The Catholic Question and the Irish Confessional State

Abstract

Prominent among the problems faced by the historian who wishes to speak of the ancien régime is that of periodisation. The solution any historian may offer will, it has already been suggested, depend largely on how he chooses to deal with the prior problem of definition.¹ However, if the term is applied to Ireland, a terminus a quo for the discussion appears easy to establish. So profound were the political, social and economic consequences of the Elizabethan, Cromwellian and Williamite conquests, that one would be unlikely to attempt to assign the origins of the Irish ancien régime to any other period than, broadly speaking, the seventeenth century.²