atic endeavours to complete the
transformation were soon rendered abortive by being coupled with huge
confiscations of land. The policy of converting the members of the clans
into freeholders was subordinated to the policy of planting British
colonists. After this there was no question of fusion of races or
institutions. Plantations on a large scale, self-supporting,
self-protecting, became the policy alike of the soldier and the
statesman.

The inevitable result of these methods was that it was not until a
comparatively late date that a political conception of an Irish nation
first began to emerge out of the congeries of clans. In the State Papers
of the sixteenth century the clans are frequently spoken of as
'nations.' Even as late as the eighteenth century a Gaelic poet, in a
typical lament, thus identifies his country with the fortunes of her
great families:--

The O'Doherty is not holding sway, nor his noble race;
The O'Moores are not strong, that once were brave--
O'Flaherty is not in power, nor his kinsfolk;
And sooth to say, the O'Briens have long since become English.

Of O'Rourke there is no mention--my sharp wounding!
Nor yet of O'Donnell in Erin;
The Geraldines they are without vigour--without a nod,
And the Burkes, the Barrys, the Walshes of the slender ships.[13]

The modern political idea of Irish nationality at length asserted itself
as the result of three main causes. The bond of a common grievance
against the English foe was created by the gradual abandonment of the
policy of setting clan against clan in favour of impartial confiscation
of land from friendly as well as from hostile chiefs. Secondly, when the
English had destroyed the natural leaders, the clan chiefs, and
attempted to proselytise their adherents, the political leadership
largely passed to the Roman Catholic Church, which very naturally
defended the religion common to the members of all the clans, by trying
to unite them against the English enemy. Nationality, in this sense, of
course applied only to Celtic Roman Catholic Ireland. The first real
idea of a United Ireland arose out of the third cause, the religious
grievances of the Protestant dissenters and the commercial grievances of
the Protestant manufacturers and artisans in the eighteenth century, who
suffered under a common disability with the Roman Catholics, and many of
whom came in the end to make common cause with them. But even long after