Plantations of Ireland - Munster Plantation (1586 Onwards)

Munster Plantation (1586 Onwards)

The Munster Plantation of the 1580s was the first mass plantation in Ireland. It was instituted as punishment for the Desmond Rebellions, when the Geraldine Earl of Desmond had rebelled against English interference in Munster. The Desmond dynasty was annihilated in the aftermath of the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83) and their estates were confiscated. This gave the English authorities the opportunity to settle the province with colonists from England and Wales, who, it was hoped, would be a bulwark against further rebellions. In 1584, the Surveyor General of Ireland, Sir Valentine Browne and a commission surveyed Munster, to allocate confiscated lands to English Undertakers (wealthy colonists who "undertook" to import tenants from England to work their new lands). The Undertakers were also supposed to build new towns and provide for the defence of planted districts from attack.

As well as the former Geraldine estates (spread through the modern counties Limerick, Cork, Kerry and Tipperary) the survey took in the lands belonging to other families and clans that had supported the rebellions in south-west Cork and Kerry. However, the settlement here was rather piecemeal because the ruling clan — the MacCarthy Mór line — argued that the rebel landowners were their subordinates and therefore the land really belonged to them. Lands were therefore granted to some Undertakers and then taken away again when native lords like the MacCarthys appealed the dispossession of their dependants.

Other sectors of the plantation were equally chaotic. John Popham imported 70 tenants from Somerset, only to find that the land had already been settled by another undertaker, and he was obliged to return them home. Nevertheless, 500,000 acres (2,000 km²) were planted with English colonists. It was hoped that the settlement would attract in the region of 15,000 colonists, but a report from 1589 showed that the undertakers had imported only in the region of 700 English tenants between them. It has been suggested that each tenant was the head of a household, and that he therefore represents 4-5 other people. This would put the English population in Munster at nearer to three or four thousand persons, but it was still substantially below the projected figure.

The Munster Plantation was supposed to produce compact defensible settlements, but in fact, the English settlers were spread in pockets across the province, wherever land had been confiscated. Initially the Undertakers were given detachments of English soldiers to protect them, but these were abolished in the 1590s. As a result, when the Nine Years War — an Irish rebellion against English rule — came to Munster in 1598, most of the settlers were chased off their lands without a fight. They took refuge in the province's walled towns or fled back to England. However when the rebellion was put down in 1601–03, the Plantation was re-constituted by the Governor of Munster, George Carew.