In 1584, Richard Stanihurst, who was by then living in the Spanish Netherlands in self-imposed exile, wrote that the people of that country were ‘exceedingly amazed when they converse with a native of Ireland who professes to knowing no Irish’. That observation seemed to epitomise the position of natives of the English colony in Ireland in the sixteenth century, who found themselves facing the universal problems of colonists. Their racial origins were misunderstood by foreigners, and they were treated patronisingly in their mother-country. Some years earlier, he had referred to how the dialect of travelling Palesmen was mocked by native Englishmen who ‘judge them, upon their first repair there, to learn their English in three or four days, as though they had bought at Chester a groat's worth of English, and so packed up the rest to be carried after them to London’.

‘We are now’, wrote James Anthony Froude, as he approached the topic of the outbreak of the civil war in Ulster in October 1641, ‘ upon the edge of the gravest event in Irish history, the turning-point on which all later controversies between England and Ireland hinge ’. Froude may have exaggerated, but few would quarrel with Lecky's comment on the same issue that ‘ hardly any page of history has been more misrepresented ’. It is well known that the reason for the controversy surrounding the events in Ulster in 1641 is that they have been linked with a charge against the Irish of perpetrating a ‘ general massacre ’ of British protestants at the outbreak of the war in which tens, even hundreds, of thousands of protestants were killed. The allegation of a ‘ general massacre ’ has, in turn, been used as a moral justification for subsequent English policy in Ireland.

The results of the religious inquiry in the Irish census of 1861 (which showed that the established church commanded the allegiance of only one-eighth of the population) were used extensively in the debate on church disestablishment, and the results of successive religious inquiries have been since used for a variety of purposes. This paper considers the origins of the inquiry, the controversy surrounding its first inclusion in the census, and the importance of church disestablishment in that controversy.