Plantation Once Again?

The Irish far-right want you to think that a new “plantation” is taking place. For example, the fascist National Party, in an article from their website entitled “Plantations Old and New” write:

“Throughout Ireland today we see the seeds of many new Ulsters being planted… Ireland now exists as a universal plantation whether it be Kerry or Tyrone”. 

These people are either utterly ignorant of the history of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries in our country or they are simply bare-faced liars. Or both.

They’re only interested in dividing working-class people and protecting the wealth and privilege of the ruling class. They’re certainly not interested in the history of the plantations.

A true understanding of the plantations should lead Irish working-class people to stand in solidarity with immigrant workers – and never defend the interests of the ruling class of any nationality.

There is no plantation taking place in Ireland today and here are six reasons why:

1. The 16th and 17th Century plantations saw the removal of the Irish (Gaelic and Anglo-Norman) ruling class – immigration today does not threaten the Irish ruling class; it makes them rich. They exploit all workers.
2. Plantations from the mid-16th century on were a threat to ordinary people because the plan was to get rid of them. The threat to the Irish working class today does not come from a ‘plantation’. Irish and foreign workers are on the same side because they are exploited by the same rich people and the same integrated global system – capitalism.
3. The plantations of Cromwell and Elizabeth were justified and driven by anti-Irish racism, but immigration today is not.
4. The far-right claim that immigration today threatens the integrity of an indigenous Irish culture. This is a lie that shows their fascism and their ignorance of history. Their use of the term plantations is, in effect “plantations denial” because they trivialise and distort how the Gaelic social order was really destroyed and Irish language defeated by the plantations.
5. The plantations were driven by an increasingly ruthless and high-stakes Europe-wide religious conflict. For the English crown, the plantations were partly battering rams to counter the threat of Spanish invasion. Immigration in 2024 plays no such role.
6. The settlers of the seventeenth century were powerful colonists who built towns and kicked the Irish out – today’s immigrants are a powerless underclass who live in camps and tents and once employed will be exploited by Irish bosses.

I’ll explain each of these reasons in more details below:

There is no plantation reason no 1:

The 16th and 17th Century plantations saw the removal of the Irish (Gaelic and Anglo-Norman) ruling class – immigration today does not threaten the Irish ruling class; it makes them rich.

The century or so between the plantations of Laois and Offaly and the Cromwellian settlement saw an inter-ruling class struggle that resulted in the removal of the Catholic, Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords and their replacement by a Protestant, English-born administrative, merchant and landholding class.

Even as late as 1600 – after the failed midlands and Munster plantations, but before the more successful Ulster and Cromwellian ones - 80% of the land was owned by Catholics. By 1703 this had fallen to just 14%. In short, one landowning exploiting ruling class was swept away and replaced by another.

This is not happening today.

This change took place through both non-violent and violent means. Examples of the “non-violent” instruments of expropriation deployed include “Surrender and Regrant”, the pursuit of “defective titles” and the engineered bankruptcy of Gaelic landholders who tried to defend their holdings through the courts.

There were parliamentary acts of confiscation (“Attainder”), there was survey and mapping of land to be sold or granted, there was the sale of land to investors such as the London Corporation who took charge of the planting of Derry.

Examples of violence are so numerous as to define the entire era. Battles were fought incessantly by the private armies of various competing powers and warfare on the Irish masses reached horrific depths of brutality and atrocity for decades at a time.

For example, in the 1580s 30,000 people died due to famine brought about by the scorched earth tactics of the forces of the British crown that saw Munster “reduced to a desert”.

Or, the findings of the “Down Survey” taken at the beginning of the 1650s were that one-third of the population of 1,4660,000 had been wiped out by war, disease and deliberately engineered famine since 1641. 

The net effect of this constant warfare was that by the end of the period of plantation the English bourgeoise had developed a colonial state that held an effective monopoly on violence. While this monopoly would be challenged over and over in the centuries that followed there is no doubt that the previous ruling classes on the island – the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords - had been thoroughly defeated and expropriated.

The outcome of the non-violent and violent means deployed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that by the 1660s, most of the land of the island of Ireland was now under English control. In 2024 there is no such plantation taking place: immigration poses no threat to the power of the Irish ruling class.

In fact, immigration is enormously profitable for the Irish ruling class. The sums of money being made from providing services to working class migrants are eye-watering. In 2023 €2.1 billion was spent to fuel the profits of over 850 companies.

Some of the largest are Irish companies like Cape Wrath/Citywest (€67 Million) Cromey/Millstreet (€7.6 million) and Brimwood (€36 million). The truth is these money making direct provision camps are not fit for human habitation. Amnesty International is clear:

“Ireland’s Direct Provision system is a human rights scandal. People seeking asylum are trapped for years in inhumane conditions”. Anyone making the argument that Irish people should be housed in these places before migrants probably hates “our own” as much as they clearly hate immigrants. 

Working class people need to remember always: the real enemy is the ruling class - not other workers.

The native Irish ruling class are no slouches when it comes to exploiting both Irish and migrant workers for example: Michael McElligott, the Irish Director of Cape Wrath/Tetrarch (who operate City West) has transnational interests in real estate investment, corporate landlordism, catering and retail, equity and hedge funds and private healthcare.

He is a ruthless capitalist who just happens to be Irish and he is a financial donor to Fianna Fáil. Or, take the owner of Brimwood, Irishman and GAA manager Seámus ‘Banty’ McEnaney.

In addition to Brimwood, ten other companies owned by his family received payments of over €40 million in 2023 to run Direct Provision camps. But the truth is GAA man McEnaney doesn’t care about the Irish working class. He is a tax dodger.

In 2019 he was hit with a tax bill of €171,000 by the revenue commissioners. He also seems to think rules are for little people: in 2021 he was banned from the GAA for 12 weeks for holding training sessions in breach of Covid rules .

The Irish far right do not oppose capitalism. It’s just that they’re against “foreign” capitalism. One of the “principles” of the National Party is to oppose what they describe as the “usurious system of international finance capitalism”. This clumsy antisemitic trope reveals their fascism and makes it clear that their understanding of capitalism is devoid of content.

And so, they do not understand that the Irish, migrant and global working classes are victims of this brutal system. This is the second reason why there is no plantation taking place.

There is no plantation reason number 2:

Plantations from the mid-16th century on were a threat to ordinary people because the plan was to get rid of them. The threat to the Irish working class today does not come from a ‘plantation’.

Irish and foreign workers are on the same side because they are exploited by the same people and the same integrated global system – capitalism.

From the 13th until the early 16th centuries the political map of Ireland was a complex, changing web of rivalries and alliances between Gaelic septs, Anglo-Norman lordships and the English speaking inhabitants of the “Pale”.

Over the same time, most people outside of the towns became more Gaelic as time passed. Agriculture, property relations, language and dress underwent a process of Gaelicisation right up until the 1530s. For the most part, the biggest threat people faced was from the fallout from wars between the ruling elites that often arose in this fractured political landscape.

After the rebellion of “Silken” Thomas in 1535 the nature of the threat facing most ordinary people changed. From this point on, the English crown took a more direct interest in colonising the island of Ireland. Plantations were to become a part of that.

Under the rules of the plantations of Laois and Offaly, Munster, Ulster and Cromwellian there were explicit plans to remove the ordinary Gaelic farmers and labourers.

So, ordinary people were threatened by plantations that explicitly planned to get rid of them. This is true despite the fact that in the cases of Laois and Offaly and Munster the plantations failed because it proved impossible to get enough English or Scottish planters in to replace the Irish.

In Ulster and following Cromwell there were large scale displacements; these plantations, by and large, did not fail. However, there is no plan - successful or otherwise - today to displace ordinary Irish people. The biggest threat to ordinary working-class people today – both Irish and immigrants – comes from the Irish and the global ruling class.

McElligott and McEnaney are albeit minor members of a tiny Irish ruling elite who are fully integrated into the global capitalist system. The two richest men in Ireland – the Collison brothers - have more wealth than the poorest 2.5 million citizens combined and they aren’t even resident in Ireland for tax purposes.

Their personal fortune of €17.5 billion is more than the state spends on education and housing combined. A system that allows two people to accumulate €17.5 billion is the enemy of working people – not a few tens of thousands of immigrants.

Further down the pecking order of the Irish ruling class are all the accountants, solicitors, bankers, senior civil servants, and politicians who combine as “fixers” in building a tax avoidance system for global capital. If you build it, they will come.

The leading entities of global capital flock here. Hedge and equity funds, data companies, real estate investment funds, private operations in healthcare, childcare & eldercare, insurance industry and more. They’re not here for the weather.

Companies like Apple, who paid essentially no tax in Ireland between 1980 & 2015, or the fifteen global fund subsidiaries that were found to have paid about €250 each in tax despite controlling loans of €10.3 billion or the tax-free status set up for corporate landlords by the Department of Finance and Deloitte are just three examples of the expert tax dodging work done by Ireland’s ruling class.

The victims of this partnership are the local and the immigrant working classes alike.

For example, the epicentre of the tax-avoidance industry is the IFSC – it is estimated that assets of €4.5 trillion are hosted there. However, taxes to the Irish exchequer in 2023 from corporation tax amounted to around 0.005% of that or just a measly €24 billion.

Or, in 2023: our state provided €147 billion in tax credits for relief on “intangible assets” more than the entire budget spend available to the state. Meanwhile, we have the highest hospital waiting lists in the EU, record levels of homelessness and a public transport system that belongs in the global south.

Speaking of the global south – the real victims of the global tax avoidance system are the poorest 3 billion people on earth. The OECD has estimated that developing countries lose three times as much in lost tax revenue as they receive in aid.

Other estimates of this put the drain of wealth out of the global south much higher: a Global Financial Integrity study from 2010 cited by Nicholas Shaxson puts the ratio of tax lost to aid received at ten to one. The beneficiaries of this theft are the ruling classes of the West (including our own) and the victims are the vast majority of the populations of Africa, Asia and South America.  

And so, societies in the global south are ripped apart by war, unemployment, disease, infant mortality. It is estimated that between seven and eight million people die every year due to the extraction of tax from the global south. Our ruling class gets its blood money, and many of the victims – working class migrants – then arrive at our airports and ports seeking refuge from economic, social and climate disasters caused by the Western capitalist system.

If the fascist National Party and their ilk cared about the Irish people, they would be protesting at 70 St John Rogerson’s Quay – the business address of no less than 125 US investment companies - or outside the IFSC or even the offices of corporate landlord IRES REIT.

But no - where they usually show up is places like Thornton Hall, East Wall, or Coolock. The far right will never take on the big boys and they’re not interested in forging solidarity with migrant workers. They are simply racists, and fascists and the workers who mistakenly line up with them are class traitors.

Their obvious racism is an insult to the Irish who were for centuries the victims of deeply ingrained racism that made the plantations possible in the first place!

There is no plantation reason number 3:

The plantations were justifed by anti-Irish racism, but immigration today is not.

The seizure of land that took place in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries in Ireland was fueled by a longstanding colonial mindset that opposed English “civility” with Gaelic “barbarism”.  This way of thinking went way back to the original plantations of the 12th Century.

At that time, the Gaelic Irish were considered unworthy of English law: it was not a felony to kill an Irishman and the term “Irish” was already an insult. The Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 made speaking Irish punishable by amputation and land would be confiscated from “English” settlers who could not demonstrate proficiency in English. Ordinances in the 14th Century forbade people of Irish blood from settling in towns.

The planned terms of the Munster, Ulster and Cromwellian plantations were that Irish should not be permitted to remain on the territories confiscated from the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords. The fact that even the most successful of these plantations never quite worked out according to those plans does not take away from the profound racism driving these projects.

The utter contempt that the English ruling class had for the Irish was reflected in the genocidal tactics deployed by Lord Deputy Arthur Chichester in 1602:

“I have often said and written that it is famine must consume them; our swords and other endeavours work not that speedy effect which is expected.”

It is an understatement to say that the Gaelic Irish were victims of racism. The entire colonial project rested on the assumption that the Irish were barbaric and needed to be civilised. Plantation was one of the means used by the English to achieve this end.

However, the immigration that is taking place in Ireland today bears no comparison; it is not being driven by hatred of or with the intention of “civilising” the barbarous Irish. To claim otherwise is to do so either in ignorance or in bad faith.

Racism was used by the growing British state to steal and exploit. The only racism in evidence in 2024 is that being whipped up in places like Coolock, Thornton Hall, and East Wall and being used to divide workers and the poor.

There is no plantation reason number 4

The far-right claim that immigration today threatens the integrity of an indigenous Irish culture. This is a lie that shows their fascism and their ignorance of history. Their use of the term plantations is, in effect “plantations denial” because they trivialise and distort how the Gaelic social order was really destroyed and Irish language defeated by the plantations.

The far-right claim that immigration is threatening the integrity of an indigenous Irish culture. The first problem with this is that their version of an indigenous Irish culture simply does not exist outside their febrile, paranoid, fascist heads.

Theirs is a nightmare vision of a disappearing Church dominated Ireland where women will be expected to give up hard-fought rights to bodily autonomy, to stay at home and bear children whether they want to or not and work hard to out-breed the foreigners:

“Ireland is a mother country…the test of any society is the willingness of its citizenry to sacrifice for the future…above all else to have families."

The following passages from Mein Kampf could easily be slotted into their extremist manifesto:

“In the education of the girl the final goal always to be kept in mind is that she is one day to be a mother.”  

“…it must be considered as reprehensible conduct to refrain from giving healthy children to the nation”

If the National Party’s Ireland is no country for post-repeal women, it is even less tolerant of foreigners:

“The strongest forms of solidarity are those of kith and kin”, they write, elevating blood-ties to their usual prominent place in any fascist’s value system. Another passage from Mein Kampf shows exactly what we are dealing with: “People of the same blood should be in the same REICH.”

The foreigners that most rile up the far right are “unvetted men of military age” who supposedly pose a sexual threat to Irish women and children. Paranoid notions regarding the inherently predatory nature of a particular race or ethnic group are also classic fascist tropes. Once more, Mein Kampf is instructive:

“The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people.”

Their understanding of nationality is a bizarre mixture of mysticism and religion:

“All nationality draws water from the past. And all nationalists stand sentinel against the destruction of that holy well.” 

This is the extent of what they have to say: they are fighting to defend a holy well. This lunacy would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high.

Working class people need to understand who the National Party and their ilk are. They talk about plantations and pretend to care about working class communities, but they haven’t got a clue. They are nothing more than vile, misogynistic, racist fascists who drive a wedge between working people and let the ruling class off the hook.

The second problem with the far right’s lie that migration is threatening the integrity of an indigenous Irish culture is that it amounts to a kind of “Plantations Denial”. The thing is, the destruction of the Gaelic social order, and the near-fatal weakening of the Irish language were real consequences of the plantations. Consequences that are still felt in 2024.

By claiming that a plantation is taking place - when it is not - these spoofers distort, disguise and trivialise historical processes of enormous importance.

Between 1500 and 1700 there was a gradual but decisive shift from a social order that was Irish speaking, with clan-based property relations and pastoralist agriculture to one that was increasingly English speaking, where property relations were regulated by English law and where arable farming for the purposes of trade predominated.

James Connolly summed up the long-term damage that this was to do in his Labour in Irish History:

“Ireland, at the same time as she lost her ancient social system also lost her language as a vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this twofold loss, the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from a long period of arrested development.”

Even the most “successful” plantations still saw some Gaelic small farmers and labourers return to where they’d been: but things were changed utterly: “things were as before, except that virtually the whole Irish Population now carried the burden on their backs of alien landlords”.

The Plantations involved more than just a change of lord: as any displaced migrant in Ireland today could easily tell you having a job is not the same as belonging to a place or culture. Maurice Coakley captures this succinctly:

“The Gaelic social order went all the way down”.

Where before, a subordinate member of a Gaelic sept spoke the same language as his lord, and both were bound by property relations defined by access to and use of land based on membership of the clan, now landlord and tenant neither spoke the same language nor belonged to the same kinship group.

They were now on opposite sides of an economic chasm – owner and tenant – and that antagonism was given documentary status in written titles. Moreover, succession under the Gaelic system (known as “tanistry”) meant that any clan member could have a say in who took over. The English system of primogeniture (inheritance from father to son) ended this too.

The differences between the Gaelic order and the English one were enormous. A whole way of life was lost. This rupture in the Gaelic social order not only fixed the Irish speaking tenant farmer and labourer in a subordinate position for centuries to come but also led to the near extinction of the Irish language.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t an exploitative ruling class before the invasion - there was. But afterewards the lives or ordinary Irish people became much worse.

There is no plantation reason number 5: 

The plantations were driven by an increasingly ruthless and high-stakes Europe-wide religious conflict. For the English crown, the plantations were partly battering rams to counter the threat of Spanish invasion. Immigration in 2024 plays no such role.

Religion was more than simply a belief system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pre-reformation church had enormous landholdings in England and Ireland and bishops operated as lords in their own right, controlling vast agricultural resources, armies and populations. 

Religion was a way of understanding the world, it was a tribal marker, it was, importantly, a rival system of authority. The Reformation was a way for the Tudor monarchs, who were encouraging capitalist development, to challenge the political authority of Rome and the Catholic kingdoms like Spain and France. 

The fact that Ireland, including the Anglo-Norman lords, remained mostly Catholic meant that Ireland was a huge threat to the power of the crown and position of England in the European balance of power.

Henry VIII seized enormous church properties in England in the late 1530s and in 1541 he was declared King of Ireland; which was a statement that his authority was higher than any other – particularly that of Rome.

The threat of Spanish invasion became particularly acute as time went on. Notably, four thousand Spanish soldiers joined Hugh O’Neill at the battle of Kinsale in 1601 and later during the wars of the Catholic confederation in the 1640s the Papal Nuncio Rinuccini led an entire army whose war aims were the restoration church lands and recognition of Rome, not the crown, as the primary authority. This dimension of the plantations and the colonisation they advanced made conciliation and compromise impossible.

“Anti-papist” prejudice reached a fever pitch at particular times – for example the revenge tactics of Cromwell’s armies were driven by absolute hatred of Catholics after the reported atrocities of the 1641 rebellion.

It should go without saying that working class migrants to Ireland in 2024 are not pawns in a Europe-wide war of religion. On that ground alone, the stupidity and dishonesty of the far-right’s use of the term “plantation” is staggering.

There is no plantation reason number 6: 

The settlers of the seventeenth century were powerful colonists who built towns and kicked the Irish out – today’s immigrants are a powerless underclass who live in camps and tents.

The subordinate status of the native Irish vis-a-vis the settlers, especially the landowning protestant elite was set in the form of the stone buildings of towns. Twenty-five towns were planned as a part of the Ulster plantation and although only fourteen were ever built these places with their bastions of settler dominance – court houses, jails, Protestant churches and above all, military garrisons – leave no doubt as to who was in charge.

Edmund Spenser, one of the primary architects of the plantations was crystal clear on the colonial function of towns as instruments of civility and brute power: “Nothing doth sooner cause civility in any country than many market towns by reason that the people repairing often thither for their needs will daily see and learn civil manners…besides there is nothing doth more stay and strengthen the country than…many towns”.

The contrast with the living conditions of refugees in Ireland could not be any sharper. The urban settlements of the plantations were permanent monuments to the domination of the Protestant settler class over the subordinate Irish. They showed the power of that ruling, settler class.

Direct provision camps are degrading places where human beings are incarcerated for years on end, whole families sleeping in single hotel rooms, men cooped up in converted warehouses, or given tents and left on the side of a canal, waste ground or halfway up a mountain. These places show the powerlessness of poor immigrants.

The working-class immigrants of 2024 are in precisely the same position as the Gaelic Irish who were brutally dispatched to Connaught in the 1650s. A proper understanding of the plantations should lead any working-class Irish person to see that the struggles of today’s immigrants are our struggles.

They are our comrades in the fight agains the rich of all nations including our own.