Northern Ireland 2125?

It absolutely was a colonisation, and was understood as such, and spoken of as such, by the people who implemented it at the time.

Yes, there was a natural, organic population exchange between the east of Ulster and the west of Scotland going back a long way, leading to much cultural commonality, trading links, political links, etc. None of that was colonisation.

But, remember, Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was claimed by the English crown, not the Scots crown. The plantations of 1609 were not devised and implemented by Scotland, but by the entirely separate kingdom of England. And they involved systematic dispossession of the indigenous population, regardless of their links with Scotland, and the transfer of their lands to planters sent by the English government, managed by English leaders appointed by the English government for the purpose. (Note that Ulster's Scottish-linked population at this time was predominantly Catholic, and definitely not loyal to the English crown, so they were dispossessed along with their Gaelic Irish neighbours.) The whole thing was funded by the English government; they in turn obtained funding in the City of London.

The plantation involved, as I hope you learned at school, the parcelling out of large estates to "undertakers", who had to be Protestant, and loyal to the King, which meant that they could be either English or Scottish, since the two countries shared a king. In practice they were a mix, but the Scottish planters were drawn predominantly from the lowlands, and not from the more Gaelic west of Scotland with which Ulster had its historic and organic links. The parcelling out of land was done by the Irish administration which answered to the English government, not the Scots, which meant that the English planters — Chichester, Parsons, Pierrepoint — tended to get the largest and best estates. Scottish planters included the Caulfields and the Humes; they were from the lowlands/borders, and had no previous links to Ulster. The one prominent planter family that sounds as though it might have been Irish — Blayney — was actually Welsh.

The undertakers in turn had to bring in (Protestant, loyal) subtenants to actually farm the land — they were prohibited from subletting to the indigenous population, since the whole point of the plantation was to displace them. The subtenants, again, could be English or Scottish; probably two-thirds to three-quarters of them were Scottish. A high proportion of English subtenants gave up after a short time when plantation turned out to be tougher than they had been led to believe; the Scots were made of sterner stuff.

As a result of the plantation Ulster had two distinct Scottish-linked populations — the indigenous, mostly Catholic, Ulster people with organic links to the West of Scotland, dispossesed by the plantation, and the planted, exclusively Protestant, mostly lowland Scots. But in the century or so after plantation the indigenous Ulster Scots largely embraced Presbyterianism and so became acceptable as subtenants; this opened the way to a considerable mixing of the two populations, with the result that most Ulster Protestants today have descent both from planters and from Scottish-linked population that was displaced by plantation.

I wouldn’t disagree with the majority of what you say in this post and indeed would accept that most of it is factual. But unfortunately, it moves into non-factual propaganda.

I said in my post that it could fairly be referred to as colonisation if you wish, but could also reasonably be challenged as colonisation.

Honestly? No, it couldn’t reasonably be challenged as colonisation. We’ve got military invasion; we’ve got the seizure of land; we’ve got the dispossession and oppression of the native population; we’ve got the importation of settlers and the establishment of settlements, all with explicit intention of changing the nature (and loyalties) of the population of the area. This isn’t some méthode champenoise sparking wine pale imitation of colonisation; this is your genuine champagne colonisation. Absolute textbook example.

What we can say, though, is that the history of Ulster does not consist only of the plantation of Ulster, and that even before the plantation there were links between Ulster, especially east Ulster, and Scotland.

as well as the point I made it earlier the point I forgot, which is very important in this context, is that the motive was not to steal resources, rather the motive was to defend against attack. Could we at least agree that is why it was ‘colonised’.The Irish were getting too friendly with major powers on the continent - not on like Russia getting nervous about Ukraine attempting to join NATO, and 400 years ago, the sensible course of action was to deal with the threat.

Oh, no, not at all. The English invasion of Ulster was not a defensive measure; the Gaelic (Irish and Scots) rulers in Ulster never attacked England.

The actual position is this:

The English had long claimed the crown of Ireland, but had never made that claim a reality in more than a small part of Ireland, and not at all in Ulster. The fiction of English rule in Ulster was maintained by granting English titles to the Gaelic rulers already in place; the English could then pretend that those chiefs ruled Ulster, exercising powers and authorities granted by the crown; the chiefs actually ruled Ulster, and commanded allegiance from the people, through their authority as clan chiefs and taoisigh under the Brehon system; they themselves could — and did — invoke whichever status was going to be more useful to them in any particular circumstance.

This creative ambiguity worked well until it didn’t. It stopped working when the Tudors decided they wanted to extend direct royal control beyond the Pale, and over the whole country.

They didn’t start with the plantation of Ulster. They started two generations previously, in Munster and Leinster, requiring Gaelic and Old English rulers to affirm their submission to the crown; to embrace Protestantism; to implement the dissolution of the monasteries; etc. This approach had mixed success; the Gaelic and Old English rulers quite liked the ambiguities of the status quo, and were reluctant to let go of them. So when an English official backed up with a body of troops would demand pledges of allegiance, affirmations of religious conformity, etc, they happily gave these, and as soon as the official and the troops had moved on they went back do doing exactly as they wanted, politically, religiously and in every other way.

Attempts to compel real submission to the crown through the force of arms did not go well; the Irish had a military advantage fighting on home ground, and English forces were mostly defeated. All the attempts did was to provoke rebellions and weaken claims to royal authority by demonstrating how hard it was to enforce them.

This is where things got brutal. Unable to carry their point by defeating Irish troops, the English embarked on a policy of weakening their enemies’ morale and cutting off their supplies by devasting the country, the systematic wholesale murder of the civilian population, and the engineering of famine. These tactics were successful; up to a third of the population of Munster died of war, hunger or plague, and the survivors mostly lived on the run — in the woods or in the hills, unable to farm or tend livestock.

The devastated land was then seized and settled in the plantation of Munster. The idea was that a new English overclass would civilise the native Irish, who would work as a happy, loyal peasantry, embracing English ways and English religion, and tilling the land as tenants of its English owners.

Unsurprisingly, this was not a resounding success; the surviving native population declined to become a happy, loyal peasantry and, although there were many thousands of English settlers, there were not enough of them, and they were too thinly spread, to be able to enforce their authority. A large and very expensive standing army had to be maintained in the planted areas, which were never peaceable. The taxes paid by the English settlers were not enough to pay for this, so the plantation was a massive drain on the crown, which was very much not part of the original plan.

This was the context within which the English attempted to extend their control over Ulster. The native leaders — principally Hugh O’Neill — tried to conciliate the English for as long as possible and to maintain the familiar ambiguous status quo, because they knew what awaited them if this failed; they had seen what was done in Munster. O’Neill and the others reached out to Spain not because they wished to attack the English, but because they wished to defend themselves against the English. They knew that to maintain their own rule in Ulster it was not enough to to be able to beat an English expeditionary force in pitched battles; they would need to be able to protect Ulster from the kind of wholesale invasion and devastation that Munster had experienced.

They very nearly succeeded; under the viceroyalty of the Earl of Essex in 1599-1600, English power in Ireland nearly collapsed. But the surrender of the Spanish forces in 1601 turned the table, and eventually O’Neill and his allies surrendered, and then fled, clearing the way for the plantation of Ulster.

The English having learned from the mistakes of the plantation of Munster, the plantation of Ulster was a much larger affair. The idea was to introduce not just a new ruling class (the Undertakers) but also a new class of tenant farmers (the subtenants), relegating the native population to the status of landless labourers. The settler population was to be large enough to maintain its own authority, and not to require a permanent army of occupation, as in Munster.

This had nothing to do with repelling threats from continental powers; the continental powers only ever took an interest in Ulster in reaction to England’s determination to conquer it in the first place. The dispossession of the native population was not a defensive measure against an external threat, but a core strategy for asserting and sustaining English rule.

Could we also agree that what you call the ‘coloniser’ has left, or at least agreed to leave as soon as they are asked?

Well, they haven’t left. The successor state to the kingdom of England, the UK, is still there. We can agree that they are committed to leave, if a majority asks. But we can also agree that that majority is to be determined by reference to an area specifically carved out with the express intention of making it difficult to assemble that majority.

We are where we are. The Planation happened; partition happened; all the other events which have shaped Ireland today happened, and whatever we may think about them we can’t unhappen them. Whatever your views about the plantations or about partition, the legitimacy of NI today doesn’t depend on whether the colonisation of Ulster was a necessary defensive measure or an aggressive imperial invasion; it depends on the GFA, endorsed on both sides of the border by votes of the people.

Your stuff around the arrival of my ancestors and the level of integration and intermarriage you suggest, are fairly non-factual. My ancestors were being persecuted in Scotland because of their religion, and were not only heading to Ireland as economic migrants fleeing persecution, but also other lands in the world.

Obviously I know nothing about your own family history. But most Ulster protestants can count ancestors of Scottish, mostly Lowland, background who came with the plantation, and also ancestors of Scottish Gaelic background who came long before the plantations. Those two populations have long since ceased to be distinct.

If NI wants to move on it needs to devolve from the UK and plot it's own course and stand on its own feet as an independent state.

It may decide to apply to join the EU.

It may request to partner with ROI.

Both or either of the above may accept or reject it.