The Tudor conquest of Ireland was the prototype. Henry VIII’s break with Rome was the beginning of England as an extractive imperial project. The Plantations that followed were the first systematic experiment in what would later expand to global scale: take the land, take the resources, install a military garrison to enforce the arrangement, destroy the local culture and legal system, and treat the displaced population as an acceptable cost of economic expansion.
The Gaelic clan system, including my own family the Mac an tSaoir (“son of the craftsman”) were specifically targeted for dismantlement because we represented an alternative structure of social organisation that couldn’t be absorbed into the colonial economy.
The Penal Laws made it illegal for Gaelic people to own land, to educate our children, practise law, hold office or bear arms.
This is a legal architecture that make the indigenous people invisible while stealing their labour and their land.
The famine of the 1840s was no…
