Act of Settlement 1662 - The Act of 1662

The Act of 1662

On the Irish Restoration of the Monarchy, those (notably the Duke of Ormonde) who had taken the Royalist side pleaded with the King for the injustices to be undone. Accordingly, the Parliament of Ireland (in Dublin) passed a new Act of Settlement in 1662 which ordered that the Cromwellian settlers give up a portion of their allotted land to "Old English" and "innocent Catholics", as would be determined by Commissioners.

However, the Irish Parliament was still Protestant only, until the session of 1666, as Catholics had been barred from voting or standing for election under the Commonwealth. As a result, the Parliament amended the 1652 Act of Settlement so that land could be returned to "innocent Catholics" – that is ones who had been Royalists in the civil wars and had not carried out massacres of English Protestants – but only on the condition that the Cromwellian settlers be compensated with an equal amount of land elsewhere in Ireland. Since there was simply not enough land available for this to work, very few Catholic landowners recovered their estates under this Act. These included the Viscount Dillon, Donough MacCarty, 1st Earl of Clancarty and Edmund Butler, 4th Viscount Mountgarret.

A further complication arose as the buyers of confiscated land in 1652-59 were third parties who expected that their purchases for cash were legal and were protected by privity of contract.