The Plantations of Ulster in the early seventeenth century involved the systematic dispossession of native Irish landowners and their replacement by English and Scottish Protestant settlers. Around half a million acres of land in Ulster were confiscated from Irish Catholic families and redistributed. Similar plantations had occurred in other parts of Ireland in the previous century.
The consequences of the Plantations shaped Irish society, politics, and conflict for four centuries. The sectarian divisions that produced the Troubles in the twentieth century are directly traceable to the demographic engineering of the Plantation era. Families displaced from their lands in the seventeenth century lost an inheritance that shaped their descendants’ circumstances for generations.
Irish people whose families were displaced by the Plantations carry a history of land confiscation and dispossession that is no less real for being less discussed internationally than Caribbean slavery. Including them in a reparations levy for Caribbean slavery would be a profound moral absurdity.
