Catholics under the Penal Laws

Abstract

MHE TERM 'PENAL LAWS' in the Irish context is as evocative as the terms 'le refuge' or le desert' applied to Huguenots seeking escape either by migration or else by retreat into anonimity at home in eighteenth-century France. The oft-quoted distinction between the two experiences, the classic ones of seventeenth and eighteenth-century persecution in Europe, is that the catholics were a majority in Ireland, the Huguenots a minority in France. More significant than this trite and obvious distinction is the fact that religious persecution in Ireland involved political or racial features not evident in France. What were the penal laws, and what were their results Their nature, role and effects are still little understood, and critical assessment of these issues has yet .scarce, ly begun. Maureen Wall's little book, The Penal Laws, in 1961 was the first real insight into them; re-reading it is a reminder how much that now seems obvious and incontrovertible was still obscured by myth in 1961, and the book has not been followed up by any further study narrowly focussed on the acts and their impact on catholics. The problems are, of course, considerable: the topic involves study of property, legal institutions, family history formidable and even austere subjects. Let me state the problems briefly. First, law is central to the subject. The nature of the penal laws has been simply interpreted from the letter of the law as enshrined in the statute books, and the isolated and meaningless phrase of Chancellor Bowes in 1759, that the law did not assume a catholic to exist, has been quoted ad nauseam. Assessment rests too on the bedrock of the old nineteenth-century view that law, of itself, made history. The actual application of law, and its interpretation from day to day, as opposed to the dead and abstract letter of the law, is crucial, and this is a subtle and complex issue not amenable to quick or easy conclusions. The existing view of the penal laws is too simplistic, and in addition to the legalistic nineteenth-century obsession with law as a force for social change, it draws heavily too on a partisan perspective derived directly from Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke's influence on the course of events in Ireland and through his words on subsequent interpretation of them is a force whose cumulative results are not to be underestimated.' Secondly, the penal laws must be related to a series of regional or