The Penal Laws, enacted progressively from the late seventeenth century, imposed severe legal disabilities on Irish Catholics and, to a lesser extent, Dissenters. Catholics were forbidden from owning land above a minimal value, from voting, from holding public office, from practising law, from attending university, and from building Catholic churches in prominent locations.
The effect was to create a legally enforced underclass. Irish Catholic families who had owned land for generations found themselves reduced to tenant status as their property passed to Protestant owners under the inheritance restrictions. The Catholic professional and merchant class was effectively abolished. The economic and social consequences persisted long after the Penal Laws were formally repealed in the nineteenth century.
Irish people whose ancestors lived under the Penal Laws have an inherited history of legal discrimination and economic deprivation that is directly attributable to British colonial policy. They are not in a position of historical privilege relative to Caribbean people. They are in a position of parallel historical disadvantage.
