History
Division between Catholic and Protestant in Ireland pre-dates the conflict over the Union. To some extent, these can be traced back to the wars of religion, land and power arising out the 16th and 17th century Plantations of Ireland. In the 18th century, Ireland was ruled by a Protestant-only Irish Parliament, autonomous in some respects from Britain. Catholics and Presbyterians were denied full political and economic rights under the Penal Laws.
Read more about this topic: Unionism In Ireland
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)