The diocese of ferns and the penal days

Abstract

It may be said with very little reservation that the purpose of the Penal Laws was not to stamp out the Catholic religion in Ireland. As a matter of fact, it would have been a serious embarrassment to the government if there had been a mass conversion of Catholics to the Protestant religion, because, already by the beginning of the eighteenth century, in Wexford as in the rest of Ireland, the position was that a small group, who were Protestant, had got most of the wealth of the country into their hands. And that wealth had come to them by confiscation, in most cases as recently as their grandfathers' time. The Penal Code was introduced about the year 1700, and the great looting had taken place about 1650. It was a very recent memory and that is why I feel it may be said without too much qualification that the penal laws were not introduced to make Catholics abandon their religion. They were brought in to ensure that anybody who wanted to remain a Catholic would never become a person of influence in the country ?and it was the hope of most people who had property that the bulk of the Irish would remain Catholic, because their becoming Protestant would have entailed a wider sharing of property and influence, for in those days influence was very closely linked with property and, particularly, with landed property. So, the real purpose of the penal laws was not religious. It was social and economic. It was to make sure that Catholics did