Qualla: Confederate Ireland

Confederate Ireland: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kweedado2, CC BY-SA 3.0. Pro Deo, Rege, et Patria, Hiberni Unanimes. For God, King, and Fatherland, Ireland is United. The motto encircled the seal of the Supreme Council of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland - a flaming heart at the foot of a cross, a dove above, the harp of Ireland on one side and the English crown on the other. It was minted at Kilkenny in 1642 by a body of Catholic aristocrats, clergy and military men who had just declared themselves the government of two-thirds of Ireland. They would not survive a decade. But for ten years they did something Ireland had never quite managed before and would not manage again until 1922: they governed themselves.

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Image: Kweedado2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Confederate Ireland: How a rebellion became a state

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, Van Brugens, Public domain. The Confederation grew out of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, when long-simmering Catholic grievances - about land seized in the plantations, about religious discrimination, about exclusion from office - erupted in Ulster and spread south. By the autumn of 1642 the rebels had organi...

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Image: Unknown, Van Brugens | Public domain

Confederate Ireland: Two Irelands inside one alliance

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kweedado2, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Confederation was always, awkwardly, two coalitions glued together. The Old English were descendants of the Anglo-Norman families who had come over with Strongbow in 1169; they were Catholic, but they thought of themselves as loyal subjects of the English crown whose property...

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Image: Kweedado2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Confederate Ireland: The Papal Nuncio and the politics of refusal

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sconosciuto, Public domain. In 1645 Pope Innocent X sent Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, the archbishop of Fermo, to Kilkenny as nuncio extraordinary. He landed at Kenmare from La Rochelle carrying weapons, military supplies and what one contemporary called a very large sum of money. Rinuccini's brief was to d...

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Image: sconosciuto | Public domain

Confederate Ireland: Benburb and the seductions of victory

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. In June 1646, three months after Rinuccini's intervention, Owen Roe O'Neill destroyed a Scottish Covenanter army at Benburb in Tyrone, killing several thousand. For a few weeks Confederate Ireland looked unstoppable. O'Neill's Ulster Catholic army was now the most formidable forc...

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Confederate Ireland: 1649 and the price of being late

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit After Samuel Cooper, Public domain. Oliver Cromwell landed near Dublin in August 1649 with the New Model Army. By then the Confederates had reluctantly joined a formal alliance with the Royalists, but the internal fights had cost them their best year. Drogheda fell in September with a massacre that became its own a...

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Image: After Samuel Cooper | Public domain

Confederate Ireland: What Kilkenny remembers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kweedado2, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Confederate Assembly met in what is now Rothe House on Parliament Street, in a city that wore its Catholic identity openly and at considerable risk. The printing press at Kilkenny issued proclamations and the mint struck coins worth real silver. The flag of the Confederation,...

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Image: Kweedado2 | CC BY-SA 3.0