THE ULSTER CONFLICT owned only 5% of the land in Ulster). Some of the dispossessed became outlaws and sought revenge by violence on their dispossessors who in turn reacted with no less ferocious couter-violence. The distance between the two communities was also increased by the new, more efficient farming methods of the colonists, and their access to British capital wich enabled them to start up cottage industries. Economic gaps opened up between the Catholics and Protestants in Ulster, and between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. The native Irish resented the colonists, and the colonists felt that they were under siege from the Irish, whom they greatly distrusted. The seeds of the Ulster problem had been sown. DEEPENING THE DIVIDE The religious difference between the colonists and the native Irish in Ulster, however, was not a simple one between Protestants and Catholics. Before 1603 the main influx of settlers into Ulster had been Scots who were just as Gaelic as the Ulstermen who had migrated to Argyll (in Scotland) centuries before, and they had not disturbed the cultural balance in Ulster. But the Scots who came in after 1603 spoke a dialect of English and adhred to a dissenting form of Protestantism, Presbyterianism, whose organization was, in principle republican, its theology Calvinist, and its social code puritan. The conditions of life in south-west Scotland from where they came were harsher than the conditions experienced by the English colonists who came in with them at the same time. Quite a lot of the English colonists became quickly disenchanted with the rigours of pioneering in Ulster, sold up and went home, wheras any Scots who did so were speedily replaced by fresh recruits from nearby south-west Scotland. Tht Scots' dourness, self-discipline, indifference to hostile opinion, determination to maintain what they had gained and social cohesion were intimately linked with their Presbyterianism, which was theoretically illegal in Ireland where the only church established by law was the protestant episcopal or Anglican church, the Irish equivalent of te Curch of England. It was generally the English colonists and the new ruling class in Ulster who adhered to this Church of Ireland, whilst the Presbyterians were mainly small freeholders, tenant farmers, merchants and manufacturers. Nevertheless, this dual community was united in defending what it saw as its superior culture against rebellious, priest-ridden and barbarous natives. But the strain between the two Protestant communities 57
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