Home Rule - Back to the Future | Professor Diarmaid Ferriter 

Of course it was a colonial relationship, and unquestionably before 1830. It was conquered and incurred plantations on numerous occasions, ever since the Normans of 1169. You can see for yourself how Elizabethan, Stuart, Cromwellian and Ascendency officials wrote about Ireland - they've left a lot of writing. Colony is often mentioned, it is described as a place for the Protestant English settlers to "civilise", "improve" and cleanse the land of its indigenous Gaelic speaking people and culture, deemed "barbarous", "drunken", "lustful" and "backward". Have you ever seen how British newspapers in the 19th racially depicted the Irish in pictures as "Irish-Iberian"? That's worth looking into too. As are Charles Trevelyan's writings about Ireland during the Great Famine. Scotland provided the Stuart dynasty that unified the crowns in the 17th century. They were accomplices to the colonising of Ireland, to Ulster in particular. Quebec was a colony in the sense that the indigenous people (as in Ireland) had no participation in the state. For the descendents of the French colonists, they had more religious freedom than any other minority in the empire.

What difference does it make? Our wealth and resources was stolen and went to the Queen of England and the British establishment same as Kenya or India. The UK to this day is still an English dominated Union it's just the Welsh and Scots are too thick to see it.

One small part of Irish society was part of the UK, namely the protestant ascendancy. But the other part was more subservient to it and didn't feel part of it at all. So I wouldn't say he's totally wrong, though you're right to make some distinction with Ireland's position compared to those other colonies.

@@gomey70 I get your point about subservience and not feeling part of it, of course. But the fact that Ireland elected MP’s to the parliament in London made it totally different to India or Kenya etc. To describe Ireland “as within the British empire” is more misleading than wrong. The Irish parliamentary party (a mainly catholic party) is often overlooked in these discussions. I totally get your point as well though.

Across the 16th-18th centuries it was undoubtedly a colony, numerous waves of conquest and plantation were implemented to ensure that. Only with the passing of Catholic Emancipation by 1830, and the full removal of the Penal Law regime, did 90% of the population get any involvement. And yet still, it was a country occupied, ruled by the whims of Westminster, which included an unelected House of Lords of British aristocrats (including the Landlord class) who held a veto power until 1910. That latter institutions frustrated decades of Home Rule campaigning. Ireland was a part of the British Empire. In a better position that Kenya, absolutely, but nonetheless still subservient. The 1801 Act of Union which created the "United Kingdom" was done so by bribery of the local colonial elite who ran Ireland.

Mr ferrite Ireland is worse than ever and better under church. Look crime homeless hospitals