destroyed in the raids. These Norse settlers tended to merge into the native culture, especially after the High King, Brían Bóromha, defeated the Norse at Clontarf in a.d. 1014, turning the tide of the attempted Norse domination of the area.

However, in 1167 the first of the Anglo-Norman attempts at conquest began. In 1175 the High King Ruraidh Ó Conchobhar signed the Treaty of Windsor, in which he recognised the emperor of the Angevin Empire, Henry II, as suzerain lord of Ireland. Ruraidh was to be the last High King, for the Normans began to carve out their own petty kingdoms and fiefdoms. These original conquerors also merged into the Irish nation so well that when Henry VIII sent an emissary to address the Anglo-Norman barons of Ireland, his speech had to be translated into Irish for them to understand.

From the time of Mary Tudor, however, new colonisation programmes were devised that led to full-scale warfare with the native population, including the early colonists, which resulted in the Irish defeat at Kinsale in 1601. English common law was now enforced throughout the country, and a new colonisation was attempted in Ulster.

In 1641 the Irish rose up and were initially successful establishing a Confederate Parliament in Kilkenny. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell began his campaign on behalf of the English Parliament to reconquer Ireland, and the Irish armies were eventually defeated. Then began the most notorious of the English colonisation programmes. By May 1, 1654, all the native Irish population were ordered to remove west of the River Shannon into a reservation consisting of Co. Clare and the province of Connacht, on pain of death. Any natives found east of the Shannon from that date on could be killed immediately. Their lands were to be taken over by English colonists. Thousands of Irish were massacred, thousands more rounded up and sent mainly to Barbados. Yet the scheme to eradicate the Irish nation failed.

The Williamite Conquest of Ireland saw another colonisation scheme and the introduction of the Penal Laws, in which only members of the Anglican Church were given any form of civil rights. This caused a mass migration to the American colonies of Ulster Presbyterians, who played a leading role in the American War