. With a limited number of settlers spread over a wider area instead of having Ulster become overwhelmingly majority Protestant and Leinster remain overwhelmingly Catholic both are much more mixed. If you can avoid the OTL ethnic cleansing of the 1640's you could have a very interesting situation in the Chinese sense.

Might not be practical. OTL was already so violent and disruptive and expensive that Elizabeth called her generals wolves and rebuked them for burning chunks of her kingdom to cinders. If the already brutal and widespread slaughter is spread out over even more of the country and the running conflicts that would follow it might be judged to expensive and abandoned.
 
Might not be practical. OTL was already so violent and disruptive and expensive that Elizabeth called her generals wolves and rebuked them for burning chunks of her kingdom to cinders. If the already brutal and widespread slaughter is spread out over even more of the country and the running conflicts that would follow it might be judged to expensive and abandoned.

Good point. Still she couldn't abandon Ireland and considering burning everything down was standard practise for everyone it's not implausible.
 
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