On this episode of the Irish History Show we discussed the Penal Laws in Ireland. The Penal Laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on the kingdom’s Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant “Dissenters”. Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy.

The laws were repealed through a series of relief acts beginning in 1771. The last significant disability, the requirement that Members of Parliament take the Oath of Supremacy, was removed in 1829, after Ireland had been incorporated by the 1800 Acts of Union into a United Kingdom with Great Britain.

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Intro / Outro music “Sliabh” from Aislinn. Licensed under creative commons from the free music archive.