For those who would look at the troubles in Northern Ireland today and wonder, "how did things ever deteriorate to such sad state," there are , of course, many complex historic causes; one of the most important of those is: The Penal Laws. This restrictive set of laws was first imposed on the Irish by the English controlled "Irish" Parliament in 1695 and strengthened several times after that. They are some of the most restrictive, racist laws that have ever been imposed on a people. These laws effectively made the Catholics of Ireland nonpersons within the British Empire of which they were, through the force of English arms, a part. What makes the passage of the Penal Laws all the more reprehensible is that they were passed a mere four years after the Jacobites were defeated by England and negotiated the Treaty of Limerick, which had promised Catholics, if not equality with Protestants, at least "free and unfettered exercise of their religion." The ink was barely dry on that treaty before the English passed these laws; one would have to look far and wide to find their like in the history of Western Civilization, most similar would be Nazi Nuremberg laws restricting the Jews in the 1930's.
 It should also be remembered that in 1789, when the Jacobites controlled Ireland, the parliament they called included both Catholics and Protestants and freedom of religion in Ireland was one of the first things that Parliament guaranteed to all. Certainly one of the first such laws to be enacted anywhere in Europe, part of the law read, "We hereby declare that it is the law of this land that not now, or ever again, shall any man be persecuted for his religion." It was a noble thought, and a fleeting moment of religious harmony in a land that has seen precious little from then until now, but the reward of the Irish people for this admirable show of nonsectarianism was a set of laws destined, over the next century, to turn them into the poorest people in Europe, in spite of being (unwillingly) inhabitants of Europes richest country. Here is a list of some, though not nearly all, the things Irish Catholics were denied by the original Penal laws and some of its later clauses. A Catholic was forbidden:

the exercise of his religion
to receive an education.
to send his child abroad to receive an education.
to enter a profession.
to engage in trade or commerce.
to live in a cooperate town or within five miles thereof.
to own a horse of greater value than five pounds.
to purchase land.
to vote.
to keep any arms for his protection.
to rent any land that was worth more than thirty pounds.
to reap from his land any profit exceeding a third of the rent.

 If a son converted and his brothers didn't, he received all his fathers land when he died; if a wife converted and divorced her husband, she received all his land. There are more, but our space is limited here. Many revisionist historians have gone to great lengths to be apologists for these laws, saying they were not strictly enforced through the 100 plus years which many of them were on the books. Of course, to some extent that has to be true, these laws were so far reaching, extending into every minuscule aspect of daily life, that it was certainly not possible for every iota of every statute to be enforced. But the thrust of these laws was clear enough to the Irish people, and clear now, three hundred years later; they were designed to destroy the Irish culture, to make the Irish give up the thing the English saw as the main impediment to the Irish transforming into good, docile English subjects: their religion. These laws presented the Irish with a clear choice; give up your religion, give up your Irishness, or live forever in abject poverty .
As is the case with many persecuted groups, the Irish reaction to this ruthless bigotry was, in fact, to become stronger believers in their persecuted religion, to become ever more Irish, and reject all things English. A look at the demographics of Ireland today shows what the answer of the vast majority of Irish people was to this blatant, brutal attempt at coercion; but it doesn't show how much the Irish suffered by that decision. The worst and most far reaching long term effect of these laws is seen in land ownership. A large percentage of Ireland had already been stolen from the Irish people by 1695, but these laws made the confiscations almost complete. By the mid 1700s Catholic land ownership was reduced to 5%. There is direct cause and effect line from the Penal Laws to the Great Hunger. In looking at the totality of Irish history, something England has always discouraged when discussing the Hunger, it is easy to see that the Penal Laws were a bigger factor in the massive deaths toll of the Great Hunger than was the potato blight. With out the former, the later may have resulted in only the same relatively minor difficulties suffered by those other European country struck by the blight.
 Dr. Samuel Johnson said, "There is no instance, even in the Ten Persecutions, of such severity as that which the Protestants of Ireland exercised against the Catholics." Here are the words of Professor W.E.H. Lecky, one of the most highly regarded ENGLISH historians of the 19th century, on the Penal Laws. It was not the persecution of a sect, but the degradation of a nation. It was the instrument employed by a conquering race (the Anglo-Irish) supported by a neighboring Power, to crush to the dust the people among whom they were planted. And, indeed, when we remember that the greater part of it was in force for nearly a century, that its victims formed at least three-fourths of the nation, that its degrading and dividing influence extended to every field of social political, professional, intellectual, and even domestic life, and that it was enacted without the provocation of any rebellion, in defiance of a treaty which distinctly guaranteed the Irish Catholics from any further oppression on account of their religion, it may be justly regarded as one of the blackest pages in the history of persecution.
 Priest were hunted, jailed, deported or killed; teachers had to bring children to hiding places in the country, "hedgerows schools," in order to teach. The effects of the Penal Laws are felt to this day; in enacting them, the English sowed the seeds of hatred and distrust permanently into the minds all the succeeding generations of Irishmen and woman while a the same time sowing the seeds of triumphalism and racial superiority deeply into the minds of the Anglo-Irish. Both attitudes can be seen in Northern Irelands "troubles." But nothing, not even in the darkest of those Penal days, could destroy the will of the Irish people to remain Irish. In the town of Bandon, in which Irish Catholics were then forbidden to live, this sign was put up over the gates of the town:
Enter here, Turk, Jew or atheist,
Any man except a Papist.
Underneath those lines, some Irishman, fighting back with the only two things left that they could not strip from him, his wit and his dignity, wrote:
The man who wrote this wrote it well
For the same is writ on the gates of Hell.
 Many historians give scant notice to those Irish people who lived in the time between the Jacobite rebellion in the 1690s and the rising of 1798. It is true that those generations of Irishmen, kept in wretched poverty as they were, with their leaders driven from the country, never rose up against England; but what they did do was something that may have been even harder. They endured an attack on their culture, their nationality, that is hard for us to even imagine in our comfortable 20th century world. The riches of their native land were stolen from them, denied to them; riches they were told they could have back, if only they would simply stop being Irish. They said no, and so they lived out their days in poverty; generation after generation, but they endured, and they brought Ireland through the darkest of nights; for this seldom noted sacrifice, they deserve the undying gratitude of every person who takes pride in something those people preserved for us: our Irish heritage.