Talk:Battle of Aughrim

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Related task forces... British military history task force French military history task force

Should this article not be put under Battles of Ireland, considering it happened in Ireland, rather than under Battles of England?

Its is the category of battles of the williamite war, which is a sub category of battles of Ireland.

On another subject, who is assessing these articles? This one has been awarded "start class" meaning "not useless" but still very poor. I find this difficult to understand as I think this article gives a pretty full account of the battle of Aughrim in the space provided, a summary of its strategic importance and is illustrated. What more does it need?

Jdorney 19:45, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

I share your puzzlement. The treatment given to the battle is reasonably comprehensive, and considerably better than many others I have come across in these pages. Rcpaterson 02:35, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Ruin of the Gaelic Nation

The defeat of the Jacobites at Aughrim was, very much, an Irish battle, in that it spelt the defeat of the Gaelic nation--one of the reasons why it was so fondly remembered by Orangemen. The events at Limerick were mere consequences of this defeat! With Sarsfield gone, and many of his remaining followers also exiled, the Gaelic society and Gaelic culture collapsed. The Irish language became the language of a downtrodden peasantry. The English Williamite victors introduced the Penal Laws--probably, with the exception of laws passed to persecute the Jews--the most savage body of repressive legislation enacted in Europe. Their objective was to reduce the Catholic Irish to abject misery. Indeed, the repeal of the last of the Penal Laws only occured when the Catholic Kerry barrister, Daniel O' Connell, took his seat in the English House of Commons in 1829.

I realize that Wikipedia cannot be responsible for what is written on other sites, but I would like to place on record that I have objected strongly to the concluding sentence on the BBC's History site Williamite Wars: Battle of Aughrim, which states "a century of peace ensued in Ireland" http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/ni/aughrim.shtml. It ensued simply because the Native Irish were at the mercy of a system of viciously repressive legislation.

It is to Wikipedia's credit that an Irish poet is quoted in the main article here. The poet, himself guardian of a hereditary function, acted, amongst other things, as genealogist, cementing the Gaelic princely social structures. Yeats was to take two lines of one of the last, but one of the greatest Irish poets, Aogán Ó Rathaille, and express them in English:

And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride
His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified.(1)

From henceforth, the Irish poet would be a farm laborer, like the wild Eoin Ruadh Ó Súilleabhán, or to invoke another Yeatsian phrase, a beggar singing to beggars, like Antaine Ó Raifteirí (Yeats's Blind Raftery). O'Connell, himself, has been called "King of the Beggars." For the Catholic Irish were often less prosperous than beggars and it can be argued that the Penal Laws, although repealed, had given rise to social conditions that were one of the causes of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840's.

(1)Yeats, W. B. "The Curse of Cromwell" in The Poems, Revised. New York: Macmillan Publihing Company, 1989, p.304.--PeadarMaguidhir 19:53, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to object strongly to your usage of the phrase "Native Irish". Also, if the purpose of the Penal Laws was to "reduce the Catholic Irish to abject misery", why then did the laws affect Presbyterians (who spoke Gaelic) so badly - their marraiges were not recognised even at a time when sufferage in that sense was given to Roman Catholics.

The fact is that the battles in Ireland were part of a much larger European bid for supremacy by the Roman Catholic French king. The Penal Laws were introduced specifically to reduce the possibility of another uprising which might pave the way for a backdoor invasion by the French. Of course, the history and politics.. and the consequences.. were much more complex than that. --Mal 13:14, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I believe that you are overstating your case. No one denies that there was oppressive legislation aimed at Protestants who were not members of the Established Church, the Church of England. That is one of the primary reasons why many Presbyterians emigrated to the American colonies, where, be it noted, they identified themselves as Scotch-Irish. But there can be no comparison between the legislation aimed at this group of Protestants and the Penal Laws, the objective of which was to reduce the Catholic Irish to such a state of misery that the process was effectively an effort at a long and agonizing genocide. (The Great Famine--even though it occurred after the repeal of these laws--was caused, to a large extent, by the effects of the Penal Laws on Catholic Irish society. Consequently, the process of genocide was almost successful.) I have no difficulty in agreeing that laws aimed at Presbyterians were unjust. But whereas (to quote your own example) Presbyterian marriages were not recognized, the very existence of Catholics was not recognized.

Also, we all agree that this battle can also be seen in a European context, with power struggles allied to religious issues, as was the case with so many European wars. (Great powers, since history was first recorded, liked to settle their differences, whenever possible, by battles on someone else's territory.) However what you describe as "a much larger European bid for supremacy by the Roman Catholic French king" is again overstating the case.

Finally, by the "Native Irish," I mean those who lived in Ireland prior to the Plantations, as well as their descendants. I believe that this is a precise term, rather than an offensive term.PeadarMaguidhir 14:49, 24 August 2006 (UTC)