Why did no one force Ireland to become protestant?

Cromwell's prejudices were a relative novelty. As far as the Tudors were concerned, they'd bent over backwards to satisfy the local Irish potentates. It said as much about their poor comprehension of the country as anything else, but they in no way regarded Irish people as innately inferior; to them it was all a sort of kulturkampf. See, e.g. Thomas Butler, a personal friend of Elizabeth I.

Thomas Butler and much of the Irish aristocracy despite the whole "more Irish than the Irish" thing were still regarded as Englishmen who had gone native and needed to be "reclaimed" and re-Anglicised, as such you are right the Tudors did bend over backwards in order to get the Old English aristocracy to assimilate. As for views of the actual natives it was a long period with a huge number of individuals involved and often contradictory policies so you can find evidence for pretty much anything between sweetness, light and respect for Gaelic Catholicism to the opposite extreme. However there was a clear policy of turning Ireland from a land inhabited by Gaelic speaking people to one inhabited by English speaking people, it wasn't just a religious thing because why else would the Catholic Mary carry out the first Plantations?
 
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Thomas Butler and much of the Irish aristocracy despite the whole "more Irish than the Irish" thing were still regarded as Englishmen who had gone native and needed to be "reclaimed" and re-Anglicised, as such you are right the Tudors did bend over backwards in order to get the Old English aristocracy to assimilate. As for views of the actual natives it was a long period with a huge number of individuals involved and often contradictory policies so you can find evidence for pretty much anything between sweetness, light and respect for Gaelic Catholicism to the opposite extreme. However there was a clear policy of turning Ireland from a land inhabited by Gaelic speaking people to one inhabited by English speaking people, it wasn't just a religious thing because why else would the Catholic Mary carry out the first Plantations?

Thomas Butler was about as English as Carlos II of Spain was Austrian -- check his ancestry. All the families that succeeded in enforcing English law ultimately married into the English aristocracy, so that by 1689 the MacCarthys, Bourkes, O'Briens etc. had all intermarried with titled English houses.

I never suggested it was "just a religious thing" -- in fact I said the opposite. As regards Mary's plantation, I know nothing about it but Wikipedia informs me that the O'Moores had been granted English title but rebelled (or failed to control their supporters who rebelled).
 
Well one could say that Charles/Karel V was more Burgundian than Austrian. (and the roots from the Habsburg dynasty were in Switzerland, however the house of Stuart originally was from Brittany).
 
Something that's bugged me about British history, and I know nothing about.

In OTL there were efforts to make people become Protestant in Scotland and England. Were these never attempted in Ireland? Or were they just spectacularly unsuccessful?

The same reason the only successful colonization of Ireland was by highland Scots. The same reason there are still Muslims in Bosnia and Albania. The same reason the Jesuits never made a serious bid to recover Iceland for the church:

Money.

For all that states in the period were driven by religious motive, from the top or from the bottom, they were still constrained by reality. The Cause depended on its princes remaining solvent enough to continue the struggle - they couldn't afford to squander their strength winning over backwaters. The risk was that the enemy would win in the economically valuable regions and thus possess an insurmountable advantage.

Ireland was one of the poorest regions on the continent. It had terrible soil, negligible mineral wealth, and a great lack in all other areas needed to make a valuable possession: shipping timber, cities, mercantile or financial institutions, trade routes, pilgrimage destinations, you name it.

It had, to it's name, only two values to interest a would-be conqueror: it's always been too weak to defend itself, and from Ireland one can invade Britain. The first was the attraction prior to the Reformation; the second defined it's history after. This is why highland Scots succeeded in taking land, while englishmen failed: too many englishmen had their standards set too high to consider Ireland. This is why Cromwell could be at once brutally determined to conquer the island and indifferent to whether the defeated kept attending mass.
 
The Irish would have lost their language and culture earlier and for good if they adopted Protestantism, the same would be why the West Slavic nations remained to be majorly catholic because if they converted to Protestantism many of them(if under the Germans it would be all of them) would germanize.
 
The Irish would have lost their language and culture earlier and for good if they adopted Protestantism, the same would be why the West Slavic nations remained to be majorly catholic because if they converted to Protestantism many of them(if under the Germans it would be all of them) would germanize.


Yet Latvians and Estonians didn't despite a long period of German rule.
 
Or poles, most Posen and Danzig Germans where there from well before the reformation began. Really Germans where just bad at assimilating Slavs and Balts.

Yet Latvians and Estonians didn't despite a long period of German rule.

West Slavs do have a tendency to Germanize when they convert to Protestantism especially Lutheranism, it was Catholicism that made the Poles and the Czechs still numerous, the Balts don't have except for the Prussians.
 
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