The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-10-23
Ireland s, Bartholomew

This is the feast day of St. Igna- tius, a ninth century patriarch of Constantinople, and in Ireland the date has all the terrible significance of St. Bartholomew's Day in France. It was just 275 years ago today, Oct. 23, 1641, that Irish Catholics honored the memory of Ignatius by inaugural ing a rebellion which soon degener- ated into a wholesale massacre of the English and Scotch rotestants.
 Sufficient provocation to rebellion the Irish had. beyond doubt, as even English historians admit. In conse- quence of repeated rebellions and consequent forfeitures, more than half a million acres of land in the province of Ulster, and smaller tracts in other parts of the Emerald Isle, had been confiscated by the crown. King James l., after removing the Irish from their native hills and fast nesses, divided the land among such of his English and Scottish subjects as chose to settle there.
 The difference in religion was an even more potent cause of trouble. The Protestant settlers sought to inn pose oppressive restrictions upon their Catholic neighbors, and the latter were fired with a consuming hatred for the invaders. Just as the leaders of the recent revolt in Dublin believ- ed that Englands trouble was their opportunity, so did the Catholics of the seventeenth century strike at g time when England was involved in civil strife. The Irish Catholics organized a con- spiracy which had for it's principal objects the establishment of the Roman faith and the recovery of the lands granted to the rotestants The war which followed was called ore and Maguire's rebellion, as the lead CTS were Roger More. a Kildare gen. tleman, and Corneulius Mcguire, Baron of Inniskillen, an Ulster chief tain
 As was the case in the latest of Irish rebellions, the plot was success fully matured without the English authorities paving any knowledge of its existence. St. Ignatius' Day, Oct. 23, 1641, was fixed as a day of gen. eral insurrection. The plan was to attack Dublin Castle and take it by surprise, but. on the previous night one of the confederates, while in his cups, revealed the plot in the hear ing of Protestant, named Owen O'Connelly, who warned the authori- ties The latter. forwarned and pre- pared, managed to save the capital and castle, but in other parts of the island, and especially in Ulster, the rebellion famed forth with terrible acts of violence The English and Scottish planters and their wives and children were everywhere put to death without mercy, except for such young women who were turned over to the rabble for worse fate. The Ulster colonists were taken completely by surprise and were unable to offer any effectual resistance to the wild Irish men. The horrid butchery went on without distinction of age or sex. and the excesses of the savage and in- fur4ated natives were of such a char acter as to make St. Bartholomew's carnage seem mild and human by comparison. Fired by an insane re- ligious zeal, the Irish tortured many of their victims, seeking to force them to renounce their Professionalism, before putting them to death. Most of those who contrived to escape the clutches of the rebels and who fled to the hills died of hunger and cold. The fairest tracts in Ireland, reclaimed by the colonists, were laid waste, and all their houses were burned. in a mad desire to obliterate every trace of the English occupancy.
 The. number of Protestants slain fin this butchery has been grossly exag- gerated, but the best authorities give the number as between 10000 and 50,000.