It is not republican separatism that Tone considered his most important contribution to the history of Ireland, but his effort to heal its religious divisions. The land confiscations and plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the penal laws of the eighteenth and the triumph of Orangeism have contributed to the long-accepted image of a besieged Protestant minority amidst an aggrieved and hostile Catholic majority. The Catholic populace was not poised to overturn the Protestant land settlement and state during the eighteenth century. But a Protestant siege mentality was undeniable and it was the heightened sectional identities of the Protestants and the Ulster Presbyterians which dictated Tone's Catholic mission. Catholic emancipation was the most heated issue of the day and it was as a Catholic campaigner rather than a United Irishman that Tone was considered dangerous by the authorities.

I

Catholicism was seen by Protestants as a traitorous creed, subject to an external power in Rome, which upheld the Jacobite cause until 1766 and reputedly counselled the killing of heretics and the dethroning of heretic kings. To Protestants the Glorious Revolution symbolised the defeat of this foreign Catholic conspiracy. Protestantism became synonymous with liberty, Catholicism with slavery and poverty. The idea that popery also enslaved the mind was instinctive with Irish Protestants and is evident even in Tone and Drennan, the Catholics’ most outspoken champions.

This intense distrust of Catholicism and the belief in the essential inferiority of its adherents has long been underestimated as a factor in framing the eighteenth-century penal code. Political and economic considerations, deemed at one time the dominant motivation for the penal laws, were indeed vital. The seventeenth-century land settlement had transferred most of the land and the political power which went with it to Protestant ownership. The penal laws were designed to protect this new status quo. In this they were entirely successful, even though their impact on the practice of Catholicism as a religion and Catholics as a whole has been exaggerated.

However, the penal laws did represent a state of mind among Protestants, a way, if not of eradicating popery, then of controlling and neutralising it, and they gave rise to tensions which increased rather than diminished with time.