Between the 1550s and the 1690s the English Crown, and then the Commonwealth, confiscated Irish-owned land and granted it to settlers from Britain. This page sets out each plantation, what happened county by county, and how the share of land owned by Catholics changed, with the source for every figure. Where sources disagree, we say so.
The first plantation, under Mary I, on the lands of the O'Moores and O'Connors.
The first plantation was in 1556, in what were renamed Queen's County (Laois) and King's County (Offaly), after Mary I and Philip. The new county towns were Maryborough (now Portlaoise) and Philipstown (now Daingean). An act of the Irish parliament in 1556 vested the territories in the Crown and made them shires; it was repealed in 1962.
The O'Moore and O'Connor clans who held the land had raided the Pale. The Lord Deputy, the Earl of Sussex, ordered them dispossessed. They retreated to hills and bogs and fought the settlement for much of the next 40 years. In 1578 most of the O'Moore ruling families were killed at Mullaghmast, having been invited there for talks. Settlers were hard to attract and settlement stayed clustered around forts.
The cost taught the Crown to look for private money for later schemes. In the more peaceful early 17th century the area drew many more landowners and tenants, and new small plantations were made there.
Sources: Wikipedia: Plantations of Ireland ↗ · Wikipedia: Settlement of Laois and Offaly Act 1556 ↗
After the Desmond Rebellions, the Earl of Desmond's estates were granted to English ‘Undertakers’.
The Munster Plantation followed the defeat of the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83). The Geraldine Earl of Desmond's estates, spread through modern Limerick, Cork, Kerry and Tipperary, were confiscated. In 1584 Sir Valentine Browne surveyed the land for allocation to ‘Undertakers’, wealthy colonists who undertook to bring tenants from England.
The scheme fell short. The Crown hoped for around 15,000 colonists; a report of 1589 found the Undertakers had brought about 700 English tenants, heads of households, which historians put at three or four thousand people. Some grants in Kerry and south-west Cork were reversed when the MacCarthy Mór argued the rebels had been his subordinates. Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser were among the Undertakers.
When the Nine Years' War reached Munster in 1598 most settlers left their land for the walled towns or England. After 1603 the plantation was rebuilt under George Carew, and by the 1620s the settler population was four times larger than before, concentrated in Youghal, Bandon, Kinsale and Cork city. Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, built a fortune there.
Counties: Cork · Kerry · Limerick · Tipperary
Sources: Wikipedia: Plantations of Ireland ↗
The largest plantation: six escheated counties, with private Scottish settlement in Antrim and Down.
After the Nine Years' War and the Flight of the Earls in 1607, the lands of O'Neill, O'Donnell and their followers were declared forfeit. Cahir O'Doherty's rebellion in Inishowen in 1608 gave the Lord Deputy, Arthur Chichester, the reason to plan a far bigger scheme. The Attorney-General, John Davies, treated the chiefs as sole owners of their whole territories so all of it could be escheated, and English judges ruled that land held under gavelkind, the Irish custom of inheritance, had no standing in English law.
The official plantation covered six counties: Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Tyrone and Coleraine, which became County Londonderry. It took in an estimated half a million acres of arable land. Undertakers got grants of about 3,000 acres on condition they settled at least 48 adult males, English-speaking Protestants. Servitors (veterans of the war) got land too. The City of London's livery companies were pressed to fund the work and were granted the site of Derry, renamed Londonderry, and lands in Coleraine, managed by the Irish Society. The Church of Ireland received the lands of the Catholic Church. Under the plan the native Irish landowners kept about a quarter of the land.
Antrim and Down were not part of the official scheme. From 1606 Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton settled Lowland Scots in north Down, and in 1607 Sir Randall MacDonnell settled 300 Scots Presbyterian families on his land in Antrim. (Two earlier private attempts in east Ulster, by Sir Thomas Smith in the Ards from 1572 and by the Earl of Essex in Antrim from 1573, had failed with heavy loss of life.)
A 1622 survey counted 6,402 British adult males on plantation lands, and another 4,000 Scots in Antrim and Down. By the 1630s there were about 20,000 adult male settlers; the total settler population is put at up to 80,000 in the Plantation of Ulster article, and 80,000 to 150,000 in the Plantations of Ireland article. Settlers became local majorities in the Finn and Foyle valleys, north Armagh and east Tyrone. The planned removal of the Irish mostly did not happen: undertakers could not find enough British tenants and took Irish ones, though the Irish now held poorer land. Most of Ulster's towns date from this period.
Counties: Armagh · Cavan · Donegal · Fermanagh · Londonderry (Derry) · Tyrone · Antrim · Down
Sources: Wikipedia: Plantation of Ulster ↗ · Wikipedia: Plantations of Ireland ↗
Titles were checked, and landowners without good title gave up a share of their land.
In 1610 land in north Wexford was confiscated from the MacMurrough-Kavanaghs. Because few landowning families had sound legal title, they were required to surrender a quarter of their land to have the rest confirmed. On the Wexford precedent, small plantations followed in Laois and Offaly, Longford, Leitrim and north Tipperary. In Munster, Irish lords gave up as much as a third of their estates for recognised deeds.
From 1632 the Lord Deputy, Thomas Wentworth, confiscated land in Wicklow and planned a plantation of all Connacht, under which Catholic landowners would lose between a quarter and a half of their estates. It went ahead only in Sligo and Roscommon before the wars of the 1640s. Wentworth's challenges to Catholic titles are named in the Plantations of Ireland article as one of the major causes of the 1641 Rebellion.
Counties: Wexford · Longford · Leitrim · Laois · Offaly · Tipperary · Wicklow · Sligo · Roscommon
Sources: Wikipedia: Plantations of Ireland ↗
After the conquest of 1649–53, most remaining Catholic-owned land was confiscated.
The Act for the Settlement of Ireland was passed by the Rump Parliament on 12 August 1652. It excluded 104 named men from pardon for life and estate, and anyone who could not show ‘constant good affection’ to the Commonwealth in 1649–50 lost three-quarters of their land, with poorer land in Connacht or County Clare offered in part in lieu. Land went to the ‘Adventurers’ who had lent money to Parliament under the Adventurers' Act of 1642, and to about 12,000 New Model Army veterans in place of wages; many sold their grants. Allocation used William Petty's Down Survey of 1655–56.
Landowners were ordered to move west of the Shannon by 1 May 1654. In practice, the 1652 Act article says, most Catholic landowners stayed on their land as tenants and the numbers transplanted or executed were small; the mass of the population was expected to stay where it was and work under the new owners. Historian John Morrill called the act and the forced movements ‘perhaps the greatest exercise in ethnic cleansing in early modern Europe’.
The Plantations of Ireland article puts the number of Irish people sold into indentured servitude in the Caribbean and North American colonies under the Commonwealth at some 12,000, and those who went into exile on the Continent at 34,000.
After the Restoration, the Act of Settlement 1662 returned some land to Royalists and ‘innocent Catholics’ but left most confiscated land in Protestant hands. The Cromwellian conquest article says about a third of the confiscated land was restored.
Sources: Wikipedia: Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 (incl. section ‘To Hell or to Connaught’, quoting Pádraig Lenihan) ↗ · Wikipedia: Plantations of Ireland ↗ · Wikipedia: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland ↗ · Wikipedia: Act of Settlement 1662 ↗ · Wikipedia: Down Survey ↗
After the Jacobite defeat of 1691, a further round of forfeitures.
James II's Patriot Parliament of 1689 voted to repeal the Cromwellian settlement and return land to the heirs of those dispossessed after 1641. The Jacobite defeat reversed that. The Treaty of Limerick (3 October 1691) protected Jacobites who swore allegiance to William and Mary, but the estates of those killed before it remained liable to forfeiture.
The Williamites proposed indicting more than 3,900 opponents. In the ‘Williamite Settlement’ over 2,000 lost their property to the Commissioners of Forfeitures, and the land was sold on in the 1690s. The Penal Laws followed from 1695.
Sources: Wikipedia: Williamite War in Ireland ↗ · Wikipedia: Act of Settlement 1662 ↗
The share of land in Ireland owned by Catholics, as given in the sources read. These are historians' estimates, not counts, and the articles do not always agree.
| When | Catholic share | Notes and sources |
|---|---|---|
| 1600 | 90% | Act of Settlement 1662 ↗ · Williamite War in Ireland ↗ |
| 1641 (before the Confederate Wars) | 60% | Given as 60% in the Plantations of Ireland, Cromwellian conquest and Popery Act (McGrath) articles, and once in the Act of Settlement 1662 article. Another paragraph of that same article gives 41% for 1641. The figures disagree; we have not resolved which is right. Plantations of Ireland ↗ · Cromwellian conquest of Ireland ↗ · Popery Act 1704 (section ‘Effect’, citing Charles Ivar McGrath, 2021) ↗ · Act of Settlement 1662 ↗ |
| 1650s (Commonwealth) | 8–9% | The 1652 Act article says ‘just 8%’. Plantations of Ireland ↗ · Act of Settlement 1662 ↗ · Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 (incl. section ‘To Hell or to Connaught’, quoting Pádraig Lenihan) ↗ |
| After the Restoration (1660s) | 20% | Plantations of Ireland ↗ · Cromwellian conquest of Ireland ↗ |
| 1685 (accession of James II) | 22% | Act of Settlement 1662 ↗ · Williamite War in Ireland ↗ · Popery Act 1704 (section ‘Effect’, citing Charles Ivar McGrath, 2021) ↗ |
| After 1691 / 1704 | 14% | Act of Settlement 1662 ↗ · Popery Act 1704 (section ‘Effect’, citing Charles Ivar McGrath, 2021) ↗ |
| 1776 / 1800 | 5% | Arthur Young's figure for 1776, which McGrath says is probably an underestimate; the Act of Settlement 1662 article gives 5% by 1800 and notes that many owners had conformed to keep their land. McGrath also gives 1.5% of rent paid to Catholics in 1778. Popery Act 1704 (section ‘Effect’, citing Charles Ivar McGrath, 2021) ↗ · Act of Settlement 1662 ↗ |
The policy was real for landowners. A Cromwellian proclamation using the phrase is not attested.
In Irish popular memory the Commonwealth declared that the Catholic Irish must go ‘to Hell or to Connaught’. Historian Pádraig Lenihan, quoted in the Wikipedia article on the 1652 Act, writes that ‘the Cromwellians did not proclaim “To Hell or to Connaught”’, and that Connacht was not chosen because its land was poor: the Commonwealth rated it above Ulster. He suggests Clare was chosen for security, penning Catholic landowners between the sea and the Shannon.
What the 1652 Act did was let the authorities give dispossessed landowners poorer land in Connacht or Clare, and landowners were ordered to move by 1 May 1654. Most of the population, and in practice most Catholic landowners, stayed where they were, as tenants.
Source: Wikipedia: Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 (incl. section ‘To Hell or to Connaught’, quoting Pádraig Lenihan) ↗
More claims checked: Myths about Irish history
Only what the sources read for this page say about each county. A county with no named plantation still lost Catholic-owned land in the confiscations of the 1650s.
Not in the official scheme. Sir Randall MacDonnell settled 300 Scots Presbyterian families on his land in 1607; by 1622 some 4,000 Scottish adult males had settled in Antrim and Down. An earlier attempt by the Earl of Essex from 1573 failed, and included the killing of about 600 MacDonnells on Rathlin Island in 1575.
One of the six official plantation counties. Settlers became a local majority in north Armagh, one of the few areas where the Plantation of Ulster article thinks some displacement of the Irish population probably happened.
No county-specific plantation is named in the sources read for this page. Catholic-owned land here, as across Leinster, Munster and Ulster, was confiscated under the 1652 Act.
With Connacht, the destination named in the 1652 Act for transplanted landowners. Historian Pádraig Lenihan suggests Clare was chosen for security, to hold Catholic landowners between the sea and the Shannon.
Part of the Desmond lands planted in the 1580s. An earlier English colony at Kerrycurrihy by Cork Harbour (1568) was destroyed in 1569. By the 1620s settlers were concentrated in Youghal, Bandon, Kinsale and Cork city.
One of the six official plantation counties. Cahir O'Doherty's rebellion of 1608, from Inishowen, led to the plantation being enlarged. Settlers became a majority in the Finn and Foyle valleys of east Donegal. The town of Donegal's Diamond is an example of the plantation town plan.
Not in the official scheme. From 1606 James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery settled Lowland Scots in north Down. Sir Thomas Smith's earlier colony in the Ards (1572) collapsed after his son was killed in 1573.
Not planted. After 1685 French Huguenots settled mainly in Dublin, perhaps 10,000 people in all; their graveyard is off St Stephen's Green.
One of the six official plantation counties. In 1612 William Cole received a grant to found a settler town at Enniskillen.
In Connacht, the destination for transplanted landowners under the 1652 Act. Parts of Galway were not covered by the Down Survey, having been covered by the Strafford Survey of Connacht (1636–40) and not being for confiscation.
Part of the Desmond lands taken in the 1580s, though settlement was piecemeal: some grants were reversed when the MacCarthy Mór appealed for his dependants.
No county-specific plantation is named in the sources read for this page. Catholic-owned land here was subject to the 1652 confiscations.
English Catholic settlers came to Ireland in some numbers between 1603 and 1641; they were most common in Kilkenny, where they may have been half of all new English and Scottish arrivals.
Planted from 1556 as Queen's County, with Maryborough (Portlaoise) as county town, on O'Moore land. The O'Moore ruling families were massacred at Mullaghmast in 1578. Further small plantations followed in the early 17th century.
One of the small plantations made after the Wexford precedent of 1610.
Part of the Desmond lands confiscated and planted in the 1580s. The 1704 Popery Act barred Catholics from moving into Limerick (and Galway) city.
Planted as County Coleraine and given to the City of London's livery companies, who built Londonderry on the site of Derry and held the land through the Irish Society. Settlers became a majority in the Foyle valley.
One of the small plantations made after the Wexford precedent of 1610.
No county-specific plantation is named in the sources read for this page. Catholic-owned land here was subject to the 1652 confiscations.
In Connacht, the destination for transplanted landowners. The 1652 Act article gives the example of Thomas FitzGerald's parents, moved from Gorteens Castle to land at Turlough.
No county-specific plantation is named in the sources read for this page. Catholic-owned land here was subject to the 1652 confiscations.
The sources disagree. The Plantation of Ulster article says land in Monaghan was privately colonised with the king's support; the County Monaghan article says it was not planted like the rest of Ulster and stayed with the native chiefs until Scottish and English families settled after 1641.
Planted from 1556 as King's County, with Philipstown (Daingean) as county town, on O'Connor land. Further small plantations followed in the early 17th century.
Wentworth's planned Plantation of Connacht in the 1630s went ahead only here and in Sligo. Later, as part of Connacht, a destination for transplanted landowners.
Wentworth's planned Plantation of Connacht in the 1630s went ahead only here and in Roscommon.
Part of the Desmond lands in the Munster plantation, and north Tipperary saw one of the small plantations of the early 17th century.
Hugh O'Neill's county, and one of the six official plantation counties. Settlers became a local majority in east Tyrone.
No county-specific plantation is named in the sources read for this page. Catholic-owned land here was subject to the 1652 confiscations.
No county-specific plantation is named in the sources read for this page. Catholic-owned land here was subject to the 1652 confiscations.
In 1610 land in north Wexford was confiscated from the MacMurrough-Kavanaghs: the first of the smaller Stuart plantations and the model for those that followed.
Thomas Wentworth confiscated land in Wicklow in the 1630s.
The official plantation of 1609 covered six counties: Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Tyrone and Coleraine (County Londonderry). Antrim and Down were settled privately from 1606 by Hamilton, Montgomery and MacDonnell. Sources disagree about Monaghan.
Historian Pádraig Lenihan, quoted in the Wikipedia article on the 1652 Act, writes that ‘the Cromwellians did not proclaim “To Hell or to Connaught”’. The phrase belongs to popular memory of the settlement. The policy behind it was real but narrower: landowners were ordered west of the Shannon to Connacht or Clare, while most of the population stayed where it was.
On the figures in the sources read: about 90% in 1600, about 60% in 1641 (one article gives 41%), 8–9% in the 1650s, about 20% after the Restoration, 22% in 1685, 14% after 1691, and perhaps 5% by the late 18th century, though many owners by then had conformed to the Church of Ireland.
Laois and Offaly, in 1556 under Mary I, renamed Queen's County and King's County.
Wikipedia articles read October 2026, with the scholarship they cite. Know a better source, or something we have missed for a county? Tell us.