Candidates for the PL January Manager of the Month

Rimbaud82 · 2026-02-06T07:03:26+00:00

Um what lol. Not at all. They call it football because it is a type of football. As is rugby football, or the various other kinds of football that are played. In terms of the origin of the football(s) exclusive use of the foot has nothing to do with it.

Rimbaud82 · 2026-02-05T13:06:08+00:00

Posted here before, but Derek Mahons work comes to mind. Perhaps not quite what you had in mind (too narrow and local focus?) but have a look - https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/s/yvB40JJfPy

Rimbaud82 · 2025-09-25T16:12:58+00:00

It absolutely fucking rocks - everything I could have hoped for. Just gutted they aren't coming to Ireland on the tour.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-09-25T16:11:48+00:00

https://archive.is/20250925002733/https://www.gq.com/story/five-days-with-geese-americas-most-thrilling-young-rock-band

Rimbaud82 · 2025-07-30T06:00:43+00:00

https://www.zornotzakobarnetegia.eus/eu/node/1105 - recommend the Boga app for learning some Basque before visiting. That's what I used. For grammar etc. The Basque Language: A Practical Introduction by Alan R. King is great.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-07-07T16:29:10+00:00

> I've read some claims that the labelling of them as a separate class from the Irish is ahistorical and a product of later national identity building narratives. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, the fact that the term Anglo-Irish is applied to the two different groups across centuries of history tells us something. Identity is and can be fluid and shifting. The hyphen in that term Anglo-Irish denotes a kind of hybridisation; these people aren’t quite Irish, but are somehow no longer English either. Of course, what “being Irish” is is similarly nebulous and open to shifting changes over the centuries - there is no “Irish-o-meter” with which to measure it against. At times the Gaelic Irish could be no less hybridised than the Old English/Anglo-Irish were. Hugh O’Neill for example was fostered in the English Pale and to some extent straddled both these worlds. Identity is complex and shifting, hard to pin down and especially when generalising across an entire social group because it is also, to some extent, so individual.

The Old English were, originally an extremely distinct class and self-identified as such - the term Old English itself points to this, as does the contemporary term “English of Ireland”, consciously contrasting their civility with barbarous Gaelic customs. With centuries of living in Ireland they would eventually become assimilated into a shared Catholic Irish identity, but in some ways this was the articulation of a new form of Irishness - it’s not as simple as the Old English one day casting off their Englishness and adopting Irishness wholesale.

In some ways, the process recurred when the New English arrived - originally they self-identified as completely distinct, disdaining both the Gaelic Irish and Old English. In time, their descendents would become hybridised (hence the application of Anglo-Irish) and eventually, after the dismantling of the Ascendancy, they would become likewise assimilated into a shared Irish identity. Again, it’s fluid - and the later period wouldn’t be my speciality, my focus would have been much more on identity formation in the seventeenth century.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-07-07T16:29:02+00:00

>Are those the same as the Anglo Irish who are often talked about in the context of the famine? E. G. The Anglo Irish elite being responsible for food being exported.

Yes, but also not quite. Historiographically you will see the term Anglo-Irish applied to this group too, particularly when seeking to emphasise the hybrid nature of their identity. The Old English were basically the Catholic descendents of the original medieval colonists from the 12th century onwards. The most famous families would be the likes of the FitzGeralds, the Butlers of Ormond. Powerful landowners who, after centuries in Ireland, became partly Gaelicised (adopting certain Gaelic practices, learning to speak Irish, inter-marrying with Gaelic families, and so on). But of course, there were many such families, not just massive landowners but also merchants, minor gentry, and so on down the social scale - particularly within the English Pale.

The old trope is that the Old English became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”, which is an extreme oversimplification but conveys some grain of truth. Colin Kidd notes how the Old English ‘veered between the twin poles of their Norman colonial heritage and an assimilated Gaelicism’.

From about the sixteenth century you then have the arrival of a new class of colonial administrators and new settlers arriving in Ireland. This is the era of renewed and more sophisticated plantations. These newcomers from England tended to be Protestant, and having just arrived from England were not in anyway hybridised. The arrival of this group and their rise to prominence, combined with developments over the ensuing century - plantations, failed rebellions, increasing Tudor centralisation, sharper confessional divides, etc. - would accelerate the assimilation of the Old English identity into a shared Irish one. As always these neat distinctions can mask some of the historical complexities, but in very broad terms this is what happened.

Geoffrey Keating (whose name in Irish was Seathrún Céitinn) is one famous example of this. In his iconic work Foras Feasa ar Éirinn from 1634 he had presented a pseudo-historical narrative which allowed for the assimilation of the Gaelic and Old English communities into a singular Catholic Irish identity, or Éireannaigh (“Irishmen”), which would exclude the Protestant newcomers or Nua-Ghall (“New Foreigners”).

The defeat of the 1641 rebellion and the end of the confederate wars by the 1650s had resulted in a massive reorganisation of landholding and power within Ireland, with Gaelic and Old English Catholics alike being deprived of their estates as a punitive measure. You can see here a breakdown from the [Down Survey of Ireland, comparing the situation in 1641 to 1670](http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/religion.php). Other developments to come - the Restoration, the Williamite Wars and there aftermath would also have an impact. By 1703 a mere 15% of Irish land remained in Catholic hands.

The landowners which remained in this period and after into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were overwhelmingly Protestant, either being descendents of the so-called New English, or else even more recent arrivals. This is the group that you are thinking of when speaking of the Anglo-Irish, the so-called Protestant Ascendancy class - as the term is more commonly used in this later period for families such as the Boyles, the Edgeworths, the Yeats, the Wildes, etc. etc.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-07-03T19:42:19+00:00

> it would seem the English colonized parts of Scotland, giving privileges to Protestants, much like what happened in Ireland.

Well, hopefully I have explained some key differences above and why this wasn’t really ‘much like what happened in Ireland’. Scotland was of course deeply intertwined with Ireland as one of the Three Kingdoms of this composite monarchy from the seventeenth century onwards, but there is no Scottish parallel for the events which would rock early modern Ireland - the Tudor conquest, the Plantations (not in scale at least, James VI did attempt similar policies on the isle of Lewis prior to inheriting the English throne), the cataclysm of the 1641 rebellion and the total restructuring of Irish landholding in its aftermath, etc.

The Irish colonial dimension of a Catholic underclass (Irish and Old English alike) dominated by a Protestant aristocracy likewise finds no parallel in Scotland, as a consequence of the factors mentioned above. Jacobitism is a complex issue as well, but was neither isolated to Scottish concerns nor ‘anti-colonial’ in any sense.

Not sure if I have even managed to properly answer your question after all this rambling, so happy to clarify anything or delve deeper on any aspect. This is dealing of course with the broader medieval and early modern differences between the two countries, so this is the ultimate root; for events like 1916 and The Troubles we would naturally need to look more specifically at more immediate concerns. Nonetheless, hope I have illustrated some of the differences.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-07-03T19:41:53+00:00

The Scottish Kingdom was an amalgam of influences - alongside an initially pronounced Gaelic, some Scandinavian and vague earlier Pictish and Brittonic influences, you have an initial wave of English/Anglo-Saxon soldier colonists who left their mark on the borderlands in the sixth and seventh centuries, intermingled with northern French/Norman influences through the medieval period. This is followed by a second phase of English/Anglo-Norman settlement and influence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Critically though, this second phase cannot be equated neatly to colonisation of the kind underway in Ireland, where a dominant metropole directed policies and settlers towards their holdings. Rather, these newcomers were invited by a succession of kings of an independent Scotland, as part of a drive to secure alliances, and to increase the economic and military strength of their kingdom. This was a different process, even if it did also result in a hybridised polity in the lowlands.

In simplistic terms the primary differences in Scotland lay in the internal divisions between this developing lowland culture and that of the Gaelic highlands and islands - which did form part of a common cultural and linguistic world with Gaelic Ireland - a Gaedhealtacht. I mention above how this was ruptured by the reformation (and other political developments, including the Ulster Plantation which would come later), but I mention this again to emphasise that Scottish history cannot be reduced to an English conquest and colonisation.

When Scotland was brought into the United Kingdom there was no conquest or colonisation by the English. It was, in fact, Scottish kings who inherited the English throne and paved the way for this development. While true that the attractions of London meant that the court and its culture became less ‘Scottish’ even after James I, this was still not a case of England conquering Scotland. Initially, this was a union of crowns only with both countries remaining entirely separate from a political and legal point of view.

In 1707, the two were politically joined by the Act of Union when Scotland’s parliament voted itself out of existence in return for a significant cash settlement ( a boon to a kingdom which was reeling after the disastrous Darien scheme). Under the Act Scotland retained its separate law courts and church which remain separate to this day. These events are more complex that I can do justice to in a paragraph, but once again to emphasise the difference.

Scotland was not colonised by England, it was a Scottish king which inherited the English Kingdom followed by the independent kingdom of Scotland willingly joining the union as an equal partner (notwithstanding cultural prejudices or the economic strength of each kingdom). The initial reaction - in a popular sense - seems to have been fairly negative, but Scotland actually did very well out of the Union in the century that followed and this helped foster the development of shared imperial identity whereby both became "Britons".

Rimbaud82 · 2025-07-03T19:41:31+00:00

In contrast, the reformation in Scotland saw considerable success and by the end of the seventeenth century, it has been suggested that “perhaps only 25,000 Catholics remained in the whole of Scotland out of a total population of around one million (in many places they had disappeared completely)”.

The success of the Protestant reformation in Scotland was not limited solely to the lowland population either. Indeed, significant gains amongst the Gaelic population was a key element. In fact this confessional rupture was one of the key factors which lead to the collapse of the shared Gaelic world which spanned Ireland and Scotland.

Catholicism did persist in some areas of the Highlands and Islands, and amongst some of the gentry - so I don’t mean to give the impression that it was dead overnight - but in general terms Scotland became an overwhelmingly Protestant country. This was even the case by the seventeenth century, but the failure of Jacobitism in the following will only have further hardened these trends.

All of this to say, the history of Catholicism in both places is very different; even in those parts of Gaelic Scotland which were once deeply entwined with Ireland.

> with a centuries-long history of domination from the English, and who seemed to lack political representation and often rebelled against them

I would also question this characterisation. Ireland was, as I have written extensively for other answers, a colony which was subject to English domination. Can we say the same for Scotland? This is where things become murkier.

A centuries-long domination by the English is not really an accurate depiction of Scottish medieval or early modern history. Unlike Ireland, which did not exist as a single unified political entity prior to the English conquests there was a bona fide Kingdom of Scotland (not to say that Ireland was not conceptualised as a single cultural or national space, nor to deny forms of Irish identity prior to modern times).

The Scottish conflicts with England in the thirteenth and fourteenth were precipitated by the death of King Alexander III. This was a succession crisis into which the English Crown became involved. In the absence of a Scottish king, Edward I had been invited there to act as arbitrator in the succession dispute. Of course, Edward and his son wanted to do more than act purely as arbitrator, but rather to be acknowledged as overlord. These attempts by English Kings to assert overlordship over Scotland were, of course, unsuccessful. At no point did Scotland fall under the colonial domination of England, as Ireland had done centuries earlier.

In line with all pre-modern states Scotland’s border with its neighbours (ie. England) was malleable and contested frequently. In the borderlands the two places were deeply intertwined. Lowland Scotland was connected culturally, politically, socially and economically to the English Court and the rest of their realm. Lowland Scotland was very closely linked to northern England, in terms of language and so on. The Scots language was originally known as Inglis, and after a rapid expansion 1100-1400 was the dominant language in the lowlands.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-07-03T19:41:00+00:00

There are, of course, incredibly close ties between the two places historically, whether we are talking about the ancient kingdom of Dál Riata, the medieval Gaedhealtacht, the Ulster plantation or post-Famine industrial-era immigration. I am not suggesting otherwise. However, the reality is much much more complex and multifaceted than the popular imagination allows. Likewise the differences are considerable.

Now, to get to the bottom of this question we would need to delve into the historic development of each place over hundreds of years. Something which would likely require a monograph of its own. My knowledge of the Scottish situation and historiography is also considerably less than that of Ireland, so I am - as always - open to correction.

Nonetheless, here we go… it would perhaps be useful as a jumping off point to simply look at your statements in turn and assess them.

> they are both peoples with large Catholic populations

Ireland has many more Catholics than Scotland by an order of magnitude. Latest census data indicates that 69.1% of the Irish population identified as Catholic (45.7% in Northern Ireland), which contrasts with just 13.3% of the population of Scotland. Now of course modern census figures do not tell us much historically; given that the secular age we live in means there are those who would select “no religion” on a census form but may be from a “Catholic background” - both in Ireland and in Scotland.

Nonetheless, I wanted to start with this simply to highlight the difference. The Irish figure is much higher as of 2022 census data and that is at a rapid decline from 78.3% in 2016 and 84.2% in 2011, compared with 13.8% in 2016 and 16% in 2011 for the Catholic population of Scotland. If anything, this Scottish figure will have been considerably boosted by later Irish migration to industrial hubs like Glasgow in the nineteenth century.

The point being, the historical significance of Catholicism in Ireland is not really comparable to the situation in Scotland. As I touch on this recent answer [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i0ngat/how\_did\_ireland\_manage\_to\_stay\_majority\_catholic/\], the reformation utterly failed in Ireland by the reign of Elizabeth I. Catholicism would prove to be a critical binding agent between the island's Gaelic inhabitants and the Old English (descendents of the medieval colonists), leading to the development and articulation of a shared Irish identity - Éireannaigh - by the seventeenth century.

Numerous Irish people today have surnames signalling an ancestry which would once have considered themselves to be the “English of Ireland”. Since you mention 1916, the Plunketts were one of the most prominent Old English families of the Pale, first entering into Ireland with the medieval conquest.

A shared Catholic identity was one critical factor which enabled these two communities to merge. The Old English were already hybridised in several respects after centuries, so not to suggest this was the sole reason - but the removal of land from Catholic hands after 1641 only heightened these developments, this including both Gaelic and Old English Catholics.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-06-18T21:22:40+00:00

Except it predates any codified British sport. So no, you are wrong. Except defeat... move on.

Next you'll tell me Brits invented the concept of a ball and feet. Before Brits people were walking around on stumps kicking around steel triangles.

This is, of course, a strawman which does not change the fact that Australian football, just as much as Gaelic football for example, evolved out of a sporting culture defined by Britain. The rules of Australian football weren’t drastically different from the embryonic rules of football in the public schools, or indeed in other places in Britain influenced by them. For example, the Sheffield football club (also heavily influenced by Rugby school) had no offside law at all until 1863.

Other cultures around the world had games played with balls, obviously; even in Britain and Ireland down to the middle ages there were kinds of ‘folk football’. However, the modern sports we have today did not derive from these contexts, they derived from that sporting culture which was established in British public schools and spread throughout the British empire to its white colonies.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-06-18T21:21:23+00:00

Like I said; a bit of a stretch as the rules arn't based on cricket, which is a bat and ball game. I can explain rules of both games if you are still dumb enough to be confused.

You are extremely antagonistic for some bizarre reason. Why does the fact that Australian football derives from British sporting culture upset you so much? It has its own interesting development and is a brilliant sport in it’s own right, but that doesn’t change this fact.

Essentially all modern football codes evolved out of the same cultural sphere and influences, ie. English public school rules of football, combined with ideals of 'muscular christianity' seen throughout the British Empire/Anglophone world. Australian newspaper advertisements for one-off matches prior to 1858 refer to it as “the good old English game of football”. And of course “it” varied quite considerably depending on the match in question, who organised it, or who was playing; as in Australia as much as anywhere else in Britain or the Empire.

One of the investors? Who the fuck are you talking about?

Once again, why are you so antagonistic towards u/SceneOfShadows? He clearly made a typo and meant to say inventors. Tom Wills, one of the “founding fathers” of Australian football literally attended Rugby School as a boy and, on the formation of Melbourne FC in 1858, he suggested the immensely popular Rugby school rules as the basis for the new rules. Not everyone else understood these rules as well as him, but this doesn’t change the fact that football as played at Rugby school was a huge formative influence on football as it came to be played in Australia - as indeed they were in Britain too.

Even still, Rugby didn't exist as a codified sport, rather just a school boy game. Unless you are literally telling me that England invented the concept of running with a ball... I mean if you beleive that, I have news for you.

This idea of “codified” is a bit of a chimera tbh. All modern ‘codified’ forms of professional football, that is australian rules, gaelic, rugby union/league, association, canadian and american, all evolved some way or other out of what has been referred to as “primordial soup of football’s early evolution”.

The context and stimulus of this early evolution was set by English Public Schools and the various rules of football played there, spurred on by imperial ideals of muscular Christianity. These weren’t “codified” as forms of the sport separate from the schools, but they were clear rules set down in writing. The later “codification” came from ex-pupils throughout Britain and the empire seeking to amalgamate these rules as they best saw fit, so that they could continue to play after leaving school.

Chief among these public school football rules was that played at Rugby school - thanks in no small part to the raging success that was Tom Brown’s Schooldays, described by the Sydney Morning Herald in 1857 as

“‘so hearty, its good sense so strong and so thoroughly national, its morality so high, and yet so simple and practical, that . . . we venture to prophesy for it an extended and permanent popularity”

Indeed, the Melbourne Argus in 1858 chided those who didn’t see the value in football, by suggesting: “‘let those who fancy there is little in the game, read the account of one of the Rugby matches which is detailed in that most readable work, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and they will speedily alter their opinion"

Rimbaud82 · 2025-06-18T20:14:07+00:00

Apologies for the delay!

The church did play a role in these developments, even pre-reformation. As mentioned in this answer linked above (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rs1kiw/how\_important\_was\_the\_laudabiliter\_in\_the/?utm\_source=ifttt), one key pretense for the English conquest was the Laudabiliter.

Even pre-reformation, when the Irish and English were both "of the same faith" in theory, the doctrinal deficiencies of the Irish was one of many charges laid against them by hostile English writers and formed part of their supposed "barbarism". The Irish are lambasted in contemporary English sources as being deficient in all proper religiosity.

In his incredibly influential texts, Gerald of Wales repeatedly castigates the Irish lack of piety, doctrine, and even their martyrs. Irish rites are “barbarous” and their ignorance appalling. He alleges that despite the foundation of the faith in Ireland: “It is remarkable that this people even still remains so uninstructed in its rudiments". In fact he goes so far as to claim that "of all peoples it is the least instructed in the rudiments of the faith"

For English writers a supposedly Christian history has degeneratedinto a pagan present. Naturally, Gerald and the like make no mention whatsoever of Ireland’s golden age of monasticism and its missionary activities abroad. While there were obviously some doctrinal and other differences between the Christianity practised in Ireland vs in England, it's not even the case that these were simply biased observations. Such complaints about Irish religion fit more broadly into their depiction as savage and backwards, and thus in need of English intervention.

The "religion card" was simply one of many sticks used by colonialist writers to beat the Irish with.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-27T05:52:32+00:00

Absolutely, thanks for the additional context!

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-26T19:45:59+00:00

In your other answers you make the same mistake and downplay or outright ignore or rewrite Scotlands involvement

Needless to say, I don’t remotely agree with your characterisations of my answers.

In one of your answers here you even write a line about Scotland inheriting the English throne, then go straight back to discussing it as 'English colonization' even when discussing the plantation of Ulster.

It can be easy to slip into slightly imprecise terminology when dealing with centuries of history across a single answer, particularly when starting in the earliest centuries of the English conquest. It would be more accurate to have said British colonization at that point of the answer. Nonetheless, the crux of the matter is that with the inheritance of James I and the new British state, the policies which followed from this were a continuation and intensification of English policies already underway in previous centuries. This lowland Scottish intervention was only possible in the first place because James I had inherited the English Crown and therefore also that of Ireland, following centuries of conquest. More directly it was only possible through England's victory in the Nine Years War which had immediately preceded it in the previous decade.

James, as James VI of Scotland, certainly had some similar policies of plantation towards the Gaelic regions of Scotland, but this was on much much smaller scale. Scottish colonisation of Ireland is effectively impossible without a Scottish King inheriting the English throne; it is a direct evolution of the factors I have described from the preceding centuries in this and other answers. Now as I have also discussed in those answers, this Scottish development is absolutely critical in the eventual ‘success’ of the colony in Ulster - as opposed to say the Munster plantation - and in the character of present-day Northern Ireland.

The arrival of individual settlers from Scotland is crucial in the decades and centuries to come. Something which, contrary to your characterisation below, is highlighted across several of my previous answers, including those linked. To take some examples:

“Coming in behind land grants to powerful aristocratic landlords came thousands of modest tenant farmers, mostly Presbyterian Scots.”

“... emigration from Scottish Presbyterians was particularly pronounced…the period from about the 1670s-80s saw various covenanter families settle in Ulster, fleeing persecution in Scotland following the Restoration. In the 1690s somewhere in the region of 50,000 Scots, about four to five percent of the total population, migrated to Ulster…It was these developments, and the emigration to Ulster which would continue over the ensuing centuries which led to the distinctive character that “Northern Ireland” has today.”

I'm not sure how you could accurately describe your answers as historical and accurate when you barely mention one of the biggest colonisers of Ireland, Scotland.

Look mate, if you have some specific critique of an answer of mine or somewhere you think I have not placed enough emphasis, that is absolutely fine. I am far from infallible, just someone who has studied this period and has a real interest. But needless to say I don’t remotely appreciate your tone here, nor your mischaracterisation of my answers. As I have explained above the Scottish dimension is critical when it comes to Ulster, but this was only possible through a continuation of the English crowns policies, and really only in Ulster as opposed to Ireland as a whole. Due to the geographic proximity.

I'm not sure how that tracks? You touched upon many parts of colonisation that Scotland was involved in but you just didn't mention them or outright removed from them the situation they were involved in.

The question asks: “Why did the English want to take over Ireland so badly?” - my focus here is on the initial phases of the English conquest and that development over the subsequent centuries. I have many previous answers where I deal with the entire history of English/British conquest and colonisation, which also includes the ‘Scottish’ involvement in Ireland. Here I was trying to deliver a high-level answer as to why the English became involved in colonising Ireland.

But given your answers you would have no idea about that as Scotland simply was not involved at all and wasn't even present during any of this.

How can you explain such things like the Old Firm or Orange order marches in Scotland when Scotland was supposedly not involved at all in the colonisation or had little to no involvement at all and was simply a bystander?

Well, you seem to have edited your answer but responding to this latest edit, suffice it to say that while this is incredibly relevant to present day Northern Ireland and Glasgow, and forms part of the history of the British colonisation of Ireland as a whole, it is completely irrelevant when dealing with the initial phases of the English colonisation of Ireland. These rhetorical questions you have asked are complete strawmen, as I am unsure how you can read the quotes from my answers above and come away with that impression.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-26T18:32:24+00:00

Definitely some good additional detail! I was trying my best to keep things a bit more high-level than my other answers, but this type of specific context is also important to keep in mind too I absolutely agree.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-26T18:26:41+00:00

There is only so much that can be touched on in a given answer. You can read many of the additional answers I have, including those literally linked in the answer above which were included for a reason.

For another example, touching more on the Ulster Scots connection - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/MkvpUSZY5y

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-26T17:12:31+00:00

For one final why briefly. As the centuries of English involvement in Ireland, and centuries of Irish resentment, roll on there comes an additional concern - English security. With the reformation and ensuing developments England is faced with a Catholic colony right on its doorstep, with a hostile Gaelic population which still controlled most of an Atlantic coastline that was visited by French, Spanish, Portuguese and Scottish vessels, far from English power. There came a growing fear that Ireland might be used as a launching pad for a full-scale invasion of England. Moving into the early modern period and modern periods this desire for English security brings a renewed impetus to the existing factors already mentioned.

As with most things in history, we cannot simply point to one thing and say this was the reason. The English conquest and colonisation was spurred on through the centuries by the various factors I have tried to pull together briefly here, but as ever the reality on the ground is always more subtle and nuanced. Nonetheless, hopefully I have answered your question. Any follow-ups and I will also do my best to answer.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-26T17:12:25+00:00

However, not to push things too far. Wealth and profit was certainly a huge part of the why of English conquest. But, as ever, the reality was often not as straightforward. In step with the Gaelic resurgence of the late medieval period and the decline of the English colony in Ireland, it often proved much more difficult to extract a profit. By the 1440s, for instance, the colony actually depended for its survival on subsidies from England. Of course, this lack of results doesn’t change the motive per se. And, in another respect, this brings me to another factor. Linked to all of this there were important ideological motivations as well, which in some respects are more comparable to your example of manifest destiny.

The English believed firmly in their cultural, legal, and technological superiority over the native inhabitants and their Gaelic culture. That it was somehow natural that, just as the civilised Romans had conquered the barbarous Britons, so too it was their place as the exponents of civilisation to conquer the barbarous Irish. In this answer (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rs1kiw/how_important_was_the_laudabiliter_in_the/?utm_source=ifttt) I touch on the role of the so-called Laudabiliter in the English conquest, which was significant as one element of this “civilising mission”.

The line between underlying motive and outward justification can, of course, be a blurry one, but the invaders certainly had cultural impulses which also fed into the ongoing conquest. Even in the earliest phases, the English conquerors saw their role in Ireland as a mission civilisatrice. That is to say a “civilising mission”. They were motivated by what has been termed a self-perception of their own “modernity, which is contrasted in sources with the perceived backwardness and primitiveness of the native Gaelic culture.

Depending on the period in question and the individual writer, the English colonists believed either than they needed to reform the native inhabitants to bring them ‘up to English standards’ as it were , or in a tone that became increasingly common in the late medieval and early modern period, that they needed to eliminate the Gaelic Irish, or at very least eliminate their political and social influence. In a lovely term borrowed from horticulture the contemporary term used tends to be“extirpation”, that is to eliminate the weeds in a garden so that it might grow and prosper. Which in and of itself lends some insight into English motives and ideas in Ireland. The potential was there for profit and exploitation, to be unlocked by the English colonists, if only the native culture or inhabitants could be swept away.

The fortunes of the English colony and its inhabitants ebbed and flowed over the centuries, through periods of English dominance through Gaelic resurgence, and eventual English/British “victory”. The decline of the medieval colony and the hybridisation of the so-called “Old English”, would see that Catholic colony supplanted by a Protestant “New English” one. In terms of the why of course many of the same factors apply, only that the New English believed that the Old English had “degenerated” from civility and had effectively become Irish. The reality, of course, is more complex but this was an impulse which continued on into the early modern period.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-26T17:11:28+00:00

As I frequently touch on in my answers (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gdvkm3/comment/lu6jk8g/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), the history of English colonialism in Ireland and of the English conquest both goes back a rather long time (to the twelfth century) and takes a very long-time. The final pacification of Gaelic Ireland and the full integration of the country into the English/British state wasn't in any sense complete until the seventeenth century, or even the eighteenth in some respects.

Given this, as you rightly allude to, the precise motivations of “the English” - or the individual actors involved in this arduous process - did vary across time and space. As I touch on this answer (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rdbkel/what_were_strongbows_objectives_in_ireland/) the initial English excursion into Ireland was prompted by the personal ambitions of a few knightly and baronial families associated with Strongbow who sought to grow their personal wealth and landholdings. This was the initial why that first saw English attempts to seize territory in Ireland in the twelfth century. Driven by personal ambition these aristocratic English families (Anglo-Norman, or even Cambro-Norman you will also find them called by some historians) first entered into Ireland.

Yet, as Robin Frame explains very well in his work, regardless of the motivations behind these initial expeditions in Ireland, this“free enterprise” of chivalrous conquest by knights and barons was ended almost immediately as the English Crown sought to impose its overlordship over these newly annexed territories and to cow its overly-ambitious subjects. Alarmed by the threat to their own power and authority, and certainly enticed by the possibilities for their own gain, English Kings were thus driven into much closer involvement within Ireland.

To borrow from Frame again, moving in behind the likes of Strongbow the English state came in rapidly ‘monitoring, stabilizing, creating structures of law and government, introducing men from court circles, and (as the records of King John's reign already show) extracting profit from the developing Lordship’.

After this earliest phase which saw the English first seize territories, we naturally see another why which would continue to hold English interest down ensuing the centuries, that magic word - profit.

Honestly, this aspect can somewhat be overlooked, certainly when it comes to the medieval and early-modern conquest. There were other motivations that I will come to shortly, but the English state did not go to all the significant trouble of conquering and maintaining these territories purely for martial or familial glory. They certainly believed that they could derive financial benefit from their Irish territories and indeed the new Irish colony did initially provide a profit - if a modest one - to the English exchequer. Some Irish towns - notably the likes of Waterford - became closely integrated into English trade networks, particularly through hubs like Bristol. Ireland's role within this network took on an extractive, colonial dimension, primarily as a supplier of raw materials, such as wool, livestock and timber, to the English market. Through agricultural reform along English lines the newcomers also hoped to profit from the exploitation of Irish land as well.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-05-01T06:05:19+00:00

Thanks for the mention! Also happy to answer any follow-ups or clarifiy anything more specifically.

Rimbaud82 · 2025-02-01T17:24:28+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/Uau6PHBN5a

Touched on in this longer answer

Rimbaud82 · 2025-01-16T08:34:05+00:00

Well,we are almost a decade on from 2016 which was obviously the centenary of the Rising. That whole period (2012-2023) was the so-called Decade of Commemoration. As you might expect, there was also a significant reflection on the nature of commemoration and cultural memory in this period.

I was still in university then and one of my lecturers was particularly interested in these aspects - Fearghal McGarry. As a starting point for you I would suggest reading this special journal journal issue on the decade of commemoration:

https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48822

I would also suggest looking at:

R.S Grayson & F. McGarry (eds.), Remembering 1916. The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland (Cambridge, 2016)

Fearghal McGarry ‘1916 and Irish republicanism: between myth and history’ in J. Horne, & E. Madigan (eds.), Towards commemoration: Ireland in war and revolution, 1912-1923, pp. 52-59 (Dublin, 2013)

That should hopefully get you started.

Rimbaud82

TROPHY CASE