The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland. By John P. Prendergast, esq. Paperback – 20 Dec. 2005

The astonishing revelations unearthed by Prendergast remain a vital source. As such they both confirm and challenge the importance of source material - since without this material the diverse interpretations of the motivations and explanations involved would be even more confusing and controversial than they are ! What is also amazing is that Prendergast expresses his interpretation of the underlying historical causes in forthright language we associate with a Marxist class analysis - but from a period predating most of Marx's own works ! Many authors cite Prendergast, but this intriguing fact is not referred to. In this sense the work is a source material in its own right - on the origins of class perspectives on history. It is refreshing to read a work that is both serious in its attitude to evidence and free of the pretended neutrality that has come to pass as a necessary and admirable stance. The selectivity of the choices of authors who quote Prendergast can be revealed and better understood by direct reference to Prendergast himself. Any student of the history of Ireland ought therefore to undertake to read this author both as source and challenge to the deeper task of consideration of what exactly is history as a discipline !

This is a copy of a book written in the 1860’s and so the opinion of the author has to be seen as of that time. It’s not a history of these events as we would know it today, but a collection of bits of information, much of it based on letters. It’s an account of the ruling elite in Ireland who were deported, transported or sent to Connaught after Cromwell and the Parliament won the Civil War. They were mainly Royalists and Catholics, and included William Spenser aged 7 at the beginning of the war, the grandson of the poet Edmund who had acquired his estate only during the Elizabethan plantation.As a child at school, I was told that all the Irish were transported. What they failed to mention was that everyone meant everyone important and not the peasants etc.The following quote from the book gives an example of this, “Colonel Sadlier asks whether any Irish Papist shall be permitted to live in the town of Wexford ? If any, whether all the seamen, boatmen, fishermen, or how many ? How many packers and gillers of herrings ? How many coopers ? How many masons and carpenters ? “.What good was it to have a town or business in a town without workers ? and this applied to the estates and farms confiscated, what good were they to anyone without workers, especially in a land decimated of people by war and the ensuing famine and disease.This is an interesting book, with lots of details and well worth reading.When they say people were sent to Barbados at that time, you have to bear in mind that the English civil servants had very little idea about the Caribbean, and the Irish went to Montserrat, Jamaica etc.