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00:00Ireland, a small island on the edge of Europe, between the old world and the new.
00:11As an island nation, the sea is part of who we are.
00:15The sea has allowed us to leave and it also has allowed us to come back.
00:19And that really is the history of the Irish.
00:22Many came to these shores, many left, never to return.
00:29The history of the Irish has long been a global one.
00:33We would have had hundreds of Irish indentured servants working in the fields, often alongside African chattel slaves.
00:43The latter years of the 18th century would be known as the Age of Revolution.
00:48The Abbey Edgeworth, born in 1745 in Longford, who was at the centre of the story of Louis XVI's demise.
00:57Ireland was a very combustible country and that all came to a head in 1798.
01:03From that small island, the story of the Irish tells the fascinating history of an island people who have truly left their mark in the world.
01:11On that small island, the story of the Irish is deeply
01:11All the interests of the Irish are made by the Irish, and the people who have been in the world.
01:14It's like a hostel of the Irish.
01:16The Irish are their great students, especially in the world and the people who have been in the world.
01:19They're great students, especially in the world.
01:21And so they're not the most standing in the world.
01:22A film is quite a sense that they are, and the class of the Irish are about their love.
01:24And their players are their only their own.
01:25And their colleagues are more they are being in the world.
01:29The Irish are the most standing in the world.
01:30And their people are being in an island.
01:31They're not a sort of a peaceful family, but their vision is about to try to bring the army done,
01:36There's what the country of which lived here.
01:38The dreams of Gaelic Ireland had died in Europe in the early 1600s with the death of the exiled
01:45lords of Ulster, O'Neill and O'Donnell.
01:58Their ancestral homelands in the north of Ireland were now ripe for English plantation.
02:08If you look around you actually can see the mouth of the ban, the fowl and the swilly.
02:22If you controlled these three great rivers, you controlled a huge sweep of Ulster.
02:31Ulster until then had been the most Gaelicised of the Irish provinces with the big families
02:35such as the O'Neills, the O'Donnells, the Maguires.
02:38Now this entire ruling class had been cleared out.
02:42For Ulster it was an absolutely fundamental transformative period.
02:49The state now takes six of the nine counties of Ulster, confiscates them and reallocates
02:56them to colonists, the majority of whom are Protestants from Scotland, England and Wales.
03:05The fertile lands to the east of the River Ban were highly attractive to the new settlers.
03:12But a different type of colonisation would be needed to deal with the heavily wooded and
03:19more isolated land to the west.
03:23What the English Crown decided to do was to get the London companies involved in the plantation
03:30directly.
03:31So these are all the various merchant guilds that would now invest in this plantation.
03:35This was going to be in what became the County of Derry and because of this London connection
03:39became known as Londonderry.
03:50It was the Eia Columquillia, the Oak Grove of Columquill, but it was re-founded as Londonderry.
04:00This is the Protestant Citadel.
04:03They built the walls, they built St. Colum's Cathedral, which is the first purposely built
04:09Protestant cathedral in the three kingdoms, and they also arm this city.
04:16They do invest very considerable sums in developing not just the city of Derry, but they establish
04:22plantation towns, Draperstown for example.
04:31You can see the wide street, always with a jail, with a church, these symbols of civilisation.
04:45For the Catholic Irish, the beacons of civilisation now lay overseas.
04:55The established Irish Colleges of Europe expanded as they attracted more students from Ireland
05:00than ever before.
05:05One of the most famous and influential of these colleges was founded by the Franciscan Order.
05:16So this college is hugely important for Irish culture in particular.
05:21Firstly because it provides trained Franciscans who returned to Ireland, but it's also hugely
05:27important as an oasis for the preservation of Gaelic culture.
05:37The Irish College in the early 1600s sets up the first ever Gaelic language printing press.
05:46And it's one of the brethren of this community, Bonaventure O'Hoghisse, who produces the first
05:51ever Gaelic print catechism.
05:55Leuven, with its Irish language printing press, is hugely important here in cultivating these
06:01ideas of an Irish nation.
06:04They are explicitly rejecting these very negative representations the English are peddling against
06:11them.
06:14They have displayed no inclination to treat of the virtues or good qualities of the nobles
06:23Christians amongst the old foreigners and the native Irish, such as to write on their valour
06:27and on their piety.
06:32So they're hugely important in forging the sense that all Catholics of Irish origin belong
06:39to a shared Catholic nation.
06:47One of the most important Catholic scholars of his day was Waterford-born Luke Wadding.
06:52Educated at Lisbon, he taught at Salamanca in Spain before arriving at the heart of Catholic
06:58Europe.
07:03Luke Wadding was a very important Irish Franciscan.
07:08In 1618 he came to Rome.
07:12He was one of the prominent theologians of the Spanish Embassy.
07:17He was an extremely intelligent man and he was very influential in building the first
07:22Irish Franciscan college and the first Irish college in the city of Rome, which was opening
07:27in 1625.
07:28Although he was highly active in promoting the international work of the Franciscan order,
07:34Luke Wadding never forgot his homeland.
07:36He was the first who decided to insert the feast of St. Patrick on the Roman calendar.
07:41So every day when we celebrate St. Patrick on the 17th of March, we have to thank Luke Wadding.
07:46And he decided to do it because it was a way to represent Ireland to the global Catholic community.
07:52The main task for the Irish college in Rome, like Leuven and the others throughout Europe, was
08:03to train priests and friars to return to Ireland.
08:06You have to think about what happened in Ireland in the 17th century.
08:11Being a Catholic priest or an Irish Franciscan was extremely risky.
08:14They could be killed, they could be jailed.
08:17So it was an extremely risky mission.
08:21We live for the most part in the mountains, and often too, in the midst of the bogs to
08:26escape the cavalry of heretics.
08:30The wild beast was never hunted with more fury through the mountains, woods and bogs, than
08:37a priest.
08:39They are telling Ireland's story to their Catholic counterparts.
08:45This is a story of persecution.
08:48This is a story of loss, bloodshed, atrocity.
08:57Religious persecution was widespread during these years, and not only against Catholics.
09:03The Catholic Inquisition also pursued heretics wherever they found them.
09:09We have the records of seven or eight Irish people who were either kidnapped or taken into
09:16custody and sold as slaves into North Africa, converted to Islam, and then later on in their
09:22lives got back to the West and were processed back into Christianity by the Portuguese Inquisition.
09:29We're looking here at one of the files, and it's of a man called David Guadid in Portuguese,
09:38but it's Wadding, and he is Irish, he is a native of Wexford, he's single, he's a sailor,
09:47he's taken into custody here in Lisbon in 1627, and the charge against him is renegade.
09:54He's a renegade from Christianity to Islam.
09:58So Wadding is being tried, if you like, for being a Muslim.
10:04The marks of conversion, of course, are change of dress, change of name, he's given a Muslim
10:10name, and most importantly, he is circumcised.
10:15Having escaped from four years of slavery, he made his way back to Lisbon, where he was
10:19tried by the Portuguese Inquisition.
10:22There is a record here where he admits his error.
10:25He also says he's repentant and remorseful.
10:30There is the certificate of his confession and his reconciliation with the church.
10:35And then he is given leave to go wherever he wants.
10:38And unfortunately for us, he disappears from the archive.
10:42We have this laser beam of insight into these four or five years of extraordinary experience
10:49he had in Algiers and on the Corsair high seas.
10:57The Corsairs, having long terrorised the southern shores of Europe, now extended their reach,
11:06as far north as the Irish coastline.
11:12In the early hours of June in 1631, they came in under the cover of darkness, and then all
11:19hell broke loose.
11:20They had burning torches, they had iron bars, and they basically broke the doors in.
11:27And completely surprised the inhabitants, taking them captive before they even knew it.
11:31They took men, women, and children captive, about 109.
11:35They were loaded onto the main ships, and they sailed to the Barbary coast then, which is
11:40the slave markets of Tunis, Tangiers, and Algiers.
11:44And they were sold there as labourers.
11:45They may have been sold for galley slaves, for the Corsairs galleys.
11:50Or the women would have been sold, depending on the age, as concubines.
11:54For the next number of years, relatives and government officials sought to try to ransom a lot of
11:59those people.
12:00Only two made it back.
12:05As the 1600s progressed, religious tensions were growing.
12:21Land in Ulster was now held predominantly by Protestant colonial settlers.
12:27In the 17th century, Catholics could not live in a walled city.
12:31They were treated with suspicion.
12:33There were a fifth column.
12:35So the Catholics tended to live on the periphery of the city, and that was the bog.
12:41We're dealing with a Catholic population that has everything to gain and nothing to lose
12:47by rising in rebellion.
12:52The rebellion finally broke out in 1641.
12:56It was particularly brutal in the heavily settled regions in Ulster.
13:01It's on both sides, both from the native Irish and Catholic Irish on the settler community, and then
13:06from the colonial government as well.
13:09Extreme violence and a bloodletting on a scale that has never been seen before.
13:15Moments of what we would call today ethnic cleansing.
13:18It's probably one of the darkest moments in Irish history.
13:22Over 8,000 witness statements from settlers fleeing from the rebellion.
13:27So it's a huge body of evidence, but it's a very problematic one because clearly it's
13:31only giving one side of the story.
13:35A hundred men and women or children were driven like hogs about six miles to the river called
13:41the Ban.
13:43There the Irish forced them to go up upon the bridge naked, and with their pikes and swords
13:49and other weapons thrust them down headlong into said river.
13:54And immediately they perished.
13:59The bloody events of 1641 were never forgotten.
14:07That siege mentality that we associate with the loyalist Protestant population or elements
14:14of it really dates back to 1641.
14:19And what's so important is how these depositions stir up fear and hysteria in England, and how
14:27they're then reprinted across time.
14:30So at moments of political crisis, this spectre of Irish treachery is sort of waved before the
14:38English public to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment.
14:42It confirmed all their prejudices and suspicions about the Irish Catholics, and they were more
14:49determined than ever to crush all elements of Irish Catholic political and economic power
14:55in Ireland as a result.
14:58But the day of reckoning for the rebellious Catholics in Ireland was postponed, as English attention
15:03was now focused on a different conflict.
15:07A civil war between the King and Parliament.
15:19Following the end of the civil war in England, the Irish would now be faced with the most implacable
15:26of foes.
15:28His name was Oliver Cromwell.
15:32Cromwell has retained this macabre fascination for the Irish because really all the evils and
15:38sins of that period are placed on him.
15:40He was the head of the army of conquest, there's no question about that, but he was one of many.
15:47This was the English Parliament and the English nation at the time that was actually undertaking
15:51this conquest.
15:55Cromwell had arrived in Dublin in August 1649, at the head of one of the most feared armies
16:00of the age, the new model army.
16:05He marched north and laid siege to Drada.
16:09The town held out for eight days, before cannons breached the walls.
16:16The enemy retreated.
16:20Our men getting up to them were ordered by me to put them to the sword.
16:25I forbade them to spare any that were in their arms in the town.
16:31And I think that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men.
16:38Civilians, women and children were also put to the sword.
16:43Cromwell and his army now marched on Wexford.
16:52Cromwell instigated a massacre of men, women and children.
16:58The thing that was emphasised again and again was Irish papers.
17:02That absolutely allows us to obliterate the lesser breed and the lesser creed.
17:09This was an act of vengeance.
17:12He was very clearly over, as far as he was concerned, to avenge the massacres of 1641
17:17of Protestant settlers.
17:20I think he was really laying down a marker, Cromwell saying, I'm here, there will be absolutely
17:24no deal or settlement or any kind of reconciliation, I'm here to conquer.
17:30Cromwell became a kind of a brutal shorthand for everything about the English colonisation.
17:37Because it was so vivid, so cruel, so bloody, so absolutely outside the norms that it seared
17:43itself into people's consciousness.
17:45In May 1650, after nine months, Cromwell left Ireland.
17:54But the war carried on over the next three years.
17:58Its effects were catastrophic.
18:05There were 504,000 of the Irish parish and were wasted by sword, famine, hardships and banished
18:12between the 23rd of October 1641 and the same day 1652.
18:21There are elements of that conquest which are definitely genocidal in terms of simply wiping
18:25out entire communities, clearing entire areas of the country with a view to refashion Ireland
18:31into a New England and one that will be Protestant and loyal.
18:35But the impact on the population of Ireland is absolutely disastrous.
18:42By 1653, the conquest was complete.
18:48The Cromwellian settlement which followed, changed the face of Ireland.
18:56That then facilitates a revolution in landholding that was utterly unprecedented.
19:04Something like eight million Irish acres are confiscated and then redistributed primarily
19:12to more Protestant colonists.
19:14So this is the single largest transfer of land anywhere in Western Europe.
19:21It is absolutely transformative.
19:23Land equals political power.
19:26Land equals wealth.
19:27And this is the establishment of what becomes known as the Protestant Ascendancy.
19:36One of the other consequences of the 1650s was the transplantation of populations really
19:44from the east coast of Ireland to the west.
19:46In other words, to Heller to Connacht.
19:52You are talking tens of thousands of people who are being transplanted across the River Shannon
19:57effectively into a native reservation where they can be controlled.
20:03The move west had to be made mostly in winter.
20:08The weather was very severe and the roads almost impassable.
20:13Hundreds perished along the way.
20:15Those who disobeyed were subject to being killed on sight.
20:19That is a terrible island of the era and the east coast of Ireland.
20:27Most generous God, lord of all blessings.
20:31Look at the Irish now, left powerless.
20:34As we travel westward to Connacht, our old friends bereft are left behind us.
20:43One Irish poet described it as the war that finished Ireland.
20:52While many were displaced and dispossessed at home,
20:56others found themselves transported thousands of miles to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
21:04Once they arrived in Barbados, the captives were sold as indentured servants
21:12and sent to work on the many sugar plantations on the island.
21:17So when you hear the term indentured, it seems almost benign.
21:21But what you're really dealing with are men, women and children from as young as five to maybe about 50s or 60s
21:27being rounded up like Shanghai and sent to an island that they know absolutely nothing about.
21:36We are stripped of our land, honour and trades.
21:47We are exiled from our homeland.
21:50Children are separated from parents, husbands from wives,
21:55virgins from the arms of their mothers and sent to the remote islands of the new world.
22:02The way in which one seeks to oppress and suppress a native population
22:08and to exploit them both economically and politically
22:11is transferred from Ireland to the Caribbean.
22:17On this plantation, they're still cultivating the sugar cane
22:21like they would have back in the 17th century.
22:24And this is back-breaking work.
22:27It's brutal.
22:28It's hot.
22:29It's humid.
22:30We would have had hundreds of Irish indentured servants
22:35working in the fields, often alongside African chattel slaves.
22:41And it wasn't just the men who worked in the fields.
22:44The women did as well.
22:46A third of the indentured servants who came from Ireland were female.
22:50We also had children.
22:51Many of them were Irish speakers.
22:53Over time, the white women would have taken on roles as domestic servants.
23:00They would have worked in the big house.
23:02They would have found other roles on the plantation.
23:05But it was the 1670s before they pulled white women out of laboring in the sugar fields.
23:14And when you take a look at the historical record and early documents,
23:18that sense of wanting freedom is shared by both the Irish indentured and the enslaved Africans.
23:26To the point where some of the early rebellions in the 1670s and 1680s
23:31are actually collaborations between Irish indentured and enslaved Africans.
23:36The final decades of the 17th century would also be filled with conflict back in Ireland.
23:48As the Catholic King James faced a rival for the throne,
23:56his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.
24:03The supporters of James were known as Jacobites.
24:13James is deposed.
24:14The battle for control of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland
24:37would be a European conflict fought on Irish soil.
24:42It began with an advance by King James.
24:44And his army on the Protestant citadel of Derry.
24:50It's the apprentice boys, it's the young men of the city
24:53who take the fateful decision to close the gates.
24:57They, at this stage, held this city for William, for the Protestant cause.
25:04When James arrives, shots are fired at him.
25:08A siege begins.
25:10It's the longest siege in British and Irish military history.
25:14The siege lasted for 105 days until the city was relieved.
25:19And the Jacobite forces retreated.
25:23The siege of Derry is an iconic event in Ulster-Loyalist history and memory.
25:33Derry became a symbol of Ulster-Protestant resistance and resilience and determination never to surrender.
25:41William now left England and followed James to Ireland.
25:45Their armies faced each other at the Battle of the Boyne.
25:50Two kings, William the third and James the second, meet at the Battle of the Boyne.
25:59William marches in.
26:02James flees the field, leaves the Irish to stew in their juice.
26:06And the result is a win for William the third.
26:09Now, what that settles is who is to be king of England.
26:13It doesn't really settle who is to be king of Ireland.
26:17Because the Jacobite forces largely are able to retreat in good order.
26:21They meet the Waterloo at the Battle of Orcham.
26:24The Jacobites' army is obliterated.
26:28They're forced then to retreat behind the walls of Limerick.
26:31Patrick Sarsfield, the leader of the Irish Jacobite forces, now signs the Treaty of Limerick,
26:39which allowed the defeated army to follow King James to France.
26:44Over 12,000 Irish soldiers and their families left Ireland.
26:50They would be known to history as the Wild Geese.
26:52These men are leaving all this most dear in life for a strange land to serve in an army that hardly knows our people.
27:09They are true to Ireland and have still hopes for her cause.
27:15We will make another Ireland in the armies of the great king of France.
27:20Louis XIV formed several regiments.
27:26These regiments are manned by rank and file Irish,
27:30officered by Irish in the 1690s and in the early 1700s.
27:37Les Invalides was established in 1671 by King Louis XIV of France.
27:43He was very dedicated to the French army and he invested enormously in his army.
27:49And this was part of that project, which was to construct a hospital where wounded soldiers could come to and recuperate
27:58and then be readmitted back into the field.
28:01In the course of the period from its foundation until the French Revolution, a total of 2,600 Irish veterans came and stayed here.
28:14We have evidence of Irish men playing hurling out on the fields here.
28:19So, a little bit of Ireland here at Les Invalides.
28:26The wild geese spread all over Catholic Europe, but in Ireland, new laws called the Penal Laws were introduced.
28:32They would ensure the primacy of the new Protestant regime.
28:35This code, as it becomes known as Penal Laws, is imposed on the Irish statute that ultimately renders the Irish Catholic a second-class citizen in his own country.
28:52They are the African-Americans at the back of the bus.
28:55They were treated as, in the biblical sense, hewers of wood, drawers of water.
29:04They were there to do the menial task, to put up and shut up.
29:07Catholics could not buy, hold land on long leases, or they could not inherit land from their father unless given to one son if he took the decision to convert to Protestantism, and many of them did.
29:27So, in every way now, we're seeing the Protestant community control the political, the economic, the commercial infrastructure of Ireland.
29:37It's best encapsulated in a couplet from Oon Rue O'Soulo, and as he said, you know,
29:44It's not the poverty, it's the indignity.
29:51It's that idea that you are never, you are never under any illusion as to who the top dog is.
30:07So, persecution in Ireland continued to drive away the Catholic Irish to more welcoming shores.
30:19Spain was a place of great opportunity, where the Irish became not only soldiers, but also important merchants and powerful administrators in the empire.
30:27One of the fascinating things about Irish migrants in Europe in this period is the extent to which first generation Irish born abroad see themselves very much as servants of their receiving country.
30:45Ricardo Wall, for example, who becomes the de facto prime minister of Spain in the early 18th century.
31:01Ricardo Wall, he's born in France.
31:03His parents have left just after the Treaty of Limerick.
31:07He's going to enter into the service of the Spanish army.
31:09You know a lot about how diplomacy is working, how the new ways of imperialism are working.
31:16He's extremely important because he, on his coattails, brings in a whole group of other Irish.
31:25Ricardo Wall rises to the top in the mid-18th century.
31:29So the generation that Ricardo Wall opened the door to become the masters of the Spanish empire.
31:39Some Irish sought to make their fortune from one of the most unsavory and cruel aspects of empire.
31:48The Irish are involved in the slave trade.
31:51They are often a captain or crew on the actual vessels that shipped enslaved peoples across the Atlantic.
31:59The Irish were very heavily involved in the slave trade out of the major centres in France,
32:07in particular the port city of Nantes, with several Irish families involved in the trade.
32:14Macamaras, Stapletons, Lees, Shields, Shees.
32:19But by far the most notorious was Antoine Vincent Walsh.
32:22He has a dreadful reputation for overloading his ships.
32:26He had one of the highest rates of mortality among slaves being transited across the Atlantic.
32:34He himself had plantations in the Caribbean.
32:38And in a kind of an ironic twist, he ended up dying in penury on his plantation.
32:44It's certainly a darker chapter in the history of Ireland and of Irish participation in the wider world.
32:58The Irish, of course, are present all over Europe and all over the world in large numbers.
33:03But what's distinctive about the Irish here in Portugal is that they actually form an entire community.
33:08The Irish in Lisbon numbered between 6,000 and 7,000 in 18th century maps of Lisbon.
33:19The area around Rimmelaris, which is just right beside the port, was known as the Irish Quarter
33:25simply because so many Irish people made their home there.
33:29In 1755, Lisbon suffered a huge catastrophe.
33:35An earthquake which shook the city to its core.
33:38The Irish community was hit badly.
33:44That community did survive.
33:46It didn't continue to grow as it had been before 1755.
33:50And in a way, 1755 represents not just a break in the continuity of Irish contacts here with Portugal,
34:00but also the meaning of a shift in Ireland away from continental Europe in general
34:06and beginning to get into the to and fro of the great North Atlantic trade,
34:13which includes, of course, the giant, which is North America.
34:16By the middle of the 18th century, instead of looking to Europe, more and more Irish were looking westwards.
34:25Their destination, the British colonies of North America.
34:29Three quarters of the migrants who came from Ireland to North America in the 18th century were Protestant.
34:38And three quarters of those Protestants were Presbyterians from Ulster.
34:43The British colonies in North America are not welcoming for Catholics.
34:52They don't like Catholics at all.
34:54Just about every colony has discriminatory laws against Catholics.
34:59And Irish Catholics hit the bullseye twice.
35:01A, by being Catholic, and B, by being Irish.
35:04At the end of the 17th century and into the 18th century, Catholicism was proscribed.
35:10You could not be a practicing Catholic.
35:12If you were, you would be penalized.
35:14If you were a Jesuit, you would be hung.
35:19Other Irish set their sights further north, drawn to the rich fishing grounds around Newfoundland,
35:24known to the Irish as Talavaneshk, the land of fish.
35:28After about 1720, the Irish began to arrive in some numbers.
35:33The first were young men, almost entirely from around Waterford City and the hinterland,
35:39south-west Wexford, south Carlow, south Kilkenny, south-easter Prairie, all of County Waterford,
35:45and even south-east Cork.
35:47And they would fish as servants for the English masters.
35:51Some of them did not have English, but they would learn their English here from the English panters.
35:55And gradually, women joined, settled, so Irish families began to settle.
36:03The Irish came in greater numbers after about 1780.
36:08Today, two-thirds of Betty Harbour, at least, is of Irish Catholic descent.
36:14The latter years of the 18th century would be known as the age of revolution in both the new world and the old.
36:34The most important revolution in the new world would be the American Revolution, or the War of Independence,
36:41when the colonists in America rose in rebellion against the British crown.
36:46The Presbyterians from Ulster were to the forefront of the American resistance.
36:53The role that the Irish played in the revolution is primarily the Ulster Presbyterian Irish.
37:00They tended to be patriots.
37:03They were on the American side, not the British side.
37:05They had a real grudge against the British crown.
37:08So when the opportunity came, they joined the colonists and fought against the British.
37:15But the American Revolution would not be the only seismic event of the time.
37:20The French Revolution would set Europe alight.
37:24The French Revolution begins as a programme for reform, radical reform, admittedly,
37:31but becomes quickly a revolution to overturn the French monarchy and eventually to set up a republic.
37:40Many of the Irish elite were closely aligned with the deposed King Louis XVI.
37:46His execution, and that of his wife, Marie Antoinette, stunned Europe.
37:54A first-hand account of Louis' execution is preserved in the library of the Irish College in Paris.
38:01These are the letters from the Abbé Edgeworth.
38:04Edgeworth was born in Edwardstown in Longford, 1745.
38:10The young Edgeworth moved to Paris where he was educated and became a priest.
38:14And as the revolution developed, he became the confessor to Louis XVI and indeed attended him on the scaffold
38:25at the time of his execution in January 1793.
38:29And in his letters, he describes the aftermath of the actual execution.
38:35All that I can say is that as soon as a fatal blow was given, I fell upon my knees and thus remained
38:47until the vile wretch who acted the principal part in this horror tragedy came with shouts of joy,
38:55showing the bleeding head to the mob and sprinkling me with the blood that streamed from it.
39:00This means that an Irish person is present for probably one of the most tumultuous events
39:09that marks the watershed in the transition from Ancien Régime Europe to the modern period.
39:16Inspired by revolutionary events abroad, a new movement, the United Irishman, was founded in Ireland
39:27by Theobald Wolftone, a Protestant radical.
39:31Their aim, to unite Catholic, Protestant and a centre.
39:37And to break the link with England.
39:38They wanted to separate Ireland from Britain, establish an Irish Republic
39:43and give full political, religious, civil rights to everyone on the island of Ireland.
39:49The British, they were always afraid that the French would come
39:52and use Ireland as a soft backdoor to take out Britain.
39:55And of course, that was a reasonable thing for them to think
39:58because Theobald Wolftone and other United Irishmen
40:01who had been kicked out of Ireland, ended up in France
40:03and were trying to persuade the French to do exactly that.
40:06Theobald Wolftone set out to persuade Napoleon to send a military expedition to Ireland.
40:13They did a great job of getting the French interested in Ireland
40:17and eventually the French did send a very significant fleet to Bantry Bay.
40:24The attempted landing at Bantry Bay in West Cork
40:27was foiled by bad weather and mountainous seas.
40:33But this failure did not extinguish.
40:35The flame of rebellion.
40:39I think in the 1790s, Ireland was a very combustible country
40:42and that all came to a head in 1798 then
40:46when the United Irishmen attempted a rebellion.
40:49It broke out in Wexford.
40:52The guerrilla hit and run stuff that they were doing was working really well.
40:56The British cavalry and the yeomanry and whatever were absolutely terrified of pikes,
41:00the long pikes, though the cavalry never went near pikemen.
41:04They were very successful in the fields, the barley fields of North Wexford.
41:08They were very successful in doing that.
41:09But fighting a pitched battle where the British were able to bring in their cannon and so on,
41:13you know, as what happened here on Vinegar Hill, that was foolish.
41:17On Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
41:2220,000 died, shaking scythes at cannon.
41:28The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
41:34They buried us without shroud or coffin.
41:41And in August, the barley grew up out of the grave.
41:49Each part of the rebellion was isolated and crushed by the British.
41:54And it failed because they were able to use their superior military power to crush it.
41:59The brief but bloody rebellion had been defeated.
42:05The unity that had been seen between Protestant, Catholic and dissenter was now broken.
42:11In Ulster, most of the rebels were from Presbyterian background, Ulster Scots.
42:18They sided with Catholics.
42:19And yet these Presbyterians, after the rebellion was brutally suppressed,
42:24many of them changed their political allegiance.
42:26Within one generation and subsequent generations moved towards Unionism, Orangism, Loyalism.
42:36The Act of Union made Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom.
42:41Irish Catholics were hopeful that the British Parliament at Westminster,
42:45which was now in control, would repeal the penal laws and grant Catholic emancipation.
42:51This was another betrayal by the British.
42:53And so there was huge resentment.
42:55This resentment would be expressed not in violent rebellion,
42:59but in a mass movement, under a charismatic leader.
43:09Daniel O'Connell is a massively important figure in moulding this new concept of a modern Ireland
43:15and what it meant to be Irish.
43:16He was the great civil rights leader of the 19th century, and he raised Irish Catholics.
43:24He raised Irish nationalists from their knees.
43:27He gave them back their self-respect, and he also won them their freedom.
43:33Daniel O'Connell finally won Catholic emancipation for his people.
43:36But his fight for civil rights was not confined to Ireland.
43:40Daniel O'Connell was a liberator who believed that everyone should be free.
43:46And the plight of men, women, and children born into slavery, being whipped, being abused, being raped, being tortured,
43:55that moved him deeply because he knew what it was like to be an oppressed people.
44:00And he was going to make himself a champion of freedom, whether that was in Ireland, or Britain, or in the United States.
44:08Among the people that Daniel O'Connell inspired was Frederick Douglass,
44:13one of the most famous black abolitionists of the 19th century.
44:19Douglass, who had escaped from slavery himself, visited Ireland in 1845.
44:25And the first place he visited was Dublin, because he wanted to meet his great hero, Daniel O'Connell.
44:35Frederick Douglass said that he learned as a child to love the name of Daniel O'Connell,
44:40because his master used to spit out the name with a curse.
44:48When he got to Ireland, the reception that he got was so welcoming and different from his experience in the United States.
44:55He didn't experience any discrimination.
44:58And when he would walk down the street, people would shake his hand.
45:01And for the first time, he felt truly free.
45:03And he said, for the first time in my life, I feel like a man and not like a color.
45:08Before he left Ireland, Douglass saw firsthand the suffering and strife of the people experiencing the first months
45:15of what was to become known in Irish as Angorta Moor, the Great Hunger.
45:22I have heard much of the misery and wretchedness of the Irish people.
45:30I must confess my experience has convinced me that the half has not been told.
45:36Here you have an Irish hut or a cabin, such as millions of people of the Irish live in,
45:42in such the same degradation of the American slaves.
45:45I see much here to remind me of my former condition.
45:52Frederick Douglass was witnessing a calamity that would devastate Ireland.
45:57The Great Famine is a monumental disaster.
46:03At least one million people die who might otherwise have lived.
46:09At least a million and a half, perhaps two million migrate that would have stayed otherwise in Ireland.
46:15And it's the Irish poor who are the victims of this ghastly tragedy.
46:23On this very day, a cry of famine, wilder and more fearful than ever, is rising from every parish and county in the land.
46:33The famine was a huge failure of the British state, and I think there's no way around that, that I think if the exact same thing had been happening in any part of England, Scotland or Wales,
46:48the response of the British Parliament would have been different.
46:51There was huge inaction when a million people were dying.
46:55The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.
47:06There was a belief, effectively, that the Irish character and attitude needed to be totally changed if Ireland was to be developed properly.
47:17For our part, we regard the potato blight as a blessing.
47:22When the Celts once cease to be potato eaters, they must become carnivorous.
47:27With the taste of gradual improvement upon the naked savagery, they have never approached the standard of the civilized world.
47:36The cancer of dependency had to be cured.
47:41The cure in question proved to be extraordinarily cruel.
47:44Curing dependency meant effectively the government not responding in a timely, generous or adequate way to the subsistence crisis.
47:53And the result was a horrific calamity in which a million people plus died.
48:00You essentially had a society which was disappearing.
48:04Whole valleys, whole hillsides turned silent.
48:07Massive transition from being essentially a very loquacious bilingual culture
48:12into one which was increasingly monoglophone, but which had also turned quiet.
48:18The singing, the dancing, the young people, the vibrancy had gone.
48:23Many people never really recovered from the trauma of the famine.
48:26The black potatoes scattered our neighbours.
48:55The bears, the brothers.
48:56Sent them to the poorhouse and across the sea.
49:00They are stretched in hundreds in mountain graveyards.
49:05May the heavenly host take up their plea.
49:08A song of our abode
49:13Are in the glory
49:18For his flaggers
49:22Screamer and glass
49:26Agus rake our gods
49:31Are a vashar isht
49:36Agus rake our gods
49:42Are a vashar isht
49:43Are a vashar isht
49:45Are a vashar isht
49:47Are a vashar isht
49:49Are a vashar isht