Plantations of Ireland

Plantations in 16th- and 17th-century Ireland involved the confiscation of Irish-owned land by the English Crown and the colonisation of this land with settlers from Great Britain. The main plantations took place from the 1550s to the 1620s, the biggest of which was the plantation of Ulster. The plantations led to the founding of many towns, massive demographic, cultural and economic changes, changes in land ownership and the landscape, and also to centuries of ethnic and sectarian conflict. They created large communities with British and Protestant identities, and a new Protestant elite. The Plantations took place before and during the earliest British colonisation of the Americas, and a group known as the West Country Men were involved in both Irish and American colonisation.

There had been small-scale immigration from Britain since the 12th century, after the Anglo-Norman invasion. By the 15th century, direct English control had shrunk to an area called the Pale. In the 1540s the English Tudor conquest of Ireland began. The first plantations were in the 1550s, during the reign of Queen Mary I, in Laois ('Queen's County') and Offaly ('King's County'). These plantations were based around existing frontier forts, but were largely unsuccessful due to fierce resistance from Irish clans.